I’m howling, howling in Cairo. I jump off my chair. I hug the closest thing to me, the gray corner of my room, my head glued to it like a stamp so eager to travel. Books on the shelf, they listen to the whispers of my nose as it smells the old paint, as it…
Are we living in a “golden age” of public philosophy, as some claim? There sure is a lot of it, as magazines, blogs, podcasts, and Substack newsletters proliferate. Even the New York Times ran a philosophy column for over a decade in which philosophers shared their thoughts on issues “timely and timeless” with the hoi…
In the doldrums of last summer, I found myself swept up in a fleeting social-media frenzy. I had thought this could not happen to me again. I had myself written an entire book describing the mechanisms that cause such explosions of irrationality, and counseling readers on how to claw their way out of the naïve…
On December 21, 1908, several hundred men and women gathered at the Bösendorfer-Saal in Vienna, settled into their seats, and bore unexpected witness to one of the great revolutions in musical history. Heading the program that night was a new work for string quartet and soprano by a controversial young composer named Arnold Schoenberg, already…
“It’s a sad poem,” Bettina said as we walked down the glistening wet ribbon of a Vienna street one rainy evening. “I don’t read it every day.” Bettina, a Viennese psychoanalyst, was describing the daily walk from her home in Leopoldstadt, in the Second District, to her office in the inner city, the First District….
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.
