coming back to what had been so long composed
I don’t know whether, when Wallace Stevens wrote “The Poems of Our Climate,” he was contemplating a still life, though it seems plausible from the opening lines: Clear water in a brilliant bowl,Pink...
View ArticleOne Whale and Two Rabbits
I am reading the Oppenheimer biography. I marvel that the authors are able to form complete, ostensibly intelligible, sentences about quantum mechanics. But of course that’s necessary if one has taken...
View ArticleHume on Humans
How many people came and stayed a certain time,Uttered light or dark speech that became part of you. . . until no partRemains that is surely you. —John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror I...
View Article“A new knowledge of reality”
“It was like/A new knowledge of reality”—Wallace Stevens Ritchie Robinson begins his chapter on the Enlightenment’s approach to aesthetics with the phrase, “[c]onsistent with its emphasis on...
View ArticleOh, the Places You’ll Go!
Ritchie Robertson, in his book The Enlightenment, opens his chapter on cosmopolitanism with the observation that “[a]n ideal of the Enlightenment was to be a cosmopolitan or ‘citizen of the world’.”...
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