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…
As I write these words, articles are mushrooming in newspapers and magazines about how privacy is more important than ever after the Supreme Court ruling that has overturned the constitutionality of the right to have an abortion in the United States. In anti-abortion states, browsing histories, text messages, location data, payment data, and information…
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…
