“I am no more than a secretary of the invisible thing.” Czesław Miłosz begins one of his poems with this evocative declaration of artistic vocation. In this spare statement, the poet abandons any pretense of authorship in the conventional sense and presents himself as a vessel, one who listens inwardly and transcribes what he cannot…
The following is, for the first time translated and brought to print, the written correspondence between Sigmund Freud and Rainer Maria Rilke. The record was only completed in late 2022, when the German Literature Archive (GLA) acquired Rilke’s entire literary estate from his descendants. Letters between the two went unnoticed by scholarship; the GLA itself…
The hero of The Magic Mountain — the perfectly ordinary, blond, blue-eyed Hans Castorp — is the typological bourgeois male. I spent seven years writing a book about the novel of which he serves as protagonist and in that time I wondered often what possessed me to devote so much energy to him and to…
Frequently, in conversation with others or in an incessant inner monologue, I try to imagine what a world after this, after this political crisis, after this historical paroxysm, will look like. I love two countries — America and Israel — which have, let us say, transformed themselves. I am rich in crises, overwhelmed by hopelessness…
Remembering Jonathan Lear A vision of the future must never be only about the future. Otherwise we will commit the terrible mistake known as futurism, which is nothing more than an attempt to make a virtue out of velocity. Whether in the form of impatience or dread, the…
I have started thinking of them as spaceships to nowhere. In my city, another one is always on the way; the latest touches down at 213 Bowery this fall. The last to arrive at that address, the SANAA-designed New Museum, was finished in 2007, the year of Obamamania and the iPhone and the first gentle…
A Conceptual Trash Heap Toni Morrison was wrong when she intoned that language is violence. But let’s give her this: the reckless use of words can do violence, idiomatically speaking, to clear thinking and therefore to political analysis. Slinging about words whose meaning is muddled, misleading, or tendentious — or whose usage is meant to…
In the summer of 1981, the novelist Italo Calvino published an article on the great books in the Roman weekly news magazine L’Espresso. “Why Read the Classics?” is classic Calvino: playful, charming, erudite, skeptical, humane. It consists of fourteen “suggested definitions” of a classic that deliberately contradict each other. Per definition one, the classics are…
On a warm Monday in June 1965, the Supreme Court declared that married women had the right to use contraceptives. This was a hard-won victory for Estelle Griswold, executive director of the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut and namesake of the case, Griswold v. Connecticut. She had previously helped displaced persons after World War II…
Lately, when I close my eyes at night, my thoughts strangely tunnel back to 2001 and one particular fireman. It was September, I was 22 years old living in New York and the world around me had turned to powder. Not the delightful dander of snow globe souvenirs or storybook Manhattan Christmases, but the dust…
Shakespeare’s mothers are often nasty. Lady Capulet ignores, then disowns, poor Juliet. Lady Macbeth would kill her child to gain a throne. Though they grieve (Constance in King John) it is vicious grief (Queen Margaret in Richard III). Sometimes they are terrifying: Volumnia raised Coriolanus to be a tyrant; Tamora encourages her son to commit…
I am about to flip a coin. Can you predict whether it will be heads or tails? You might have gotten it right. (It was heads.) But if so, you were lucky. Whether it would come up heads or tails depends on an assortment of factors that you could not identify before I flipped the…
