Indholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2020 i The American Scholar

IF LIFE AS WE HAVE COME TO KNOW IT in the past few months has led you to ponder your new relationship to the world, then perhaps a few articles herein will aid you in this pursuit, as they have me. In “Guardian of the Glaciers,” a report by Alex Basaraba on the growing movement to attribute personhood, or legal status, to parts of nature such as mountains and rivers, he points to Ecuador’s recognition in its constitution of “Nature or Pachamama, a reference to the earth mother goddess of the indigenous Andean peoples.” The constitution grants her “the right to exist, persist, and maintain and regenerate its life cycles.” My own inchoate notion is that nature, or the earth, or what I did not know to call Pachamama has,…

FIFTEEN YEARS AGO, when my daughter was about to turn two, my wife and I took her on a trip to Walden Pond. As we approached the place where Henry David Thoreau’s cabin once stood, with my daughter riding up on my shoulders, I said to her: “That’s where the man lived who ruined your father’s life.” Ruined in a mostly good way, I meant. I discovered Waldenwhen I was 16 and never quite recovered. The way my life was ruined was that I began to question the values of the system I found myself in. “The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind,” Thoreau wrote, and I hollered, “Amen!” In this way, Thoreau was like a more profound, less musical version of getting stoned…

ONE OF OUR PRIME REASONS for reading prose fiction is to get outside, to travel, and to learn about how people think and feel who are different from us. The familiar defense of the novel as an education in empathy and otherness follows from this, as does the attack on the novel as a diversion or an escape, a charge as old as the genre itself. Poetry is different. We read it to stay at home and to reflect on who and where we are, even—or especially—when the poet speaks across a distance, historical or otherwise. Hence the way poems circulate in times of public and private crisis, and the surprise and gratitude we feel when we discover a poem that speaks for us, and all the more so when…

IN 1510, 27-YEAR-OLD Raphael Sanzio became the talk of Renaissance Rome. His commission to paint two frescoes on the walls of the private apartments of Pope Julius II—which were anything but private—had led to an exclusive engagement to decorate the whole suite. His most flamboyant competitor, the crusty Florentine Michelangelo Buonarroti, had been sequestered for two years inside the Sistine Chapel, a sculptor compelled to paint the chapel’s vast ceiling by a pope notoriously deaf to the word no. Julius, of course, was right. Rumors suggested that Michelangelo could handle a brush as brilliantly as a chisel, and in 1510, Raphael gained admittance to the sanctum to have a look for himself. What Raphael saw transformed his own work, to Michelangelo’s endless annoyance. By that time, however, Raphael was well…

CHARACTER: The History of a Cultural Obsession BY MARJORIE GARBER Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 464 pp., $30 DAYS AFTER THE 9/11 attacks, Susan Sontag noted the frequency with which the hijackers were being charged with cowardice: “[W]hatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday’s slaughter,” she insisted in The New Yorker, “they were not cowards.” Sontag’s commentary outraged many readers, but her description of courage as “a morally neutral virtue” has a rich history. It finds an 18th-century analogue in Samuel Johnson’s observation that even a highwayman can manifest this quality. “We have more respect for a man who robs boldly on the highway, than for a fellow who jumps out of a ditch, and knocks you down behind your back,” Johnson said. “Courage is a quality so necessary…

Before turning against the fascists, the writer MARIO RIGONI STERN (1921–2008), a native of Asiago, in the northeast of Italy, served as a sergeant in Mussolini’s army. The experience informed his haunting memoir, The Sergeant in the Snow, the first of his many books. JOHN PENUEL has been a devoted translator of Rigoni Stern’s work for many years (two of his translations have appeared previously in these pages). Here is a passage from a new translation of Rigoni Stern’s story “In the Last Winter of War.” One morning, when it was still dark, and the camp, buried in snow, was enveloped in total silence, the noncommissioned officer roused the third crew. The crew members were to go down to the Trofaiach station, board the civilian train, and go to Eisenerz,…

On Peeling Potatoes When I peel potatoes, I put my head down,as if I am still following orders and being loyalto my commander. I feel a connection acrosstime to others putting their heads downin fatigued thought, as if this most naturalact signified living the way I wanted to,with the bad spots cut out, and eludingmy maker. Instead of cobwebs, tumult,and dragons, I experience an abundanceof good things, like sunlight leaking throughtall pines in the backyard. I say to myself:This is certainly not a grunt’s knowledge—perception of a potato as my own soul—but a sturdy, middle-aged, free man’s. Dandelions (III) Everyone has secrets—moments that change them.I tell my secrets to some dandelions hugging the lichen-like turf.He was doing lines on a mirror and had sugar spots on his nose.It made him…

INSOFAR AS RELIGION CONCERNS a theory of an afterlife—and let’s face it, anything else amounts to philosophy—I lost what remained of my religious faith when I inherited my mother’s needlepoint purse. The purse is what we used to call a clutch. I remember it as my mother’s go-to bag from my earliest childhood to adolescence. I know that she crafted it herself because she included her initials, AHF, on the side, in green yarn embedded on the backdrop of black. The main design is a stylized tree in almond brown thread, with green and yellow leaves curling out from the candelabra branches. A few touches of gold—in the shape of pears—punctuate the black. For a clutch, it is capacious, bladdering out from the gold rim that snaps together at the…

THE BIRD WAY: A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think BY JENNIFER ACKERMAN Penguin Press, 368 pp., $28 GABRIELLE NEVITT GREW up enthralled with birds. Not just the birds at the feeder or in the woods near her home. She knew birds intimately—because they lived with her in her house. She carried a pet bantam rooster around like a doll. She remembers the sweet scent at the base of his comb. The hackle feathers of his neck smelled like a plum tree, or grass, or like eucalyptus. The family’s mynah bird, she remembered, “smelled dusty, except on his earlobe.” They had a parrot, too, and she noticed that the bird was particular about the kind of toast he ate, “and whether we buttered it with…

After every war someone has to tidy up. — Wisława Szymborska, “The End and the Beginning,” 1993 The road, just in front of the sidewalk where I sat and played jacks, would be ankle-deep in dust, and seemed to drink up the moonlight like folds of velvet. It drank up sound, too; muffled the wagon-wheels and hoof-beats; lay soft and meek like the last residuum of material things,—the soft bottom resting-place. Nothing in the world, not snow mountains or blue seas, is so beautiful in moonlight as the soft, dry summer roads in a farming country, roads where the white dust falls back from the slow wagon-wheel. —Willa Cather, “Two Friends,” 1932 Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind. —Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex, 2002 And in 1934,…

THE AGE OF THE EARTH has intrigued people for a long time. Aristotle thought that our planet had existed forever, while a careful reading of biblical accounts suggested to theologians that it was created in 4004 BCE. In modern times, radiometric dating makes it possible to determine the age of rocks and fossils, so we now know with confidence that Earth is 4.54 billion years old. Since a timespan so vast is difficult to contemplate, I find it useful to shrink it down to a single year, which starts with Earth’s formation on January 1. We can then look back on the events in this Earth Year from the vantage point of midnight on December 31—a stratagem that lets us view the history of our planet in its proper perspective.…

Formed of a living god, Himālaya, supremeRaja of the Mountains, rises in the northand bathing in the western and the eastern oceansstretches out like a rod that could measure the earth. — Kālidāsa (translated from the Sanskrit by Hank Heifetz) HUMANS HAVE LIVED in the shadows of the Himalayas for the past 5,000 years, so it is not surprising that the world’s tallest mountain range would figure prominently in the mythology, folklore, and culture of the region. This is especially true in Nepal. Spanning the length of its northern border and forming a barrier that separates the Tibetan Plateau from the alluvial floodplains of the Indian subcontinent, the Himalayas are central to Nepal’s identity. They not only exert an immeasurable spiritual and emotional force on the nearly 30 million people…

My brother William, 10 years old to my 13, visibly shook in the big feather bed and gave me his famous zombie gaze; he had a way of somehow flattening his face so that his dark brown eyes, science-fictionally wet at all times, nailed you—a look of disappointment and immediate forgiveness that could make you feel ashamed even when you were innocent of whatever thing it was he thought you’d done, or, more often, as now, left undone. We were at our crazy paternal grandparents’ farmhouse in the woods of Alpharetta, Georgia, in the unheated first-floor bedroom always assigned to us, where, this time of year, two days past Christmas, it was cold enough to see your breath. I’d not yet got into the bed with William, but still sat…