Indholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2021 i The American Scholar

FOUR YEARS AGO, we planned a cover story for our first issue after the presidential election that would urge magnanimity on victorious Hillary Clinton voters, suggesting that they should take seriously the concerns of those defeated Donald Trump voters. Clever us! Early on the morning after the election, our writer, the political philosopher Amitai Etzioni, emailed a plan to recast his article. He would help the dazed majority of voters, who had nonetheless lost, to understand the victorious minority. And indeed, “Understanding the Trump Voter” were the words on the cover of our Winter 2017 issue. Now the tables are turned, but the need to understand the 71 million Americans who voted to continue the Trump presidency is no less urgent, especially since the huge size of that number is…

IN 1857, AN ENSLAVED TEENAGER named Alexina Morrison created an uproar in New Orleans, center of the euphemistically labeled “fancy market” trade. She claimed she was white and filed a suit arguing that she was entitled to her freedom. Fifteen years old, she had blond hair and blue eyes. In her affidavit, she asserted that she had “white blood” and was born of “white parentage.” Alexina Morrison was one of many light-complected enslaved women regularly sold to men. Like models on a runway, the women were fashionably dressed, appropriately adorned, and coached on their behavior. “White slaves” were highly prized, and the most attractive of them sold at the highest prices. Their value derived not only from having fair skin but also from a well-documented near-white pedigree that was sometimes…

TO BE AWARE OF YOUR mortality is to be aware not only that your life will end, but also that your world will end, and indeed that it is ending all the time, forever turning into the past. “The person I once was,” James Longenbach writes, “found himself / In the present, which was the only place he could be.” Everything else was gone. Longenbach recently bought a house by the sea on School Street, as is implied by the poem here with that address for its title. Like the boy in “Notre-Dame,” he has had to learn to live with a threatening cancer diagnosis. As you might guess from the walks traced in “Venice,” he has visited that city often enough to have memorized its maze of houses and…

Before the pedestrian bridges had railings, before most people knew how to swim, the water entrance would have been the Hotel Danieli’s fulcrum, the hub of its staff’s solicitations. The beginning of everything was in seeing the gondola-beak come actually inside the door at the Danieli: for centuries it’s been impossible to see Venice except through the images of Canaletto and Turner, the sentences of Shakespeare and Byron, but the teenaged John Ruskin nonetheless experienced the beginning of everything—not just a discovery of a lifelong passion for Venice but the discovery of eros itself. Nobody has been there before. Every time you walk from a typically mid-century train station onto the water—the vaporetti unloading their cargo of tourists, the dome of San Simeone Piccolo hovering on the other side, improbably…

WORK: A Deep History, From the Stone Age to the Age of Robots BY JAMES SUZMAN Penguin Press, 464 pp., $30 ANTHROPOLOGIST JAMES SUZMAN spent 20 years studying the Khoisan, specifically the Ju/’hoansi, a nomadic tribe whose territory spans the borderlands of Namibia and Botswana. In his 2017 book, Affluence Without Abundance: The Disappearing World of the Bushman, he noted that the Ju/’hoansi sustain an “unyielding confidence” that nature will provide for them, a confidence so sturdy that they have no need to store or preserve food, let alone prepare for scarcity. Far from being nasty, brutish, and short, their well-lived lives of simplicity and generosity offer evidence that the self-imposed rat race of “civilized” humans was made necessary not by our actual needs but by our endless wants. While…

LOVE, KURT: The Vonnegut Love Letters, 1941–1945 EDITED BY EDITH VONNEGUT Random House, 240 pp., $35 MOST MEN IN UNIFORM never see death. But Private First Class Kurt Vonnegut of Indianapolis was captured at the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944 and shipped to Dresden as slave labor. Decades later, he would describe arriving at “the loveliest city that most of the Americans had ever seen. The skyline was intricate and voluptuous and enchanted and absurd … Somebody behind him in the boxcar said, ‘Oz.’ ” His POW group was housed in an underground meat locker and told to memorize its street address: Schlacthof Fünf. Slaughterhouse Five. One month later, Europe’s architectural jewel box was gone. In February 1945, the war nearly won, 1,249 Allied planes dropped 4,000 tons…

Poet, biographer, and translator Peter Filkins is the author of H. G. Adler: A Life in Many Worlds and The View We’re Granted, among other books. This poem, part of his forthcoming collection Water / Music, was inspired by something he observed in Ireland a few years ago. “Walking past a rain barrel” in the countryside, he says, “I noticed a thin layer of ice atop the water’s surface, one that reflected briefly the sky and snowflakes above, while also remaining transparent to the depths beneath. That’s a poem, I said to myself, and I wrote it that afternoon.”ice on a rain filled barrela penumbraof swollen gun cotton skyabsolving snowto bury the inflectedreflected flakes fallingupon a chill mirrorbuoyed in the barrelby rain swallowed light For more Works in Progress, please…

The person I once was found himselfIn the present, which was the only place he could be.The dog that yesterday had barkedAt his empty dish barked again.The stars were still shining,Though the brilliance of the sun obscured them so completelyYou’d believe they’d disappeared.Time to walk to the paddock.Will the roses be blooming? Will Penny be there, too?Selfishly we planted cornflowers, delphiniums,A different bed for every shade.From behind the wisteria came children, then grandchildren—The girls wore smocked dresses, dresses my motherHad made, the boys had floppy hair.The things we madeOurselves seemed permanent,But like the stars invisible, even the thingsWe made from words. DownstairsThe kitchen, the living room, everything in place:The bed could fold up in the wall.But upstairs a ladder where each evening, one by one,We’d climb into the crow’s nestTo…

I The pandemic is many things. The medical crisis is just a starting point, dwarfed by existential anxieties. Covid-19 is a grave instrument of analysis, a deafening warning shot, a ruthless scourge. It is veritably biblical. Every festering problem we face—as individuals, as communities, as a nation—seems exercised and magnified: racial discord, economic inequality, fires and floods, a shredded social fabric. The least-noticed debacle is cultural: the vexed fate of our performing arts institutions, our museums, our artists in every field. That this same debacle is being noticed and addressed abroad seals a reckoning moment for Americans. When the virus hit, the city of Berlin swiftly allocated $320 million to its cultural workers. The German government added $50 billion; its culture minister, Monika Grütters, said, “Artists are indispensable, especially now.”…

When this one calls, Mikey doesn’t like it. Mikey calls him Love Number 6 because once I said that this was my sixth boyfriend ever, years ago. I never actually counted, but Number 6 stuck. Number 6 phones at three a.m. to tell me factoids and calamities. “The baby’s sleeping,” Mikey says in my left ear, beside me in the bed. “Tell him you can’t talk.” “Did you see the world news?” Number 6 says in my right ear, miles away in Sarasota. “Word news?” I say. “World. World. There’s a virus starting up. I always told you one would.” “What virus?” I say. “It’ll spread fast,” he says. He tells me what he’s read. I read things, but he sees news I don’t even know how to access. We…

METAZOA: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind BY PETER GODFREY-SMITH Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 352 pp., $28 I’VE WRITTEN SEVERAL books about the natural world and read countless others, but never have I encountered anything like Metazoa. In it, Peter Godfrey-Smith, a professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Sydney, focuses on the evolutionary developments that shaped our brains, and no matter how much you think you know about these developments, his book will deepen your understanding. Subjects such as the evolution of the mind are usually discussed by scientists in papers intended for other scientists. Are these papers interesting? Not really, because so many scientists don’t seem to care whether or not nonspecialists understand them. As science journalist Dalmeet Singh Chawla recently commented,…

IN THE SUMMER OF 1837, American painter and poet Christopher Pearse Cranch settled himself at his drafting table to complete a sketchbook—a comic really—his shorthand depiction of a new American way of thinking. Later published as Illustrations of the New Philosophy, it consisted of 28 caricatures that, according to Cranch, captured the seeds of a philosophy that had recently arisen in the outskirts of Boston: American Transcendentalism. On the second page of his Illustrations, Cranch sketched an otherworldly image: a spindly legged being making his way up a New England hill, looming over the countryside, dressed in a waistcoat and hat, whose head had been replaced by a single probing eyeball. The drawing, no bigger than a sheet of paper, became Cranch’s most famous work for no other reason than…

High above our heads the forestIs burning, oaks and chestnuts almost a thousand years old.Smoke is rising, alarms are ringing,But down here in the pastWe’re ignorant, we’re unprepared. This boy lights a candle in a little red cup.Maybe the girl he lovesNo longer loves him.Look at her, she’s standing right beside him; isn’t he dumb? This boy’s going to be a father, he’s just found out.Together with his wifeHe’ll celebrate at Trumilou, their favorite bistro, just across the Seine. Viollet-le-Duc is sketching a buttress.Louis Vierne is playing Bach, the Toccata and Fugue in D minor.They’re embellishers, both of them,They can’t leave the past alone! Doesn’t anyoneHear the sirens, see the black smokeBillowing against the sky? The forest is burning. Beneath itLittle flames of hopeAre burning, too.Hope, desire, longing, fear— This…

THE DOCTORS BLACKWELL: How Two Pioneering Sisters Brought Medicine to Women—and Women to Medicine BY JANICE P. NIMURA Norton, 336 pp., $27.95 ELIZABETH BLACKWELL, the first woman in America to earn a medical degree, is an icon. But for most of us in medicine, she is only that. Few people today know much about what she actually did, and fewer are even aware of her younger sister Emily, by far the more accomplished clinician. Janice P. Nimura, in her new book, The Doctors Blackwell, aims to give both doctors their proper due. The Blackwell clan—two parents, nine children, four “starveling aunts”—originated in Bristol, England, and migrated to the United States after the father, Samuel Blackwell, lost his sugar refinery business in a conflagration. The family lived in New York City…

RELIGION AND THE RISE OF CAPITALISM BY BENJAMIN M. FRIEDMAN Knopf, 560 pp., $35 OVER THE YEARS, some religious conservatives have strained to attenuate Christianity’s doctrinal role in some of history’s darker moments—the Crusades, the Inquisition, the European witch hunts, pogroms against Jews, and the slave trade. Some have gone so far as to credit Christianity for the core institutions of modern industrialized democracies, including and especially capitalism. It was human potential in this world, not predestinarian beliefs about the next world, that drove capitalism, Friedman contends. But Harvard political economist Benjamin M. Friedman rejects such Whiggish triumphalism. In his new book, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, he resurrects a thesis proffered a century ago by English historian R. H. Tawney (in his book of the same title) that…

I felt the winter breaking up in me, and if I had been at home, I should have tried to write poetry. —Henry David Thoreau, Journal, December 26, 1854 Violent socks,my feet weretwo fish madeof wool,two long sharkssea-blue, shotthroughby one golden thread …beauty is twicebeautyand what is good is doublygoodwhen it is a matter of two socksmade of woolin winter. —Pablo Neruda, “Ode to My Socks” (tr. by Robert Bly), 1956 Sitting out in the backyard—afternoon, a white half-moon—and your fruitcake inside—me, not the moon, though that speaks for where it should aim at, in its excellence. … As you see, I opened it like a letter. —Eudora Welty to Emily and William Maxwell, December 21, 1955 “If spring never comes, does that mean summer won’t either? How will the…