Recently, I have been rewatching Northern Exposure. Yes, this TV series is over 30 years old, but the series has a particular nostalgia for me. Often while watching the show with my mother, one of the characters, often John Corbett’s Chris Stevens, would make a literary reference. And I would point to my corner bookshelves and say, “Yeah, I’ve got that book over there.” It’s like they had my home library for reference. It has been a little uncanny. Which of course, endeared me to the series even more. I by no means have a comprehensive library, but whoever was writing for the show had gravitated toward many of the same classics I had. I detect the machinations of a cultural zeitgeist at work.

The one reference that inspired me to write this blog was to a work I had not read, “Remembrance of Things Past” by Marcel Proust. It was such a beautiful passage though, I felt compelled to pick up the novel (the first in a series). Corbett’s DJ character read this one on the air:

When from a long distant past nothing persists, after the people are dead, after things are broken and scattered, still alone, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long, long time like souls, ready to remind us, waiting, hoping for their moment amid the ruins of all the rest, and bear unfaltering in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence the vast structure of recollection.

Certainly, speech patterns change over time, but I found this prose so lyrical as to be magical. I found myself wondering if writing like this gets weeded out these days as too alienating to readers, or if it simply isn’t written.

The Chris Stevens character has a meandering, philosophical and well-educated style of pontification, which he delivers mostly over the radio, but also to fellow members of the town as a kind of defacto psychiatrist. I delight in the intellectual inquisitive nature of the dialogue that I haven’t found anywhere else.

Here’s a short list of literary references I know of made on the show that occupy space on my library shelves:

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig

In Dreams Begin Responsibility, Delmore Schwartz

Plays of William Shakespeare (The Tempest)

Leaves of Grass/Song of Myself, Walt Whitman

On Walden, Henry David Thoreau

The Stranger, Albert Camus

The Call of the Wild, Jack London

The Power of Myth + The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell

The Raven, Edgar Allan Poe

Other authors mentioned include: Fyodor Dostoevsky, Franz Kafka, Carl G. Jung, William Wordsworth, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Friedrich Nietzsche, Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson.

What fun!