Reflecting on Philip Roth in Harper’s not long ago, the journalist Hannah Gold observes that few of the novelists she read during her high school years “captured my imagination and became my companion throughout adulthood the way Roth did.” It is a moist confession familiar to writers who recall clinging to Little Women in faraway…
To run out of memory, in the language of computing, is to have too much of it and also not enough. Such is our current situation: we once again find ourselves in a crisis of memory, this time marked not by dearth but by surplus. Simply put, we are running out of space. There is…
Is it possible to be a historian of your own life? To see yourself as a figure in the crowd, as a member of a generation who shared the same slice of time? We cannot help thinking of our own lives as uniquely our own, but if we look more closely, we begin to see…
In February 2017, Steve Bannon, then senior counselor and chief strategist to President Donald Trump, pledged to a gathering of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC; initiates pronounce it “See-Pack”) that the Trump administration would bring about “the deconstruction of the administrative state.” Bannon’s choice of the word “deconstruction” raises some possibility that he had…
1 In the middle of August in 1818, some three thousand five hundred Methodists descended on a farm in Washington County, Maryland, for days of prayer and fellowship. Their lush surroundings seemed to quiver in the swelter of a mid-Atlantic summer, to which the believers added the fever of faith. Men and women, white and…
Here goes; and there it went. It might stay gone. What next? Play faster with the quick and dead, with the tightened fist play looser: amplify the beggar in the chooser. Cursed are we who lop the tops off trees to find heat’s name is written in the wood; cursed are we who know…
Genesis, behold your progeny: inventor, behold your inventory: protagonist, behold your agony: window, the wind is in your eye: Capuchin, here’s your cappuccino: tragedy, I’ve got your goat: and here I come O deathless mortgage, O unmanageable manifesto. Ready or not.
Yesterday P. asked: “Do you think the children from Job’s second chance could actually be happy?” – Anna Kamieńska, A Nest of Quiet: A notebook, translated by Clare Cavanagh But then amid the helplessness of Lives and corrugated sewage,…
To me moans came for food, my roars poured forth like drink. – John Berryman, “Job” “So why did my umbilicus, umbrella of the belly, not asphyxiate and fix me at my birth and make my due my expiration date? Why was I lapped in aprons, and…
Once, there were neither bottled-up fields nor bluebottled breeze; nor trill of pollen, tree nor hill to die on was there there (there, there): not yet our unseated adjustment of dust; no striking star, nor stroke of sun; nor did the moon light, like the grey, scaled nodule nodding off the dead end of a…
1 If nationalism sounds like a dirty word, then Ukrainian nationalism has sounded even worse. In the imaginations of many, it is associated with extreme xenophobic violence. Even those who sympathize with Ukraine are not free from this image. Michael Ignatieff, for example, an eminent Western liberal intellectual, wrote shortly after visiting independent Ukraine: “I…
For Carlos Pagni 1 Too many electoral results are described as earthquakes when in reality they are little more than mild tremors, but the self-described anarcho-capitalist Javier Milei’s victory in the second and deciding round of Argentina’s presidential election over Sergio Massa, the sitting minister of the economy in the former Peronist government, who in…
A number of years ago — sometime in the decade between the financial crash and the advent of Covid — I found myself at the hotel bar of the Modern Language Association’s annual conference (in Vancouver? Boston? Chicago?) arguing with a professor about modernism. Or rather, about modernism as a field of current scholarship in…
In the summer after the fall of Afghanistan, I received an invitation to speak at CIA headquarters. I used to work as a paramilitary officer at the Agency and a former colleague of mine attended the discussion. Afterward we went back to his office to catch up over a drink. The two of us had…
As we know, a musical composition does not by nature have the presence of a picture, a sculpture, a novel, or a movie. It lays dormant in the score and needs to be made audible. It is the performer’s obligation to kiss it awake. “Bring the works to life without violating them,” was Edwin Fischer’s…
Iran today may be best known for two things: one of the most repressive regimes in the world and one of the most remarkable cinemas in the world. The coexistence of the two is a conundrum that perplexes many people. How does a country known for ferocious repression of dissent and artistic freedom produce some…
“Genius and evildoing are two things that do not combine,” Mozart remarks in Mozart and Salieri, Alexander Pushkin’s short play written in 1832. The Mozart of Pushkin’s play is an impure genius. He does not see perfection in himself or seek perfection in others. He has a natural humility and earthiness. On his way to…
Let me explain to you mortals what an instinct is: the end of explanation. Settlements are where your belongings are dropped. Like gravity, there’s nothing under there. None of you go around asking gravity why it exists. Life wants, like gravity wants. * “Unlike the rest of you, I refuse to be governed by…
In theory, anything can be depicted. And what is? What, on the walls and floors and ceilings of theory, is depicted and not? Not in the lover’s light of retribution. Not in the poets’ utilitarian light. In the fat-and-fire-in-a-cup light. Artificial, if that’s what that means: light from other than the foot-wide sun….
Here we are. The baby needs changing. It’s early in a midweek, late summer day. The cool skepticism that blankets us all before the dew drops, before the dawn god rises reluctant from her bed, is a memory now, a feeling faded into thought. Strange hours those, empty of opinion. Strange feeling—so total then,…
How long all this will go on, the circulating blood—hauling, having its way with us, around us, skin-deep presence and us oblivious, blood that stays where it should until it doesn’t— how long its warming, halting, stock-taking, unremitting run between some bloodlike-before and, after, what then,…
Be like the grasses, which are not waiting, says the sun-whipped god. Always with her partial information. What grasses? What must we go out there and learn about now? The wild grasses— here only of the wind’s accord, happy survivors, rewarded for their ignorance, their readiness, the seeds that took —are…
The representation of “real war” is more naturally expected in epics or novels than in a lyric poem or even a sequence of poems. But Walt Whitman is a rare hybrid, a lyric-narrative poet, and is necessarily aware that a war poem must visibly exhibit its primal archetype in realistic battle. His war poems can…
The Palestinian refugee camp Dheisheh is buckling beneath poverty and inherited hopelessness. The despair is palpable even in the pictures that my friend and co-worker Ali sends me from inside the camp. I have never been there — even before October 7 it was not simple or prudent for a Jewish woman to visit Palestinian…
Look who thinks he’s nothing. All these blacks and whites make existence grey. The certainties, the rectitudes, the stridencies, are like a cloud cover interdicting the light, halting it in its natural course to us, and trapping the world in a dense foggy dread. It sometimes seems as if the more people make a claim…
Apart from being sent to bed early, the worst part about being the youngest member of my family was that everyone around me could read except me. Even if I wasn’t born into a bookish family, I could intuit the power of the written word. It allowed my mother to remember what she had to…
Regrettably, I must begin with the quantitative — the least Proustian of all categories. The six-volume Modern Library Edition of D.J. Enright’s revision of Terrance Kilmartin’s reworking of Andreas Mayor’s and C.K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu is 4,347 pages long. At an average speed of two hundred…
Several groups of rightwing intellectuals hover around the Republican Party, defending a stark conservatism. But there is a very different group, definitely rightwing, that is equally disdainful of Republican conservatives and Democratic progressives — who are all at bottom, its members insist, liberals: classical free-market liberals or egalitarian liberals, it’s all the same. These ideological…
Even alliances between countries that share similar cultures and rich, intersecting histories can be acrimonious. France and Israel, for example, provoke vivid and contradictory sentiments for many Americans. Franco-American ties are routinely strained. No one in Washington ever believed that Charles de Gaulle’s nuclear independence, guided by the principles of tous azimuts, shoot in any…
“I’m not irrational. But there’ve been times When I’ve experienced—uncanniness: I think back to those days, when, four or five, I dreaded going to bed, because I thought Sleep really was a ‘dropping off.’ At night Two silver children floated up from somewhere Into the window foiled with dark, a boy And girl. They never…
Everything you touch you taste. Like moonlight you gloss over garden bricks, rusty chicken wire, glazing your trail with argent mucilage, wearing your eyes on slender fingers. I find you grazing in the cat food dish waving your tender appendages with pleasure, an alien cow. Like an army, you march on…
I used to think the Cloud was in the sky, Something invisible, subtle, aloft: We sent things up to it, or pulled things down On silken ribbons, on backwards lightning zaps. Our photographs, our songs, our avatars Floated with rainbows, sunbeams, snowflakes, rain. Thoughts crossed mid-air, and messages, all soft And winking, in the night,…
I still remember the summer we were becalmed: No breezes rose. The dandelion clock Stopped mid-puff. The clouds stood in dry dock. Like butterflies, formaldehyde embalmed, Spring kites lay spread out on the floor, starched flat. Trees kept their council, grasses stood up straight Like straight pins in a cushion, the wonky gate That…
Matthew, 2.7-12 Summoned to the palace, we obeyed. The king was curious. He had heard tell Of strangers in outlandish garb, who paid In gold, although they had no wares to sell. He dabbled in astrology and dreams: Could we explain the genesis of a star? The parallax of paradox — afar The fragrance of…
Last spring, in The New Statesman, Samuel Moyn reviewed Revolutionary Spring, Christopher Clark’s massive new history of the revolutions of 1848. Like most everything Moyn writes, the review was witty, insightful, and provocative — another illustration of why Moyn has become one of the most important left intellectuals in the United States today. One thing…
When you log into ChatGPT, the world’s most famous AI chatbot offers a warning that it “may occasionally generate incorrect information,” particularly about events that have taken place since 2021. The disclaimer is repeated in a legalistic notice under the search bar: “ChatGPT may produce inaccurate information about people, places, or facts.” Indeed, when OpenAI’s…
It was probably OK for the environment? It wasn’t the worst. The kids, then four years old, had the wrought-iron fireplace tools (you question my judgment) and were using them to break up a rotting log at the edge of the forest. In rhythm with the falling of the poker, they chanted “This stump must…
“In all ages of speculation, one of the strongest obstacles to the reception of the doctrine that Utility or Happiness is the criterion of right and wrong, has been drawn from the idea of Justice.” This is from John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism, in 1861, perhaps the most renowned exposition of the ethical theory that stands…
The Franco-Tunisian Jewish writer and social philosopher Albert Memmi died in the spring of 2020, having lived a full century, at least a half of which he devoted to developing an arc of thought with great relevance to some of the most vexing questions now facing the societies of the Middle East, the region where…
Sometimes I think I must have ground to a halt on this lot for the sake of the orange tree alone. I might have preferred the olive — rolled on a bias — but it requires labor, refinement, salt. Oranges are easy: sweetness sewn inside a roughly perfect handhold. Fruit in different stages…
The resort staff are turning off the light at the poolside bar. The iron gate around the pool clanks shut loud enough to wake the kiddos whose sleep their mothers toiled to obtain. This Saturday night is uniquely music-less, the usual spate of sounds drowned out — rough and slick alike, proclivities and druthers….
I lost my grandmother’s opera glasses … an empire in thrall to innovations offered electric shocks in the Prater for a small charge. In wedding dresses, fräuleins dove from moving trains. Scions, following the Great Somnambulator, walked out of windows (into Blush Noisette!) or stepped off bridges in uniform. Thunderclouds amassed as if looking…
Hong Kong has its own Antigone and her name is Chow Hang-Tung. I had never heard of her until June 4, 2021. Every year from 1989 until the start of the pandemic, Hong Kong has commemorated the Tiananmen Massacre with a candlelight vigil at Victoria Park on June 4. Though attendance had been dwindling through…
For Jim Longenbach On or about November 9, 2016, human nature changed. All human speech shifted, and when human speech shifts there is at the same time a shift in religion, conduct, politics, and literature. The word equality — so long associated with liberalism — left the left; they erected the house of complicity in…
“Tomorrow’s Child,” a story by Ray Bradbury, opens with Peter and Polly Horn traveling to a hospital for the birth of their first child. In their technological utopia, a helicopter conveys them across a sky spangled with rocket ships. An advanced birthing machine awaits, promising to eliminate Polly’s labor. At the moment of truth, however,…
No Coward Soul Is Mine No coward soul is mine No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere I see Heaven’s glories shine And Faith shines equal arming me from Fear O God within my breast Almighty ever-present Deity Life, that in me hast rest As I Undying Life, have power in thee …
The worst thing that was ever done to a person I know was committed by a man who claimed he loved his victim. “That was not rape,” he told her afterwards. He was in this regard highly unoriginal. Every rape survivor who has shared her story with me was also told by her rapist…
I There are facets of my being of which I am ashamed, but the love of my people is not one of them. (Reader, hear me out.) The bond is primordial, though I am under no illusion that its primordiality exempts it from thoughtful consideration and the question of justification. It has nothing to do…
The State of Israel recently celebrated its seventy-fifth year of existence. If someone had told us way back in 1948 that the country would count nearly ten million people as its citizens, eight million of them Jews; that it would lead the world in technological innovation; that it would be a regional superpower — we…
On June 8, 2022, when the world finally recognized the atrocities of Russian troops on the occupied territories of Ukraine, I proposed an intellectual exercise to my Facebook friends: “Imagine that a couple of years have passed. Russian war crimes are discussed less and less. Perhaps some war criminals have even been jailed. Those who…
