The Quiet Mysticism of Almanacs
12th October 2021
Attention has always been a commodity, though not in the same way it is now. Where paying attention was once something that afforded farmers a plentiful harvest, now our attention is increasingly something to be captured and capitalized upon by others. Our attention spans are often described as “scarce.” Some scholars have even started referring to advertising as “attention harvesting.” An almanac is, of course, a product (and it does sell other products in its advertisements), but it more frequently turns readers’ attention to things that cannot be bought or sold, to remarkable phenomena that can only be found in the natural world: bird migration, meteor showers, eclipses.
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Almanacs force the kind of surrender that comes naturally to a child in the woods. Paging through the almanac, readers must accept things as they come. The reward is a wonderfully freeing randomness: in this year’s almanac, I read about how to plant trees from clippings; learned that Duluth, Minnesota, is famous for “hawk watches”; and prepared for the “full flower moon.” Even the advertisements delight me: at what other one-stop shop could I purchase artisanal sausages, collectors’ nickels from 1935, and a product called “chicken soup for the soil”? I float along the pages, learning things I’ll likely never use — or things that are so obvious as to be useless. This year’s Old Farmer’s Almanac spent an entire section breaking down the pros and cons of owning different species of pets (in case you didn’t know, dogs are friendly but chew shoes sometimes, and cats are cute but independent). That’s part of the charm, too: the almanac doesn’t take itself too seriously. As its five-page article on choosing a pet says: “[D]on’t intellectualize dog love.”