Abandoned in Place
A judge gave a father five days to help the mother. On the sixth day, he left. The infant woke up in a house with one fewer person in it, and no one called it what it was.
Abandoned in Place is a work of cultural criticism that traces the pattern of institutional abandonment from the personal to the political. Beginning with the author's own childhood, the book identifies the grammar by which abandonment is disguised: the passive voice that removes the actor, the euphemism that renames the departure, the appeal to inevitability that converts a decision into a condition, and the therapeutic instruction that recruits the abandoned into the management of their own forgetting.
Across twelve chapters, the book examines the churches that closed their doors while the faithful were still sitting in the pews, the schools that replaced formation with sorting, the factories that left and called it globalization, and the governments that withdrew services while narrating the withdrawal as fiscal responsibility. Drawing on Bowlby's attachment theory, Arendt's analysis of loneliness and totalitarianism, and the social contract tradition from Hobbes to Rousseau, the book argues that abandonment is not an event but an education, and that the structures meant to hold us together have been systematically emptied of their function while their forms remain standing.
The title comes from engineering: the designation for a decommissioned structure too large to remove, left standing with a small notation that says no one is coming back to restore it.
David Boles writes from the interior country of a person who was abandoned on the sixth day of his life and who has spent five decades mapping the territory. The map is drawn with cold, precise anger. The grammar is translated into the active voice. The actors are restored to the sentences from which the grammar removed them. And the book arrives, in its final chapters, at a philosophical position that is not healing, not closure, and not moving on, but something harder and more honest: sufficient ground.
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