Articles

Visioning the Invisible Recent Artists’ Biographies Cézanne: A Life by Alex Danchev (Pantheon, 2012) Caspar David Friedrich by Johannes Grave (Prestel, 2012) Leonardo and the Last Supper by Ross King (Walker & Company, 2012) T HE BIOGRAPHY is, in many ways, the most conservative of popular literary forms. It is philosophically retrograde. It presumes many…

An old man was dying in the hospital, —-my friend the doctor told me. He was eighty-nine, his whole life a tailor in a shop —-below the room where he was born. He had no one, so a kind aide from Ghana —-sat with him, one hand in his the other holding her sandwich. The…

I WANTED TO LIGHT her a candle at the holy sanctuary at Chimayo. I chose a Saint Christopher candle: she had just died. Melinda may have died at forty-nine of a heart attack, though there was nothing wrong with her heart. Or she might have died by choking, following a week of seizures. Or it…

The following is a chapter in Richard Rodriguez’s new memoir, Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography, forthcoming this October from Viking.   GOD formed you of dust from the soil. I was a sort of an afterthought. A wishbone. He blew into our nostrils the breath of life and there we were. You were his Darling Boy…

New York At noon precisely, just as the bells began to ring, the white peacock in the garden of Saint John the Divine spread its glorious tail, making a rippling many-splendored sound, like a sibilant wind rushing through many leaves. The tips of its feathers, shaped like tiny V’s, reminded me of doves descending, the…

All his lighthouses are self-portraits…. ————Jo Hopper on Edward Hopper   Darkness. Darkness & a wild crashing & smashing of waves on the rocks below. My light swinging round & round—shining for a split second on shards of rocky coast & a vast oily blackness ready to swallow small craft & large. I preside over…

The following is excerpted from Soil and Sacrament: A Spiritual Memoir of Food and Faith by Fred Bahnson, forthcoming from Simon & Schuster, Inc. The book tells the story of the author’s series of pilgrimages to communities that integrate religious practice, love for place, and the production of food, including Pentecostal coffee roasters in Washington…

Robert Clark was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He received a BA in English from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MA in medieval studies from the University of London. He is the author of ten books, both fiction and nonfiction. Clark’s first collection of personal essays, My Grandfather’s House, was a finalist for…

An Apprenticeship in Affliction: Waiting with Simone Weil   I DOUBT there is a twentieth-century figure who has inspired more poetry than the French philosopher-mystic Simone Weil. Though her writings were few and fragmentary, their utterly unconventional, severely brilliant insights and her absolute fidelity in living out her own precepts have moved poets to produce…

IT SEEMS TO ME, who have never held a brush in my life except to dip it in a bucket of house paint, that a good reason to become a painter, aside from the enduring mystery of beauty, is to learn how to see. And painters do indeed spend an inordinate amount of time in…