I know a man who spends four or five weeks of every year in the army. He is a young man, but not all that young—fortysomething—and has a wife and four small children. He lives in Jerusalem. His annual five-week tour of service in the Israel Defense Force is called in Hebrew by a term . . . . Continue Reading »
Let me re-introduce you to Mr. Harold Skimpole. Skimpole lives in the pages of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House; he made his first appearance 140 years ago, yet those who are acquainted with the principal hierophants of New Age spirituality may receive more than a slight shock of recognition: He . . . . Continue Reading »
The mountainside failed. But when we saw that deep spot the dead sun came back heavy as an engine and my pick rattled like a gun. The ice unravelled; we peeled it from his toothy face, glittering brown, a woody rubber round his mind, the Bronze Age still stuck to . . . . Continue Reading »
From a distance it looked like ordinary wood, a snuff-colored twig one might rake for burning. Surfaced by the bulldozer from a sarcophagus of clay, it could have been the brittle finger-bone of a prophet, or a phalange of an extinct ape from another age. Black . . . . Continue Reading »
Tell me everything you know, the sapient sage asked the seeker, and, since the former was, in his role, an editor, the latter filled page after page of all that followed and preceded cause and wherefore and why and when. Which he gave to waiting world and bookman with a flourish, so: here’s the . . . . Continue Reading »
Eternity is uncorrupted light; the world proceeds by interrupting sight, exchanging day and night. Half the acts of earth avoid the sun; much that's done may be begun by day but end at night: aborted, buried light is customary here; it shocks no more than does a war such as the one we wage against . . . . Continue Reading »
Prospects for a Common Morality edited by gene outka and john p. reeder, jr. princeton university press, 302 pages, $47.50 cloth, $16.95 paper Eleven distinguished ethicists weigh in on the question of whether there is a universal morality, relevant to all cultures and traditions by virtue of . . . . Continue Reading »
Thinking of my grandparents, I stand for a moment on the curb of a street they often walked, the old walks cracked and chipped, and I want to call out to them, as if they were climbers just ahead moving across rock and fields of ice, rubble in the slip of years past. But if they spoke, would . . . . Continue Reading »
In Washington, where he was to give the eighteenth Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities on May 3, 1989, Walker Percy also gave an interview to Scott Walter for Crisis . This is almost exactly a year before his death, and both the interview and his lecture, “The Fateful Rift: The San Andreas Fault . . . . Continue Reading »
Ronald L. Numbers, who holds a chair in the History of Science and Medicine at the University of Wisconsin, has performed a desperately needed service in this book, and he has performed it very well. Toward the end of the volume there is trenchant, if succinct, interpretation, but mostly this is a . . . . Continue Reading »
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