Full Width 
Shortcuts 
Sign Up 
Log In 
Articles 
Reading List More from The Marginalian
“To be an artist is a guarantee to your fellow humans that the wear and tear of living will not let you become a murderer,” Louise Bourgeois wrote in her diary as a young artist. “The poets (by which I mean all artists),” James Baldwin wrote in his late thirties, “are finally the only people who know the truth about us. Soldiers don’t. Statesmen don’t… Only poets.” And the truth about us, as I know it, is that how we love, how we give, and how we suffer is just about the sum of who we are. The transmutation of… read article
This essay is adapted from the nineteenth chapter of my book Figuring. In the first autumn of her thirties, Emily Dickinson wrote to her confidante and eventual editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson: I had a terror — since September — I could tell to none, and so I sing, as the Boy does by the Burying Ground — because I am afraid. Not a “fright,” not a “shock,” but a terror. What lay behind this enormity implied by a woman who measured her words so meticulously? Generations of biographers have filled pages with conjectures of varying persuasiveness — a death, some… read article
We are always either drawing closer or drifting apart — there is no stasis in relationships. The direction of movement may change over the course of a relationship, but there is no stasis. Despite our culture’s bias for the drama of cataclysm — the violent heartbreaks, the very notion of falling in love, implying a sudden tripping along the path of life — the most profound of these motions of the soul are the work of gradualism, their pace geologic, their velocity that of continents, so incremental as to be imperceptible, until one day two people find themselves a sum… read article
There are things in life that come over you sudden as a flash flood, total as an eclipse — the great loves, the great creative passions, the great urges to conquer a mountain or a theorem. They can feel like an alien invasion, like the immense hand of some imperative has seized your soul from the outside. But when you look back on them once they have had their way with you, if you are awake enough to your own life and conscious enough of your unconscious, you come to realize that they were not a possession by some external… read article
Only a fool or an egomaniac would deny that chance shapes the vast majority of life. The time, place, culture, family, body, brain, and biochemistry we are born into, the people who cross our path, the accidents that befall us — these dwarf in consequence the sum total of our choices. Still, our choices are the points of light that flicker against the opaque immensity of chance to illuminate our lives with meaning, just as stars, all the billions of them, comprise a mere 0.4% percent of a universe made mostly of dark energy and dark matter, and yet those… read article
More in literature
Montaigne’s charming opening to his essay “Of the Education of Children”: “I have never seen a father who failed to claim his son, however mangy or hunchbacked he was. Not that he does not perceive his defect, unless he is utterly intoxicated by his affection; but the fact remains that the boy is his.” And I have never suggested otherwise. My youngest son David graduates today from Rice University with a B.A. in political science. In September he will enter the Peace Corps, assigned to Peru. He’s already smarter and more mature than I was at his age, and is neither mangy nor hunchbacked. As the Frenchman puts it: “There is not a child halfway through school who cannot claim to be more learned than I, who have not even the equipment to examine him on his first lesson, at least according to that lesson. And if they force me to, I am constrained, rather ineptly, to draw from it some matter of universal scope, on which I test the boy’s natural judgment: a lesson as strange to them as theirs is to me.” Montaigne speaks for autodidacts everywhere. Our educations have been spotty and self-centered, but also passionate and memorable. We love to learn. David got a more complete formal education than mine, as did his older brothers. I never went to graduate school, except for the newspapers where I worked as a reporter. David will do his graduate studies helping the people of Peru. “Of the Education of Children” is dedicated and addressed to Madame Diane de Foix, the Comtesse de Gurson, wife of Louis de Foix, Montaigne’s friend killed in the Battle of Montraveau in 1587. The countess is pregnant as Montaigne addresses her, and he blithely assumes she is carrying a son (“you are too noble-spirited to begin otherwise than with a male”). The confidence with which he lectures her on children and their education is breathtaking. Montaigne had married in 1565 and with Françoise de la Chassaigne he had a daughter. Four other children died in infancy. He writes: “Wonderful brilliance may be gained for human judgment by getting to know men. We are all huddled and concentrated in ourselves, and our vision is reduced to the length of our nose. Socrates was asked where he was from. He replied not ‘Athens,’ but ‘The world.’ He, whose imagination was fuller and more extensive, embraced the universe as his city, and distributed his knowledge, his company, and his affections to all mankind, unlike us who look only at what is underfoot.” Throughout most of the essay, Montaigne’s advice is admirably open-minded. He urges the countess to hire an accomplished tutor and expose the boy to the best of books and people. He particularly recommends Plutarch, Seneca and Tacitus, and says “the first taste I had for books” came with reading Ovid’s Metamorphosis. Montaigne writes of himself as a young man: “Meanwhile, for all that, my mind was not lacking in strong stirrings of its own, and certain and open-minded judgments about the things it understood; and it digested them alone, without communication. And, among other things, I really do believe that it would have been wholly incapable of submitting to force and violence.” Well done, David. [The Montaigne excerpts are taken from The Complete Essays of Montaigne (trans. Donald Frame, Stanford University Press, 1957).]
“Inspiration is perhaps merely the joy of writing: it does not precede writing.” A student and aspiring fiction writer wonders why I seldom refer to “inspiration.” What is it? Do I deny its existence? Have certain writers successfully relied on it? Can he? My answer is yes and no, which betrays my background as a newspaper reporter. Telling an editor I hadn’t completed a story because I wasn’t “inspired” would be grounds, at minimum, for mockery if not dismissal. All those years of writing for a daily deadline resulted in a work ethic that now is second nature. You learn to budget your time appropriately, make telephone calls in a timely fashion and write even when the Muse is nonresponsive. Writing can jump-start inspiration. Just plow ahead, get something on the page or screen, and you’ve created the conditions necessary for inspiration to bloom. Shortly after publishing his penultimate novel, Transparent Things (1972), Nabokov published a teasing essay titled “Inspiration” in the January 6, 1973, issue of The Saturday Review. Listen to the voice of a man who had published his first novel almost half a century earlier. He describes his experience with inspiration in detail: “The bolt of inspiration strikes invariably: you observe the flash in this or that piece of great writing, be it a stretch of fine verse, or a passage in Joyce or Tolstoy, or a phrase in a short story, or a spurt of genius in the paper of a naturalist, of a scholar, or even in a book reviewer’s article. I have in view, naturally, not the hopeless hacks we all know—but people who are creative artists in their own right . . .” [The sentence at the top is Jules Renard’s entry for May 9, 1898, in his Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020).]
Ian Kumekawa tells the story of the global economy in one barge The post The Shipping News appeared first on The American Scholar.
I should make that the new official slogan of the blog. It is from p. 614 of Finnegans Wake, one of the books I recently read. FICTION The Sword in the Stone (1938), T. H. White – I for some reason did not read this as a youth. It is wonderful, full of anachronism and parody and outstanding British nature writing in the tradition of Gilber White (mentioned in the novel) and Richard Jefferies. It turns out that the most important thing in the education of a king is to know what it is like to be a fish. Finnegans Wake (1939), James Joyce – begin Here and Continue to the End. The Big Clock (1946), Kenneth Fearing – A jittery Whitmanian poet of the 1920s and 1930s finally cashes in with a jittery multi-voiced semi-mystery. The “detective” is the staff of the equivalent of Time Inc., making the killer Henry Luce. The detective is deliberately not trying to solve the mystery. The single best part is narrated by a cranky painter. Odd, odd book, but I see why it survives. The Mountain Lion (1947), Jean Stafford – A Boston writer, but this sad descendent of What Maise Knew is set in California and on a Colorado cattle ranch. The Jewels of Aptor (1962), Samuel R. Delaney – His first novel, clumsily constructed but stuffed with imaginative conceits. I’d never read Delaney. God's Country (1994), Percival Everett – Almost every Everett novel and short story I have read has a similar voice and narrator, a PhD with a savior complex. James in James does not have a PhD, but might as well. In this Western, however, Everett’s narrator is an idiot and another, non-narrating character fills the usual role, which is a lot of fun. Thirty years older, God’s Country is a companion novel to James (2024). I urge anyone interested to read them together. It is time to get the James backlash going. I have seen a couple of interviews where Everett himself seems to be trying to get the backlash going, but it has not worked yet. I have read eleven of Everett’s books now and hope to read many more. James is the worst one! POETRY Blues in Stereo (1921-7), Langston Hughes – It is like a gift book, a pointlessly tiny volume that could and should be expanded to include all of The Weary Blues (1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927), both of which are in public domain, which seems to be the limiting concept. But for some reason this book does include the pieces of a never-realized collaboration with Duke Ellington that is a fantasy refraction of The Big Sea (1940), Hughes’s first memoir. I do not think the theater piece has been published before. Worth seeing. Collected Poems (1940), Kenneth Fearing – High-energy Whitman mixed with advertising=speak and business lingo and gangsters. So sometimes it’s kitsch. Ten Burnt Offerings (1952) & Autumn Sequel (1953) & Visitations (1957), Louis MacNeice Chord of Light (1956) & Hermes, Dog and Star (1957), Zbigniew Herbert What Rough Beasts (2021), Leslie Moore – An earlier book by a Maine poet and artist I read a year ago. She specializes in prints, and poems, about birds and other animals. About an hour after reading her poem about grackles invading her yard and establishing a grackledom the grackles invaded my yard and ruled for several days. That was enjoyable. MISCELLANEOUS Lexington and Concord: The Battle Heard Round the World (2018), George C. Daughan – Preparation for the 250th anniversary of Paul Revere’s ride and the Battle of Lexington and Concord, which is another thing I did in April. Here I am at the Concord parade, the library in the background. Sound May Be Seen (2025), Margaret Watts Hughes Lecture on Radium (2025), Loie Fuller No Title (2025), Richard Foreman – Three little collectible conceptual art books. I will just point you to the website. IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE Peregrinação de Fernão Mendes Pinto: Aventuras extraordinárias dum português no Oriente (The Pilgrimage of Fernão Mendes Pinto: Extraordinary Adventures of a Portuguese Man in the Orient, 1614), Fernão Mendes Pinto – The real book is a 900-page semi-true account of a Portuguese wanderer in the 16th century Far East who, in the most famous episode, joins up with a patriotic privateer, or a bloodthirsty pirate. The book I read is a rewritten abridgement for Portuguese 9th graders. How I wish I knew how it was taught. La femme partagée (The Shared Woman, 1929), Franz Hellens La Cité de l'indicible peur (The City of Unspeakable Fear, 1943), Jean Ray – I plan to write a bit about these two novels, my excursion to Belgium. Navegações (1983), Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen
