You like to read biographies of poets You rummage through another life That sudden shock of entering another life’s dark forest But you may leave at any moment for the street or the park or from a balcony at night you may gaze at stars belonging to no one stars that wound like knives without…
In articles that appeared in the American Journal of Psychiatry in 1969 and 1971, three army psychiatrists boasted that the policy of embedding psychiatrists in Vietnam’s combat units had been a wonderful success. And so the army’s statistics seemed to show. Peter Bourne, who headed the army’s psychiatric research team, announced that henceforth “psychiatric casualties…
The controversy over whether Proust was in any sense a Jewish writer or, on the contrary, in some way essentially a Jewish writer, began in France only weeks after he was buried. It still persists there. But before we dip into these muddied waters, some clarifications are in order about the…
We yearn for great leaders, but we seem to resist them when they come along. This is a paradox inherent to democracies, between the demand for liberty, equality, and self-reliance among citizens and the continuing need for leadership in the unruliness of an open society. We vacillate between power and drift, between embracing strong leaders…
On July 15, 1945, Rembrandt’s 339th birthday, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam re-opened with the most emotionally charged exhibition in its history. Called “Weerzien der Meesters,” or “Reunion with the Masters,” the show gathered one hundred and seventy-five paintings that had spent the five years of the Occupation hidden in bunkers. During those five years, private…
An epitaph — the short inscription on a tombstone — normally names and praises admirable qualities of the person buried there, and then hopes for a benevolent future after death. The gravestone may speak to the viewer in the dead person’s voice (as Coleridge imitates the Latin Siste, viator: “Stop, Christian…
Strictly for the birds. – Holden Caulfield Easy to think of what’s different, what’s broken or chastened somehow now that I’ve lived longer than my father ever did. No nightlights back then, for example, those steady little stars we plant and grow about the house now like nightflowers to make us…
Pride comes before a fall, Solomon says, but any fool knows that’s not true. Take Jesus, for example, or Gump Jaworski, who did a double half gainer and most of a triple solchow on his last day of working for Gutters ‘R’ Us (“Gutter Problems? Gutter Call Us!”) when he fell off a company ladder trying…
They say Lady Godiva put everything she had on a horse, but what if the wager had grown from speculating whether everything on earth is always growing steadily, incrementally, or whether things are inevitably falling apart? The safe bet would be the latter, of course, the smart call. You’d have gravity on your side, that…
Teach your tongue to say: I do not know, lest you be duped. Talmud Berachot 4a The phrase “Joshua Katz,” as it is ground down and churned out by the national rumor mill, refers not to one character but to many. He is a conniving fiend; a wronged and saintly genius; a bitter man who…
“So Socrates!” he teased, “you are still saying the same things I heard you say long ago.” Socrates replied: “It is more terrifying than that: not only am I always saying the same things, but also about the same things.” Xenophon, Memorabilia, IV.4.6 (translated by Jonathan Lear) In the plenitude of discouragements that…
What is happening on the Supreme Court of the United States? The Court has overruled Roe v. Wade. It has rejected the whole idea of a right to privacy. It is sharply restricting the ability of federal agencies to protect safety, health, and the environment. It is limiting voting rights. It is expanding the rights…
