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Anything you polish with attention will become a mirror. Anything to which you give yourself fully, vest all your strength and risk all your vulnerability, will return you to your life annealed, magnified, both unselved and more deeply yourself. It can be a garden, or a desert, or a hare. It can be, perhaps most readily, a place. “Place and a mind may interpenetrate till the nature of both is altered,” the Scottish mountaineer and poet Nan Shepherd wrote in her stunning love letter to a mountain long before neuroscience found the seat of personhood in the hippocampus — the… read article
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
More in literature
A discussion with Marjan Ehsassi, executive director of FIDE North America, about citizens' assemblies and how they can be used in politics, business, and academia.
We squabble and seethe about it but our tastes in literature – and other realms, like food and music -- ultimately remain mysterious. It has taken me a lifetime to accept this realization. You are not a cretin for enjoying the work of Norman Mailer or Toni Morrison, though I find both writers repellant. Nor am I among the enlightened for loving Proust. Most attempts to analyze and defend our tastes quickly turn into snobbery and self-justification. So much online bookchat amounts to playground-style bickering. We’ve all endured the sort of book-bully who, when encountering a reader he decides holds unacceptable opinions, banishes him to the bookish Gulag instead of ignoring him. Literary spats are too often Manichean in nature and mirror contemporary politics. Reading and writing are important – in fact, central to my life and that of many others – but hardly worthy of threats of violence and other condemnations. Not long ago I wrote that I judged V.S. Pritchett the finest literary critic of the twentieth century – hardly an eccentric judgment. A reader told me I was stupid, probably illiterate and ought to be “slapped around” for uttering such a judgment. He was at least half-serious. The American poet Howard Moss (1922-87) in “Notes on Fiction” (Minor Monuments, 1986) identifies an important and rarely recognized relation between writers and serious readers. Across a lifetime of reading, a handful of writers become trusted companions whose company we depend on. We give their books second and third readings. We confide in them and feel no need to defend them. Moss writes: “Certain writers inspire affection in their readers that cannot be explained either by their work or by the facts of their lives. It proceeds from some temperamental undercurrent, some invisible connection between the writer and the reader that is more available to the senses and the emotions than to the mind. Bookish affections of this kind are deceptive and irrelevant, yet they truly exist. For me, Colette, Keats, and Chekhov inspire affection. Faulkner, Shelley, and Ibsen do not.” Moss was poetry editor at The New Yorker for almost forty years. His examples, pro and con, match my own. I find his prose, mostly essays and reviews, superior even to his poetry. If we can generalize from his examples, his literary preferences suggest a fondness for a quieter, more subtle, less rabble-rousing voice, little Sturm und Drang. Faulkner, whom I lionized when young, now seems too loud, too insistent, too stylistically attention-seeking. Can I explain and defend this reaction? I won’t even try. Moss writes elsewhere in “Notes on Fiction”: “Chekhov’s stories tread the finest line between a newspaper account and a fairy tale. Inferior writers step over the line one way or the other.”
Lost in the woods, a writer confronts the duality of nature The post A Splendor Wild and Terrifying appeared first on The American Scholar.
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.
