More on: Essays

Burning Bright. Curated by Elizabeth Wyckoff and Timothy Young at the Yale Center for British Art, Fall 2025. Elizabeth Wyckoff. Blake. Yale Center for British Art Collection Series, 2025. WE HAVE HAD THE WORD ICON FOR A WHILE, since the 1570s at least in our language, but it has recently been subjected to fairly comprehensive…

TWO YEARS AFTER I received a monstrous beating, I became interested in pietàs. What happened, according to the police report filed in Morris Park, was this: The G train approached the Flushing Avenue stop at nine on a Tuesday evening. The car was half full. I was journaling and reading Flaubert. A man in matching…

I am content to dwell in ambiguities and conflict, understanding, as I see it, that we are all caught in inescapable systems, systems of value or belief, linguistic systems, systems upon systems within systems, which permit or preclude, which shape and suggest and stifle our apprehension of reality.

Russell’s description of oblivion as a poison is clarifying. The book left me wondering what our modern oblivions are. Into what vaults do we deposit our lives, robbing ourselves of the tools to understand them?

A family lives here, here things are a bit wild, yes, I’m trying to maintain, give me grace, please, look, there’s beauty in the attempt—and all of this is not only the subject matter of the yard, but the aesthetic, let’s call it, an aesthetic of too-muchness, or, as in a line from a poem I jotted down in my commonplace book, “the is-ful ah!-nesses of things.”

Objects that explain themselves make no demands.

I felt a thrilling moment of relief, amazed that I had been freed of the burden of a child, then crushed by guilt for having felt so.