The following conversation took place in Russian in 1995 at Headington House, Isaiah Berlin’s home near Oxford. ADAM MICHNIK: What do you consider yourself to be: an Englishman, a Jew, or a Russian? ISAIAH BERLIN: I have lived here for seventy years now and people see me as an Englishman. After all, Oxford is the…
Why are the landscapes beautiful, and the approaches to the forest at twilight drawn to the melody of the pipes warming in your breast, and the bluish puddle on the other side of the railroad tracks make the tune in your heart tremble and the body yearn to step over its banks as if once,…
We have to understand how movies have taught us to feel. That spell is always waiting to take us beneath the tracery of storyline so that we may plunge into the pit of what the story is about. And why we are breathless to see what happens while wondering if we will ever escape the…
Batter my heart, three-person’d God; for You As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend; That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new. I, like an usurped town, to another due, Labor to admit You, but O, to no end; Reason,…
How good it is, to sip a beer outdoors, with winter drawing near, above the wreckage of a meal. How good, before the bill comes due, to watch a copper light gleam through an ale infused with chanterelle and trust yourself to only those sensations of the tongue and nose, what’s felt, and how it…
Going home means anywhere but here, putting aside worn grays for the bright amber of a fall morning. No more counting days in the clack and steam of laundry. With the hush of brakes a Greyhound bus glides beneath the trees and past a shuttered smelter. Grisaille shadows. Chains of geese. A swath of sheepish…
after Guiraut Riquier It’s for the best that I stop singing. Songs should come from happiness, and lately I’ve felt less and less inspired, with my horizon shrinking. When I recall my darkest days and contemplate a world ablaze and dread extinctions of tomorrow, who could wonder at my sorrow? My fire dwindled long ago….
They slip away, those creatures who once caught my eye and ventured near, near enough to smell of snow as cold lingered in their fur and breath warmed my sleeping ear; who ate an apple from my hand and lounged in sunlight, unconstrained. Such old affections slip away, all but one, la douce dolor: she…
Thirty-five minutes into the movie The Piano Teacher, there occurs an indelible scene. In a dim bathroom cluttered with drugstore label sprays, lotions, and other feeble concoctions designed to fend off decay, a middle-aged woman in a silk robe briskly zips open her pocketbook and removes a folded slip of paper, which she unfolds to…
It is a dreary world, gentlemen. GOGOL The most consequential event of our time, I pray, will be the heroism of the Ukrainians. Here are men and women fighting and dying for liberal democracy. It was beginning to seem as if such a thing were no longer possible. Worse, no longer desirable. Here in the…
The king was pregnant. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness It turns out the supply-side cheerleader George Gilder was more correct than not when he forecast, in the poignantly titled Sexual Suicide in 1973, that women playing at being men would spell the collapse of Western civilization and probably the social order…
Science is a creative endeavor that requires the free and open exchange of ideas to thrive. Society has benefited immensely from scientific progress, and in order for science to continue to better the lives of individuals and nations scientific work must be evaluated on the basis of scientific merit alone. Over the past decade, however,…
