More on: Essays

It had been four months since we’d run out of money. Somehow, we were still afloat.

In no world was there enough medication, technology, or manpower to keep everyone alive.

Even though Aylon painted it in 1978, there were still oil drops around the outside of the frame. The painting appeared to drip.

Many have lamented that we don’t have a Lewis to help us think through these questions (or a Chesterton or a Tolkien to help him), but in my estimation Sally Rooney comes pretty close.

Like a person caught in quicksand, the Schrader male antihero struggles toward salvation only to be driven deeper into the thing that’s swallowing him whole.

The insides of our mothers’ bodies are the only places that are most certainly past. From then on, from there on, every room is just an echo of that first, red room.

Like Mackey, [Howe] is forced to interpret the historical recurrence of evil as cruelly fated; human beings are the unwitting playthings of what she calls, in Manimal Woe, “the mystery of repetition.”

One can almost hear T.S. Eliot, the native Missourian in his self-imposed exile from America, looking out over these rust belts and muttering, “I had not thought that globalism had undone so many.”

Still, the novels and histories of madness couldn’t hold a candle—well, maybe Plath could—to stories of the Complete Nervous Breakdown I’d heard throughout childhood. My grandmother always had a story about somebody she knew who’d broken down.

I think Hart wanted—he was nothing if not a man of magnificent and consuming desires—the wrong things, or things to which he was not quite entitled. I have wanted them too