I have not lived among famous people. My comrades were lovely men and women rarely celebrated or even mentioned in the mass or mainstream media. But I did meet briefly with people like those described below. If they were called back from the dead, they probably wouldn’t remember the meeting, but it is still vivid…
The preface to the first volume of Capital ends with a motto about intellectual autonomy, or rather, about intellectual autonomy and the attitude toward reception that serves it best. Altering a line from Dante’s Divine Comedy, Karl Marx pledges to live by the words: “Go on your own way, and let the people talk.” He…
Marx was a great ape: he could do Goethe, he could do the Bible, he could do capitalists as well as workers, he could certainly do Hegel — better, he thought, than the legions of Hegel’s other apes. In a sense, he was, at any one moment, Marx-Goethe or Marx-Hegel or Marx-Ricardo. It is true,…
Everybody knows I have them. My problems were bad then. I have value now. I actually love chugging green juice. Dialectical Behavioral Therapy is the name of the holy game. They give me homework over there. They put ice in my hands. They take the sunglasses off my face. Yeah, I miss being a terror….
She was looking like trapped meat. I’m talking about the pretentious freak of nature stuck in her mother’s washing machine down the street. It was yesterday afternoon. I’d dropped by to return borrowed eggs. I heard screaming, begging, laughter. We used to play house. I was eleven. She was ten. I was a bank teller….
I run into my therapist from seven years ago. He’s standing around, still the young side of middle-aged, face blank, totally unimpressed. But he’s not as I remember him. For instance, he has a fever. He’s glistening. His spectacles: gone. Man, our old sessions. He was strict, for real. Even coffee was off the table….
On a rainy Sunday afternoon, pre-workout, I approach the girl behind the counter at my gym. She mostly deals in fresh towels and electrolytes, and she doesn’t like me — not sure why, but she’s blatant. And so right in front of her I go, “I’ll take the red Gatorade — the fruit punch flavor…
Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot had a similar quirk to their literary careers: after penning their respective masterpieces — Jane Eyre for Brontë in 1847, Middlemarch for Eliot in 1871 — both lived to publish deeply strange and religiously preoccupied novels a half-decade later. While the Jewish mysticism and Wagnerian scope of Eliot’s Daniel Deronda…
“Art, of course, lives in history,” said Elizabeth Hardwick. By which she meant that a novel emerges in its own time, and changes in its passage to our own. This — the likeness which is also an unlikeness, the unfamiliar familiarity — is the shock of reading classic literature, of literature even a generation or…
“In the huge gathering . . . there were, according to the official estimate . . . 1,250,000 persons. So far as available records indicated last night, this was the largest crowd that has ever assembled at a single point anywhere in the world.” This New York Times report from May 1942 refers not to…
“Man is but a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed.” The line appears halfway through Pascal’s philosophical work, Pensées (“Thoughts”), quiet as a whisper, final as a verdict. In around a dozen words, he captures both our fragility and our strange dignity. This is Pascal’s gift: the ability to distill…
It was still early in the war. After four days of internet blackout — and, God knows, testing countless VPNs — I finally reached a stable enough connection to check my email. The last one was from a prestigious university in New York, where I was scheduled to begin my Ph.D. in the upcoming academic…
