WRB—Feb. 25, 2026

“aimed at children”

leaflets, brochures, articles, placards, and the Washington Review of Books

Links:

• In Harper’s, Nicole Krauss on Caravaggio, La Tour, and attention:

  What is it to live near to light, in sustained awareness of it? How does it braid itself into our sense of revelation, our communion with grace? Attending to it, where does it lead us? “We have all known moments in life when light appeared to transfigure a familiar scene and to make us feel what Wordsworth felt on Westminster Bridge,” Ernst Gombrich once wrote, referring to the moment of wonder brought on by noticing the spine-tingling peace of a city bathed in morning light. But a great artist doesn’t merely wait for such rare moments, Gombrich suggested; instead, he has the power to transfigure the commonplace by his imagining and handling of light. For Caravaggio, that handling was not just of light itself, but of the darkness that allows for its existence, and vice versa. This lesson transcends optics and speaks to the existential, to matters of the soul. It’s easy to describe Caravaggio as a genius of light, but he was an expert in darkness too, in life and in art, on how it also calls to us, how it can be soft or beckoning or another side of the story, and not just obscuring, or an absence, or the opposite of knowledge.

  [I was once in a class—I can’t remember what the class was actually about, since it certainly wasn’t Baroque painting—where we spent quite a lot of time looking at Caravaggio’s Calling of St. Matthew, and our teacher called our attention to the detail that, even as Matthew points at himself to question Christ’s decision, he seems to be positioning his legs and feet to stand up. He is responding before he knows he is responding. This is a statement about grace, but it is also a statement about art, which knows more than it first lets on and calls us into it. —Steve]

• In The Paris Review, Frances Lindemann on Virginia Woolf’s approach to reading:

  Rapture, for Woolf, is recognition. Recognition relies on something that already exists, and this is Woolf’s ideal of writing: it calls forth what already exists, but is not yet known, in the reader. You might call this a kind of emotional knowledge; you might call it the unconscious, a submerged level of sense that the conscious mind can register only as “random”-ness. It is worth noting here that Woolf’s Hogarth Press was Freud’s publisher in English, and she was reading his work around the time she drafted “Reading at Random.” One penciled margin note on a typescript passage of “Anon” conjures Woolf’s idea of reading as a recognitive process: “It brought to the surface the old hidden world.”

  In To the Lighthouse (1927), Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay sit together reading in the library after dinner. Each longs to communicate with the other, but neither can find the right words. Taking up a volume of poems, Mrs. Ramsay “began reading here and there at random.” The words resonate and echo in her mind, seamlessly interweaving with her thoughts, lulling her “like a person in a light sleep.” The book, though Woolf does not say so outright, is a collection of Shakespeare’s sonnets; and it can be no coincidence that Shakespeare, for Woolf, is the quintessence of anonymity in writing. In her “Reading at Random” notes, she writes, “About Shre: the person is consumed: Sre never breaks the envelope. We dont want to know about him: Completely expressed. When the incantation ceases, we see the person.” Who is “the person,” exactly—Shakespeare or his reader? For as long as the incantation lasts, both are “consumed” together.

  [Cf. the idea of the artist transforming the commonplace in Krauss’ piece above. —Steve]

Reviews:

• In our sister publication on the Hudson, Edward Mendelsohn reviews reissues of two books by Margaret Kennedy (The Feast, 1950, 2023; and Troy Chimneys, 1953, 2022):

  In the book’s unacknowledged autobiographical allegory, Pronto stands for the best-selling writer celebrated everywhere for what was taken to be the tear-jerking titillation of The Constant Nymph (1924), Miles for the same writer’s less visible probings into psychological and philosophical depths and linguistic complexities supposedly reserved for modernist masters. Simone de Beauvoir perceived Margaret Kennedy’s aspect as Miles; an English biographer of Beauvoir, Margaret Crosland, seeing only Kennedy’s Pronto aspect, was puzzled to find that Beauvoir “seems to have admired” The Constant Nymph “more than one might have expected.”

  Double portraits of the same person are fairly common in novels: Dickens typically portrays himself as both innocent victim and canny exploiter, David Copperfield and Uriah Heep; Mary Shelley portrays her husband, Percy, as both the grandiose Victor Frankenstein and the generous Henry Clerval. Troy Chimneys is a rare portrait of a novelist’s doubleness within herself. One hint of the hidden authorial allegory occurs when Miles Lufton names Emma and Mansfield Park as his favorite novels; Kennedy had published a book about Jane Austen two years before Troy Chimneys.

  [Since Mansfield Park is one of my favorite novels, I can confidently report that anyone who says Mansfield Park is one of their favorite novels is deeply disturbed. —Steve]

[Behind the paywall are even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and Critical notes. Today’s specials:

• Life in various ruins (R.I.P. Michael Silverblatt, R.I.P. books coverage)

• The sources of Thom Gunn’s poetry, and his transformation of them

• K. T. on a poem by Maria Zoccola and body horror

If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe.

And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? The best way to support us is by subscribing, but the second-best is by sharing the WRB with other people. —Steve]