American Scholar articles from January 2002

American Scholar archives from January 2002

Barnraising. (Letter From the Editor).(Brief Article)(Editorial)
January 1, 2002... Because I work at home in rural Massachusetts and the SCHOLAR'S other staff and board members are scattered across a dozen states, I am often asked if my job is lonely. Not at all, I say; our innumerable e-mails and faxes and midnight phone...

A piece of cotton. (At Large And At Small).(patriotism and the American flag)
January 1, 2002... When we bought an old brick farmhouse last summer in a small New England town, the elderly couple who had lived there for many years left us a set of plastic lawn chairs, a garbage can, a tool bench, a wheelbarrow, and an American flag. On...

Courage. (Commonplace Book).
January 1, 2002... True courage is to do without witnesses everything that one is capable of doing before all the world. --LA ROCHEFOUCAULD, Maximes, No. 216, 1665 But the hour, the day, the night pass'd, and whatever returns, an hour, a day, a night...

The skyscraper and the airplane. (9.11.01).
January 1, 2002... And as the smart ship grew In stature, grace, and hue, In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too. -- Thomas Hardy, "The Convergence of the Twain" (1912) Before the fire, before the ash, before the bodies tumbling solitary...

A hole in the wall. (9.11.01).
January 1, 2002... July and August. After living in the same house for fifteen years, my husband and I moved from Rochester--upstate New York, a small city surrounded by farms--to Brooklyn. Our plan was to live for a year in the city, during which Barry would...

Double exposure. (9.11.01).
January 1, 2002... The authors, brother and sister, recorded accounts of the morning of September 11 in their journals. D. Graham Burnett was in Princeton, New Jersey, at the time; Maria Burnett-Gaudiani was in midtown Manhattan. GRAHAM BURNETT: A day of...

In Morocco. (9.11.01).
January 1, 2002... When it finally happened, it was as if I had never entertained the possibility of such a catastrophe. Ruth and I learned of the assault upon New York and Washington on our first day in Rabat, when a young Moroccan trailing our steps in the...

Dancing to distant tunes. (9.11.01).(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... My family has photograph albums that go back more than a hundred years. Beneath the family groups--picnicking, posing tranquilly in the garden, marrying, displaying new babies--the years have been inked in: 1014, 1918, 1939, 1041, 1945,...

Affliction. (9.11.01).
January 1, 2002... "Before I knew what affliction meant," wrote Mary Rowlandson in her account of being captured by Indians during King Philip's War, "I was ready sometimes to wish for it." Until sunrise on February 20, 1676, the "dreadful hour" when she...

Grace, punishment, and the Torah. (9.11.01).
January 1, 2002... "Vengeance is mine," saith the Lord. But what about the rest of us? In the aftermath of September 11th, some people have voiced the concern that American troops overseas are there primarily to take revenge. I confess that this has surprised me;...

The lesson of Antietam. (9.11.01).(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... Our recent losses seem almost immeasurable, yet another cataclysmic September day--September 17, 1862--remains the bloodiest in American history. In the Battle of Antietam, six thousand soldiers were killed outright or mortally wounded. Sixteen...

The global century. (9.11.01).
January 1, 2002... On September 11, 2001, the twenty-first century was born. Remember all the disputes about whether the new millennium actually began on January 1, 2000, on January 1, 20017 of course either date would have been an arbitrary choice, tracing human...

Leap. (9.11.01).(Poem)
January 1, 2002... A couple leaped from the south tower, hand in hand. They reached for each other and their hands met and they jumped. Jennifer Brickhouse saw them falling, hand in hand. Many people jumped. Perhaps hundreds. No one knows. They struck the...

After September. (9.11.01).(Poem)
January 1, 2002... After September Evening, four weeks later. The next jet from the nearby Air Force base repeats its shuddering exercise closer and closer overhead. A full moon lifts again in the fragile sky, minute by minute...

Belief.(Poem)
January 1, 2002... Belief The Christmas tree, grown to be cut, tilts in its bucket, untrimmed, drawing water through the stub of trunk. Each time I go in the kitchen I'm surprised by its fragrance-- its silent breath--am...

Teacher: eleven notes.
January 1, 2002... 1 I have been a teacher for almost thirty years without having intended to be one. I suspect this is true of many of us. The postwar explosion of American schools--and their consolidation into a uniform, specialized institution, an...

Why do we still read Homer?
January 1, 2002... I am a professor of classical studies. Today, when the field's very name seems to be accompanied by a puff of dust and the soft rustle of old books falling apart, it can be difficult to recapture how important the classics once were in higher...

Private view.(Poem)
January 1, 2002... Private View Christ, and don't these bastards talk! Now the light's gone bone dry the yard starves back to two dimensions, slate parched by a puddle the color of engine oil; this blinks in one corner while another (can't...

Mechanic.
January 1, 2002... In 1654, when Oliver Cromwell was Lord Protector of England, some of the followers of the exiled Charles II issued "a proclamation in the King's name offering five hundred pounds, knighthood, and a colonel's commission, to anyone who...

Childfree in toyland.
January 1, 2002... On the threshold of thirty and divorce, the personable daughter of a Southern Baptist minister once informed me calmly that any child of hers would probably be a battered child. She was being neither neurotic nor more self-centered than people...

Uncertainty principle.(Poem)
January 1, 2002... Uncertainty Principle Outside this window a firethorn, one branch of small blunt leaves and orange pomes bent under a cap of spongy snow twice half-melted, now mostly ice. Sometime soon, not this gray day, that...

Obelisks and empires of the mind.(role of obelisks in Rome and other empires)
January 1, 2002... Between spring and fall 1586, the blase inhabitants of Rome were dazzled by the greatest media event--and one of the greatest technological feats--of the sixteenth century. Sixtus V, a terrifying pope who rerouted the city's streets, restored...

Grief and reflection. (The Uncertain Art).
January 1, 2002... Ten days after: Faced with the anguish of so many who have been directly touched by our national tragedy, we seek means to unite ourselves with them. We scan the lengthening lists of those who have died, and feel intense relief to find that we...

Houston-Manhattan by U-Haul. (Journal).(aftermath of World Trade Center attack)
January 1, 2002... I was in Houston on September 11, delivering a speech at a conference on knowledge management sponsored by the American Productivity and Quality Center. Three-quarters of the way through my talk, APQC president Carla O'Dell held up a sign for...

Whitman's Triumph. (Books: rereading).
January 1, 2002... On the Monday after the World Trade Center attack, I taught "Song of Myself" to my first-year-studies class in poetry (half literary survey, half workshop) at Sarah Lawrence. The class was the first group of freshmen I'd been put in charge of,...

The 2001 American Scholar Awards.(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... The Editorial Board and staff are pleased to announce the fourth annual AMERICAN SCHOLAR Awards, honoring the best writing that appeared in our pages during the past year. "Happy Trails to All" by JAMES McCONKEY Autumn Best Essay...

Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. (Books: the depths of feeling).
January 1, 2002... UPHEAVALS OF THOUGHT: THE INTELLIGENCE OF EMOTIONS by Martha Nussbaum. Cambridge University Press. $39.95. According to a widely held view of the species, philosophers have neither had much time for the emotions, nor been able to cultivate...

The Birds of Heaven: Travels with Cranes. (Books: pilgrim's progress).
January 1, 2002... THE BIRDS OF HEAVEN: TRAVELS WITH CRANES By Peter Matthiessen. North Point Press. $27. Paintings and Drawings by Robert Bateman. The trouble with the term nature writing is that it conjures up an image of a quaint, anachronistic art, the...

Borrowed Finery: A Memoir. (Books: growing up alone).
January 1, 2002... BORROWED FINERY: A MEMOIR By Paula Fox. Henry Holt. $23. Introducing the 1999 edition of Paula Fox's 1970 (and long out of print) novel Desperate Characters, Jonathan Franzen confesses that "my underlining and marginal annotations are...

Enemies Within: The Culture of Conspiracy in Modern America. (Books: conspiracy fatigue).
January 1, 2002... ENEMIES WITHIN: THE CULTURE OF CONSPIRACY IN MODERN AMERICA By Robert Alan Goldberg. Yale University Press. $29.95. What do the assassination of President Lincoln and the alleged crash of a UFO in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947 have in...

To Begin Where I Am: Selected Essays by Czeslaw Milosz. (Books: vita activa).
January 1, 2002... TO BEGIN WHERE I AM: SELECTED ESSAYS BY CZESLAW MILOSZ Edited by Bogdana Carpenter and Madeline G. Levine. Farrar Straus & Giroux, $25. Czeslaw Milosz is a stern companion, "difficult, in the best sense" according to the 1980 Nobel Prize...

70th anniversary issue. (The Reader Replies).(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2002... John T. Bethell's 70th Anniversary Chrestomathy in the Autumn issue matched elegance of design with startling prescience of selection. The prize, for me, was to hear again the emphatic, careful voice of the late Jacob Bronowski (whose...

Mendeleev's garden. (The Reader Replies).(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2002... Like Oliver Sacks, I love footnotes (1) and the associated worlds they clue and connect. So I must ask the Big Question raised by Dr. Sacks's tenth and last footnote, about the twelve-year-old boy who asked on a children's radio quiz show in...

Happy trails to all. (The Reader Replies).(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2002... I found James McConkey's "Happy Trails to All" very happy reading, especially when I came to the reflection, on page 58, about the ironic juxtaposition of Islamic, Christian, and pagan imagery in the same Istanbul building. Before I read as far...

Why smart people believe in God. (The Reader Replies).(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2002... Congratulations to THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR and Arthur Krystal on the latter's expertly written and thought-provoking essay. GLENN WILLEFORD Chihuahua, Mexico Arthur Krystal's problem of belief is best answered with a series of'...

Getting and spending. (The Reader Replies).(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2002... I was interested to read Phyllis Rose's agreeable portrait of poetry teaching at Harvard as practiced by Douglas Bush decades ago (although Bush was no "New England aristocrat"; having grown up in Canada, he was not to the Harvard manner born)....

With whom would you travel? (The Podium).(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... Imagine you are about to leave on a journey through deserts and over mountains and across grassy plains; there will be droughts and earthquakes and plagues. You may choose to go with one of two parties. One party is known to be straightforward...