WRB—Oct. 2, 2024

“novels about love and manners”

We had a new vision that death and the Washington Review of Books are a complimentary pattern.

N.B.:

The audio of September’s D.C. Salon, on the topic “Can we choose our beliefs?”, is now available:

[If you listen to our recording, you’ll hear Celeste announce with the kindest possible words that later this month I will be taking the role of Associate Publisher of Liberties Journal. Liberties shouldn’t be new to any readers of the WRB: not only have they made possible our co-hosted D.C. Salon for the past ten months, they’ve been publishing wonderful writing for years and have (therefore) been a feature of our Links section since the early days of the newsletter—I’m very proud to be joining the staff.

Here I want to assure you, our loyal and attentive readers, that the WRB isn’t going to change a bit. See you, as always, in your inbox this Saturday morning, and every Wednesday and Saturday after that. —Chris]

Links:

• In The Paris Review, Srikanth Reddy on Hannah Arendt’s poetry:

  For the German speaker newly arrived in America, bread is no longer Brot. One irony of Arendt’s historical displacements lies in how her original German word for bread is now effaced by “bread” in the English translation. A further irony is to be found in the poem’s final line, where “a foreign language” intrudes on what would otherwise read: “and wine changes the conversation.” The essential purpose of wine—at a dinner party, for instance—is to change the conversation. But what is wine in a foreign language? When many of your dinner guests are, like you, serial émigrés who’ve fled Europe in the political wake of World War II, wine serves an additional purpose; anyone who’s found themselves a little more tipsily fluent at a dinner party abroad will understand how “wine in a foreign language changes the conversation.” Arendt made a home away from home for herself—and for others—in New York at 317 West Ninety-Fifth Street and, later, at 370 Riverside Drive, where she entertained fellow expatriates like Hermann Broch, Lotte Kohler, Helen and Kurt Wolff, Paul Tillich, and Hans Morgenthau. The slightly slanted rhyme of “Stadt” with “Gespräch” that concludes the poem in Arendt’s original German links the author’s mid-century Manhattan to the bonhomie of intellectual exchange; “city” sounds a little like “conversation” in the poet’s mother tongue.

  [For as long as there have been cities, I think, people have been going to them to learn what’s being talked about now and participate in those conversations. —Steve]

• Two in The Point:

  • Nandi Theunissen on the philosopher’s quest for sayings:

    As Socrates describes it, the philosophical culture of the Spartans is marked by “laconic brevity.” Socrates gives the example of a saying by Pittacus, one of the Seven Sages: It is hard to be good. This strikes me as true but clipped to the point of opacity. How do we know what it is to be good, or, dare we ask, what goodness itself is? Is that how a saying does its work, and why it is a kind of weapon? It punctures the eardrum with a riddle that, like an earworm, will not go away until its meaning is grasped. What is the war, then, for which this is the weapon? The war of wisdom against ignorance? Socrates suggests that it is actually a battle for philosophical glory among the authors of sayings themselves, with one trying to give another the cerebral analogue of cauliflower ear (cauliflower soul?). A winning saying would make one famous in one’s lifetime through oft repetition and, presumably, inscription at sacred sites.

    [One way Twitter has disappointed is that its character limits have not produced a renewed taste for aphorisms and epigrams. You’d think we could have at least gotten that out of a website that half of our literary class has spent all their time using for a decade and change. —Steve]

  • Joseph M. Keegin on the experiences of academia not represented in “quit-lit”:

    This kind of activity—developing an intellectual grasp of one’s life, one’s place in the cosmos and the permanent problems of thought—is not easy: as Socrates made clear, education toward this goal is often undergone unwillingly and accompanied by confusion and pain. But, precisely on account of its difficulty, it is the most important activity the university can occasion—especially as the world beyond the campus grows increasingly one-dimensional and ever more feverish. Already in 1831, and just a week before his death, Hegel despaired of “the inevitable distraction caused by the magnitude and multitude of contemporary interests” which made difficult “the dispassionate calm of a knowledge dedicated to thought alone.” His great adversary Kierkegaard, in an oft-quoted passage, strikes a similar chord: “For even if the word of God were proclaimed in the modern world, how could one hear it with so much noise? Therefore, create silence!”

[Behind the paywall: Jude on a poem from the Second World War, Steve on being known and romances of equals, stolen artifacts, cooking websites, Agamben, Sally Rooney, Brutalism, and more links, reviews, news items, and commentary carefully selected for you, just like on Saturdays. If you like what you see, why not sign up for a paid subscription? The WRB is for you, and your support helps keep us going.]