These bareback races are medieval in the modern sense: a bribe, a ruse, the occasional fall, fracture, and a bullet —but also in the sense of a retrieval of standards and emblems, the use of symbol, allegory, amulet, the team colors you cannot refuse. Tomorrow the terracotta dust will plume for about two minutes taking…
1 A girl puked on the tour bus on the switchback up Vesuvius. Her mother looked the other way —out the window. Where else? Wildflowers, hardy and tender, seemed unaware of the perils of flourishing in cinder. We trudged, as through beach sand, and when we got back on, sand had been shoveled onto the…
Two sounds in the house lately: clanking barbells and electric guitar behind garage and bedroom doors. J.’s mesocosm failed; he flagrantly excused himself on the basis of gender, as the gathering of mud and spores, weeds and worms for “nurturing” is not the métier, apparently, of boys. Dear A., I myself was quite taken with…
A couple of years ago we rented a beautiful apartment in London, a large flat where we must have stayed four or five times. It was perfectly comfortable and perfectly private, and the location, directly behind the British Museum, was ideal for visits to theaters and museums. It was decorated in the taste of a…
In 1925, student delegates from twenty colleges met at Wesleyan University to discuss a growing concern on America’s campuses: the poor quality of teaching. They decried dry-as-dust professors who filled up blackboards with irrelevant facts while students doodled, read novels, or dozed off. At larger schools, “section men” — soon to be known as teaching…
MARIANNE 1960 GOOD GREEK COFFEE GRECIAN WOMAN STUDY MONTREAL WOMAN NO. 1 JUST TO HAVE BEEN MY FIRST WIFE MONTREAL WOMAN NO. 2 MONTREAL VISITOR NO. 1 VIBRANT BUT DEAD
Does liberalism have poems? Are there liberal poets? John Stuart Mill, who loved Shelley and who celebrated “human feeling,” thought so: “Although a philosopher cannot make himself, in the peculiar sense in which we now use the term, a poet, unless at least he have that peculiarity of nature which would probably have made poetry…
For paradise to be possible either the lion must lose his nails, or the lamb must grow his own. HANS BLUMENBERG Before setting out to Moriah, where he intends to obey God’s command to sacrifice his son, Abraham loads the wood into Isaac’s arms and carries the burning torch and a sharp knife himself. On…
Poetry can sometimes offer to the young a piercingly accurate formulation of their inchoate suffering. I remember reading, at twenty-three, two lines in a new book: For to be young Was always to live in other people’s houses. Perhaps some poet had said it before, but if so, I hadn’t come across it. I learned…
In 1945, Columbia University published an obscure treatise by Jean Bodin, which originally appeared in 1566, as part of its “Records of Civilization: Sources and Studies” series. Bodin was a theorist of absolutism, but one who had a profound influence on later natural rights thinkers, and this was his first work, translated from Latin by…
Among the great longer poems of the twentieth century, the circumstances under which Shaul Tchernikhovsky’s To the Sun was composed were perhaps the most unlikely. This sonnet cycle was written in Hebrew in war-torn Odessa in 1919, with Red and White forces struggling for control of the city. Tchernikhovsky, then forty-five, had served on the…
Over the past year, there was so much to be afraid of that fear itself grew fatigued. Was the solitude of lockdown passing into a new systemic withdrawal? Or were we practicing turning our blind eye to kids on the streets with guns? Nothing felt as eerie then as the bourgeois comfort that now at…
