My invisible friend
At one point they tried to calculate when time began, when exactly the earth had been created. In the mid–seventeenth century, the Irish bishop Ussher calculated not only the exact year, but also a starting date: October 22, 4,004 years before Christ. It was a Saturday (of course). Some even say Ussher gave a precise...
Lore Segal: A life in stories
Lore Segal published her first Ladies’ Lunch story, ‘The Arbus Factor’ in The New Yorker in 2007, and the most recent, ‘Soft Sculpture’, in summer 2022. For her extraordinary new collection, published to coincide with her 95th birthday on 8 March 2023, she brings three new stories together into a sequence with earlier stories published in The New Yorker and elsewhere....
The rhinoceros in the room
In one of the most famous duels of elephantine minds, Bertrand Russell would challenge Ludwig Wittgenstein to concede that there was no rhinoceros in the Cambridge room that served as their legendary battleground (in a different version of the story, Russell claimed that the pachyderm to be located was a hippopotamus). The question, under ongoing...
The Mourners’ Kaddish
Sometimes it is very hard to put words to experiences. In Adorno’s much used (and misused) own words, “there can be no poetry after Auschwitz”; the human soul and mind can conceive of no recreation of experience, no seamless relating to, or of, life through words alone, once the humanity of meaning has been so...
