Those banished from a church are always its elite. They are ahead of their time. ERNEST RENAN I In the eyes of many, Victor Serge, the Belgian-born writer and anti-Stalinist militant, has come to stand for political probity in a time of cowardice and falsehood. The child of exiles from Tsarist Russia, from whom he…
1. There was a myth in college that Renata Adler had come over to America in a suitcase, and that’s how she got her tremor. Students gossiped about her at Bryn Mawr in the 1950s, and so did writers in Manhattan, later on, when she started working for The New Yorker. One man apparently thought…
There are writers you do not so much read as live alongside: writers of a depth, a density, a multiplicity of suggestions that resist the sort of encapsulation by which their names wither into the occasion for empty allusions and knowing nods. For nearly twenty years now, the French philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch has been such…
So the word for Did you know her You may be thinking Are you thinking Of someone else The red oak survives Life in the city Feng is wind in Chinese Sirocco wind Over the Sahara A wind off the dessert Burdened Memory now sand A lost ring Buried there Bells In European towers Sound…
Aren’t we all, all of us? Coming from a world before time and dream, a place without time a place that does not exist into a world that does, of time and content. The clock starts with a slap, breath, an intake of our air, the colors of this world and first dreams of what’s…
You were dreaming again, of holding her in the failing light of some failing stop over or another, some merely broken down town with nothing operative but corruption. The sun like a cavity filling with blood on the western horizon made the ocean Pacific, the late afternoon dangerous in its willingness to reveal. Were you…
So when I think of you there is light. There is a window that disappears at night and returns at sunrise. There is the dust of us on the slant of incoming rays warming the rooms where we were, the many rooms, the dust of us blended, one sheath of light.
This is a small thing, but it happened in a time when we were content to hang on the marvel of moving photography. In 1946, without undue fuss or fraud, the medium could record actual things and say, look, this happened. That’s what we were up for then, the appearance of a changing now. Even…
The vastness and nuance and intelligent, rough beauty of John Dubrow’s paintings, the rhythmic turmoil which roils their cakes of paint, tempts one to conceive of them as natural wonders. How are such things made? These works sometimes put me in mind of the forces of nature that combine to create hurricanes and mountain ranges….
I. On the second night of Passover, in the year of our Lord 5784, a seder was held in the streets of Brooklyn, in Grand Army Plaza, a block away from the residence of Senator Chuck Schumer. The event was called the Seder in the Streets to Stop Arming Israel. It was addressed by a…
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…
