1 I wear a second-hand country a second-hand city apartment bed pillow blanket ability to walk across a park without checking under my feet without checking over my shoulder but Poland is not safe Lithuania is not safe Germany is not safe 2 I wake up from loud conversations behind the wall fuss jostling banging…
Dear Professor Legutko, Early this year, when Russians were positioning their troops along Ukraine’s borders and liberal democracies were debating what it all might mean, I started reading your books. I have heard that they are influential in Poland, and I am concerned about the weakening of liberal democratic commitments in our native land and…
War begets war: it is an old truism, and internecine wars — of the type twice fought on American soil — typically have their antecedents in prior wars. Consider our Revolutionary War, whose cri de coeur was “no taxation without representation.” But how often we overlook that Britain imposed these heightened taxes on the colonists…
Wait long enough and every enjoyment is eventually placed on the altar, gussied up, and sanctified. Rock ‘n’ roll lyrics were once a readymade source of ridicule, regarded as gibberish written by and for bubblegum brains and blasting out of transistor radios to drive mom and dad mad. The late-night television host Steve Allen, equipped…
I’ll admit to being biased here. Teaching a great books course at Columbia — I was a graduate student, my charges were freshmen — was the pedagogical experience of my life. I was never the same again, and I know that many of my students also weren’t, because they told me so, and because, decades…
Ilya Ilyich Oblomov is a mid-nineteenth century landowner outside of Saint Petersburg. An honest and decent man, he suffers from a natural tendency towards inertia. He lives less in his home than on his sofa, and less on his sofa than in his capacious dressing gown of Persian fabric, and less in his dressing gown…
In the clear water of a spring, A Deer gazing at himself one day Praised the beauty of his antlers And could hardly bear the sight Of his slender legs, Whose shape he saw vanish in the waters. “What a disproportion between my feet and my head!” He said, grieving when seeing their shadow, “My…
As soon as the Goats have grazed, A certain sense of independence Makes them seek out fortune; off they go To the parts of the pasture Least frequented by humans. There, if there is a place without roads or paths, A cliff, a mountain with precipices, That is where these Ladies walk away their whims;…
An evil that spread terror, An evil that the Heavens in their fury Invented to punish the crimes of the earth, The Plague (we must call it by its name), Able to replenish in one day the river Acheron, Made war against animals. They didn’t all die, but all were struck: You didn’t see any…
On a steep, sandy, arduous trail, One from all sides exposed to the Sun, Six sturdy horses pulled a Coach. Women, a Monk, old men—all got off. The team was sweating, snorting, spent. A Fly arrives, and gets near the horses; Claims to be urging them with her buzzing; Stings one, stings the other, and…
A Rat living in a field, a Rat with a small brain, has one day had enough of the paternal Gods. He abandons the field, the grain, and the stubble, Quits his burrow to roam the countryside. As soon as he is outside of his home: “How vast and wide is the world!” he says….
On the fourth page of Pure Colour, the fourth and most recent novel by the Canadian writer Sheila Heti, it is proposed that there are three kinds of beings on the face of the earth. They are each a different kind of “critic,” tasked with helping God to improve upon His “first draft” of the…
