Boys of my age grew up fighting Nazis and Japs. We inherited our fathers’ war and were too old to “play Army” – always the phrase – by the time Vietnam heated up. A German refugee, Mrs. Becker, lived next door and we were ordered to kill only Japs if we were playing near her house. Most of our weapons and tactics were taken not from our fathers but from movies and television (Combat! and The Gallant Men).  I remember only one “war story” told by my father from his four years (1942-46) in the Army Air Corps. He was severely sunburned while stationed in North Africa and made a hammock of a rubber sheet filled with olive oil to ease the burn. That’s it. He never spoke of combat, and I have no idea where he was on June 6, 1944. We understood that was terra nullius and never asked questions.   I read Howard Nemerov early, as part of that remarkable postwar generation of American poets who fought in World War II, including Karl Shapiro, Edgar Bowers and Anthony Hecht. After graduating from Harvard in 1941, Nemerov flew fifty combat missions with the Royal Canadian Air Force as a fighter pilot and another fifty-seven with the Eighth U.S. Army Air Force. He published “D-Day + All the Years,” first in The Sewanee Review in 1986 and collected it in War Stories the following year:   “What Daddy did on Opening Day? Yes, well,  He led the squadron out before first light  Over the Channel as far as Cap Gris Nez  And turned to port along the Frisian shores  Up past Den Helder and Terschelling where  We had lost a few, and so on up as far  As the Bight of Heligoland and distant Denmark  Where Hamlet and the others used to live,  And so wheeled homeward on a parallel track  To land at Manston in Kent for an early lunch.    “Pleasant and warm under the perspex canopy  Of the office fifty feet above a sea  Hammered and brazen as on the world’s first day,  A peaceable morning. And the sky was blue.    “And Daddy sitting there driving along  Under his silly hat with the stiffener out,  Wearing the leather gauntlets flared heroic  Over the white silk elbow-length debutante’s gloves  They used to wear then whatever the weather was,  And more or less the way you see him now.”   The poem’s addressees are likely Nemerov’s three children, including art historian Alexander Nemerov. What’s not stated is at the heart of the poem. Nemerov describes the mission in some detail without overtly mentioning the Normandy invasion taking place nearby on that day: “A peaceable morning.” No heroics, no war stories.       To put the Allies’ accomplishment on D-Day into historical context, here is Victor Davis Hanson writing in The Second World Wars (Basic Books, 2017):   “The D-Day invasion of Normandy (Operation Overlord) was the largest combined land and sea operation conducted since the invasion of Greece by King Xerxes of Persia in spring 480 BC. It dwarfed all of history’s star-crossed beach landings from Marathon to Gallipoli (April 1915). Normandy would serve as a model for large subsequent American seaborne operations from Iwo Jima (February 1945) and Okinawa (April 1945) to Inchon (September 1950). It made all prior iconic cross-Channel invasions in either direction—Caesar’s (55 BC), William the Conqueror’s (1066), Henry V’s (1415) or the British landing in Flanders—seem minor amphibious operations in comparison.”

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Mountains are some of our best metaphors for the mind and for the spirit, but they are also living entities, sovereign and staggering. I remember the first time I saw a mountain from an airplane — forests miniaturized to moss, rivers to capillaries, the Earth crumpled like a first draft. It is a sublime sight in the proper sense of the word — transcendent yet strangely terrifying in its vantage so unnatural to an earthbound biped, so deliriously and disquietingly godly. Even from ground level, mountains overwhelm our creaturely frames of reference, confuse our intuitions of scale and perspective, belie… read article

A Guest Lecture featuring Sondre Rasch, co-founder and CEO of SafetyWing.

This essay was originally published as the cover story in the Summer 2025 issue of Orion Magazine. “Who are you?” the caterpillar barks at Alice from atop the giant mushroom, and Alice, never quite having considered the question, mutters a child’s version of Emily Dickinson’s “I’m nobody! Who are you?” Before he was Lewis Carroll, author of the Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland books, Charles Dodgson was a logician. His Wonderland is a series of nested thought experiments about change and the limits of logic. When the caterpillar tells Alice that one side of the mushroom would make her smaller and… read article