What we don’t know about our own minds is equaled only by what we don’t know about each other—and what we don’t want to know. For no earthly reason, for example, I insist on confusing the actors Timothy Hutton and Tim Matheson.
I think this sort of thing has to do with pathways. How something [...]
The soldiers we see in Iraq, looking more and more like cyborgs with their night vision headgear, and the soldiers who won the great tank battles of Desert Storm because of their night vision capability, could not have carried out their missions were it not for a son of Iraq named Abu Ali Hasan al [...]
Read More...There are certain gewgaws, doodads and gimcracks I can’t seem to resist. So over the recent holidays I bought two green-flame candles at The Museum of Modern Art. (More about MoMA later). It turns out the flames are lovely in the near-dark, my usual state, but almost invisible in a brighter environment, and the wicks [...]
Read More...I’ve always thought of snobs as narrow of foot and thin of lip, given to cutlery stares and cold shoulders, none of which describes this broad-footed fellow. But now in my old age and especially when walking around Woodstock, New York, that rainbow-hued, pinwheel-kinetic redoubt of the New Age, I repent of ugly snobbery, because [...]
Read More...This is far too specialized country for me to explore, but I would like to suggest that it might be worth exploring. We in the West are inheritors of the Greek ideal of physical beauty. But Middle Eastern thought is haunted by the idea of veiled beauty. We in the West are inheritors of [...]
Read More...I take great comfort in the fact that no two snowflakes are alike. The implications seem far weightier to me than anything I read in the newspapers. My favorite pasttime in winter is shoveling snow. I imagine myself some kind of cosmic geometrician moving blocks of blue light, blocks composed of an infinity of flakes, [...]
Read More...Once human beings learned how to speak and write it was inevitable they would soon start counting everything and everyone. King David, for example, ordered a census, and his critics, more obsessed with counting than their king, added it to their list of his sins. Herod even more infamously started counting people.
Attic and Roman [...]
I think—you were waiting breathlessly for what I think, right?—I think Americans need to change our job description. I mean, we didn’t exactly clamor to be alpha consumerists, did we? It was sort of foisted on us by people who had a lot to sell. They promised us that if we bought all they had [...]
Read More...Nothing frames the clash between the West and the rising number of Muslim jihadis more clearly than President Bush’s October 11th press conference. He used the word caliphate as if it had a metallic taste, displaying his vast ignorance of Islamic history.
The President refers to the caliphate as misguidedly as the al-Qaeda and Salafist extremists. [...]
Poetry is alchemy. The poem is its catalyst. The poet employs algebra—the Arabic root words are al jabara, the joining—to make an elixir to catalyze words unaccustomed to each other. The elixir combines opposites to create wholes that hold ideas in suspension. The whole serves the reader a new way of experiencing things. This whole [...]
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