To believe that a certain athlete, musician, artist, political leader, or writer is not just “great” but “the greatest of all time” is to give undue weight to our time and to our own experience. It also unnecessarily forecloses our imaginative horizons that something or someone can indeed come along and surpass what we may [...]
The quest to write the Great American Novel has long been the American literary equivalent of the quest for the Holy Grail. Among the perennial roster of contenders for this legendary status, there is a strong case to be made for “Moby-Dick.” With the generosity of a patient teacher, Geoffrey Stanborn makes that case in “The Value [...]
The problem with the notion that one should do good because doing good leads to happiness is that, well, what if it doesn’t? Throughout human history, the greatest thinkers and theologians have each proposed a state of being which in their view was the highest state of personal fulfillment one could achieve. For Plato, the [...]
“There are chance meetings with strangers that interest us from the first moment, before a word is spoken,” writes Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment. And such is the impression made upon us by Dosteovsky’s incredible psychological masterpiece… “Personally, I require a ceiling, although a high one. Yes, I like ceilings, and the high better than [...]
Understanding Henry James’ relationship to painting may very well unlock one of the keys to understanding the notoriously concealed prose style of the greatest of all English-language prose artists. There is no single way to read a writer as complex as Henry James. His novels are renowned as much for their psychological openness as for [...]