Reviews and News:
Terry Teachout on Van Cliburn in Russia: “Cliburn’s talent was recognized early on when he won the prestigious Leventritt Competition in 1954. The panel of judges included Leonard Bernstein, Rudolf Serkin, and George Szell, all of whom believed him to be a world-class talent in the making. But the concert scene was overcrowded with promising young pianists in the mid-’50s, and by 1958 Cliburn was desperate to jump-start his sputtering career. To that end, he entered the first Tchaikovsky Competition, even though it was assumed that the Soviet government would prevent any foreign pianist from winning the first prize. Indeed, the fix was in, for a Russian pianist had already been tapped by the Ministry of Culture to come out on top. But Cliburn’s outgoing manner charmed the Russian people, who were closely following the competition on TV.”
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America’s early atheists (and why so few of them were women).
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Camus’s 1940 Paris: “From March to May 1940, Albert Camus was…finishing a draft of the book he was calling The Stranger. The city, eerily calm, overtaken with a sense of dread, was weeks from the German invasion. Paris has changed enormously since 1940, but you can still walk in Camus’s footsteps through places that a few literary specialists have put on the map and come close to a moment of artistic creation.”
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Michael Dirda on the timeless allure of the gentleman-crook.
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The poetry of Kathleen Hart: “The Puritans’ example testifies to a tenacious fidelity to the original words of David coupled with a no less tenacious pursuit of English words worthy of recitation and song. Barber’s career suggests a similar blend of persistence and adaptability. Hart’s poems as a whole both celebrate and instantiate the truth that human invention creates nothing out of nothing, but rather receives its elements from the past and merely sets them in a new context, combines them into a new whole, or puts them to some new use. As such, human work, like all the works of nature, are first and foremost gifts of divine grace, which we receive and make use of as continuers of God’s creative act.”
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Essay of the Day:
In 1815, Thomas Jefferson sold his library to Congress to replace the one that was destroyed when British troops set the Capitol building on fire. Jefferson was in debt and the sale of his library, according to most historians, was merely opportunistic. Was it? Endrina Tey responds in Common-Place:
“When British troops invaded the city of Washington on August 24, 1814, their orders were to capture the city, and ‘complete the destruction of the public buildings with the least possible delay.’ In perhaps the most memorable event of the War of 1812, they set ablaze the interior of the United States Capitol, the president’s house, and the public offices, in retaliation for the looting and burning of the capital city of York in Upper Canada (present-day Toronto) by American troops the previous year.
“At the Capitol building, the British forces used the books from the 3,000-volume congressional library to kindle the fire that reduced the north wing to charred timbers (fig. 1). Lovers of literature and learning, even the British press, denounced the destruction of the library. The editor of a Nottingham newspaper called it ‘an act without example in modern wars or in any other war since the inroads of the barbarians who conflagrated Rome and overthrew the Roman Empire.’ British Major-General Robert Ross, who ordered the burning of public buildings, was reported to have said, ‘Had I known in time, the books most certainly should have been saved.’
“Retired president Thomas Jefferson got wind of the burning of Washington from Monticello, his residence in the Virginia Piedmont, sometime around August 28, 1814, most likely via reports published in the Richmond Enquirernewspaper. Four weeks later, the deeply indebted Jefferson offered to sell his library to Congress to replace the one that was destroyed. What was the motivation behind this move? Jefferson biographers and historians have typically portrayed his offer and later the sale as purely opportunistic, and have characterized his motive in primarily financial terms. Even Jefferson descendant Sarah N. Randolph asserted in her 1871 biography, The Domestic Life of Thomas Jefferson, that it was her great-grandfather’s financial situation that led to the sale of his library. Writing about Jefferson’s pecuniary pressures, which grew more urgent with the war, she stated, ‘There was then nothing to be made from farming; but while his income was thus cut short, his company and his debts continued to increase. In this emergency something had to be done; and the only thing which offered itself involved a sacrifice which none but his own family, who witnessed the struggle it cost him, could ever fully appreciate.’
“While Jefferson certainly benefited from and used the proceeds from the sale of his library to settle some of his debts, might his motives have been more multifaceted than previously understood?”
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Image of the Day: Afternoon storm over Colorado Springs
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Poem: William Reichard, “Equinox”
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