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…
Even alliances between countries that share similar cultures and rich, intersecting histories can be acrimonious. France and Israel, for example, provoke vivid and contradictory sentiments for many Americans. Franco-American ties are routinely strained. No one in Washington ever believed that Charles de Gaulle’s nuclear independence, guided by the principles of tous azimuts, shoot in any…
“I’m not irrational. But there’ve been times When I’ve experienced—uncanniness: I think back to those days, when, four or five, I dreaded going to bed, because I thought Sleep really was a ‘dropping off.’ At night Two silver children floated up from somewhere Into the window foiled with dark, a boy And girl. They never…
Everything you touch you taste. Like moonlight you gloss over garden bricks, rusty chicken wire, glazing your trail with argent mucilage, wearing your eyes on slender fingers. I find you grazing in the cat food dish waving your tender appendages with pleasure, an alien cow. Like an army, you march on…
I used to think the Cloud was in the sky, Something invisible, subtle, aloft: We sent things up to it, or pulled things down On silken ribbons, on backwards lightning zaps. Our photographs, our songs, our avatars Floated with rainbows, sunbeams, snowflakes, rain. Thoughts crossed mid-air, and messages, all soft And winking, in the night,…
I still remember the summer we were becalmed: No breezes rose. The dandelion clock Stopped mid-puff. The clouds stood in dry dock. Like butterflies, formaldehyde embalmed, Spring kites lay spread out on the floor, starched flat. Trees kept their council, grasses stood up straight Like straight pins in a cushion, the wonky gate That…
