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

I no longer write in books, a decision I made decades ago that I occasionally regret. It came to feel like defacement. But it’s interesting to see what attracted, delighted or puzzled my younger self. Here are the three books on my shelves most heavily underlined and glossed:  Ulysses, the Random House edition I bought in 1967 and read for the first time that year. With each subsequent reading, I added so many glosses I had to tape notepaper among the pages for annotations. The margins were full. On the title page I find such invaluable information as the etymology of Odysseus, the definition of parallax (with diagram), an explanation of the punningly named Ormond Hotel in “Sirens,” and this sentence fragment: “the madnesses [sic] of Deasy, Lyons, Breen, Farrell.” I probably wrote this in 1972, and I don’t remember writing it.   Pascal’s Pensées, the Penguin paperback from 1961, translated by J.M. Cohen. I  already had a taste for aphoristic prose, which is reflected in the passages underlined. I must have been reading the existentialists at the time. A disturbing number of references to Sartre.   Dr. Johnson’s The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, another Penguin. Mostly underlinings rather than notes. I seem to have been especially impressed by Imlac.   All three volumes are officially unreadable. Ulysses has a broken spine and binding. Pascal and Johnson are in two pieces held together with rubber bands. My attachment to them is sentimental. In Johnson’s Dictionary I discovered an appropriate verb, “to postil”: “To gloss; to illustrate with marginal notes.”

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

Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “In the Summer” by Nizar Qabbani appeared first on The American Scholar.

Often, I hardly recognize my younger self. I did foolish things I would never contemplate today. My self-centeredness was appalling, my taste frequently shameful, even in books. I read critics uncritically and was cowed by their fame and influence. Taste doesn’t arrive congenitally. You have to work at it and learn to know yourself, capacities rare among the young. Dr. Johnson understood: “Of many writers who filled their age with wonder, and whose names we find celebrated in the books of their contemporaries, the works are now no longer to be seen, or are seen only amidst the lumber of libraries which are seldom visited, where they lie only to show the deceitfulness of hope, and the uncertainty of honour.”   As a teenager and beyond I read too many contemporary writers, so my larger literary education suffered. I often mistook fashion for brilliance. Admittedly, some of our best writers were at work back then – Nabokov, Auden, Singer – and I dutifully read them as they published new work, but my lack of taste was best exemplified by my devotion to Norman Mailer. His egotism was as dense and unpalatable as last year’s fruitcake. To read him today is to confront a writer whose pretentiousness makes him almost literally impossible to read. Usually, that description is a metaphor, a measured dose of satirical exaggeration. Try reading him today, with a post-adolescent’s sensibility.   Consider Mailer’s 1967 novel Why Are We in Vietnam?, written in a hipster’s pidgin English borrowed from William Burroughs, another crime against literature. I remember taking the novel with me on a family camping trip shortly after its publication and convincing myself that I enjoyed it. I was a bookish poseur, dim and dishonest enough to blatantly lie to myself with a straight face. My behavior was not atypical. Much of the literary world – writers, readers, critics -- remains an elaborate masquerade, people signaling their hipness and sophistication by endorsing an approved brand. I still encounter the occasional advocacy of Mailer’s work, including a critic who not long ago launched a defense of his Apollo 11 book, Of a Fire on the Moon (1970). Johnson on Mailer and others:   “Of the decline of reputation many causes may be assigned. It is commonly lost because it never was deserved; and was conferred at first, not by the suffrage of criticism, but by the fondness of friendship, or servility of flattery. The great and popular are very freely applauded; but all soon grow weary of echoing to each other a name which has no other claim to notice, but that many mouths are pronouncing it at once.”       [The passages from Johnson are taken from The Idler essay published June 2, 1759.]