American Scholar articles from June 2002

American Scholar archives from June 2002

The world's eye. (Letter From The Editor).
June 22, 2002... In the summer of 1837, in his "American Scholar" oration, Ralph Waldo Emerson exhorted his listeners to free themselves from European culture and to look instead to their own country. "Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the...

Commonplace book: travel.
June 22, 2002... They change the sky, not their mind, who cross the sea. A busy idleness possesses us; we seek a happy life with ships and carriages; the object of our search is present with us. --HORACE, Epistles I. xi, c. 20 B.C. The attention of a...

The Vienna Three-step.(Poem)
June 22, 2002... The Vienna Three-step One-two-three, one-two-three I twirl through the hallway. In one part of the house night sets and Grandfather yawns. In another part of the house day rises and Grandmother...

Not the Soul.(Poem)
June 22, 2002... Not the Soul Not, in all likelihood, the soul, with its many rallies, nor the heart, with its dyspeptic series of fits and starts, is exactly in charge of us, I fathom, but more likely the gull, who this very moment is...

John Reed's unblinking stare.
June 22, 2002... Though Russia produced a lot of great books in the nineteenth century, it did the opposite in the twentieth. Probably nowhere in history could you find as many tendentious, pat, lifeless works of literature as appeared in Russia between the...

Judgment.(Poem)
June 22, 2002... Judgment Having confessed his crime (writing love poems to the Prince's mistress), the straight young knight from Venice stood all alone, above the royal palace court, to hear his fate: "You have a choice. So listen...

The road from Abalak: heat, wind, dust, fear.
June 22, 2002... Early on Christmas morning I stood with hundreds of people on a roadside in Abalak, a town in southern central Niger, West Africa, on the edge of the Sahara. I remember the peculiar fine dust, like talcum, that arrived on a cool wind and dyed...

Tono, Japan--December.(Poem)
June 22, 2002... Tono, Japan--December Crows against snow. This must have been written before, Perhaps flowering austerely in an ancient haiku Or yellowing terribly in an encased Portuguese diary. Beauty beaten on these anvils ...

The harpsichord on the mountain.(Short Story)
June 22, 2002... Because my husband had some years earlier taught in Florence for his university, we decided to return and live there senza gli studenti for a month to see the city on our own. My husband, who was a lover of early music and had built his own...

Blacklisted titles.(Poem)
June 22, 2002... Blacklisted Titles The USSR Academy of Science, local branch, looking like a chocolate cake from afar with its neoclassical stucco moulding on the cornices, stood in scaffolding before the holidays. Women in the...

The peculiarities of German travel.
June 22, 2002... On a cold March morning, I wait in a long line at Hamburg's Fuhlsbuettel Airport to check my bag for a flight to Milan. It's a Friday and there are, it's true, a few gray suits around me, carrying briefcases and not much else, setting out for a...

Gifts.
June 22, 2002... 1 I'm not sure why anyone would pick up a hitchhiker in the middle of a Nevada desert. A carpenter named Russell finds me thumbing along a dirt road with two dollars in my pocket and a gallon of water. He is one of those Vietnam vets who...

In Iran.
June 22, 2002... In Frankfurt airport, I witnessed an unexpected phenomenon. The airplane that would carry me to Tehran was disgorging its Frankfurt-bound passengers, Iranians all. As they disembarked, the women stopped in the departure lounge to remove their...

Life in the margins: from Brooklyn to Bulgaria.
June 22, 2002... If doughnuts are nothing but sweet empty calories, their centers are nothing but nothing. Centers, held Yeats, cannot hold, but neither can distinctions between inside and outside, up and down, center and circumference. The double helix, on...

To the noodle shop: a love story.(Short Story)
June 22, 2002... Now that nearly ten years have gone by, I find that the only things I can trust my memory to restore to me exactly are the weather and what it did to us: how hot it was that July day in Kyoto, how we found ourselves, even in the early morning,...

The uncertain art: scatological medicine.
June 22, 2002... Who remembers Serutan? In ads that began to appear about seventy-five years ago on billboards and public transportation and in the pages of periodicals, it was touted as "Nature's Aid to Elimination!" The very name of the anti-constipation...

"I am what is".(THE MIND OF EGYPT: HISTORY AND MEANING IN THE TIME OF THE PHARAOHS)
June 22, 2002... THE MIND OF EGYPT: HISTORY AND MEANING IN THE TIME OF THE PHARAOHS. By Jan Assmann; translated from the German by Andrew Jenkins. Metropolitan Books. $35. Ancient Egypt lasted a long time. There is no accepted definition of what history...

Evolution by degrees.(BODY HEAT: TEMPERATURE AND LIFE ON EARTH)
June 22, 2002... BODY HEAT: TEMPERATURE AND LIFE ON EARTH By Mark S. Blumberg. Harvard University Press. $22. Probably the greatest virtue of Body Heat, Mark S. Blumberg's tour of the strategies living things have adopted to cope with temperature, lies in...

Freedom, bounded.(THE IMPERFECT GARDEN: THE LEGACY OF HUMANISM )
June 22, 2002... THE IMPERFECT GARDEN: THE LEGACY OF HUMANISM By Tzvetan Todorov; translated from the French by Carol Cosman. Princeton University Press. $29.95. Humanism is a vague term. Variously qualified, it can mean many different things: the revival...

Travelogue of tyranny.(LETTERS FROM RUSSIA )
June 22, 2002... LETTERS FROM RUSSIA By Astolphe de Custine. Edited, revised, and with an introduction by Anka Muhlstein. NYRB Classics. $16.95 (paper). Astolphe de Custine, a forty-nine-year-old French aristocrat, mediocre novelist, and patron and host of...

The mourning paper. (The Reader Replies).
June 22, 2002... "The Mourning Paper" ("At Large and At Small," Spring 2002) airs some of my own grievances, though Thomas Mallon's disappointment with The New York Times's "Portraits of Grief" lies less in their lack of restraint than in their outright...

Brown. (The Reader Replies).
June 22, 2002... I wasn't sure if I wanted to renew my subscription, but Richard Rodriguez's "Brown" made the decision for me. I cannot describe the impact of this essay. More, please. More from this brilliant writer who has no allegiance to race, creed, sex,...

Bearing Arms. (The Reader Replies).
June 22, 2002... Tim Morris's "Bearing Arms" may be the freshest and most frisson-inducing essay I have ever read in THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. Morris skewers all nutty-partisan ideas about citizens arming themselves without stooping to caricature. His...

The tramp of a fly's footstep. (The Reader Replies).
June 22, 2002... This reader must reply to Professor John M. Picker's claim of the preeminent role of Victorian physicians in the introduction and extensive application of auscultation. French and American physicians, not the English, should be given the...

Electroshock therapy. (The Reader Replies).
June 22, 2002... I was troubled by the appearance in the same issue of psychiatrist Susan Mahler's vivid description of how her own mental problems affect her day-to-day life ("Inferno") and Sherwin B. Nuland's description in "The Uncertain Art" ("Lightning on...