Nonfiction

Over the years I have developed a distaste for the spectacle of joie de vivre, the knack of knowing how to live. Not that I disapprove of all hearty enjoyment of life. A flushed sense of happiness can overtake a person anywhere, and one is no more to blame for it than the Asiatic flu…

In 1862, Flaubert recalls for the Goncourts the beginnings of his liaison with Louise: “He told us the story of his coupling with Colet, initiated in a drive home in a carriage, painting himself as playing the role of someone disgusted with life, of the dark, handsome stranger, of the suicidal romantic, which so amused…

When V. S. Naipaul was a toddler growing up in Trinidad, his grandmother sold marijuana. Only old people bought it, for, during the early 1930s in Trinidad, only the elderly, whose energies were depleted and for whom life had become boring, desired to smoke hemp. Naipaul told this story to his students at Wesleyan University…

. . . A couple of thousand men scattered throughout the great European cities. A few of them are famous; a few write unusually arid, consciously frightening and still peculiarly moving and gripping books; a few, shy and proud, write only letters, which will be found fifty or sixty years later and preserved as moral…

I've thought about the matter a great deal, and I'm now convinced that one of the few things that could still save our literature, not to mention the deeper life of culture at large, would be evidence – preferably in the form of direct contact – that there is other sentient life in the universe….

trans. German Jay Boggis • One must read every important writer once, in order to reach the point of being able to read him at all. • At the moment that we form an ideal the thought arises in God's mind to create it. • The comic is the continual negation of nature. • In…

A traditional theological question asks why God allows there to be evil in the world. I shall consider some untraditional answers. While for the religious this problem is a pressing one, the non-religious too can find it interesting, or at least a challenging intellectual exercise. The "problem of evil" is set up by the fact…

trans. Chinese Robin D.S. Yeates Born between 834 and 836, Wei Chuang lived through the bloody collapse of the T'ang dynasty, which had witnessed the first great flowering of the art of poetry in China. He lost almost all the verse he had composed in the first fifty years of his life when, on January…

People ought to like poetry the way a child likes snow, and they would if the poets wrote it. Wallace Stevens Affection for poems is a personal thing, transcending time, fashion, and even friendship. We return less often to what we admire or approve of than to what we love, and there are surprisingly few…