In October 1876, an intense young man with vague but fervent dreams of becoming an urban missionary went to preach a sermon—his debut in the pulpit—at a Methodist church in Richmond, on the southwestern fringes of London. This foreign drifter, still unsure of his path in life, walked from his nearby lodgings along the River Thames on a day of radiant autumn colors. He adored long contemplative walks, and wrote wonderfully about what he saw and felt on them. In a letter, he captured for his beloved younger brother the river as it “reflected the large chestnut trees with their load of yellow leaves and the clear blue sky, and between the treetops the part of Richmond that lies on the hill, the houses with their red roofs and windows without curtains and green gardens… and below, the grey bridge with tall poplars on either side.” He also transcribed to his brother his homily in church, with its message that “We are pilgrims in the earth and strangers—we come from afar and we are going far.”
Vincent van Gogh had, at that point, made no more art than a few crude sketches. Four more years would pass before the Dutch pastor’s son, who had already tried his hand at picture-dealing, school-teaching, book-selling, and evangelism, would pursue his vocation as an artist. Yet, from his teenage years, he had painted in words, with all the rhapsodic power of a voracious reader steeped in the fiction and poetry of three languages: Dutch, English, and French. The sixty or so surviving letters that Vincent wrote to his brother Theo or, less often, to his anxious parents during the three years he spent in England (from 1873 to 1876) sparkle with scenes that, you feel, only Van Gogh could have honored in paint, from the light of the street-lamps “reflected in the wet street” of a rain-soaked seaside town to the twilit view from a muddy hillside “covered with gnarled elm trees and shrubs” toward “a beautiful little wooden church with a kindly light at the end of that dark road.”
Virginia Woolf once noted that all Shakespearean criticism was autobiographical: the Bard’s works are a mirror in which critics see themselves. Adam Smith, the famed 18th-century economist, comes in for similar treatment, as he’s variously been portrayed as a rabble-rouser, a Marxist, a heretic, a bumbling professor, a Scottish nationalist, a rampant capitalist, a bore, a Tory and a mummy’s boy. He has been embraced with gusto by Republicans and Democrats, Brexiteers and Remainers, central planners and free marketers.
Today, we mainly remember Smith for his landmark work of political economy, The Wealth of Nations, and we regard him first as an economist and second as a philosopher. But during his lifetime, ‘economics’ existed neither as a profession nor a discipline, and he saw himself among other things as a serious literary scholar. He helped pioneer the academic study of English literature; he lectured on the arts of writing and rhetoric; and he took his most powerful rhetorical device—one that became his catchphrase and the most overused metaphor in economics—from Shakespeare.
On March 8, 2016, the cast of Nerds, a musical based on the lives of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, was working up a sweat inside an Eighth Avenue rehearsal studio. Previews at Broadway's Longacre Theatre were just two weeks away, and the ensemble was running through a big gospel number called "Think Different," a nod to the iconic Apple advertising slogan. They made it all the way to the song's rousing final lyric — "Liiiiiiive yoooour dream!" — when they noticed the creative team had left the room.
"I was like, 'Where's Casey?' " says actor Kevin Pariseau, referring to Casey Hushion, the show's director. "Then the door opened and she entered in tears, just sobbing." Right behind Hushion was Carl Levin, the show's lead producer. "I don't know what the vacuum of space feels like," says Pariseau, who played IBM president Tom Watson Jr. in the show, "but it probably feels a bit like what happened the moment that door opened."
What happened was that Levin dropped a bombshell. "Stop! Stop what you're doing!" he told the actors. "We've lost a major investment. The show is off. It's not happening."
A good memoir says what happened, not how to live. To read (or write) a memoir as a kind of self-help book is fundamentally to misunderstand the project. It is the job of a literary memoirist simply to write down her experiences with as much art and truth as she can muster. In her debut memoir, “Running Home,” Katie Arnold does an admirable job of trusting the everyday material of her life. Arnold, an ultrarunner and contributing editor at Outside magazine, could easily have opted for a different approach, one that solely focuses on the extraordinary aspects of her life as an elite athlete and adventure writer. Instead she writes a story exploring how her growing preoccupation with running has been intertwined with loving and losing her father. She takes the risk of being ordinary, and therefore human.
In this powerful work of reportage, Chernobyl and its aftermath emerge as the Soviet Union’s last stand, containing all the pathologies and passion of that social experiment now lost to history: “hubris,” magical thinking, grotesque disregard for individual life, gaping inequity between the political class and the rest in a supposedly classless society, and sheer bloody-minded communal courage.
The flowers were assembled, beginning with their stems.
The flowers feared us, our longings, our appetite.
The flowers were made for the low in the lake.
Flowers whisked with force.
Flowers as cheap poetic device.