“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…
