“May you burn in hell like you are going to burn here.” — Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, upon ordering a massive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union at the conclusion of a Pentagon nuclear war game in 1983 For eighty years, the world has lived with the knowledge that a small number of…
In the spring of 2024 I taught a comparative literature class at Columbia University called Unland: Writing Utopias. The word Unland is a neologism of the German-Jewish poet Paul Celan, from his poem “Hawdalah” from 1963. Unland, in my reading, could refer to a decimated postwar geography that is no longer recognizable as itself. It…
Sometime during the year 1337, the Sienese painter Ambrogio Lorenzetti began planning one of the most innovative works in the history of European art. Frescoed on three of the four walls of the executive council room of the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena, the painting is huge — almost twenty feet high and a hundred and…
If they show me stone and I say stone they will say stone. If they show me wood and I say wood they will say wood. But if they show me blood and I say blood they will say paint. If they show me blood and I say blood they will say paint. Translated from…
A boy is out doing a man’s work with a chainsaw, when his sister comes to call him in for supper. Suddenly, the chainsaw leaps and cuts deep into his hand. The boy looks at the bleeding gash and begs his sister, “Don’t let him cut my hand off— / The doctor when he comes.”…
I knew the jig was up when one day, in the fall of 1995, my boss and publisher Peter Osnos asked me to lunch. I was then editorial director of Times Books, an imprint of Random House. Previously, I had been publisher of Hill & Wang, a nonfiction division of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. I’d…
Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) To my son I still remember Hedley Bull his slow, regular footfall in front of the podium; the sudden way he would look up and turn his handsome head to us before asking in that droll Australian accent: “Gentlemen, it all hinges on the meaning of the word virtù. Bacon, Hobbes, Adams,…
“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…
