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"What we’d hope for on the planet is creativity and sanity, conviviality, the real work of our hands and minds."
If you live long enough and wide enough, you come to see that love is simply the breadth of the aperture through which you let in the reality of another and the quality of attention you pay what you see. It is, in this sense, not a phenomenon that happens unto you but a creative act. The poet Robert Graves knew this: “Love is not kindly nor yet grim, but does to you as you to him,” he wrote as a young man a lifetime before the old man came to define love as “a recognition of truth, a recognition… read article
When the first hot air balloonists ascended into the skies of the eighteenth century, they saw rivers crossing borders and clouds passing peacefully over battlefields. They saw the planet not as a patchwork of plots and kingdoms but as a vast living organism veined with valleys and furred with forests. They had to leave the Earth to see it whole, torchbearers of that rude paradox of the human condition: often, we have to lose our footing to find perspective; often, it is only from a distance that we come to feel the pull of the precious most intimately and most… read article
The year the young Charles Darwin (February 12, 1809–April 19, 1882) boarded The Beagle, Mary Shelley contemplated the nature of the imagination in her preface to the most famous edition of Frankenstein, concluding that creativity “does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos” — the chaos, she meant, of ideas and impressions and memories seething in the cauldron of the mind, out of which we half-consciously select and combine fragments to have the thoughts and ideas we call our own. The chaos of ideas Darwin was about to absorb on the Galapagos would lead him to… read article
More in literature
My understanding of “deliquescing” goes back to high-school chemistry: a solid melts or becomes liquid by absorbing moisture from the air. Kay Ryan uses the word in an unexpectedly metaphorical way in her review of This Craft of Verse (2002), a transcript of the lectures Jorge Luis Borges gave at Harvard in 1967-68. Ryan may be the most precise writer at work today. There’s no mushiness in her choice of language, no sense of almost the right word. When she chooses a surprising word, it’s not sloppy or generic. It means something. She writes in the Borges review: “[I]t was instead a lovely lightness of spirit. Behind all the lectures I could feel Borges’ abiding dream of deliquescing into the glories of literature. At first this was hard to see because it’s mixed up with his worries about getting things a bit scrambled up, but then there it is: this big egolessness. Borges simply apprehends the inexhaustible radiance of literature and would walk into it naked and without a name, such a lover is he.” By “deliquescing” in this context I think she means being absorbed by the books we love, so the line where we stop and literature begins is beyond recovery. Like any dedicated reader, much of me – my ways of thinking, my emotional life, the things I find beautiful or otherwise rewarding – come out of books. Reading is a big part of life experience, not a segregated realm. What do I owe Tolstoy or Fulke Greville? I can’t tell you. Here’s the next paragraph in the review: “And that’s another thing; there is an emphasis upon passion in these lectures and a reliance on feelings that is, I suppose I shouldn’t say contrary to, but outside the universe of Borges’ cool, impersonal, intellectually thrilling fictions. After all, Borges is a thinker who can squander what would be a dozen other writers’ whole intellectual careers in a single story such as ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.’” A writer needn’t shriek and moan to prove his emotional chops. Borges wrote about gauchos, for God’s sake. Ryan concludes her review: “Borges’ aesthetic ‘tingling’ recalls Nabokov's famous 'frisson.' The sensation along the spine was probably much the same for these similarly exhilarating masters who grew old so differently--Nabokov becoming ever more defended and riddling, Borges becoming ever more transparent and universal.” [Ryan’s review of the Borges volume is published in the Winter 2003 issue of The Threepenny Review.]
Parag Khanna on metanational corporations and how they are opening borders, reshaping geopolitics, and creating a world of interconnected city-states.
We have acquired new, smaller bedside tables. More than a third of the surface area is occupied by the alarm clock and a lamp, leaving less space for reading matter. All further accumulation of books and magazines will, of necessity, be vertically arranged, a single stack, which makes it convenient to answer some questions from a reader: “Do you read more than one book at a time? How do you manage to keep them straight in your head? Do you ever forget what you have already read and have to read it again? What are you reading now?” The answers: Yes. I don’t know. Yes. Give me a minute. I’ve never had difficulty reading several books simultaneously. Usually they represent contrasting genres, which minimizes confusion. In other words, I would probably never read Nostromo and War and Peace at the same time. Think of it as exercising different sets of muscles in the body. Sometimes I’ll go weeks without opening an active volume. On occasion, I’ll give up on a book – something I wouldn’t permit myself to do when young. Here are the books and periodicals on my bedside table: The Complete Essays of J.V. Cunningham (Wiseblood Books, 2024) Immortal Souls: A Treatise on Human Nature (Editiones Schoolasticae, 2024) by Edward Feser From the Holy Mountain (Harper Collins, 1997) by William Dalrymple The Collected Stories of Peter Taylor (Farrar, Straus, 1969) The New Criterion, January 2024 Both The Claremont Review of Books (Fall 2024) and The Jewish Review of Books (Winter 2025) are published in the tabloid format, so I keep them in the drawer below. Respectively, literary essays, philosophical text, history, fiction, periodicals. Little chance for confusion. Taylor represents a respite from the other books. I know and love his stories and even met him once back around 1971. I’m reading Cunningham for review so I’m taking heavy notes. The Feser I’m reading out of pure selfishness and, again, taking heavy notes. The Dalrymple volume is a lark.
