The Emperor Nicholas was alone in his accustomed writing-room in the Palace of Czarskoe Selo, when he came to the resolve. He took no counsel. He rang a bell. Presently an officer of his Staff stood before him. To him he gave his orders for the occupation of [the Danubian] Principalities. Afterwards he told Count…
I My title may appear provocative, but I doubt whether anyone is likely to disagree that of all the great composers Liszt is the one most frequently accused of bad taste, and also that the accusation has never threatened his status among the great. Indeed, as Charles Rosen once suggested, the accusation in some sense…
* * * The Earth, stuffed to the gills with burning coals and consuming itself from its birth bristling with folds that sharpen into peaks, sometimes of short hairs sometimes forming dark dense beards and hollowed out with giant cavities filled with restless water from which emerged the grand debris of its genesis…
* * * Over our heads masses are moving, whitish cottony, ghosts on the weather maps Windings, swirls, languid scrolls under the sting of the wind, wandering herds Floating bodies. Appearing. Disappearing. In our own image. We, more unstable than plants fixed to the ground or the fish sheltered in water…
On the sandy path that goes by my door and leads to the station of dreams, where I had just walked, a muffled cry reached my ear. I stopped walking and saw a clump of dry, drowsy grass. The cry came from the ground. A root deplored being without news from the stem up there…
Leaning in summer tuxes across the balcony or reclining like nudes with their hair thrown back, some trees, after high conversation, complained about having to go back to the deaf earth again. The leaves pulled on their arms to keep them from going and to get even closer to whom?…
* * * Mother death you came to him so mildly so cruelly alternating authority with seduction He out-of-breath following you or fleeing you In the end you wore the features of Morphine and clasped her to you cruelly mildly I gave his body to flames married his ashes to…
I As a political thinker, the German philosopher Carl Schmitt was enamored of symbols and myths. His biographer has shown that during the 1930s Schmitt was convinced that providing National Socialism with a rational justification was self-contradictory and self-defeating. The alternative that was conceived by Schmitt, a conservative who was an eminent member…
Back when I was an idealistic young soul, I enrolled in a PhD program in French and Comparative Literature, intent on making a career in academia. Those were the days when New Criticism and Semiotics held sway, and texts were to be read without interference from outside influences. The approach we were taught,…
Last year, a student came to my office hours to discuss her post-graduation plans. She said she wanted to travel, teach, and write. “How about joining the Peace Corps?” I suggested. She grimaced. “The Peace Corps is problematic,” she said. I replied the way I always do when a student uses that all-purpose put-down. “What’s…
This is the work of your own hands strange to say, all these stories carved with a certain severity, each woodcut brought forward in strokes, a register of darkness removed. There’s a tower and a bridge. A figure midway across watches the shadows below. Midway between what? Today and tomorrow, if you like,…
It is not wholly myself, this shadow tugging itself loose as though it knew better where to go from here what to do and see before the ship leaves with the tide. Not a thousand ships, you understand, just the one. Tall and proud, I suppose, and in a dreadful hurry, what with the wind…
