Three years before he vowed, in “Carrion Comfort”, not to feast on despair, the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins grieved the physical decay of growing old: “And wisdom is early to despair: / Be beginning; since, no, nothing can be done / … So be beginning, be beginning to despair”. We age, decline and die, like everyone we love.
Yet despair is not, to put it mildly, a popular stance. In his “Sonnets of Desolation”, Hopkins fought against it; and the poem that bids us despair was paired with verse consoled by “beauty’s self and beauty’s giver”, God. Forced to choose between optimism and pessimism, hope and despair, the well-adjusted opt for optimistic hope.
PESSIMISM, QUIETISM AND NATURE AS REFUGE by David E. Cooper
HOPEFUL PESSIMISM by Mara van der Lugt
Two recent books take issue with this upbeat orientation. Both defend pessimism, though to very different ends. Their arguments are timely. The past ten years have made it hard to be optimistic about humanity. We’ve squandered our best chance to confront the coming climate chaos – storms, droughts and famines that will mean suffering on a massive scale – and the looming crises of forced migration and resource scarcity have spawned reactionary nationalism, not solidarity. In the US, democracy is under threat. The damage will be difficult to repair: it’s easier to wreck trust and infrastructure than to build them up.
ALTHOUGH ONE CAN never get enough of Vermeer or van Gogh, a regrettable consequence of this current age of blockbuster art exhibitions is that more and more great artists are being viewed in isolation from each other. Turning the 18th-century notion of the singular genius into a marketing ploy, museums around the world present their subjects as rebels, outcasts, and troublemakers who operated outside time and space, when all of them were, in fact, closely connected with—and creatively indebted to—their culture and time period.
It is refreshing, then, to stumble upon a show like Impulse Rembrandt: Teacher, Strategist, Bestseller (2024–25) at the Leipzig Museum of Fine Arts in Germany, whose accompanying English-language catalog of critical essays plugs the most revered of the Dutch masters back into the ecosystem that influenced him as much as he influenced it.
Born in Leiden to a well-to-do miller in 1606, Rembrandt in early youth began to draft sketches of the Dutch countryside and portraits of his Protestant mother, who instilled in him a lifelong reverence for Christian mythology. In his teens, he apprenticed first with Jacob Isaacszoon van Swanenburg, a history painter freshly returned from Italy, then with Pieter Lastman, who also taught Jan Lievens. At 22, Rembrandt began taking on students of his own, many of whom, including Ferdinand Bol, Gerard Dou, and Carel Fabritius, became successful painters in their own right. Contrary to popular belief, writes the head of paintings and sculpture at Leipzig Museum, Jan Nicolaisen, in the exhibition catalog, these students—some as young as 14 when they first appeared at Rembrandt’s stately house and studio on Amsterdam’s Jodenbreestraat—didn’t spend their time completing Rembrandt’s masterpieces so much as copying them, adopting his style and sensibilities as their own. Concerned more with light and emotion than idealized forms, and increasingly painting in loose, expressive strokes, Rembrandt has been deservedly called one of the first “modern” painters, his well-documented influence running from his immediate disciples to Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, and Salvador Dalí.
By and large, the development of 17th-century Dutch literature followed the development of 17th-century Dutch painting, Amsterdam’s writers and poets moving away from the dominant, classical style of their French neighbors in much the same way Rembrandt looked beyond the masters of the Italian Renaissance.
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It is, in light of this conclusion, rather fitting that both academic and literary treatments of Rembrandt have slowly moved beyond the one-sided interpretations of the past, viewing him neither as a nuisance—as the classicists and Victorians did—nor as a Romantic genius, but rather as a man of unresolvable contradiction, a hungry miller’s boy who bit off more than he could chew. Possessed of both innate talent and acquired skill, he was equally sensible to corporeal and aesthetic pleasures, and willing to change and develop in response to both his surroundings andhis own better judgment. A best-seller indeed.
Tim Brinkhof is a Dutch journalist and researcher based in the United States. He studied history and literature at New York University and has written for Vox, Vulture, Slate, Esquire, Jacobin, GQ, New Lines Magazine, and more.
LITERARY HUB (February 14, 2025): I first read Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy as a teenager. I was hungry to assert maturity through my reading habits, to bypass YA fiction in favor of books for adults, and so initially its playful visuals made me frown; I associated illustrations with children’s books. Soon, however, I realized how sophisticated and delightful they were.
The squiggle representing the emphatic twirling of Corporal Trim’s cane. A blank page where the reader is invited to imagine how Widow Wadman might look—”paint her to your own mind.” A marbled block which the reader can gaze into and contemplate the mysteries of life. And—my favorite—the iconic black page that represents the death of Parson Yorick.
Whilst Sterne was certainly an innovative writer ahead of his time, it is worth noting that this was not anarchic at the time of publication; other texts published in his era, such as funeral publications, also included black pages as a symbol of death. However, the image was unusual for a novel, and is a perfect visual representation of grief, inviting multiple interpretations—a dark tombstone, funeral attire, a bleak starless night, a black hole of grief.These books felt idiosyncratic, shaped by authorial intent, as if harking back to those medieval manuscripts where monks wrote in calligraphy and included beautiful pictures in colors bright as stained glass.
CEREBRAL ENTANGLEMENTS: How the Brain Shapes Our Public and Private Lives, by Allan J. Hamilton
A profound and profoundly important book that, using the most up-to-date revolutionary discoveries in neuroscience, shows us how to understand the brain; how it allows us to think, feel, experience and perceive, written by an acclaimed Harvard-trained neurosurgeon.
The human brain! It’s amazing! A master conductor of our emotional symphonies, a supercomputer of intelligence, a treasure inside the “temple” of the skull, where it gloriously shimmers “vivid, vital, jewel-like.” I mean, is it any wonder we’re such a special species?
Sorry: I had to get that out of my system. Books built on hyperbole seem to bring out the worst in me. And “Cerebral Entanglements,” a new book by the surgeon and medical consultant Allan J. Hamilton, is so breathlessly excited about our brains and how they work, about the dazzle of new insights and technologies, that occasionally this reader felt compelled to take a break and fan herself.
Deborah Blum is the director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at M.I.T. and the author of “The Poison Squad: One Chemist’s Single-Minded Quest for Food Safety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.”
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS (February 13, 2025): When, in his 1716 poem Trivia: or, the Art of Walking the Streets of London, John Gay announced he would instruct his readers on “How to walk clean by Day, and safe by Night”, he firmly positioned his account between two different modes of representing the city. Like Ned Ward’s The London Spy, Gay’s poem acknowledges the chaotic energy – and the dirt and odours – the pedestrian is likely to encounter. At the same time, it offers an account of good conduct and urban sociability like that found in Addison and Steele’s Tatler and Spectator, albeit adapted to the busy streets of the commercial city. In so doing, Gay’s generically playful poem – which borrows from epic, georgic, and pastoral to produce a commentary on modern urban life – raises fascinating and still pertinent questions about what it means to be a walker of the city’s streets.
Taking its cue from Trivia, my book The Art of Walking in London: Representing the Eighteenth-Century City, 1700-1830 considers what representations of pedestrianism can tell us about how the metropolis was imagined and experienced – by writers and artists, visitors and inhabitants – in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the popular imagination, the idea of eighteenth-century London evokes a Hogarthian underworld of dirty streets, daring pickpockets, and chaotic scenes in which new arrivals trace well-worn routes to poverty and prostitution, criminality and death. This image of eighteenth-century London as dark and dangerous has helped to shape a common misconception that only criminals and the poor walked the streets, while Romantic-period poems like William Blake’s “London” and Book VII of William Wordsworth’s The Prelude suggest that the early nineteenth-century was defined by a sense of alienation, as captured in the latter’s pronouncement that “‘The face of every one / That passes by me is a mystery’”.
FRONTLINE (February 12, 2025): In his incisive 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language”, George Orwell performs a brilliant autopsy on the art and craft of writing and communication. He focusses on how and what language manifests—or rather, fails to manifest—in political discourse. The master satirist, never one to mince words (though he’d be the first to appreciate the irony of that cliché), dissects the tendency of political language to change straightforward ideas into bloated, pretentious prose that obscures rather than enlightens.
Towards the end of this long essay lies a powerful statement: “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable”. Clearly, Orwell was talking about how politicians and other public figures twist words to hide ugly truths. When leaders want to justify terrible or unpleasant actions, they turn to a vague, fancy vocabulary. Instead of saying “we killed civilians”, they might say, “collateral damage occurred during military operations”. This kind of cloudy language makes it harder for people to understand what really happened or will happen.
Language shapes perception. It defines how we see the world and the forces that power it. In an ideal scenario, words like “development”, “reform”, and “progress” should inspire optimism, suggesting a march towards a better future. But in practice, these terms become euphemisms for destruction. Beneath their hopeful facades, they have hidden environmental devastation, the displacement of indigenous communities, and the widening gap between the rich and the poor. If we strip away their idealistic veneer, we uncover a history of exploitation and loss—one that continues to this day.
THE PARIS REVIEW (February 10, 2025): Plato’s Phaedrus begins at the edge of the city of Athens, in the countryside, as we would say today. Enter Socrates and Phaedrus, his younger friend. Phaedrus has just come from the house of Lysias, his master and erastēs (older male lover).
SOCRATES: Dear Phaedrus, wither away, and where do you come from?
PHAEDRUS: From Lysias, Socrates … and I am going for a walk outside the wall [of Athens].
Earlier that day, Phaedrus says, Lysias had given him a speech in which he described the erotic relationship that a master can have with a young disciple whom he does not love, with whom he is not in love.
PHAEDRUS: Lysias has represented one of the beauties being tempted, but not by a lover; this is just the clever thing about it; for he says that favors should be granted rather to the one who is not in love than to the lover.
This report does not satisfy Socrates. Dying to know more, he is determined not to let Phaedrus out of his sight; he will follow him everywhere, hound him until he agrees to read Lysias’s speech to him. At the very threshold of the reading scene there thus emerges a close and complex connection between loving and reading, two verbs, two gerunds, between which, for reasons that will soon become apparent, it makes sense to leave open all the possible punctuation marks, including the possibility that there be none (as though one wrote them in scriptiocontinua, with no space between them, which was a common scriptural practice in Plato’s day). Loving()reading could then be read (or connected) at least in two different ways:
1. Lovingreading or loving-reading (a double verb, conjugated as transitive, where what one loves-reads is someone or something, Lysias or the book).
2. Loving reading (in which case, it is reading that one loves).
THE ATLANTIC MAGAZINE (February 10, 2025): The idea that people should be able to choose their own communities—instead of being stuck where they are born—is a distinctly American innovation. It is the foundation for the country’s prosperity and democracy, and it just may be America’s most profound contribution to the world.
No society has ever been as mobile as the United States once was. No society has even come close. In the 19th century, the heyday of American mobility, roughly a third of all Americans changed addresses each year. European visitors were astonished, and more than slightly appalled. The American “is devoured with a passion for locomotion,” the French writer Michel Chevalier observed in 1835; “he cannot stay in one place.” Americans moved far more often, over longer distances, and to greater advantage than did people in the lands from which they had come. They understood this as the key to their national character, the thing that made their country distinctive. “We are a migratory people and we flourish best when we make an occasional change of base,” one 19th-century newspaper explained. “We have cut loose from the old styles of human vegetation, the former method, of sticking like an oyster to one spot through numberless succeeding generations,” wrote another.
As the 19th century turned into the 20th, as two world wars passed, as the Baby Boom began, Americans kept on moving. And as Americans moved around, they moved up. They broke away from stultifying social hierarchies, depleted farmland, declining towns, dead-end jobs. If the first move didn’t work out, they could always see a more promising destination beckoning them onward.
THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE (February 10, 2025): Harold Wallace Ross, who founded The New Yorker a century ago, had a rule that no one should ever write about writers, because writers are boring, except to other writers, and he figured the same was true about editors—only it was more true, because no one should even know an editor’s name. That didn’t stop William Shawn, who became the editor of the magazine after Ross’s death, in 1951, from naming one of his kids Wallace, for Ross. It didn’t stop Ann Beattie from naming her car Roger, for her New Yorker editor, Roger Angell. And for all I know there are Chihuahuas and nieces and motorcycles at large named Bob Gottlieb, the magazine’s editor from 1987 to 1992; Lady Evans, the titled name of Tina Brown, its editor from 1992 to 1998; and D.R., for David Remnick, its editor since then. (I once had a tuxedo cat named Shaun, with a “u,” but that came from “Finnegans Wake” and doesn’t count.)
Most editors remain unsung. To be unknown is, ordinarily, to be underestimated. “The only great argument I have against writers, generally speaking, is that many of them deny the function of an editor, and I claim editors are important,” Ross once wrote. For him, editors were worth more than writers in the way that a great batting coach was worth more than a great batter. “Writers are a dime a dozen,” Ross told James Thurber. “What I want is an editor.” Writers were children; editors were adults. “I can’t find editors,” Ross fumed. “Nobody grows up.” (The magazine’s editorial director, Henry Finder, once said of Remnick, “I think he regards the editor’s job as being not crazy,” while, on the other hand, “the writer’s prerogative is to be, perhaps, a little crazy.”) Ross also found it useful—and this was a pretty clever trick—to tell writers who balked at being edited that the more they argued with an editor, the less worthy they were of being published. “The worse the writer is, the more argument; that is the rule,” he informed one very quarrelsome contributor. Stating this rule was an exceptionally effective way of getting a writer to pipe down. Then, too: it happens to be true. (I promise that my editor did not write that last sentence—he doesn’t even agree with it.)
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL (February 7, 2025): The portrait of Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci, more exactly the portrait of one Lisa Gherardini, was executed by fits and starts very early in the 16th century. By now it has been seen by billions of people and is regarded as a painting like no other. Many visitors to the Louvre, where the “Mona Lisa” is displayed, must surely go only to see what all the fuss is about.
Some people feel that the sitter’s beauty is perfect, others that her looks are nothing special. There are those who say, thinking perhaps of Nat King Cole’s charming song, that her smile is enigmatic. But a smile without a known reason is scarcely an enigma, a puzzle to be solved. What is enigmatic is the extent of Mona Lisa’s stardom.
Whatever its source, the aura surrounding the “Mona Lisa”—in addition to bringing millions of admission-paying visitors to the Louvre each year—has contributed to the pop superstardom of the painting’s creator. Leonardo is everywhere. The proliferation of biographies and videos, the ill-researched journalism, the pseudo-historical claims, the blockbuster shows, the promotion of newly touted works that may just possibly be unknown Leonardo pieces—all this is the subject of Stephen Campbell’s “Leonardo da Vinci: An Untraceable Life.”
