Author Archives: James Mustich

Yahia Lababidi, Revolutions of the Heart:“Belief, in the midst of chaos, remembers the indestructible world.” “Bodies are like poems that way, only a fraction of their power resides in the skin of things, the remainder belongs to the spirit that swims through them.” ❦ Samantha Power:“The binaries of the modern moment don’t suit a lot […]

From a notebook: On War and Peace, 1 A couple of years ago, Margot and I embarked on a tandem reading journey. Concerned that I was succumbing to digital distraction and losing the ability to concentrate, I prescribed myself Proust as a therapeutic measure: I would immerse myself in his imagination for ten pages a […]

A reflection from A Month of Sundays. “The years teach much which the days never know,” said Emerson; they gather to themselves our hopes and fears, faiths and failures, loyalties and memories, allowing the past to assume an almost institutional presence, a corpus of authority and belief that guides—knowingly or unconsciously—our thought and action. The […]

A Classical Education, part five. In gratitude for the Harper’s Dictionary and all it represented, and out of a politeness I knew he would appreciate as much as the gift, I sent Mr. DaParma a book: John Gardner’s then recently published epic in verse, Jason and Medeia, a retelling of the classic mythological tale of […]

A Classical Education, part four. Not too long after entering college, I became a lapsed classicist. As this essay illustrates, I look back on my prelapsarian era with nostalgia and regret. Indeed, through the nearly five decades since I left Mr. DaParma’s immediate orbit, I’ve spent a considerable number of hours, albeit intermittently, looking back—through […]

A reflection from A Month of Sundays 1Pervasive enough to be invisible, powerful enough to disrupt, if not destroy, the shape and substance of our lives, weather is a wonder worthy of our admiration (if not, indeed, our worship). Yet the weather comes and goes so quickly our direct regard of it seldom relaxes into […]

A Classical Education, part three. I worked on translating the Tusculan Disputations, part of it at least, in my junior year in high school, as part of a somewhat ill-starred school-wide embrace of independent study. While I can’t recall the exact curricular sanction for my work on Cicero’s philosophical treatise, it was like Mr. DaParma […]

A reflection from A Month of Sundays. Is there a watching in the world—a wakefulness—attentive to our thoughts and deeds? All of us, at one time or another, have intuited such intent to some vague presence outside ourselves. The feeling can be provoked—quite readily, in fact—by a landscape (a sylvan setting might provide it, or […]

A Classical Education, part two. I turned to the Harper’s Dictionary last week to read up on Cicero, prompted by some passages I’d marked in the pages of Michael Massing’s Fatal Discord: Erasmus, Luther, and the Fight for the Western Mind, an immense book that I had begun reading in April 2018, soon after its […]

A Classical Education, part one. One of the most treasured volumes in my library is one I seldom open these days. In fact, I’ve only occasionally consulted it in the past decade. It’s big: 3¾ inches thick by 10½ tall and 7¼ wide, and bound in green cloth that’s been rubbed to an almost silken […]