The Romantic Modernists’ convictions regarding the divine essence of humankind were the basis for their antipathy toward social conventions and institutions.
The exasperated tone with which evolutionary scientists, philosophers of science, and others on the side of science and philosophy received Nagel’s book was struck early.
The original definition of the American Dream was rooted in the democratic principles of both the Founding Fathers and nineteenth-century transcendentalists.
Training in objective, scholarly techniques would produce particular types of ethical subjects.
Venues now available for many more competing voices, together with the multiplying perspectives of our times—hailed as liberating diversity—serve as dispensation to believe in anything, everything, or nothing.
With the rise of humanism and modern critical scholarly practices in subsequent centuries, texts began to be treated as material objects to be fixed and plumbed for meaning.
To the arguments of Huxley and Tyndall against traditional religion, Yeats had no answer until literature and the other arts came to the rescue.
Majoring in English, the sales pitch now goes, will help you craft your soul.
For some friends of the library, no defense of the stacks is necessary.
The devil was understood to be present and industrious, and America’s earliest forebears were quick to suss him out by his evil works.
The complexities of social media ought to prompt deep reflection on what we all owe to the future, and how we might discharge this debt.
Death is experienced as the total absence of meaning and, consequently, as something not to be understood but merely to be managed by drawing on medical ingenuity, pharmaceutical resources, and the (increasingly limited) forbearance of insurance companies.
Why do dreams, aside from those that prove uncannily prophetic, not befit our biography?
The Great American Novel? Why are we still banging on about that old thing?
A neglected hard-boiled novelist wrote on the greatest conspiracy of all.
To feel and give voice to the “more” of our humanity was Saul Bellow’s vocation.
Vampire and zombie stories are stories of a new mass folklore. But they have dreamt themselves into us for specific reasons.
Today’s witches are no longer experts in the “occult.” Instead, they rush to aid the downtrodden—and to publish their potion recipes in best-selling how-to guides.
At their core, cryptids represent the triumph of the particular over the generic.
We might do a better job of living together if we believed that we are meant to do so.
True crime is not quite about watching people die, but it does require an interest in the subject.
Writing a book about Thomas Jefferson means entering a very crowded field.
At the beginning of a plague, everyone is implicated.
Péguy’s critical stance toward both broad coalitions made him neither a modernist nor an antimodernist, but something quite distinctive and instructive.
For Faulkner, all of time existed as a moment, during which all could be changed: past, present, and future.
As the crisis wears on, I find myself wondering about the code of hospitality.
The humanities may have suddenly mattered more than ever, but their support was also as fragile as it had been for decades.
Given the gorgeousness of George Eliot’s own prose, her translation’s eloquence comes as no surprise.
If John Brown failed at anything, he failed at saving us from ourselves.
Everything that was once considered lowbrow is now triumphant.
When you bring children into being, you give them the gift of life, but you also impose on them these terrible costs.
All modern forms of government presume an objectification of their citizens.
On locating the sublimity of art within the world and within history.
Hunting after the “hidden life of learning,” Zena Hitz defends learning for its own sake.
On the surface, “normal” might seem harmless, charmingly self-deprecating, maybe even endearing.
The disagreement between modernism and the contemporary discourse of “self-help” is not about whether literature has “therapeutic” capacities.
On the face of it, Simone Weil is a remarkably poor candidate for domestication.
As a history of art and thought in the Cold War era, The Free World is enthralling but unsatisfying, inevitably so.
The meaning of performative in contemporary parlance is almost exactly the opposite of the word’s original meaning.
Consider embracing utopia at once as indeterminate speculation about a qualitatively better future and as a hypothesis, by assuming it to be possible.
An important part of his legacy is his criticism of the critics.
Substack prompts the question should the people we rely on to inform us be celebrities?
Concern with authenticity seems to be unique to societies marked by conspicuous racial or ethnic hierarchies.
Learning to read for the possibility or the certainty of laughter in the writings of Phillis Wheatley.
Is love so discrete and impregnable that it can subsist in the midst of the most repellent undertakings?
Black Americans still embrace the exodus story as the defining trope of their collective experience.
We used to want to assimilate into the mainstream. Now identity is front and center of what we want the world to know about us.
Augustine is crucial to determining the continuity and dissimilarity between the Romans and ourselves.
The liberty of the adult citizen depends on the subordination of the prepolitical child.
If the pandemic has taught us anything, it is that the health of the community is essential to the health of the individual.
Putting the cult back into culture in the analysis of politics.
We can’t properly define the Enlightenment without making reference to happiness.
Were it not for this creative, constructive impulse, the fire next time would have burned this country down many times over.
The captivity narrative is the most American of genres, not just in fostering fear, paranoia, and violence but in contributing to the creation myth of a new variety of person: the American.
Why precisely are the most fortunate of us the most restless? How can our private, individual restlessness explain our public, political sclerosis?
As much as we may wish otherwise, history gives us few reasons to believe that its moral arc bends toward justice.
Fantasies of freeing ourselves of the baggage of the past run aground on the fact that humans are history-bearing animals.
Tocqueville was acutely conscious of living in a special moment in history
Our identity—insofar as it may be thought of as a fortress—is less adept at resisting life’s various microassaults at 3 am.
The Internet as we know and use it in our daily lives significantly limits our capacity for freedom in all the various and complex senses of the term.
Dostoevsky is an author who takes risks, makes us both laugh and wince.
Bellah held the conviction that religious matters were not purely intellectual, much less merely academic.
The cleverness that proliferates in public life today is a nuisance.
I’ve been cursed to envision peace without ever experiencing it myself.
Exploring the social and psychological costs of a life increasingly lived online.
The resurrection of Carne-Ross’s book should give a little bit of hope
Mantel demands that we inhabit Cromwell’s story along with him.
The fact is that we do not hold desire and reason together very well.
Amid the social turmoil of postwar Vienna, Othmar Spann’s class auditorium became a political battlefield.
Why is Shelby Foote's Civil War subject to so much contemporary debate?
MacIntyre is philosophically an antiliberal, yet he provides no real alternative to liberal democracy.
Costică Brădățan’s argument in praise of failure rests on its ability to make us humble.
What Pleasants found in the Afro-American idiom was a body of music intended to comfort the afflicted.
The verbomania that compelled ordinary Russians to devour thousand-page books appears increasingly remote, even mythological.
Henry David Thoreau has a reputation for being suspicious of work.
Though we must use stories to explain the world to ourselves, we must stay vigilant to their power to close off reality itself.
The only distinction that matters is between fiction work that lasts and work that doesn’t.
Kafka waited in stillness and solitude for the right words to call forth “the glory of life.”
It is a tall order to see—and to enable others to see—with a child’s perception and the wisdom of a pilgrim.
The histories and literatures of antiquity can help us address some of our contemporary ethical deficit disorder.
This is why the stories we surround ourselves with and immerse ourselves in matter.
Calling the idea of wilderness into question makes as much sense as asking whether the United States is a democracy.
To say that writing novels trained a mind for eternity was a bold professional claim.
We would do well to heed Kafka’s insight that Flaubert found in family life a kind of flourishing he himself failed to seek.
That Edvard Munch never met Friedrich Nietzsche is one of the great missed encounters of the modern age.
Summer reads from THR staff and friends.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; even smaller minds complain about the rest of these people.
After situating themselves in a “wild” context, both women do what the entire history of nature writing has implicitly instructed them not to do: they bring their emotional backpacks into the landscape.
A translation of English to English presumes that ambiguity of language is always a flaw—but it’s not.
Cormac McCarthy gives us 500 pages of idiosyncratic wordplay without even cheap narrative excitement. Who does he think he is? Joyce? Faulkner? Melville? Well, yes.
The question for Silence is not whether another world exists but how such a recognition should affect our lives here.
Why should anyone focus on the life of the mind when individual and societal survival is threatened?
It is precisely at such moments of technological dependency that one might consider interrogating one’s relationship with technology more broadly.
To make promises, to stand by one words, to be answerable for them, is to open oneself to blame.
The solitude of sickness is not a waste of time but rather a compression of it, a bundle the size of a pill bottle.
Faulkner’s treatment of the past means much for the nature of our future.
My quarrel with M.F.K. Fisher was part of a larger quarrel I’ve been having with myself ever since we went to ground in March.
Who will emerge as the new elite from this particular moment’s cast of winners and losers?
Herzen won’t stop striving for social transformation with every ounce of energy he has, but also won’t pick up Chernyshevsky’s axe.
Why read long books? Well, if you have to ask…
We need to preserve a distinction between recognizing our transgressions and resolving to change, on one hand, and imagining that we can forgive ourselves, on the other.
Our writing process lacks sufficient resistance, hesitation, reconsideration.
Well known free speech advocates may not always be free speech absolutists.
To measure the Wealth of Nations, you had to inspect the shirts on people’s backs and the shoes on their feet.
Reading and interpreting poetry offers a unique way to cultivate ethical knowledge and therefore bears on collective, and not just individual, life.
What if the more successful political commentators on Substack, or music teachers on YouTube, or masters of the podcast interview, began to teach their craft to others?
Henry James’s fiction shows how aesthetic misjudgments can be connected to moral vice.
When I give myself over to the self-writers I love most, I am transformed.
The question I want to ask is simply this: Is the writing of a Life a game that, in our current moment, can be played?
Self-knowledge and pleasure, the Idiosyncratics teach us, go hand in hand through the library.
Everyone contributes to the pandemic, so all bear responsibility.
It’s easy to see how lectures got a bad rap. We have all been subjected to someone who abused the privilege of an audience.
Pretending that all workers are the same obscures rather than clarifies the reality of class.
Taking pleasure in a well-crafted sentence is a good in itself.
We view the concept of “compromise” from all sorts of oblique angles.
Perhaps the older Auden merely wants to have the humility to accept the terms on which agape offers itself.
We are here to ponder the longue durée of mutton in an age of capitalist wolves.
Throughout the book, Sherrell eschews the phrase “climate crisis,” substituting a much more nebulous term: “the Problem.”
The benefits of the humanities have danced so gracefully through these tutorials that it’s never occurred to any of us to ask what’s the point.
Can we excuse the bigotry of a writer whose books are so hip and full of life and infectious that you can’t put them down?
Well, then, why—on Kierkegaard’s view—would anyone choose a life of faith?
Making a new paragraph is as easy as drawing a thin line in the margin.
We can learn from the outdated Western Civ model, even as we transcend it.
It seems that neo-paganism is attractive in part because it offers an identity to those who have rejected postmodern, deracinated versions of Christianity.
What makes this so difficult is that time has a way of eroding the power of words.
An institution entering the last of its salad days while still running on the fumes of its preening self-importance.
Hope Mirrlees is interested in what happens if the power of Fairyland cannot be wholly excluded.
His writing became Ellroyian—telegraphic, fast-paced, and intellectually cynical.
If there is a war between database and narrative in Cervantes and Sterne, it is a merry one.
Calvino recognized the digital age as an existential condition as well as a technological one.
The cultural legacy of Bruno Schulz.
Whether or not we find beauty in rhetoric, its eloquence depends on its power to persuade.
The very short story can conjure a fiction out of almost nothing.
The official publication day came and went. I felt weirdly out of it, waiting for something I had anticipated for half my life and worked toward unremittingly.
Cormac McCarthy is provoking us more than we may realize.
Austen’s sparing use of attributions is also a sign of her confidence in her art. She dispensed with unnecessary scaffolding.
Kundera’s novels are expansive and support irreconcilable yet arguably valid points of view.
The philosophical divide doesn’t neatly correspond with our political divide. There are egoists on all sides, just as there are altruists.
There is a familiar feeling here: existential dread, impending doom, a light dose of despair.
The literature classroom is an unusually fit environment in which to pursue “the deepening and sharpening of emotional powers.”
Kundera chose to take the long view, reflecting on the relationship between the Jews and Europe, and, more broadly, on the Jews and that European, literary spirit to which he saw himself heir.
Consider another problem of motivation in the house of fiction: why characters write.
Every graduate student in the humanities should be required to take a course in the English Bible.
John von Neumann’s life ended the way many of those of his intellectual caliber end: in madness.
The special challenge of presenting a poet whose work is neither new nor widely known.
Dostoevsky is too Christian for a secular age and too secular for Christendom.
The language of self-censorship removes the question from the moral realm in which it properly belongs.
The historical novel strives to recreate not only the material dimensions of a past age but also its mindset.
The emptiness of words, and our shared resignation to meaning manipulation, is no small matter.
The greatest characters possess an irrepressible vitality.
If you read Frost for the snow, but don’t feel the cold, then you’re not really reading Frost