Nonfiction

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…

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…

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…

trans. Greek Martin McKinsey 1. It is one of the talents of great stylists to make obsolete words cease from appearing obsolete through the way in which they introduce them in their writing. Obsolete words which under the pens of others would seem stilted or out of place, occur most naturally under theirs. This is…

trans. Greek Athan Anagnostopoulos 1930 January 12 "We remain at the same post awaiting orders." I was quietly walking in the street, when they hit me on the back and I found myself in an elevator. There, a priest, sitting on his cap, was combing his hair with a seashell. He turned, looked, and asked…

Saturday, late at night. I've returned from the outside. I know tomorrow's waking and the daily uphill climb. The streets were quiet; the mind light; the soul with all her windows open. Life's despair, sentiments condemned to end, man's wretchedness, the inevitable death – were circulating through the openings and didn't bother me. I am…