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In the late summer of 1832, England was set aflame with wonder — a glimpse of something wild and flamboyant, shimmering with the lush firstness of a world untrammeled by the boot of civilization. Edward Lear (May 12, 1812–January 29, 1888), barely out of his teens, had been working on his Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots for two years. Moved by the young man’s talent and passion, one of William Turner’s patrons — a wealthy woman with a deep feeling for nature and art — had procured for him an introduction to the newly opened London Zoo,… read article
Prediction is the sharpest tool the human animal has devised — the chisel with which we sculpted survival out of chance, the fulcrum by which we lifted civilization out of survival. Among the greatest gifts of the imagination, that crowning curio of consciousness, is our ability to alchemize hindsight into foresight, to chart the most probable course of the future by drawing on our experience of the past. And yet, like the tragic flaw of the Greek hero, our great strength is also our great vulnerability. It is salutary to remember how often our predictions have been wrong, how again… read article
I once asked ChatGPT to write a poem about a total solar eclipse in the style of Walt Whitman. It returned a dozen couplets of cliches that touched nothing, changed nothing in me. The AI had the whole of the English language at its disposal — a lexicon surely manyfold the poet’s — and yet Whitman could conjure up cosmoses of feeling with a single line, could sculpt from the commonest words an image so dazzlingly original it stops you up short, spins you around, leaves the path of your thought transformed. An AI may never be able to write… read article
One of the most important things to have learned in life is that choosing joy in a world rife with reasons for despair is a countercultural act of courage and resistance, choosing it not despite the abounding sorrow we barely survive but because of it, because joy — like music, like love — is one of those entirely unnecessary miracles of consciousness that give meaning to survival with its bright allegiance to the most alive part of us. “We’ve all had too much sorrow — now is the time for joy,” Nick Cave sings in one of my favorite songs,… read article
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Of all the ways this blog have changed my life, the most exciting was in December 2021 when I wrote a post about Ivan Illich that ended up, to my utter astonishment, to get read by almost a hundred people.
Lost in the woods, a writer confronts the duality of nature The post A Splendor Wild and Terrifying appeared first on The American Scholar.
Who remembers the first book he ever “read”? Qualifying quotes because I don’t mean some wordless board-book given to an infant by optimistic relatives. I mean the real thing, with decryptable signs on the page. I can’t remember this pivotal event, though it would change my life and my understanding of the universe forever. A book becomes more than its merely physical nature and carries with it a world of thought and imagination. I must have been four or five, pre-kindergarten, when my mother taught me to read not with books but the newspaper. Think how miraculous it is that in less than two decades we can go from toddler illiteracy to a happy reading of Ulysses. Consider that the person likeliest to remember the first book he read is a recent illiterate who mastered the art while an adult and knows true gratitude. I know I favored singable poems (Stevenson), field guides to butterflies and wildflowers, and collections of brief biographies of the famous and heroic. I remember juvenile monographs devoted to Marie Curie and Davy Crockett. On the cover of the latter, Crockett is on the wall of the Alamo, swinging his rifle like a baseball bat at the Mexican army. The first “grown-up” book I remember reading was The Wonderful O (1957) by James Thurber, a fellow Ohioan. If those are the first, what about the last? Robert Richman (1957-2021), former poetry editor of The New Criterion, poses that question in “The Last Book,” published in the Fall 1999 issue of The Paris Review: “What will be the last book I read? Woolf’s finest work, the only one I shunned? The Turgenev novel everyone disdains? End Game in Poetry, a just-uncovered work by Grandmaster Borges, or Dinesen’s stories, seeking for a fourth time the mercy of my eyes? What will be in my hands the morning they find me? A dog-eared Borzoi, or sassy new Penguin? A pockmarked Pantheon, or pristine Random House? And will the failed-poet coroner claim foul play and confiscate the thing? Will the book then appear in a dealer’s locked case, scarred by marginalia claimed to be authentic, where I propose a brief tying-up-of-ends-type poem? Or will the last book be the one that I wrote and never could abide, but could read that night with kinder eyes, and whom I turned slowly to greet like a long-lost daughter?” Richman died at age sixty-three – too young but old enough to begin thinking of last things – the last kiss, the last laugh, the last book read.
