ISSUES | fall 2005

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There’s no such thing as being out of the wind in the Antarctic. We inhabit a barren continent buried under mile-deep ice and shaped by the cold gales of millenia. Katabatic winds plunge down to the frozen coast like an endless train falling off its tracks.

As a gangster, that’s when I actually earnestly became an artist as well. I had already been writing since the time I was six years old. When not fighting in…    read more

I wonder what makes a person belong to a place. And why it seems some people never do, no matter how long they stay.

Edmund Wilson was twenty-seven. He was fortunate to come on the scene as a critic when he did, but he had trained for this moment. At fifteen he had been sure of his literary vocation, and he absorbed all that liberal education had to offer both at the Hill School and at Princeton… He joined Vanity Fair as an editorial assistant, immediately became its managing editor, and began publishing criticism there as well as in other magazines.

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Paul is driving on the southern tip of the Maine Turnpike when the first snowflake falls, a lonely ephemeral shape that dissolves on the glass as soon as it hits. He glances at the urn in the backseat, sitting upright in a cardboard box with the seatbelt cinched tightly around the box, squuezing it slightly out of shape.

When they asked, I told them I wanted the dog that would take up the most space in my house. They opened a heavy door, went into the back and came out with a giant.

For months Allen Jensen moped ceaselessly, then fell into something deeper. He blamed his job at first, then the unexpected death of a cousin he had never really known, but finally he concluded that there was no reason at all for his feelings of sadness and dread. He, himself, was the reason.

My childhood was spent in a garden. This garden was in Egypt, a few miles outside Cairo, but its furnishings were English–ponds and pergolas and rose beds. There were majestic eucalyptus trees, with which I communed–children are natural animists.

We sometimes assume that the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a time when thinkers became sensitized to the struggle and uncertainty of nature and life. It truly was one of the most creative and turbulent periods in the history of thought. Darwin, Marx, Freud and Einstein all depicted not just conflict but systems of disparity between what seems to be and what is. In literature as well as the sciences both the obvious and the hidden struggles of life were being looked at with new intimacy and understanding.