To Artur Sandauer Higher reveilles of shape habitations of touch all weathers of the senses . . . Lowest — I the staircase of reality rises from my breasts. And I feel nothing. Nothing succulent. Nothing colorful. I’m not only not a testament hero I’m worse…
the window’s wing I’m in my nook my ears hum weeds carried on Noah’s line in the painting, it’s incomplete, old brown greens fluttering for three hundred years and an angel’s bent elbow ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ what is this art when centuries fly interplanetarily us knocking at our own doors all…
Oh how I rejoice that you are sky and kaleidoscope that you have so many artificial stars that you glow in a monstrance of brightness, when I place your perforated half-globe over my eyes under the air. How unstrained in…
The Lamb Little Lamb, who made thee? Dost thou know who made thee? Gave thee life, and bid thee feed By the stream & o’er the mead, Gave thee clothing of delight, Softest clothing, wooly, bright, Gave thee such a tender voice, Making all the vales rejoice? Little Lamb, who made thee?…
A fragile creature that cannot be broken is confounding, and this juxtaposition of delicacy and strength renders it freakishly powerful. Isabelle Huppert is so constituted. This is evident from almost every one of the dizzying number of films in which she has appeared. Her aura is incongruously encased in an exceedingly slim frame. Animated by…
I “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” This must be the most overly admired sentence by the most overly admired writer of our time. It is the renowned opening of Joan Didion’s essay “The White Album,” a canonical document of high-end alienation, and it long ago achieved fortune-cookie status. Didion was making the…
Historians like to say that correlation is not the same as causation. But evidence of correlation is often the starting point for an inquiry into causation. Here is one such inquiry: How might the loss of humanistic thinking generally, and historical thinking specifically, be connected to the current dysfunction of American politics and to the…
In constitutional law, there are a lot of isms. Textualism claims that the Constitution’s text is binding. The central idea is that judges are bound by the written words of the founding document. (Reasonable textualists acknowledge that the text is often ambiguous. What, for example, is meant by “the freedom of speech”? That is far…
I consider Javier Cercas one of the best writers in the Spanish language, and I believe that, after oblivion has buried his contemporaries, at least three of his extraordinary books — Soldiers of Salamis, The Anatomy of a Moment, and The Imposter — will still have readers who turn to them to learn what our…
“But Mark, you don’t seem to understand, these are good people. These are all good people.” My interlocutor was a long-time administrator at my university, and an accomplished scholar. In his genial way he was trying to set my straight on some important facts. I had just learned that there would be a new aspect…
sitting in the bower after lunch with my sadness like unto Magdalene our defectiveness known all around the town (a passion for extravagant apology) (flimsy promise to do better from now on) I knew the crowd had stones heating the hollows of their hands (the teacher has always shown me the underlying structure of a…
For Moshe Idel Since the very inception of their discipline, scholars of Kabbalah, or Jewish mysticism, have tried to define the object of their study based on its supposed relationship to myth. Gershom Scholem viewed the rise of Kabbalah in the Middle Ages as the return — with a vengeance — of myth. After having…
