We knew we were already too late. Too late to be modernists, too late to be reds, too late to turn against Stalin, too late to fight the Nazis, too late to be red-baited, too late to join the anti-communist left, too late to take money from the CIA for our magazines. We were too…
What a film demands from a viewer varies a great deal. Often not much is demanded. Keeping the characters straight, remembering what has happened, and following the plot are usually enough for much commercial cinema to “work,” to make sense and entertain. We easily accept the illusion that we are watching a fictional cinematic world…
Night Sail I dreamt of sailing Spray, grandfather Herrick’s pilot cutter, from its berth in an old black-and-white on the kitchen wall, past the docks, the cranes and derricks, not to some sluggish oil-rainbowed bight with pier and prom, in the lee of Gosport or Goring, not to the wild side of the Isle…
You enter the cave of horrors in the basement of an Ottoman-era house that is now a small yeshiva just outside the medieval walls of the Old City. On the one hand, there could be no better encapsulation of Jerusalem than this: disjointed histories piled one atop the other like dishes in the sink, all…
“This is Jane calling from central Kenya. Sasa, so, I am in a lesbian relationship, and we are hoping to get married, and I would like to pay bridewealth to my partner’s father, but we don’t know how to bring this issue up with him because he thinks we are just friends.” The voice spills…
One of the many extraordinary powers that the progressive Israeli Supreme Court has given itself is the authority to invalidate a government action based on the Justices’ conclusion that the government did not weigh, or properly weigh, all relevant public interest considerations before acting. This “reasonableness” doctrine is an open-ended judicial check to ensure that…
On the evening of June 7, 1914, police officers were dispatched to break up a crowd of over a thousand people assembled outside the Comedy Theatre on West 41st Street in Manhattan. Hoping for a last-minute ticket, they had been turned away at the doors and were now blocking traffic on Sixth Avenue. Inside the…
God has not shown me in nightdreams and no sorcerer has divined where my last day will overtake me and how my end will look, that I may know. Whether in my tent, on my couch, I will die with all my cherished close to me, every one of them camped mutely around me, sentries…
Elizabeth Hardwick is having a moment — and why not? The last two years have brought The Uncollected Essays, an addendum to The Collected Essays of 2017; Cathy Curtis’ biography, A Splendid Intelligence; and Come Back in September, Darryl Pinckney’s memoir of his writerly apprenticeship at Hardwick’s feet. Like Joan Didion, a very different sort…
In August 1990, the recently retired Dutch ethnologist Johannes Jacobus Voskuil had a dream: he lay in his coffin and was carried to his grave while a song he had heard hundreds of times — Sidney Bechet’s rendition of “Nobody Knows When You’re Down and Out” — played in the background. He heard the crunch…
Roland Barthes asked if we are “condemned to the adjective” when speaking of music, when attempting to put into words music’s special way of pulling heartstrings and twisting guts; and in the case of Gustav Mahler one feels especially so condemned. It is difficult not to rhapsodize about Mahler. The descriptors accumulate on the tip…
Past the fences of beds we are movie sheds of sleep. We can’t stamp or clap. At best we shriek in monkey speech, our old dialect, about the latest things. And then we truly live through our own civilization. Translated by Clara Cavanagh and Michal Rusinek
Night. The bridge’s scent. The fence lets in roots. Water shines for the earth. A listening stone. A hair sings. Night. Road. Your own knees lost in suppositions. There is no separate green. A different epoch of the…
A chair stands: article of truth sculpture of itself tied into one knot reality’s abstraction It broke. That’s a form too yes — candelabra yes — bull’s face. A chair’s abstract calling now summons whole crowds of reality ties them in one knot inside the stockroom of truth reality’s…
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…
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…
So many slopes they touched, and once leaned outside while I tromped into the parlor of an alpine monastery, clattering boots, my bluster welcomed to dine silently with the brothers who had also vowed to get to the powder of what is daily fused with life: to glide, to carve, to schuss and float with…
I like parking at the big box store, watching people come out and go in. Swaying winter grasses in the median, sky that brigand Saturday blue. I’m waiting to pick up my son from his guitar lesson. Already masterful, he doesn’t quit. Even Jimi Hendrix continued with a vocal coach, up to the very day…
Our bones will touch in the water one day after the supernova, or maybe it’ll be an Electromagnetic Pulse we bought the old Volvo to outsmart— we escaped the need for computers to govern coffee makers, and made our own kombucha— but one by one the streaked coyotes, wimpled foxes picked off the…
Depending on how history is written, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine may be looked back on as the beginning of a third world war. President Zelensky’s government, along with its advocates in allied governments, has been making this argument since the war’s inception. They frame Ukraine as one battlefield in a larger global struggle, one that…
[Innocent wayfarers, beware. This essay contains what are vulgarly known in the trade as “spoilers,” so if for some unfathomable reason you’ve yet to view Succession, Glass Onion, and The White Lotus, tread gingerly and try not to gasp.] It may be the most famous and chewed-over exchange in American literature that never actually took…
Some thirty years ago, with the launch in 1990 by the Bush administration of the “Decade of the Brain,” neurocentrism took hold in the Western world — America, Japan, and Europe. It held on well into the aughts. Neurocentrism is the belief that the brain is the seat of the mind, that they are in…
Is astronomy the key to our wellbeing? If we “learn the harmonies and revolutions of the universe,” Plato wrote in the Timaeus, we will attain “the most excellent life offered to humankind by the gods.” The pre-Socratic philosopher Anaxagoras was even more dramatic: And they say that when someone asked Anaxagoras for what reason anyone…
In memory of Michael Porder I September 29, 1939, 20 Maresfeld Gardens, Hampstead, London: on the first Friday after Sigmund Freud’s death, having accepted more than a half-century’s imposed impiety at her husband’s insistence, the seventy-eight year old Martha Freud started to light the Sabbath candles again. Licht-bentshn, as the ceremony is called. You…
He was born in 1886 in Armenia, in a remote mountain village called Pingyan above the Aradzani River. It was not the typical Armenian village of the Ottoman Empire, subjugated by Turkish authorities and terrorized by marauding Kurdish tribes in the guise of tax collectors. Pingyan was an unusual place: it was secure and very…
To my friend Kegham Parseghian With what intoxication! The trees, in the light, Trees in the wind and the rain, Shaggy-tressed trees, trees that to the heavens strain, And saplings green, as sea waves Collapsing to the bosom of the corn strewn, Dazed, all drink of the swelling sunburst of life. With what intoxication! The…
Agnon and Flaubert: the conjunction is, at first blush, altogether unlikely. Their background and the kind of language in which each wrote could scarcely have been more different. Agnon, the commanding figure in Hebrew fiction in the twentieth century and the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1966, grew up in an Orthodox…
If you read this essay you will not become a better person. I will not delineate the most progressive stance that you could take on a recent development in politics or culture, taking into account the various relevant social justice considerations and concluding on a rallying cry. And neither will you be presented with a…
When I was young, I wondered what the essential ingredient in a successful lyric poem actually was. I had learned that a poem did not have to have meter and rhyme, that a poem could do without the first person, and that no topic was impossible to poetry. But when I was disappointed in a…
In March of this year, the Jewish state was like a single organism whose arteries were straining to strangle one another. I visit the country regularly, but this spring I found it in the throes of a fever which has by now launched a new era of Israeli history. Liberal Zionists, freighted with the responsibility…
I The heaviest stone that melancholy can throw at a man is to tell him he is at the end of his nature. W.G. Sebald All my life I have pondered my failure to live up to the romance of transformation. I have been born only once. I studied mystics but saw no visions….
My subject is really three subjects that together constitute a single theme at the heart of American life. First, slavery itself — that form of human relations by which, for more than two centuries, white persons exerted unappeasable power over black persons as if they were tools or livestock. When speaking about this subject, I…
I am a direct beneficiary of the most successful social movement in American history. I am a gay man. Born in 1983 when a mysterious disease was beginning to decimate an earlier generation of gay men against a backdrop of societal indifference, I now live in a country where gay people can marry, serve openly…
For many years, professors of international politics have been telling us about the decline of the nation-state and the coming transcendence of the Westphalian system. But the political critique of the nation-state comes most often from men and women on the left, who condemn its parochialism, its tendency to produce nationalist fanaticism and xenophobia, its…
I Can one think of a more inauspicious time than now to offer a case for the continuing relevance, the necessity even, of the Enlightenment project to the fortunes of contemporary Africa? What follows is not a defense of the Enlightenment and its ideals. Where that is concerned, the great enterprise does not need my…
There’s only one time when you were perfect for loving in life, and if you miss that time, if you ignore it or pass it by, you’ve really missed something. James Salter I Autumn wind, the leaves a golden mash at our feet in the kind, quiet blaze of the streetlight; I am taking your…
On the day the Russians invaded Ukraine, Patol Moshevitz, a landscape architect and painter, woke early and looked out the window of his apartment on the fourteenth floor of one of the newest, most desirable buildings in the city of Irpin. He could see for miles in almost every direction: Kyiv, Bucha, most of Irpin,…
Thinking about extraordinary figures such as Goethe and Beethoven, one gets the feeling of observing in the distance two inconceivably tall towers. Their height seems impossible to calculate. What do they have in common? Where do they differ from each other? How harmonious is their architecture? Are there areas of dilapidation? Getting nearer, you can…
At this time two decades ago, President George W. Bush resolved to invade Iraq and topple its brutal dictator Saddam Hussein. His decision was the most consequential American foreign policy decision since the end of the Cold War, and arguably the most significant foreign policy action of the United States in the twenty-first century. As…
I An old theory has it that the most important architects of classical ballet have all been émigrés. In the late Renaissance and early Baroque eras, when ballet became primarily an art of the French courts and acquired some of its enduring characteristics, it was shaped by dancing-masters and composers from Italy. The most influential…
