WRB—Jan. 31, 2024

Eyeless in Washington

He who will merely hope is cowardly; he who will merely recollect is voluptuous; he who wills repetition is a Managing Editor, and the more emphatically he is able to realize it, the more profound a human being he is. But he who does not grasp that life is a repetition and that this is the beauty of life has pronounced his own verdict and deserves nothing better than what will happen to him anyway—he will unsubscribe.

N.B.:

The recording of Saturday’s WRB x Liberties salon discussion on the topic “Is Forgiveness Possible?” is now available for your listening pleasure or displeasure. We will announce the date of February’s salon discussion soon—if you’re in or near the District of Columbia, please join us.

Links:

• In Bustle, Erin Somers on books about the wives in literary marriages:

  If I had to guess at the market reason for their enduring popularity, it would be that readers like retellings of familiar stories combined with the fact that most of the people who buy books in the United States are women. But there is also an element of correcting the record. McLain said in a 2011 interview that her book gave Hadley Richardson “an opportunity to step into the light for a moment, out of the fringes of literary history”; Sittenfeld noted the incorrect public perception of Laura Bush as “stiff, and proper, and heavily made up.” The thinking seems to be that if we recover the stories of the women who propped these men up—and often relinquished their own art to do so—we’ll rebalance the scales. (Feminism: We did it!)

• In the JSTOR blog, Livia Gershon on dreams in the Islamic world:

  In the eighth century, new Arab translations of classical Greek texts influenced dream interpretation in the Muslim world, helping create what Green calls “a Muslim science of dreaming.” Interpreters developed methods of recognizing dreams caused by physical issues like overeating, dreams that held psychological importance, and dreams that represented religious revelation. Reflecting the importance of classical Mediterranean thought on Islam in this period, caliph al-Ma’mun described Aristotle appearing to him in a dream to lecture him on the concept of the good, which may have prompted him to subsidize the translation of many classical philosophical treaties.

• In Public Discourse, Matthew J. Franck on E. D. Hirsch, Jr.:

  Such reasoning, by Hirsch’s lights, confuses meaning with significance—a vital distinction in his hermeneutics that crops up again and again. To understand a text is to “re-cognize” it, to perceive the “verbal meaning . . . someone willed to convey by . . . linguistic signs.” Once we understand a text’s meaning, we can interpret it—i.e., “re-present” its meaning to others in our words. “Significance,” on the other hand, “is always ‘meaning-to,’ never ‘meaning-in.’” This is the province not of understanding but of judgment, considering a text’s value to us, or its use to us, or its application to our concerns. It is the function not of interpretation but of criticism.

• In Noema, Alastair Humphreys bought a map and started exploring the area it depicts:

  Sometime later, my car was being hauled out of a ditch by two construction workers. They were too polite to tell me what a moron I was. I’d flagged down their pickup to ask for help after my front wheel dropped off the edge of the tarmac into a void hidden by the hedge off the side of the road where I tried to park. As their engine revved and bits of my car crunched and cracked and fell off, I reasoned I was here to look for new experiences, so perhaps this was a good start?

  [Something I like to do is look up very old maps of my neighborhood, from the 1800s or so, and try to line them up as much as I can with contemporary ones. —Chris]

Reviews:

• In The American Scholar, Joseph Horowitz reviews Fiona Maddocks’s book on Rachmaninoff after he left Russia (Goodbye Russia: Rachmaninoff in Exile, January 2):

  The picture that emerges of Rachmaninoff in exile is by no means insular. He was no snob. He adored driving motorcars and piloting motorboats. The sleek design of his Lucerne retreat was modernist. He was fascinated by the bandleader Paul Whiteman, who “made a lady out of jazz.” Like so many musical émigrés, he recognized George Gershwin’s genius more readily than did native-born American classical musicians. Though Maddocks finds no evidence of Rachmaninoff in Harlem, he was smitten by the virtuosity of Art Tatum. He considered scoring the most bewitching tune in his Symphonic Dances for contralto—as a vocalise for Marian Anderson—but wound up handing it to a solo saxophone. He believed that “the seed of the future music of America lies in a true Negro music.” And he (belatedly) took American citizenship in 1943.

[Behind the paywall: Chris with a lengthy discussion of C. S. Lewis, romantic comedies, and Kierkegaard, Steve accidentally lining up his reading with the anniversary of the execution of Charles I, a series of notes on the state of the media, the variety of drinks available, and more links, reviews, news items, and commentary carefully selected for you. If you like what you see, why not subscribe, and why not consider a paid subscription? The WRB is for you, and we couldn’t do it without you.]