Reviews and News:
Algis Valiunas writes about the bleak lessons of Herodotus’s Histories: “Human sorrow comes in infinite variety, and you can be sure that the gods spare no one; nothing human endures, and life is far from sweet even while it lasts.” Happy Wednesday.
Robert Murray Davis revisits the publication of Brideshead Revisited and the responses of Waugh’s first readers: “Lady Daphne Acton and other Catholics thought the book a masterpiece. Christopher Sykes, later Waugh’s official biographer, praised the characterization of Sebastian and his Oxford friend Anthony Blanche but predicted, ironically, adverse reaction: ‘Feeling is running high about it. “Roman Tract” is being hissed in intellectual circles…. Connolly is very upset…. The New Statesman will never forgive you for your crimes against taste: No miners, no mention of communism, no strictures on the house, and your obscure and constant references to the nobility.’”
Laura Freeman thinks that everyone should own and carry a decent pen. Or pencil, I’ll add, and agree whole-heartedly. “‘I’m afraid you do not like your pen,’ says Miss Bingley to Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. ‘Let me mend it for you. I mend pens remarkably well.’ You know then — if you didn’t suspect it already — that Mr. Darcy could never marry Miss Bingley. Is there anything so maddening as someone interfering with one’s pen?”
How maps helped build America.
Two sketches, recently confirmed to have been drawn by Vincent van Gogh, will be featured in an upcoming exhibit in the Netherlands.
I was born and raised in the United States, but I’m also a proud Swiss national thanks to my wife. This story made me a little prouder: Dutch Vegan refused Swiss citizenship for being “annoying.”
Essay of the Day:
In Reason, Matthew Harwood tells the story of how one of the founders of the American Civil Liberties Union came to defend Soviet tyranny:
“On Christmas Eve 1926, Roger Baldwin set sail for the Soviet Union, a man adrift.
“Nearly seven years before, he had helped found the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). He had been a hands-on executive director for the upstart organization, which had had an immediate impact with its unapologetic First Amendment defenses of labor radicals. The early ACLU wasn’t in any way a neutral defender of the Bill of Rights. As ACLU counsel Walter Nelles put it, ‘We are frankly partisans of labor in the present struggle, and our place is in the fight.’
“But in 1926, Baldwin took a leave of absence from the organization as personal crises mounted. He was battling depression. His marriage was on the rocks. A close friend had died of a drug overdose. Later in life, Baldwin would tell an interviewer that it was ‘a time of confusion in my values.’
“Baldwin had always been a mess of contradictions. He was a Boston Brahmin pursuing a classless society, a pacifist who called for class war, a civil libertarian who enthusiastically supported the Soviet experiment despite reports of the Bolsheviks’ police-state tactics. Now he would finally get to see the workers’ paradise for himself.
“Before setting sail, Baldwin agreed to write a book for Vanguard Press’ series on Soviet Russia. Nearly a decade had passed since the Communists had swept away the czarist regime. Baldwin’s task was simple: As America’s foremost ‘fighter for liberty,’ according to his editor, he would evaluate the Soviets’ civil liberties record and separate fact from fiction.
“He failed miserably…”
Photo: Salzburg
Poem: Alexander Pushkin, “A Rake Progresses” (translated by Chris Fahrenthold)
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