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Is Peace Possible?, originally published in 1957, is the second title in Marginalian Editions. Below is my foreword to the new edition as it appears in on its pages. How ungenerous our culture has been in portraying science as cold, unfeeling, and aloof from the human sphere. No — to live a life of science is to live so wonder-smitten by reality, by the majesty and mystery of nature, that the willful destruction of any fragment of it becomes unconscionable. It is impossible to study the building blocks of life without reverence for life itself, impossible to devote one’s days… read article
When AI first began colonizing language — which is still our best instrument for bridging the abyss between us, a container for thought and feeling that shapes the contents — I asked chatGPT to compose a poem about a solar eclipse in the style of Walt Whitman. It returned a ledger of cliches in rhymed couplets. Getting the form wrong — Whitman did not rhyme — seemed like an easy correction by a line of code. Getting poetry itself wrong was the interesting question, the question that gets at the heart of why we make poems (or paintings or novels… read article
“Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy,” Albert Camus wrote in one of the most sobering opening pages in literature. So here you are, having answered affirmatively, consciously or not, now facing the second fundamental question that ripples out of the first: How shall you live? Perhaps the sharpest, most recurrent shock of being alive is the realization that no one can give you a ready-made answer — not your parents or your teachers, not scripture or Stoicism, not psychotherapy or psilocybin, not the old dharma teacher or the new… read article
Walking through the white-walled gallery at the graduation show of one of New York’s most esteemed art schools, between beautiful young people with Instagram faces, I was struck to see project after project take up as its subject the least durable, most illusory aspect of human existence: the self. Where was the Iris Murdoch in these dawning artists’ lives to remind them that art, at its best, is “an occasion for unselfing”? And yet who could fault them: Not just their generation, but our entire culture seems to have forgotten that identities and opinions are the least interesting parts of… read article
We are perishable matter yearning for meaning, and time is both the matter and the meaning of our lives. “Time is a river that sweeps me along but I am the river,” Borges wrote in 1940. “Time is the substance I am made of.” Around the same time, the chemist Willard Libby had a revolutionary insight that brought physics to the poetry of time, measurement to the mystery of this substance we are made of. Science is stratospheric, layering discovery upon discovery, continually changing the landscape of knowledge we call reality. The late 1930s and early 1940s were a particularly… read article
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9 reflections
My newly graduated youngest son is visiting Thailand with friends from his alma mater, Rice University. Most of the photos he has sent document meals eaten and temples visited, but among them is this one, my favorite image: The smiling head of the Buddha sunk among the tangled roots of a banyan tree. The place is Wat Mahathat in Ayutthaya, former capital of Siam and a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1991. Founded in 1350, the city was destroyed by the Burmese in 1767 and today is known as Thailand’s Angkor Wat. It was abandoned until the 1950s. I had seen the banyan/Buddha image once before, in black and white, accompanying a series of poems by the late Kenneth Fields, collectively titled “One Love,” a sort of travelogue documenting a visit to Thailand, Laos and Cambodia. Fields was a student of Yvor Winters at Stanford University, and co-edited with him a poetry collection, Quest for Reality: An Anthology of Short Poems in English (1969). Fields doesn’t mention the Buddha head explicitly: “Sacred figures draped in yellow Bas-reliefs crumbling away Wat overgrown returning to earth” Fields’ memories rhyme with my own: “Rolling through these jungles News footage in my head I don’t have to spell it out” And this: “I feared seeing it as a boy Then thought I never would Mekong The wake of empires Spreading out” Fields reanimates the Imagist impulse: “Magnificent ruins, Forest and culture In symbiotic rush” Fields visited Cambodia in 2009, during the trial of former Khmer Rouge prison camp commander Kang Kek Iew, known as “Comrade Duch”: “Duch is on trial today. Head of Tuol Sleng, S-21. Old Party pols are trembling He’s not the only one” From the beautiful landscape and temples, Fields move on to recent history and genocide: “Decimated An entire country Many times over Some for wearing glasses” Fields concludes the poem: “The world is dark With us. Even Electricity darkens. Only a few— Honored in crumbling ruins Built by darkeners darkened In their turn— Only a wild heedlessness A spare carefulness for those we love Suffice”
Laura Spinney on the spread of Proto-Indo-European The post Lingua Obscura appeared first on The American Scholar.
“Happiness is the search for happiness.” I’m not so sure. My understanding is that there are no happy lives, only happy moments. Those moments seem to be the byproduct of right living. A life dedicated fulltime to achieving happiness is likely to be filled with respites of pleasure, long stretches of disappointment and much unhappiness for others, like second-hand smoke. Some people, like spoiled children, confuse happiness with getting their own way. Most of us never learn what’s best for us and others. You can see the very human fallacy built into that effort: demands can only grow more insistent. In an 1895 entry in The Journal of Jules Renard (ed. and trans. By Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Roget, 1964,) Renard writes: “I desire nothing from the past. I do not count on the future. The present is enough for me. I am a happy man, for I have renounced happiness.” Hard to say just how tongue-in-cheek that passage is. Renard was a master ironist. He always impresses me as a realist, a rejector of pie-in-the-sky grandiosities. Bogan writes in her preface: “Renard’s passion for factual truth and stylistic exactitude, once formed, remained central to his work throughout his career. This preoccupation never hardened into obsession; one of the great pleasures of reading Renard is the certainty, soon felt by the reader, that nothing is being put down in meanness or malice.” Renard died on this date, May 22, in 1910, exactly one year after writing the aphorism-like entry at the top in his journal. He was forty-six years old. [The quote at the top comes from Renard’s Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020).]
The story of the American West in one photograph The post An Enigma at the Center appeared first on The American Scholar.
