Editor’s note: This piece was originally published December 23, 2016.
How much do we trust the mind? How much should we—when thoughts lead on to thoughts, conjectures build atop conjectures, hypotheses extend upon hypotheses until it all seems just . . . too . . . much, a daydream from which we shake ourselves awake?
It’s not difficult to come up with a theory of language. Mine is vaguely Augustinian (if we ignore the scholars’ endless battles over what St. Augustine meant by signs and reference), and it looks like this: All language starts in pain. The first speech of humankind is the newborn’s howl of outrage.
It must chafe professional historians that one of the most important history books ever published was written by an amateur. A smart amateur, of course, but essentially a mildly incompetent American sea captain whose family connections helped wrangle him a lectureship on tactics at the Naval War College in 1885, despite the fact that he had only an undergraduate degree. In preparation for his lectures, he buried himself in the library and, working almost entirely from secondary sources, he emerged in 1890 with a book that would shape the next half century of warfare around the world. His name, of course,…
In the month after the November terrorist attacks that killed 130 people in Paris, the French government launched airstrikes against ISIS targets in the Middle East—responding with all the ferocity of an irritated sleeper slapping at the alarm clock to get it to shut up.
The alarm had rung before: in the March 2004 Madrid train bombings that killed 191 people; in the July 2005 London attack that killed 56; in the January 2015 assault on the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo that killed 17. Europe has swiped at the snooze button several times in recent years—but why, really, should the Continent wake up? Why should the Island of the Lotus-Eaters ever rouse itself from dreams?
The American experiment has always been a rickety thing, a wobbly stool balanced on the three legs of its politics, its economics, and its public morals. From its founding, the United States had a political impulse toward greater equality, while the nation’s economics sought free markets, and the American cultural ethics generally expressed the country’s broadly shared Protestantism. Through much of our history, each of these three legs both accommodated and strained against the other two. Democracy, for example, grants some participation in national identity, an outlet for the anxious desire of citizens to take part in history, but it always…
To read the rage this fall—the angry comments, the push of reporters, the attempt to gin up controversy about Chrissie Hynde’s new rock ’n’ roll memoir Reckless: My Life as a Pretender—was to be tempted to despair. We are at such a crazed point in our culture, I wanted to scream, that to find sanity preached, we have to listen to a washed up 1980s punk rocker recalling her pre-stardom days of drugs and madness.
In a curious way, Julius Caesar isn’t the most important figure in The Death of Caesar: The Story of History’s Most Famous Assassination. The moral of Barry Strauss’s story, the point of it all, belongs instead to a thin, sickly young man in Caesar’s entourage—a grandnephew named Octavian—who would wend his way through the political crisis of Julius Caesar’s murder in 44 B.C. to become Caesar Augustus, ruler of the known world. The irony is almost unbearable: In the name of ridding the republic of a dictator, the incompetent assassins managed only to give Rome an emperor. “The Ides of March changed the world,” as Strauss notes, “but not as the men who held the daggers that day planned.”
You might think the greatest literary assault on Soviet communism is Animal Farm, George Orwell’s fast-paced 1945 allegory—and you wouldn’t be far wrong. Although it satirizes the specifics of Stalin’s triumph over Trotsky, Bukharin, and the others in the wake of Lenin’s revolution, the book drives toward the more universal conclusion that the swinish elements of human nature will always snuffle their way toward power. All animals are equal, as Orwell famously put it, but some animals will quickly attempt to prove that they’re more equal than others. For that matter, you might think the most important account of Soviet communism…
The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers. Or all the noblemen. College professors. People with glasses. Kulaks. The petty bourgeoisie. Any kind of bourgeoisie, for that matter. Perhaps some of them do not entirely deserve it, considered under an abstract concept of justice. But we do not live, you and I, in any world of abstraction. We live in the hard materiality of social economics, and humanity is suffering. The ground must be cleared, even if some flowers are ploughed under with the weeds. Even if some wheat is lost with the tares.[1]
I hear the angels, high in the hills. Up among the trees, the ponderosa pine and Black Hills spruce. Down through the snow-patched meadows, the counterpanes of brush and rock and long stems of cold, brown grass, forlorn above the ice. I hear the angel voices in the overtones of the wind through the buffalo gaps. I hear them along the frozen streambeds winding through the needles, down from the mountains. I hear them proclaiming the advent of the Lord. In a sense, of course, to talk of angels in the wind is simply to construct an allegory. It’s a way…
Andrea Mantegna, Adoration of the Magi, 1495-1505
Author Tom Wolfe (Photo by David Corio/Redferns)
DOMINIQUE FAGET/AFP/Getty Images)
La Mort de César (ca. 1859–1867) by Jean-Léon Gérôme.
Sylvan Lake, South Dakota