Indholdsfortegnelse for Autumn 2023 i The American Scholar

On hearing the news of Milan Kundera's death in early July, I dipped back into The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a novel I first read some three decades ago. And though I tend to avoid film versions of books these days, I wanted to see Philip Kaufman's cinematic adaptation again, since I remembered how much its soundtrack—consisting almost entirely of the music of Leoš Janáček (1854–1928)—contributed to its lyricism and power. Janáček was born in a Moravian village, and the folk traditions of his native land were essential to his music. He was drawn especially to the sound of the human voice, its rhythms and cadences informing not only his fantastic operas but also his piano music and chamber works: In the Mists, the string quartets, On an Overgrown Path,…

One brisk evening last fall, I took my 15-year-old daughter out for a driving lesson near our home in Portland, Oregon. We were in our old Ford pickup, and I was cheering her smooth downshifts and complimenting her feel for the clutch and gas when she made a left onto an unlit street. Suddenly, we were surrounded by tents, piles of garbage, grocery carts, old bicycles. A few figures sat in the shadows. Ahead and to the right, a man squatted in the dark, firing a blowtorch over something near the ground. When a car approached from the other direction with no room to pass, my daughter braked, then stalled. The car stopped a few feet in front of us, headlights in our eyes. “Mom, Mom, I can't reverse, and…

When I was going to college, I worked off and on for several years on the night crew at a Sunflower Food Store in Cleveland, Mississippi. We came in an hour before the store closed and began unloading the trucks that arrived from the company's warehouse, and we left before the store reopened the next morning. I stocked the baking, grain, and pasta aisle and then, near the end of each shift, spent an hour or so either sweeping and mopping the floors or burning paper and cardboard packaging in the incinerator room, where the temperature often reached 140 degrees. Unlike a lot of guys on the crew, I always assumed the job was temporary, that I would move on to greater endeavors. But I actually came to like the…

CAROLINE McCOY is a writer and editor based in Savannah. She is the author of a collection of short fiction, Museum of Hard Times. For more than two years, I have lived in the lower level of Flannery O'Connor's childhood home, which sits on a quiet residential block in downtown Savannah, Georgia. I had studied O'Connor's life and work in graduate school, and it was my research that enabled me to recognize the gray façade of the author's first residence during a routine Zillow search. This happened one morning in late September 2020, at the height of the pandemic. I was subletting an apartment in Savannah, spending my days scrolling through the same stock of dismal, overpriced rentals. Spotting the listing for the garden apartment on Lafayette Square, I imagined…

MEGAN CRAIG is an artist and associate professor of philosophy and art at Stony Brook University. In November 1938, Dorothea Lange snapped a black-and-white photograph at a gas station in Kern County, California. A couple of buildings and trees are visible in the background—vague signs of life. In the foreground we see an air machine, made of wood and resembling a bedroom wardrobe, its door swung open to reveal a tangle of black hose inside. A sign atop the machine reads, “AIR.” And on the inside of the door is a large, hand-painted message. AIR THIS IS YOUR COUNTRY DONT LET THE BIG MEN TAKE IT AWAY FROM YOU Look at the picture long enough and the word “AIR” starts to seem odd. For me, the letters drift apart, and I'm…

ANNE VALENTE is the author of two novels, The Desert Sky Before Us and Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down, as well as the short story collection By Light We Knew Our Names. She is an associate professor of creative writing at Hamilton College. It happened before the stop sign at the base of the hill, the steepest part of the road, an inevitability she should have anticipated when they moved in eight months ago. They'd come for her husband's job, a faculty position at an elite liberal arts college in rural Pennsylvania, the kind of job he'd coveted when he started his history PhD at Berkeley and the kind of job she'd feared. He'd told her, Relax, there are colleges in every major city in America, and then he'd…

There are the snowshoe hare years when the furred lumps of their bodies spot the roads where I live in Homer, Alaska, like some kind of terrible acne. Usually, all you can identify amid the hairy mess is a single hind foot—in life, a miracle of engineering with such propulsion, it lands in front of the forefoot after a leap. There are the porcupine seasons when the pavement is littered with their flattened bodies, a few quills rising like exclamation points on their demise. There are winters of moose kills, when friends get a call from the state troopers in the middle of the night, then groggily venture out to salvage the meat right off the road. These deaths on pavement are windows into the wild world, telling of the…

Nineteen -fifty-seven was the year when Edith Hamilton, a widely read translator of classical literature and ideas, finally achieved the status that had long eluded her—that of bona fide public intellectual. Her book The Echo of Greece not only sold out its first print run but also received favorable reviews from eminent scholars who had, she felt, previously snubbed her. More meaningful to her by far, the Greek government invited her to Athens that summer for a performance of her translation of Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound. Onstage at the theater of Herodes Atticus, in the presence of the U.S. ambassador to Greece, Hamilton was made an honorary citizen of Athens by the city's mayor. She gave a short speech, calling the occasion her proudest moment, to a standing ovation as camera…

In the popular belief, ghosts are a selecting tribe, avoiding millions, speaking to one. -Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Demonology,” North American Review, 1877 Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned in long grass. Let the stars appear and the moon disclose her silver horn. Let the fox go back to its sandy den. Let the wind die down. Let the shed go black inside. Let evening come. To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop in the oats, to air in the lung let evening come. -Jane Kenyon, “Let Evening Come,” Otherwise: New and Selected Poems, 1996 I would rather feel your spine than your skull, whoever you are. -Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, 1851 Babel towers of chimneys, wanting half their height; temporary wooden houses and enclosures, in the most unlikely situations;…

Fifty years ago, on September 11,1973, Chilean armed forces staged a coup that resulted in the death of leftist President Salvador Allende, the overthrow of the Popular Unity government, and the installation of a junta led by General Augusto Pinochet. In the aftermath of the coup, political opponents were rounded up and some put to death. Meanwhile, books associated with leftist authors were burned, as were magazines and newspapers, with the aim of eradicating the “Marxist cancer.” Further book burnings would take place in Chile during the subsequent 16 years of military dictatorship, most notably in 1986, when thousands of copies of Gabriel García Márquez's Clandestine in Chile were confiscated and torched.…

I might have been sleeping when her plane crashed. Or maybe I was awake, listening to heavy rain pound the roof of my family's mobile home. I might have been under the covers, snuggling with my cat or plotting the last few days of summer vacation before the start of sixth grade. My last thought before drifting off to sleep might have been about the outfit I planned to wear on the first day of school, a lemon-yellow top with pink stripes and a flipped-up collar, a pair of round yellow earrings to match. The next morning, when I heard on the news that Samantha Smith had died, I pictured her on the plane as it was going down. Her body tense as her seat violently shook. Her eyes stretching…

ILAN STAVANS is the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities and Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. His latest book is The People's Tongue: Americans and the English Language. Anyone who sees Aher, Elisha ben Avuya, should be concerned about calamity, as he strayed from the path of righteousness. —TALMUD BERAKHOT 57B:6 I All these years later, everyone who knew Dr. Jacobo Grinberg Zylberbaum is still puzzled by his mysterious disappearance. How could this famous Mexican neurophysiologist have vanished without a trace? Grinberg was a few days shy of 48 when he was last seen, on December 8,1994. Almost immediately, rumors began to circulate: that the CIA had kidnapped him; that he feared for his life to such a degree that for weeks, maybe months, he had slept in a…

Lorna Goodison's “Quicksilver” starts: “Lost at the halfway; you were in search of a sign.” This might be the opening of an anecdote about a tourist in a confusing foreign city—or it might be a free translation of the first line of Dante's Commedia. The poem tacks between these two possibilities, relating a simple anecdote that is also a fable of spiritual quest. The poet chooses “a side street,” not the main road, where she comes upon a craftsman. His “mud roof” suggests this city is not in Europe or anywhere else in the prosperous north. It's an ordinary day, a Tuesday. He is at work as usual, as countless craftsmen before him have been, to judge from those steps “swaybacked from centuries of footfall.” With delicate artistry and the…

CHRISTIAN WIMAN teaches at Yale Divinity School. He is the author most recently of Survival Is a Style. This essay is adapted from his forthcoming book Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair, to be published in December by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. I You only love when you love in vain. Try another radio probe when ten have failed, take two hundred rabbits when a hundred have died: only this is science. You ask the secret. It has just one name: again. In the end a dog carries in his jaws his image in the water, people rivet the new moon, I love you. Like caryatids our lifted arms hold up time's granite load and defeated we shall always win. —MIROSLAV HOLUB, “Ode to Joy,” translated from the…

What drives the human impulse to collect and sort and categorize nature? In her new dual biography, Mischievous Creatures, Catherine McNeur explores this question as she traces the lives of entomologist Margaretta Hare Morris and botanist Elizabeth Carrington Morris. The sisters, bom at the very end of the 18th century, spent their adult lives collecting and observing and experimenting—lives that McNeur, an environmental historian, uses as the basis for her inquiry into American science in the early Republic, when professional societies were forming, and the lines dividing “amateur” enthusiasts and collectors from professional scientists were just being drawn. Margaretta and Elizabeth grew up in Germantown, near Philadelphia, where they explored the nearby Wissahickon Creek, a tributary of the Schuylkill River, and were tutored by enthusiastic naturalists connected with the new…

Like Plato, Niccolo Machiavelli, and Franz Kafka, George Orwell is a writer so well known that he has become an eponym. Yet the sinister connotations of “Orwellian” are at odds with the admiration and affection that Orwell himself, the champion of clear writing and honest thinking, continues to enjoy across a wide spectrum of readers. The British historian Geoffrey Wheatcroft voiced a general sentiment when he wrote, “The secular saint of our time par excellence was George Orwell.” Orwell expressed his own credo when, in an essay on Charles Dickens, he wrote, “if men would behave decendy the world would be decent.” Despite the humanistic clarity of his prose, however, Orwell himself was hardly an exemplar of decency. As Anna Funder, an Australian human rights lawyer-tumedauthor, writes, Orwell was a…

One evening in the early 1890s, after giving a concert in St. Louis, the Polish pianist Ignacy Paderewski asked his friend George Johns whether the city had “anything novel, anything out of the ordinary, a trifle bizarre” by way of nightlife. Johns hustled him over to the Castle Club, an opulent bordello run by Babe Connor. There, a dozen beauties danced “in little more than stockings” while a blind pianist played and a Black woman named Mammy Lou belted out bawdy songs. Paderewski was especially taken by one number, “Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay.” “He went to the piano and asked her to sing it again and again,” Johns's son wrote in a memoir. “In a season or two the song, like many others that originated with Mammy Lou, got into vaudeville by way…

We all know what a literary critic is: a trained reader who examines, analyzes, and appraises the texts of all kinds of writers. But what exactly is a science critic? Wouldn't that be a trained practitioner who investigates and sometimes assesses the assumptions and accomplishments of scientists? Of course, there are countless science writers, but I believe that Evelyn Fox Keller is one of our foremost science critics: a brilliant professional with an undergraduate degree from Brandeis and a PhD from Harvard who explores physics, mathematics, molecular biology, and genetics from a deeply learned insider's point of view. She is now a professor emerita at MIT. She also happens to be one of my oldest friends. Evelyn was mentored in her youth by the eminent nuclear physicist Leo Szilard and…

Dining With Naipaul's Sister Amber accord of Shalimar arrived before her into a room set like a scene from Scheherezade: Oriental rugs, brass lamps mantled with jujube glass. She entered slightly out of breath, one end of a silk sari afloat behind her, embraced my sister, called her dear friend; me, she was pleased to meet. She could have been playing the part of a princess in an epic set in some grand Mughal palace. Her bracelets streamed light when she proffered silver platters of cardamom and saffron spiced food, but there was dukha in those kohl-rimmed eyes. Driving home past the cinemas her husband owned, we could hear the shriek whistles of peanut vendors. One day she would leave that marriage. Naipaul's sister was my sister's friend. Just Imagine.…

It's now official: America is suffering from an epidemic of loneliness. That's not a metaphor—it is, according to U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, a major public health crisis. On May 3, Murthy formally announced a “National Strategy to Advance Social Connection” geared toward reducing the emotional isolation that is damaging our psyches and our bodies. Public health experts have been warning tor years about the toll loneliness can take. But the scope of the problem, as laid out by Murthy and others, is striking—not just how many people are lonely but how much damage that loneliness does. The lonely are at substantially elevated risk for heart disease, stroke, obesity, addiction, and dementia; being lonely increases your overall risk of premature death by more than 60 percent. And the number of…

We tend to think of philosophers as solitary creatures. Whether it be Diogenes or Socrates, Spinoza or Rousseau, Thoreau or Nietzsche, the philosopher is by necessity a loner. Several recent books, however, remind us that philosophers can also travel in packs. Not the packs that wear lanyards at academic conferences, mind you, but those that form in spite (or defiance) of the academy. David Edmonds's The Murder of Professor Schlick and Karl Sigmund's Exact Thinking in Demented Times are sharp accounts of the Vienna Circle, the group of European thinkers who founded the club of logical positivism (one that their idol, Ludwig Wittgenstein, refused to join). Another pair of books—Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman's Metaphysical Animals and Benjamin J. B. Lipscomb's The Women Are Up to Something—offer insightful and…

“An eccentric woman deserves an eccentric biography.” So writes Willard Spiegelman in this first biography of the poet Amy Clampitt. If there was anything eccentric about the genteel bohemian Amy Clampitt, it was that she was extremely private about her private life—which makes writing her life story a singular challenge. Indeed, the subtitle of Spiegelman's book is “The life and poetry of Amy Clampitt” (my emphasis). Although she was often autobiographical in her poems, Clampitt was never a confessional poet. We have no record of divorces, breakdowns, births, addictions, or abortions, because there were none. We do know that much about her. If not the chronicle of an “eccentric,” then, this is an extremely courteous and well-mannered biography of a mild but chatty bohemian and, considering the huge gaps in…