As I read the essay “The Writer and the Valet” in my latest issue of the London Review of Books, an image came to mind of a T-shirt I saw in one of the random catalogs that come in the mail. It was a simple black shirt with the sentence, “Artists make bad slaves” printed on it. The essay by Frances Stoner Saunders is about how Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago came to publication, and it is a story filled... Read more
Guest Post by Ryan Pemberton “It’s a funny feeling,” I confessed to an editor-friend as we worked on my first memoir, a book on calling. “In a few months perfect strangers will be able to read some of the most intimate stories from my childhood that even my closest friends don’t know.” She nodded thoughtfully, her brow furrowed. “And the conclusion I’ve come to is that strangers can know these stories about me and still not know me. They’ll still... Read more
I gave up sports for the same reason I gave up politics and pornography. I was once in a political party, not because I felt any great affection for it, but because the aims of its chief opponent constitute a recipe for civilizational suicide. I still suspect as much, but I long ago became an Independent, because I concluded that associating myself with a political party was a moral act, or rather an immoral one, given the criminality, corruption, and... Read more
Loving my fellow man has never come easy. Candidly speaking, I love a small contingency of folks, am fond of a goodly portion of others, indifferent to the vast majority, with the trailing remainder either disliked or outright despised. That doesn’t bode well for me in the long-range view of my religion, I admit. I read Dante’s Purgatorio—which is what I’m shooting for, purgatory, for starters—and got a little squeamish when I saw the mountain was only seven stories high.... Read more
Guest post by Holly LeCraw Lately, I am drawn more and more to the thought of Carl Jung. I’ve been thinking a good deal about the stages of life (I’m approaching fifty); I’ve been having some pretty vivid dreams. Jung has plenty to say about both these things, and he’s always been especially appealing to me because he was a scientist who endorsed humankind’s need for the spiritual. This past week, a friend with far more knowledge of Jungian thought... Read more
From the mid-1980s through the early 1990s, I devoted my research and writing to the nuclear arms race and nonviolent responses to it. The mid-eighties marked the height of the Cold War. The U.S. and the Soviet Union were locked in an arms race that our government referred to as (I kid you not) “MAD.” The acronym stood for Mutually Assured Destruction. The strategic theory behind MAD was that if both nations had enough nuclear bombs to totally annihilate the... Read more
The story of how the text of the Bible was set down and transmitted is one we all know by heart. Once upon a time, ancient scribes set the sacred words down on papyrus, followed a few centuries later by monks in dimly lit scriptoria putting ink and gold leaf on richly illuminated pages of vellum. Then came the revolution of Gutenberg’s printed books and finally the digital age dawned, giving us the Bible in myriad forms, from searchable online... Read more
“And who by fire, who by water, / Who in the sunshine, who in the nighttime,” sings Leonard Cohen, picking up on a thousand year old poem that is one of the touchstones of the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services. The poem that Leonard Cohen sings is known by its first two words, Unetaneh Tokef¸ meaning let us cede power. Its vision is disarmingly clear: during the year to come, some will die, some will live. While we can... Read more
The writer, critic, and literary scholar D.G. Myers died September 26 at the age of sixty-two, almost seven years to the day after he was diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer. David wrote about his illness as he wrote about books and his faith–incisively, forthrightly, with vast knowledge, and without self-pity. In August, David wrote in an email: “When someone replies to me, ‘We’re all dying,’ as if to relieve my mind, I want to punch him.” As many of you... Read more
You learn a lot about your neighborhood when you drive a junkie from the laundromat to the homeless shelter in the next town over. You learn, for instance, that the red house on the corner across from the pizza joint is owned by a man who has a serious crack habit and (though you must take this next part of the story with a large grain of salt) owes the junkie in your car a good deal of money. You... Read more
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