Wednesday, January 07, 2026

'More Recent Misjudgments'

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“My past literary judgments sometimes embarrass me.”   My friend, a man of roughly my age, has just reread Conrad’s Under Western Eyes af...
Tuesday, January 06, 2026

'Evidence on Which a Life Depends'

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I always find consolation in T.S. Eliot’s observation in his 1929 essay “Dante” that “genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood...
Monday, January 05, 2026

'You Are Never Out of Business'

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“I prefer reading books—those I should have read when younger, those that might awaken me to things I should have known long ago—and rereadi...
3 comments:
Sunday, January 04, 2026

'To Find Joy in the Everyday, in Life Itself'

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“Everyday life is miraculous because it subjects the violent impulses to itself. The Essays of Montaigne are the revelation of the miracle o...
Saturday, January 03, 2026

'To Settle Upon Its Most Inspired Bit'

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John Updike’s finest work of fiction, the short story “The Happiest I’ve Been,” was published in The New Yorker on this date, January 3, i...
2 comments:
Friday, January 02, 2026

'I Wish I Knew More About . . .'

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I once worked with a middle-aged man who, when quantum physics came up in a story I was writing, showed me a video clip from a super-hero mo...
2 comments:
Thursday, January 01, 2026

'My Mind Was Not Free From Perturbation'

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Dr. Johnson writes in his diary on January 1, 1774: “This year has past with so little improvement, that I doubt whether I have not [rather]...