Gambling, Debt, and Literary Fortune
Dostoevsky lost everything at the Wiesbaden casino, but the episode seemed to finally reveal to him the true depth of his habit, that it threatened not only his marriage but the life of his wife.
Aeneid Wars
French departments do not stop teaching French literature after Moliere and Racine, Italian departments do not stop teaching Italian literature after Dante and Petrarch, so why do almost all classics departments feel they have no duty to study and teach Latin literature after Juvenal, Martial and Seneca?
Dual Nature, Singular Poulenc
Poulenc’s style, and the French aesthetic that he inherited from Satie, Fauré, and Debussy, are defined by their elegance, lightness of touch, and humor, but with the ability to move one deeply.
Will Laughing at and with One Another Save Us?
Israel seems quite correct in his claim that if Melville’s Ahab, with his bitter rage at what is morally offensive and cosmically disordered, may be seen as a representative figure revealing the haunted soul of American white Protestants, for the Jews the complementary imaginative construction is the Yiddish writer Sholom Aleichem’s Tevye the Milkman.
The Cost of Discipleship
Reitter and Wellmon do propose Weberian vocation as a universal possibility which, if we all acted on it, would grant us more meaningful lives. But an equally plausible conclusion is that there is something wrong with Weber’s ideal of vocation.
Coins, Trinkets, Bits and Bobs
Lake takes her readers through a history of artifacts that people dug up or collected in England during the eighteenth century, focusing on coins, manuscripts, weapons, and grave goods as specific case studies.
In Praise of Ozsváth and Turner’s Poetry of Translation
Ozsváth and Turner, amazingly, have achieved the impossible: the syllabic count, the metrics, the rhyme scheme, and the even the number and line placement of the feminine endings matches Goethe’s German perfectly.
Opening Our Eyes to See
Greene offers a gentle, albeit powerful call-to-action: “The world is chockablock with untold wonders, there for the taking, ready to be uncovered at any moment, if only we keep our eyes open.”
A Way of Knowing
Kindness, amity, and benevolence are the motivating factors. These aspirations are embedded in the central artwork linguistically with the prominently utilized kanji seals for “heart” and “friend.”
A Weird, Unique Lushness
You don’t have to believe anything spiritual to find yourself bewitched by El Greco’s acidic palette, fantastic settings, and writhing, soaring saints.
What We Talk About When We Talk About Leonardo
The popular picture of Leonardo as an inventor of machines (and the many science-museum exhibitions that have followed) and as a scholar of anatomy was essentially formed in the twentieth century as his manuscripts and drawings were widely published for the first time.
Immortal and Beloved: Beethoven and Bildung
What distinguishes Beethoven is his insistence that the performer and listener engage in Bildung of their own through his music. Having performed a great deal of Beethoven’s music, I am often in awe not at what he wrote on the page, but what he left off it; that is to say what he forces the performer to interpret, discover and create themselves.
A Classic, Done Classically
The Royal Ballet’s production, with Oliver Messel’s original 1946 designs, is the crème de la crème of British ballet.
Reason and Follies, Majas and Bulls
Making appearances are flying dogs, people traveling in weird conveyances, all sorts of raging lunatics, defecating monks, acrobats, gluttons, murderers in the act, and phantoms dancing.
The Fruits of Augustine’s Confessions
“Augustine,” Constantine explains, “is the first autobiographer to achieve a warm and intimate bond with his audience.”
Resilience in the Absence of Hope
Despite Braun’s sense of hope- and aimlessness, he keeps on writing, and a new poetic role opens up in the process through the very act of writing: he becomes a seismograph of the aftershocks of the great earthquake.
