“If you think that, well, all morality is simply prejudice and murder is fine,” says Gary Saul Morson in an interview, “you actually become a terrorist.”  In 2023, Morson published one of the few essential books of the twenty-first century: Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter (Belknap Press). In it he anatomizes Russia’s homegrown fashion for terror in the nineteenth century and the responses of the country’s greatest writers. In the interview he tells Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky.:   “This is when the modern terrorist movement is born. I mean, by the end of the century, by the beginning of the next century, there were so many terrorists. It was a career that was inherited from parents to a child, including daughters who had become terrorists. It was a family tradition. There were thousands of them killing thousands of people, and it was considered, next to being a great writer, the most prestigious occupation in the world.”   I had never heard of Charlie Kirk before his murder. I don’t follow the news closely and have little interest in politics. Three things about his killing and its aftermath struck me: 1.) Kirk seemed like a reasonable fellow, a gentleman, not a thug, someone with whom you could disagree without being assaulted. 2.) He was murdered on a college campus. 3.) A friend sent me a video of young people celebrating the killing of a husband and father. Some were singing about it.   More than forty years ago, as a newspaper reporter, I sat in a jail cell with a man who had just been convicted, along with an accomplice, of kidnapping a barmaid, killing her in an Indiana cornfield and raping the corpse. The court had ruled he was sufficiently sane to stand trial. No sign of contrition. His reaction was typically grandiose. Like the young people in the video, he sang and expressed joy at what he had done. He had adopted the name of a cartoon character. This was the closest I had ever come to undiluted nihilism. I was stunned but fortunately had a professional job to do. I kept asking questions and taking notes. Who can argue, using logic and appeals to morality, with barbarism?   In Wonder Confronts Certainty, Morson writes of the Russian nihilists: “Terrorists, therefore, felt little or no compunction about killing dozens of innocent bystanders and they eventually engaged in random killing (throwing bombs into cafes).” In the last few days, as my country goes insane and many celebrate evil, I’ve taken some comfort in Mike Juster’s “Vigil”:   “Set all routines aside; let hours leak to weeks. Decide not to decide.   “Ease anguish with your voice; speak, though you are unheard. When sleep is deep, rejoice.   “Let go of Hell and Heaven. Pray, play a cherished song, forgive and be forgiven.”

On July 26, 2022, as I was living through a period of acute loneliness despite being a naturally solitary person, NASA reported that computer modeling of data from its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) had revealed several cylindrical pits on the Moon with just the right shape to be shaded just the right amount to offer shelter from the extremes of the lunar surface. Because the Moon has no atmosphere to act as its thermostat, its temperature fluctuates dramatically as it faces and turns away from the Sun, rising to 260°F (about 127°C) in the daytime and plummeting to -280°F (about… read article

And how should we respond?

Dr. Johnson identifies nine meanings for composition in his Dictionary. The first -- “the act of forming an integral of various dissimilar parts” – recalls Aristotle’s notion that perceiving similarities among dissimilar things constitutes genius. A basic human drive is to find pattern in the seemingly random. Johnson’s sixth definition is the most succinct -- “written work” – and corresponds to my favorite subject in grade school: composition. That’s what they still called writing when I was a kid. I was a lazy student who excelled only at what interested him, and putting words together was always a kick, a way to organize my disorganized thoughts. Soon I discovered that often I didn’t understand something until I had written about it – a phenomenon that remains in place. Words are thoughts and sounds made real and sharable with others.  Writing, or course, is complemented by reading. A writer – say, Jonathan Swift – impresses you with his precision and concision, the power he musters with words. You imitate him, plagiarize him, try out his voice and technical devices. With time, you absorb his lessons and customize them to your own needs. Occasionally, you reject him entirely and find a new teacher.     A veteran fifth-grade teacher among my readers tells me her students, to put it bluntly, don’t read and can barely write. None find writing a pleasure, even at the level of storytelling and autobiography. It’s a familiar teacherly lament. I have no solutions. It may already be too late to fix things.   Eric Ormsby is a sensualist of sound, one of our finest poets and critics. In 2005, Canadian Notes & Queries dedicated an issue to Ormsby and included an interview with him, “Menageries of Vocables,” conducted by Robyn Sarah. It was later collected in her Little Eurekas: A Decade’s Thoughts on Poetry (2007). Ormsby is enviably articulate:   “I’d like to think that there’s no English word I couldn’t conceive of using in a poem somehow. And why not? The world is full of fantastic beings – why should our lexicon be any less so? But I have to admit too that this besottedness with words, this playing the ring master in menageries of vocables, can be a self-indulgence.”   That’s poetry. Ormsby’s prose is comparably accomplished. He chose it as a conscious act:   “Slowly I came to see, to my pleasure, that there were many things I could express in prose that would not have worked in poetry, and I began to enjoy writing prose enormously. . . [Y]ou fashion a different authorial voice when you write prose; you can be casual, digressive, a bit offhand or even genially banal – you can make various forms of small talk – all gambits that doom a poem.”   I’m speaking as a writer, one who learned the hard way that he can’t write poetry. Good prose of many sorts – reading it, writing it -- can be as intoxicating and fulfilling as verse. Ormsby says:   “[P]rose is connected in my mind with the world of affairs, with conversation and interchange, in a way that poetry isn’t – or at least not immediately so. . . . I can’t write the essay or review until I’ve mulled it over for a while, and I can’t actually put words to paper until I’ve thought of an opening sentence or, better, opening paragraph. Once I have that, the rest follows smoothly.”

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