It is not natural for me to think of God in this way. My God tends to be the God of Pascal more than the God of benevolent interventions. All you need to know about Pascal’s God is the title of the great Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski’s book on Pascal. The title of that book is God Owes Us Nothing.

I’ve just read a thirty-page article called “Whitman Music: The Problem of Adaptation.” A critical analysis of musical settings of Whitman’s poetry, the article was published in the 1965 issue of Books at Brown, a journal devoted to materials in the Special Collections of Brown University’s library. The author is Peggy Z. Rosenthal.