2025-01-06
30 分钟This is the Guardian.
Welcome to the Guardian Long read showcasing the best long form journalism covering culture, politics and new thinking.
For the text version of this and all our longreads go to theguardian.com longread teeth as time Capsules Soviet Secrets and My Dentist Grandmother by Jacob Michanowski Teeth are our meeting place with the outside world, the point of attack.
Crystalline and mineral in nature, teeth show us at our most mollusk.
Like the fact that we can grow them, lose them and grow them again if only once, seems to ally us with reptiles and the largest of the cartilaginous fish.
Yet few things mark us more intimately as mammals than our teeth.
The development of variable dentition is one of the great trump cards in the arsenal of mammalian evolution.
At our very core we are a tribe of nibblers, biters and grinders.
The human dental formula flat incisors, dainty canines, hard working molars is a classic omnivore's aggression and carnivory in front, industrious vegetarianism in back.
Harder than bone, harder than any other part of the body, they are also where we are most vulnerable.
Thomas de Quincey wrote that if toothaches could kill, they would be considered the most dreadful among human maladies.
Apocryphally, he is said to have claimed that fully a quarter of human misery could be chalked up to their cruel torture.
I suspect this figure is an exaggeration, but I've had enough cavities, root canals, gum shavings, crown fittings and outright extractions to put the total at a healthy 20%.
I have persistent nightmares about my teeth crumbling out of my mouth.
For me, the smell of teeth being drilled is the scent of burning flesh.
A borrowed memory.
Marek Kuperman was that rare thing in post second World Warsaw, a real country Jew.
Or at least he acted like one.
Whenever he came over to my grandparents apartment on Yovozhinska street, he would bring with him a whole chicken wrapped in a newspaper with its head cut off.
Someone else would have to take out the feathers.