Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot had a similar quirk to their literary careers: after penning their respective masterpieces — Jane Eyre for Brontë in 1847, Middlemarch for Eliot in 1871 — both lived to publish deeply strange and religiously preoccupied novels a half-decade later. While the Jewish mysticism and Wagnerian scope of Eliot’s Daniel Deronda…
“Art, of course, lives in history,” said Elizabeth Hardwick. By which she meant that a novel emerges in its own time, and changes in its passage to our own. This — the likeness which is also an unlikeness, the unfamiliar familiarity — is the shock of reading classic literature, of literature even a generation or…
“In the huge gathering . . . there were, according to the official estimate . . . 1,250,000 persons. So far as available records indicated last night, this was the largest crowd that has ever assembled at a single point anywhere in the world.” This New York Times report from May 1942 refers not to…
“Man is but a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed.” The line appears halfway through Pascal’s philosophical work, Pensées (“Thoughts”), quiet as a whisper, final as a verdict. In around a dozen words, he captures both our fragility and our strange dignity. This is Pascal’s gift: the ability to distill…
It was still early in the war. After four days of internet blackout — and, God knows, testing countless VPNs — I finally reached a stable enough connection to check my email. The last one was from a prestigious university in New York, where I was scheduled to begin my Ph.D. in the upcoming academic…
Pedro Alvares Cabral was the first human being in recorded history to have been on four continents. He set foot on each of them — Europe, Africa, America, and Asia — in a single year, 1500, which was the same year that he led the first extensive European exploration of the northeast coast of South…
A little lectionary: Every human being, no matter how slightly gifted he is, however subordinate his position in life may be, has a natural need to formulate a life-view, a conception of the meaning of life and its purpose. — Kierkegaard The world has become “infinite” for us all over again, inasmuch as we cannot…
To grow up, as I did, in a country that had been under Nazi occupation less than a decade before I was born, was to be very sure about who had been good and who had been evil. Where I lived, in The Hague, we refused to buy candy from a local tobacconist, because the…
The late Michael Longley told of how, one Saturday morning in the middle of the 1970s, when tribal warfare in Northern Ireland was becoming bloodier by the day, and even more so by the night, he and his wife, the literary critic and academic Edna Longley, were having a weekend lie-in, when he heard from…
December 2024 marked the thirtieth anniversary of Russia’s first war against Chechnya, begun by President Boris Yeltsin in 1994. Chechnya had been conquered by the Russian empire in the mid-nineteenth century in a decades-long and very cruel military campaign that combined the Russian colonization of the area and the genocidal removal of the indigenous population. …
Under the pearl-hued sky of Paris, as a welcome spring breeze ruffled the trees above, I walked with a friend through Montparnasse Cemetery to pay our respects to a long-dead artist we both admire. As we wove our way through the marble headstones, we passed a group of people convening around a grave. At first,…
The first time I was beaten up by police I was sixteen years old. It was March 8, 2004, and more than four thousand feminists had gathered in Tehran’s Laleh Park to commemorate International Women’s Day. Hundreds of security forces were dispatched to the park to prevent our rally from going ahead. They were especially…
