More on: tragedy

I wasn’t afraid until / I peeked into the hall, saw a black-clad SWAT team / scooting along the wall, rifles held vertical, a strict formality / that made the whole world seem shabby.

IN the final section of The Waste Land (“What the Thunder Said”), T.S. Eliot strives to integrate two dimensions of the poem that have been running on parallel tracks: the snapshots of inner, psychic alienation (“On Margate Sands. / I can connect / Nothing with nothing”) and the critique of a decadent social order (the…

I. EVERY FACE IN THE NEONATAL intensive care unit looked apologetic and scared, like old, lonely men do on their deathbeds. A nurse told my wife Georgie how lonely she had been ever since her husband died. An intern cried alone in the far corner of the room and sent her condolences later via email. One…

WHEN I first arrived at Oxford University in the early 1980s to pursue graduate work, I was all swagger on the outside, but that was to conceal the soft center of terror within. I had gone from being a big man on a small Midwestern campus situated between two cornfields to a nobody at an…