In The Praise of Folly, in 1509, Desiderius Erasmus personified folly as a goddess. She develops the thesis that folly is good and that it is deserving of praise. Folly remarks on her own ubiquity — since we all, the wise and the unwise, live in folly’s grip. “Fortune herself,” Folly tells us, “the directrix…
My estranged father’s death did not affect me as I had expected it would. I had been informed just two days before his passing that he was gravely ill. On the windless drive from France to Germany, somewhere in Belgium on the Sunday before the American elections, I was told he had died. My husband…
The Met on a cloudless Tuesday afternoon was not too crowded (the Vermeer room was empty for five minutes — a record, in my experience). We came to Rembrandt first. I entered his art with a helping of Malraux to guide me. He had written that Rembrandt was a brother to Dostoevsky and “one of…
When Rümeysa Öztürk, a 27-year-old Turkish student, was snatched off the street by masked plainclothes police officers and put in the back of an unmarked car, she wasn’t marching on the streets of Istanbul protesting Turkey’s authoritarian president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. She was walking in America in broad daylight, about to meet friends for dinner…
In August of last year a video was posted on X by the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem in which four masked settlers, three of them wielding clubs, can be seen walking onto a Palestinian man’s land. One settler, wearing a sheet of white cloth tied around the lower part of his face, is recorded…
There is perhaps no more reliable measure of the health of a political order than the degree of autonomy that culture enjoys within it. Culture, high and low, may be construed as the sum total of the feelings and the values of a society as they are expressed by means of beauty (or by their…
I have a friend who takes other people’s suffering as her own, and almost physically. When she visited Babyn Yar — the place where Kyiv’s Jews, thirty-three thousand men, women, and children, were shot in the fall of 1941 — she described being torn by excruciating pain. Her experience reminds me of Simone Weil, who…
A.D. My unchristian ancestors: for a lifetime they got along without God. Though something always happened that they had not foreseen. Two world wars, the downfall of their city, diseases, or what it is like to lose everything — freedom stripped from them, twice in a row. When unchristian beings (Hitler, Stalin) took this only…
What is the Enlightenment, for us? Are we its heirs, its continuers, its defenders? Or should we acknowledge our distance from it, and try to imagine a different sort of connection to this now-distant past? At the present moment, the temptation to identify with the Enlightenment is almost overwhelming. In dark times, after all, few…
In memory of Albert Murray I am what might be called an integrated black man. Many of my friends are white, and I live in a mostly white neighborhood; my long marriage is an interracial one, my grown children are biracial. I offer these facts neither as a lament nor as a boast. They are…
Thousands of minutes and hours, deeds and words, specifications, delusions, mistakes without end, longing, flesh — it takes so much to create a single person — that he be, that he survives, that he feels a hand on his shoulder, that others say to him “It is you.” And it is so easy for him…
