For Mario Vargas Llosa, a prince of our liberalism. With one foot on the platform and the other foot on the train For many decades I have participated like a good soldier in the war of ideas, by which I mean the application of philosophical notions to public affairs for the purpose of persuading readers…
The writer responsible for Job is the greatest of all biblical poets and one of the most remarkable poets who flourished in any language in the ancient Mediterranean world. He is a technical virtuoso, deftly marshaling sound and rhythm for expressive effects, at times deploying brilliant word-play — as when he writes, “My days are…
I take my title from the critic and literary scholar Simon During, who coined the phrase “cultural secularization” as a way of understanding the sharp decline in prestige — since the beginning of the twenty-first century and especially in the last decade — of the “high humanities.” The concept will strike many as evasively abstract,…
Yehuda Halevi Nine Poems Yehuda Halevi (c. 1075–1141) was the Hebrew poet who culminated the startling period of Andalusian cultural production that Jewish history calls the Golden Age. In a moment of symbiosis in Islamic Spain from the eleventh to the twelfth centuries, Hebrew poetry flowered as it had not since the Bible and would…
I was a liberal before I knew what the word meant, before I had read a word of Locke, Mill, Berlin, and Rawls, before, in fact, I knew anything about the world at all. Liberalism was not a political idea; it was a family loyalty, born in the blood, and it became a way of…
In 1952, a year after I was born and a decade and a half before I became an active participant on the American left, Daniel Bell published a book called Marxian Socialism in America, the first serious scholarly examination of the subject. He considered, among other questions, why the traditional Marxist parties in the United…
It would be silly to call William Wyler underrated — he was one of the most acclaimed and commercially successful movie directors in American history. A staple in every American film canon, he was my favorite director long before I knew his name. Growing up I watched Dodsworth, The Little Foxes, The Heiress, and Jezebel…
Horror — like beauty, passion, and all states in extremis — confounds the habits which regulate the human mind. Before articulation — which is to say, before the experience or the witness of horror is transformed from something beyond our ken into a verbal artifact manufactured by reason or insight or prejudice or all of…
Sunrise lines a cloud: flamingo silk in an old fur coat. Seagulls catch the wind like scraps of paper. She’s been up for hours, wrapped in her old plaid bathrobe. Migraine. Lightning flashes behind her eyelids. She drinks her coffee and writes: the tattered world. Later there will be champagne and candlelight Phone calls from…
Ripe olives drop from the tree, grapes glow green in the sun, bursting, already smelling a little of decay. A thousand miles away, the emperor slogs through mud with his grumbling soldiers. His son is worthless, possibly insane. At night in his tent he writes of odd accidental pleasures: bread splitting its crust in the…
My witchy hair so furious and alive stands up and crackles like a scratched 78 Galli-Curci singing from the moon Sempre libera! It’s an owl’s nest twigs and feathers and bones and rain a straw broom forgotten in a corner but still capable of spontaneous combustion so watch out. There’s joy in taking your final…
Behind us, centuries of child brides split open in childbirth peasants fleeing bent under sacks of grain small boys who hid in the outhouse when the soldiers came for the family. Every one of us a survivor of survivors. Ishmael waves as he floats by on a coffin. Even the one-eyed cat slinking off round…
