Mark Edmundson, the author of The Death of Sigmund Freud, writes: "For a year or two during the mid-1970s, living in New York, I was a moviegoer. I was in my early 20s then, working off and on, driving a cab, setting up the stage at rock shows, writing occasional pieces for The Village Voice. But there were also long empty spells. I tried to write some fiction and couldn’t, tried to read and could—but only for so long. I ended up going to the movies. It was the right decade to be doing that." You think? Edmundson continues: "Martin Scorsese made Mean Streets, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, and Taxi Driver; Paul Schrader wrote and directed Blue Collar; and Robert Altman directed Brewster McCloud, The Long Goodbye, California Split, and Buffalo Bill and the Indians. The Godfather, both I and II, were news then. Woody Allen seemed to be bringing out something good every six months. I can’t really tell you whether these movies summarized a national mood, but they summarized some moods of mine. Almost all of the movies conveyed a feeling of missed opportunities, of having been tossed out of the garden just before you came to know you’d been living in one. The only paradises, we’re told, are lost paradises, and I had recently left a couple of them...People who need movies, the true moviegoers, go in the afternoon; matinees are therapy for those who can’t afford therapists or don’t know that they should get one." The essay, which does a bang-up job of speaking for all of us who, for a while there during the uneasy transition to something like adulthood, had movies instead of a life, is in the current issue of The American Scholar, which has actually been on a bit of a roll lately and is well worth searching for in the "literary" section of your neighborhood newsstand. But those of you who may be snowbound can find the full text on-line here.