One of the most famous images by the Spanish artist Francisco Goya is an etching that depicts a man slumped over his desk asleep, papers underneath him and his head buried in his arms. From the shadows behind him, strange and sinister creatures emerge: owls and bats with their wings spread wide, a cat with a stony gaze, other beasts impossible to identify. “El sueño de la razon produce monstruos,” a caption on the side of the desk warns: “The sleep of reason produces monsters.”
The picture is often taken as Goya’s assertion of faith in Enlightenment values, in the ability of logical thought and empirical observation to sweep away the darkness of superstition. But there is a catch: sueño, the Spanish word for “sleep,” can also be translated as “dream.” What if the monsters are present not because reason isn’t awake to fend them off but because reason, in its slumber, actively generates them? If monsters can exist not despite reason but as a consequence of it, then perhaps we’re not as safe in the rational world—the land of logic and science—as we thought.
There are few things more glamorous than the belief that we are living through the end of an era — and there are even fewer times in recent history when we haven’t believed it. It’s a conviction that allows us to ennoble ourselves with pathos, with rueful maturity, with wisdom won too late. To be certain that we’re at the beginning of something can mean feeling optimistic and openhearted about the future in a way that, especially these days, risks courting contempt. And to know that we’re in the middle of an era is — well, it’s not even a phrase, is it? It’s nothing much at all, simply a kind of semipermanent Wednesday of the soul, a spirit-flattening acceptance of stasis and complacency. But nearing the end? In that, you have a lifetime’s worth of wistfulness, and perhaps some bitterness and grief, not to mention prescience about what might come next. In short, life at the end of an era is — to use a term that might be coming to the end of its own era — lit. And it almost doesn’t matter if the lighting is seductive and flattering or as harsh and glaring as if the music has just been turned off and the club is about to close. Drama is drama.
Nutritionism and essentialism provide comfortingly clear perspectives about what makes food healthful. But an open-minded look at the evidence suggests that many of the most hotly debated questions about nutrition are impossible to answer with the information we have, maybe with the information we will ever have in the foreseeable future. If we isolate nutrients and eat them in different forms than they naturally come in, how will they affect us? Can processed foods be made in ways to approach or even surpass the healthfulness of natural whole foods?
Subtitled “Four Songs of Care and Constraint,” the book consists of a series of linked essays examining different conceptions of freedom in the realms of art, sex, drugs and climate change. Nelson says she decided to group her thoughts under the rubric of freedom in part because of her “long-standing frustration with [the word’s] capture by the right wing” – think “freedom fries,” the Freedom Caucus and the pro-military saying, “Freedom’s never free.”
What a treat it is to write about a translation of Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin (1799–1837) — like getting invited to rhapsodize about oxygen (“Great stuff!”). He’s our everything, as Russians say, and indeed his DNA is everywhere in Russian literature. Even if you spend most of your time with more recent writers, he’s so important to every subsequent poet writing in Russian that every door back to him stands open. Even that brilliant idol-smashing Futurist Vladimir Mayakovsky, who wanted to toss all his poetic predecessors off “the steamship of modernity,” eventually wrote a thoughtful and intimate poem addressed to Alexander Sergeyevich. Pushkin deeply shaped Russian as it is written, so even his moments of archaism still feel elegant and effective. Who he was is unusually important too, since his African heritage (and what he wrote about it) put openness to the wider world into Russian culture from this formative moment onward — no matter what Dostoyevsky made of Pushkin’s specifically Russian greatness in his famous 1880 speech, when they dedicated the black metal statue in Moscow. Finally, and most vitally, reading Pushkin offers tremendous pleasure: right after shaking one’s head at what a little prick he was, a typical Gemini, one is touched or amused by the next amazing line. We require our students to memorize a poem of his in first-year Russian language class, as precious cultural capital plus good phonetic practice.
The result is a touching, introspective story about identity, belonging and the effects of long-term transience on both the heart and soul.
Though a few stories read more like fragmentary situations, “How to Wrestle a Girl” shines in its propensity to magnify small moments, challenge our presumptions and dissect the beauty, danger and wonder of girlhood.
You asked me for a love poem
and I gave you a text message and a handful of
imaginary paprika crisps. You told me this was