I signed the papers, and the world created out of all I have destroyed honestly doesn’t look much different. A grainy whitish wind blows in from Little Poland, and a human form in heavy gear screams unanswerable questions into traffic. Questions, while inadequate to truth, are faithful to sorrow, so fair enough. Inside…
I can’t make it right. Not the shadow lying on the snow, not the snow, terrain sloping crudely toward the poor outcome of a structure neither representational nor abstract, and the sketched-out town beyond ill-proportioned, depthless, and basic. There isn’t any sense of an origin, of what Plato called the lower soul, to animate what’s…
Each old thing in its new place must prove its worth yet again. Dust is disturbed, having made itself at home among what former tenants have found wanting. A friend brings a gift to brighten my room then leaves a cruel word to move in with me. Good and bad don’t always line…
You shall surely reprove your fellow. Leviticus 19:17 A long time ago, I spent a couple of years reading Calvinist theology and Puritan treatises and sermons (for a doctoral dissertation and a first book).I don’t remember many lines, but one has stuck in my mind. The Reverend Richard Baxter, author of The Holy Commonwealth, described…
Nearly all observers today agree that politics in the United States is in a dire, poisoned state. For this they generally blame “polarization” — and the other political camp. In fact, the reasons are both more complicated and more distressing, and cannot be blamed on any single political grouping. In his pre-pandemic best-seller Enlightenment Now,…
Alongside the industrial and the digital revolutions, the modern era has witnessed a happiness revolution. The scientific study, laboratory refinement, and industrial production of happiness are all big business. If we count among its products the dopamine rush with which we are awarded for our small efforts online, the happiness industry is now the largest…
Delight is an orphan. Many other moods and emotions have had champions in literature and philosophy, patrons invested in their cultural standing. Melancholy can claim The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton’s strange masterpiece from 1621. It generated a fashion for melancholy that has not entirely faded, which the Romantics powerfully refreshed, lionizing melancholy for its…
Figs are sweet, but don’t last long. They spoil fast in transit, says the shopkeeper. Like kisses, adds his wife, a hunched old woman with bright eyes. Translated by Clare Cavanagh
Good government, Buon Governo, and the good judge — we see how Siena thrives under the just ruler. Peace reigns over all, revealed. The peasants work serenely, grapes swell with pride, a wedding party dances in the street. But bad government sets out to torment justice, who bears the lovely name Iustitia, it…
Let’s try to imagine it: a little like old Tolstoy he strolls the fields of Picardy, where funny tanks once clumsily defeated the terrain’s slight elevation. He visits the town where Bruno Schulz died or sits on a riverbank above the Vistula’s dim water, a meadow scented with warm dandelions, burdocks, and…
And then when you entered the empty garage a trumpet called as in the Fifth Symphony And it suddenly grew clear that there is joy and death and mad flies that circle the table where all of you sat just moments ago calmly chatting
The old painter stands by the studio window, where his brushes and colors lie. Poets wait for inspiration, but objects and faces assault the painter, they arrive shrieking. Their contours, though, have blurred and faded. Objects turn blind, mute. The old painter feels only a dim wave of light, a longing for…
