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On Claudia Rankine’s Citizen. “Yes, and this is how you are a citizen,” we read as we approach the end of this book about race, identity, language, and memory: “Come on. Let it go. Move on.” The phrases echo others sounded on earlier pages in their urging that the consciousness at work—the “you” being addressed—evade […]

A reflection from A Month of Sundays. The assumptions that anchor our days, those habits of heart and mind we rely on to palliate the tyranny of the actual, are invisible allies—or are they as often enemies?—in our never-quite-settled war with the world.

Suggestions for therapeutic reading. In his taut, eloquent introduction to The Journals of John Cheever, the author’s son Ben recalls that his father “used to say that a fine piece of prose could not only cure a depression, it could clear up a sinus headache.” Such allusion to the medicinal benefits of good writing made […]

A reflection from A Month of Sundays. It can come as a shock to recognize that the straight-and-narrow is more oblique than one imagined, and that the suspension of disbelief, in religion as well as drama, can be far more cunning in the long run than rationality might be able to measure. As Pascal said, […]

On the essays of James Baldwin. Evidence and Eloquence On the essays of James Baldwin. It can be a little too easy to pin labels on James Baldwin: black, gay, expatriate, aesthete. But every label sells him short, diminishing the singularity of his work. That he wrote specifically of his time and place—America in the […]

Sonnets on a bookstore’s demise, 1990. ​1 Over a shoulder, through the humming cloud,A newspaper focuses my attentionUpon a quiet headline with its mentionOf City’s Oldest Bookstore, Shutting Down. Imagining a map, I scour the townBut the damned store eludes my apprehension —Aloft in our Florida-bound suspensionI wish my fellow passenger would read aloud. No […]

A reflection from A Month of Sundays. We invest all creation stories (large and small, universal and individual) with our sense of time, so that every birth is a beginning rather than a revelation, every death an ending rather than a return to the dark waters from which life sprang. Despite the solemn invocations of […]

Face to face with destiny. In the glass she wore an expression of tense melancholy, for she had come to the depressing conclusion, since the arrival of the Dalloways, that her face was not the face she wanted, and in all probability never would be. However, punctuality has been impressed upon her, and whatever face […]

From a notebook: On War and Peace, 3 “Everything flows; nothing remains,” is how Guy Davenport rendered the most famous maxim of Heraclitus, immediately annotating his translation with bracketed alternatives—“[Everything moves; nothing is still. Everything passes away; nothing lasts.]”—and following these with a formulation nearly as well known: “One cannot step twice into the same […]

A reflection from A Month of Sundays. We are familiar with the state of grace (or at least with the idea of it), but that other states—of despair, for instance, or melancholy, or bewilderment and anxiety or even gladness—might be conditions of the soul, a possession by divine or cosmological promise of our inmost intelligence, […]