We are lesser people for the disappearance of our architectural heritage. If Edmund Burke was correct that “to make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely,” then historical preservation takes on the same importance as land conservation. Both are inheritances to be held against the bulldozers of economic development. Salem Depot [...]
The Florentine Pieta was not commissioned. Instead, Michelangelo intended it for his own tomb. He worked on the sculpture in his spare time, late into the night with a candle fixed to his hat for light. The Museo dell’Opera del Duomo is an unmissable new sight in a visit to Florence. Designed by American art [...]
For most people, the name of Sir Alec Guinness is associated with his playing of Obi-Wan Kenobi in the original Star Wars trilogy. Such an association is understandable enough but it does scant justice to Sir Alec’s true legacy as one of the greatest actors of the twentieth century. He was a fine Shakespearean actor, [...]
“Lift Every Voice and Sing” is a song written as a poem by James Weldon Johnson, an American writer and civil rights activist, in 1900 and set to music by his brother J. Rosamond Johnson in 1905. A prayer of thanksgiving for faithfulness and freedom, evocative of the biblical Exodus from slavery to the freedom [...]
At a time when intellectual Europeans scoffed at the very possibility of America producing art or beauty, the Hudson School created an outpouring of beauty worthy of any country. It was an aesthetic uniquely American, based on hope in a bountiful land blessed by Providence but also aware that our world below is dark without [...]
The slow disintegration of our legal system will continue apace until and unless judges, in particular, cease acting as if the legal system they serve either does not need or does not deserve their active support. Americans’ attitudes toward lawyers and the legal system are filled with ironies. We complain that lawyers are money-grubbing sophists [...]
Intellectual life provides an escape in that it is beyond “straitened circumstances,” but the escape is again a flight into realities beyond oneself: animal behavior, astronomy, and the mechanics of the inner life. The intellect has no limit to its subject matter: It reaches greedily for the whole of everything. In 2001 I was a [...]
At his farm, my grandfather had rigged what he called his “snow ropes”: hand-hold-by-hand-hold, the snow ropes prevent getting lost and wandering off in who knows what direction only to freeze and be found come spring. I’m interested in “snow ropes” and, well, mysticism and religious language. The mystic says, that “God is a blinding [...]
The theater of modern America loves to shock but has overdone the trick so often that our nerves are jaded and immune to further outrage. The New York stage must be allowed to dry up and blow away, creating space for a rebirth. To act out, in concert, before an audience, an interpretation of how [...]
Shut your eyes as you listen to “Scheherazade,” and the mind fills with vivid images: a turbulent ocean, eighteenth-century clipper ships with billowing sails, sailors and dashing sea captains saving the day. Musical colors and textures alert you, seduce you: the booming, ominous tones from the brass section (a tyrannizing Sultan) and the sweetest, most delicate violin [...]
Christopher Dawson radically revises our sense of the continuity of Western culture. For the ordinary educated consciousness, what happened in Western Europe after the collapse of the Roman order tends to be a blank page labelled “the dark ages.” But as Dawson makes clear, there were heroic continuities, an enormous effort on the part of [...]
Beauty is found in art when there is connectedness to something beyond novelty and originality. This connectedness must exist between the artist and the source of what inspires the particular medium of art. Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.[1] Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever [...]
There is nothing like the kinetic energy of live actors treading the boards to excite the mind’s passion. That is why we cannot leave the theater to its decline. The political implications of its failure are serious ones. Did anybody catch this year’s Tony Awards? I thought so. Actually, I didn’t watch the whole thing [...]
Does “Paradise Lost” succeed as a poem qua poem, but not as a didactic theological poem? If we lived four hundred year earlier, might we suggest Milton pit Satan primarily against St. Gabriel or St. Michael? The concepts of the Apollonian and Dionysian are famously invoked by Nietzsche in the context of Greek drama, but not [...]