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…
