We live in a state of constant strife; the truths we relied on no longer seem certain; we are unsettled, shaken, adrift. Even those of us lucky enough to retain our health, homes, families, and jobs feel exiled from the lives we once knew. The bonds of friendship and community that secured us have loosened,…
I On New Year’s Day in 1863, Thomas Wentworth Higginson was stationed in the Sea Islands of South Carolina, presiding over a large group of Unionist whites and formerly enslaved black workers who had gathered to celebrate the Emancipation Proclamation. A prominent prewar abolitionist, Higginson had recently become commander of one of the first black…
Edith Stein, a soulful modern thinker, was murdered in Auschwitz in August 1942. Born to a Jewish family in 1891, she was baptized into the Catholic faith on New Year’s Day 1922. In October 1933, she began the process of becoming a Carmelite nun, in which capacity she would take the name Teresa Benedicta of…
Morning Song Love set you going like a fat gold watch. The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry Took its place among the elements. Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue. In a drafty museum, your nakedness Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls. I’m no more…
On February 22, 1990, Vaclav Havel spoke to a joint session of the United States Congress as the newly elected president of a free Czechoslovakia. Just a few months earlier, he had been detained (the last in a long line of arrests) by the StB, his country’s infamous secret police; he said he didn’t know…
Was a swell commandment: drink up, sleep. She’d relinquished the vampy black and absconded to her toddler color (muddy sunset) as we, one from each grief stage, commissioned to flock her, petal’d her pale strapless, pressed the appliqué along her spine with dancer’s glue, all funds sunk into that silk, hence the wan hors d’oeuvres,…
Frigid in vibrating daylight, with no distinction between indoors and out. Ailene on the gurney asked her children, Am I dying? and received a coward’s answer. How she eyed the ward, panicked, more alive than ever. Once a lounging teenager, biting the brush end of her braid, the lattice more alive than ever with…
Stunning as noon sun or psychosis aftermath, vase flung into the garden, but surely the porcelain was speaking and the mother, she couldn’t let it go on terrorizing the household, could she? White noise, attention span frail as a ghost crab clattering into surf, washed backwards into the mist of Ansel’s photographs, synth to soften…
You shall not hate your brother in your heart, you shall surely reprove your fellow and not bear guilt because of him. Leviticus 19:17 “This last winter was another lost in fog. As usual he did nothing.” In this way A.B. Yehoshua introduces readers to the anonymous, plodding, intellectually undistinguished Israeli protagonist of his story…
Being implies obligation. …
February 20, Sunday Yesterday, at home in Kyiv, we listened to Boris Johnson’s speech and immediately bought tickets to Lviv. My husband Roman suggested a week ago that S, our three-and-a-half-year-old daughter, and I stay with my parents in Lviv, but I refused, despite the American and British embassies having already relocated there (and my…
Why did the United States intervene in the Second World War? The question is rarely asked because the answers seem so obvious: Hitler, Pearl Harbor, and what more needs to be said? To most Americans, World War II was the quintessential “war of necessity.” As the late Charles Krauthammer once put it, “wars of choice,”…
