Whatever winds up documenting modern lives holds nothing like Henry VIII’s love letter to Anne Boleyn, signed, “written with the hand of him who wishes he were yours.” Our martyred heroes will not send letters from Birmingham or any other jail. Contemporary epistolary novels will be a rally of terse texts.
To the Cynics, the goal of life was, in literal translation, freedom from smoke—meaning false beliefs, pretense, and shallow lures.
Our corpses enrich your gardens, aerate your lawns, and plump your birds. Yet you see cicadas as a plague and a punishment?
What am I seeing?, I have wondered as the names, dates, events, and sensory impressions pile up. By coincidence I found the film “Zerograd” this week, the Soviet entry for Best Foreign Language Film for the Academy Awards in 1989.
Our tastes are being changed for us, homogenized by algorithms that force clicks of approval into spirals of popularity.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning exclaimed only, “Beautiful!” Martin Luther relaxed into amiability and said only “Yes.” Truman Capote—and this revelation breaks my heart—kept repeating “Mama.”
The letter was V-Mail, as it was called, for corresponding with service members overseas then. It was strict in its single-sheet economy, as letters were photographed then shipped on microfilm and printed on the other end. Add the need for operational security, and the handwritten letter has a pinched but personable tone.
The pattern of our favor indicates that the substance in question is not “race” at all, but a clump of biomolecules called melanin. Swayed by ancient symbols and contemporary prejudices, we, supposedly the creatures of reason, react powerfully to the black-and-white extremes.
One of the throughlines in Matisse’s work was his love of water: swimming in it, rowing across it, and above all, painting it. He described the water in Nice as “the color of sapphires, of the peacock’s wing, of an Alpine glacier, and the kingfisher, melted together, and yet it is like none of these.”
When I saw the full lots, I knew reports of the death of the book had been greatly exaggerated.