Dive into the archives.
- On Culture: How E. Bowen Illuminates S. Beckett
Augie March was a Chicagoan, born and bred. But Saul Bellow was born in Canada. Looking at the world from a window on the Upper West Side, I think of my own little piece of globalization. Two generations through Brooklyn and then Manhattan, from the Russo-Polish Pale; and I was looking, last week, at real [...]
- On Pessimism, Beckett, and Optimism
Reading Beckett, reading Beckett’s reading of Proust, reading the intellectual regress back to Schopenhauer and Kant, I put down the books. I stop. It comes down to this in human affairs: we know that on the way to dying, we live and experience. Obviously, not only good times, but the odd “peak” experiences, fade: sometimes [...]
