The Topiary of the Angels Imagine it now: the hedges trimmed into cherubic little seraphim, forbidden fruits sculpted into a haze of green, even Cupid and Psyche enraptured, eyes opened, entwined in the shape of a bush, and who really is to know whether it was the messenger Gabriel or the archangel Michael […]
And the Child is Father to the Man It was many years ago. We were on a ski lift in France. My son’s mother and I had been separated for years. I turned to my son, who had already become a good father to his father, and said: „N’s my girlfriend, you know?“ My son, […]
America’s Viagra Moment: Donald Trump Morgantown. Despite finding him odious and alarming, I watched all of Donald Trump’s speech in Charleston the other night and, when it ended, felt I finally understood the source of Trump’s amazing rise to power and political potency (pun intended): Donald Trump– braggadocio, puffed up rhetoric, beautiful young wife and […]
Geese for Lynn Freed When the Germans beat their geese into honking at Auschwitz so as not to allow the cries of children on their way to the gas chambers to be heard, they made a strategic decision. Like generals, they decided it wasn’t enough to gas the children, but that the geese, too […]
Hypocrisy I wonder what small animal had to die so I could buy this leather belt for a mere 1,500 forints from the street vendor near the Lukacs Baths here in Budapest I wonder how much it had to suffer before its flesh was served with good wine in some elegant restaurant and its skin […]
„PARTIR EST MOURIR UN PEU“ „Every parting is a small death,“ or so the saying goes, which is to testify to the cost of a life without roots, or without the reliable givens (job, family, friends, place) which might allow us to wholeheartedly embrace the larger deaths… and, ergo, the larger life. For we […]
THE SENTIMENTAL ANIMAL There is something poignant– and, I must confess, satisfying– about the sight of a so-called „intellectual“ weeping at a sentimental movie. Last night, for example, sitting beside a friend of mine– a well-known and widely respected American scholar– I suddenly heard what I was sure was the susurrus of barely-contained laughter […]
LOVING/BEING IN LOVE Being in love with you, you become merely an appendage to my affection for a condition… the state of being in love. Which is why those who are frequently „in love“ seem to be able to enter that condition so easily… and so briefly. Enchanted by a feeling rather than a […]
ON TEXTURE How shall we find off the textured, the splotched, the mottled, complicated harmony? It’s a question those who deal in the verbiage of superlatives and excess („the best book of the year,“ „the worst poet in America,“ „the most impossible man I have ever met“) are always half-asking themselves, seeking to […]
THE LOVE OF DRAMA The love of high drama, too, can be a kind of idolatry, a narcissism of longing and romance. For drama– especially of the human kind we so love, such as the romantic triangle-always seeks to bathe what it cannot (or will not) see clearly in the artificial light of the […]
PANIC What, then, is panic? Something suddenly fills you, a dread, and your are like a frightened animal, a twittering chipmunk caught in a perceived crossfire of dangers, scurrying first one way, then another, in search of safety. What triggers this is usually simple: a choice, an abandonment. Something will be lost– some old, […]
POSITIONS We shit in the hands of those who love us, is how the writer Andre Dubus, who has had the experience on a literal level, put it the other night at the end of a series of benefit readings to help pay the medical expenses brought on by his recent accident… thereby making, […]
THE CONVERSATION Love, of course is the ultimate conversation… as is hate. And– like all genuine conversations– its subject is, to a large extent, itself. So that lovers (at least those who have any right to the name beyond the purely physical act) are always engaged in the process of defining what love, in […]
HARD ON THE NERVES You can tell the good Kibbutz, says one of the Israeli scholars during a colloquium on Kibbutz ideology, by the fact that it’s hard on the nerves. A simple statement, perhaps characteristically Jewish. (After all, how could anything possibly be of value if its weren’t hard on the nerves?) Yet […]
WHAT IS „POLITICAL“ ART? My friend Rudolph Baranik is at Boston University for the opening of an exhibition of his paintings, and the discussion concerns the nature of „political“ art. Yet, in Rudolph’s comments, it is not so much politics that is the subject, but words like „sensual“ and „mysterious“… which, indeed, describe the […]
CORNERS We speak of „turning a corner“ as if life contained a geometry so precise, a landscape so clear, a series of hairpin turns so well defined, that we could shimmy willfully and easily along in it, moving from forest to mesa, prairie to desert, mountain to ocean. But‑‑ change being slow, laborious, painfully […]
FEAR What is fear, this thing that lives in the pit of the stomach and can find no home? We think of it, of course, as fear of the unexpected, the unpredictable, the unknown. And yet our greatest fears are quite to the contrary: of the inevitable ‑‑ death, separation, loss, loneliness, the splotched […]
WHAT REMAINS BEHIND, WHAT MOVES AHEAD Youth, being still oblivious‑‑ at least, mostly‑‑ to the decline of the body, the upheavals and disappointments (as well as the rewards) of love, the repeated pain of separation, the ubiquitous dialectic of good and evil (what Wordsworth called „dialogues of business, love, or strife“ ), is […]
