Reviews and News:

Over at Paris Review, Hernan Diaz writes about the pleasures of H.W. Fowler: “Grammar enthusiasts either love Henry Watson Fowler or they have yet to encounter his work. It is possible to read his Dictionary of Modern Usage (1926) from cover to cover as a weird, wonderful essay; it is impossible to do so without laughing out loud.” Matthew J. Franck, also a fan of Fowler, offers a few corrections to the piece.

“Israel has pulled out of a planned exhibit of the Dead Sea Scrolls in a Frankfurt museum after the German government refused to guarantee their return if claimed by Palestinians or Jordanians.”

Why 18th-centry Britons read aloud: “There were practical reasons for reading books aloud. ‘Domestic lighting was primitive, and prohibitively expensive,’ Williams says. ‘Why strain the eyes with insufficient light and small print when a single person with a well-lit book could do the work of many?’ Also, eyeglasses were rare until late in the 18th century, so it made sense for a person with good eyesight to read to people whose eyesight was poor. And reading aloud was a way of entertaining others—including people who were illiterate and could not read for themselves—while they were doing housework. There also were moral reasons...”

What is painting? “From the Renaissance onwards, when art first separated itself from craft, painting has been the focus of innumerable attempts to explain and define it...Leonardo made the case for painting as being the prince of the liberal arts because it dealt not only with light, shade and colour but also with mathematics, optics, observation, intellect and imagination. What’s more it was ‘less tedious to follow’ than poetry.”

In praise of bookstores: “After surviving a civil war, a devastating fire and a property dispute, the 89-year-old Catalònia bookstore in Barcelona closed in 2013 and was reborn as a McDonald’s. Witnessing this sacrilege was Jorge Carrión, a Barcelona-based novelist and essayist who at the time was preparing a cultural history of bookstores. ‘Of course, it is an obvious metaphor,’ he recalls glumly, ‘but that doesn’t make it any less shocking.’ Fortunately he holds off his pessimism until the end of Bookshops (so named because its seasoned translator, Peter Bush, is British) since his real purpose is to celebrate bookstores. And he does so by wandering the globe in search of those that play — or have played — a special role in the intellectual and social lives of their communities.”

Sam Shepard’s final work: “The unnamed narrator of Spy of the First Person, the final work by the playwright Sam Shepard, suffers from a degenerative disease that leaves him immobile, disconnected from his own body but keenly, painfully aware of his surroundings and his meandering consciousness. ‘Nothing seems to be working now. Hands. Arms. Legs. Nothing. I just lie here,’ he writes. ‘Waiting for someone to find me. I just look up at the sky.’”

Essay of the Day:

In The American Scholar, Phil Klay writes about Christian martyrs, the violence of war, and faith:

“My time in the Marines left that worn saying, ‘there are no atheists in foxholes,’ sounding especially hollow. For one thing, it’s verifiably untrue. Marines come from every religious background. But even if we consider the adage’s underlying meaning, that a man in enough terror will cry out to something, to anything, what kind of faith is that? The Russian journalist Artyom Borovik once described a young soldier in his first firefight, whispering to himself, as the bullets whizzed overhead, ‘Mommy, take me back inside of you … Mommy, take me back inside of you.’ If this kind of impulse is the stuff of religious faith, then religious faith doesn’t count for much.

“A soldier may call out to God while in combat, but the experiences that caused him to do so might be the very ones that later cause him to abandon his faith altogether. What kind of God, after all, would allow any of the innumerable things that happen in a war zone?

* * *

“So no, the most intense horrors of the world do not always lead to faith. There are plenty of atheists in foxholes, and some of them are atheists because of what they experienced in foxholes. It would be more accurate to say, as the Vietnam veteran Keith Nightingale has stated, that war leads less to faith than it does to a moment of choosing. Faced with immeasurable human suffering, causing immeasurable human suffering, causing the deaths of other men, experiencing the highest reaches of terror, fighting side by side with men you love so passionately you’d gladly give your life for them, only to see them killed or maimed—all this raises questions about the nature and purpose of life with an urgency that can’t be held at bay by scrolling Twitter or turning on the television. Nightingale writes that the veteran thinks either, ‘I have to believe in God who got me through this night,’ or, ‘I cannot believe in a God who would permit what I have just lived through.’ Read the rest. Image: Excel landscapes

Poem: Susan Delaney Spear, “Emmaus”

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