For my brother, Bryan Lightweis (1977–2024) Comrade, fill no glass for me You might as well cancel the songwriter’s century. Nothing short of that could eliminate his hooks and rhythms, the vocables and caesurae and scansion that have, in each of his songs, a performance history of their own. Born in the American provinces, he…
1. Opera arrived in Naples twice, first among the contortions of myth and then in an unlikely twist of history. The myth is an extravagantly famous one about someone who survives hearing some singing that should destroy him. Homer barely describes the Sirens, but their high voices float all the more forcefully out of the…
In January 1948, four months after the traumatic partition of the Indian subcontinent, the Urdu writer Saadat Hasan Manto boarded a ship to Karachi from Bombay. He was moving to Lahore, where his wife, Safia, and daughter, Nighat, had travelled the previous year to attend a wedding, but after yet another British colony was split…
God, bless the lowborn and the shy of luck, Those rubbing nickels, hoping for a spark, The tweakers, boozers, losers, and the fucked Who breed like cats behind the mobile park. And bless them even when they’re screwing up, Or shooting up, or burgling something sad, Or fishing for old cig butts in that cup…
Have I been faithless to your memory, Who died before our beards had come full in? We who’d buzzed our hair short in the yard, And punched each other’s arms until they bruised? Our falling out was from a dozen things. You mocked me secretly to the wrong friend, I thought myself the better of…
She always speaks too little or too late. Never has lied, but always puts the truth So on the lean that touch it and it tips. She wears a blindfold as she paints her lips. You go to her when desperate and alone. Up from her navel comes the platinum word That cleaves you like…
“A white doe in the green grass of a glade Appeared to me with two horns made of gold . . .” —Petrarch All joy, being considered in its truth, Has in it both the terrible and good. You will not know the beauty of the deer Until you’ve lain her low within the wood….
Her whistle is climbing its spiral stair And loathe are my evenings, loathe of bone, And fir trees are steeples in the air, And every confession is told alone. The little lung beats the feathered snare, And fair is my sunset, fair of light, And here bend the proverbs, the tricky prayer, And I sit…
1. In 1979, in an article entitled “What Is Wrong with Slavery,” the British philosopher R. M. Hare wrote: “Nearly everybody would agree that slavery is wrong; and I can say this perhaps with greater feeling than most, having in a manner of speaking been a slave.” The first time I read this I was…
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…
