Category: Books

A Polarizing Artist: Rudyard Kipling’s Legacy

I remember it well. I was a young graduate student, privileged to study under one of the world’s foremost professors of Victorian literature, a renowned authority on Thomas Hardy.

The course was rigorous. We read the greats of the age—Macaulay, Tennyson, Browning, Dickens, Mill, Newman, Arnold, Morris, Ruskin, the Rossettis, Swinburne, Hopkins, Pater, and of course Hardy. Yet strikingly absent was Rudyard Kipling. Our professor dismissed him as the mere voice of imperialist Britain—an attitude then dominant in the Academy, and one I suspect still lingers on American university campuses.

I had never read Kipling. I had not yet learned to question. I accepted what I was told.

It was only later, during a summer course at Exeter College, Oxford, that I encountered another view: one that esteemed Kipling’s literary brilliance without committing the American folly of conflating his politics with the merits of his artistry.

Kipling’s literary range was astonishing. His verse, endowed with rhythmic command, borders on the hypnotic. He opened poetry to colloquial speech and became a supreme craftsman of the ballad form.

Yes, he gave voice to Empire in works like The White Man’s Burden, Kim, and The Jungle Books. But he also revered Indian culture—its spirituality, wisdom, and sensory richness. Often, with subtle irony, he questioned the very order he seemed to affirm.

Perhaps his greatest achievement lies in the short story. With precision and nuance, he crafted narratives of extraordinary compression, modern in their suggestiveness, wide-ranging in their scope. The Man Who Would Be King remains a masterpiece—its sweep and power undiminished. Kipling’s influence on Conrad, Maugham, Hemingway, Borges, and others is beyond doubt.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907—the first English-language writer to receive it—honored for his “power of observation, originality of imagination, virility of ideas, and remarkable talent for narration.”

Kipling’s stories, like all enduring art, probe psychological depths. They are complex, skeptical of conventional wisdom, and riveting in their precision.

In today’s multicultural Britain, he is taught in context: his genius as a storyteller acknowledged, his colonial perspective rejected. Lewis, Tolkien, and Pullman have recognized him as a precursor to modern fantasy.

In India, where he was born and spent his early years, his reception is understandably ambivalent: many readers disdaining his imperial condescension, yet acknowledging his literary craftsmanship. Salman Rushdie has called Kim “one of the greatest novels written about India,.” Other Indian writers continue where Kipling left off, offering vivid vignettes of India, but through an Indian prism.

Controversy about his place in the Western literary canon remains. Vladimir Nabokov, in his Cornell lectures, dismissed Kipling for his moralizing, He deemed his indulgence in exotic adventure stories as juvenile. Great literature, he argued, obeys the aesthetic imperative of narrative neutrality, or distance, as in Flaubert and Joyce.

On the other hand, the late eminent Yale critic Harold Bloom came to Kipling’s defense. In his The Western Canon. Bloom lists Kipling among hundreds of writers deserving inclusion in the canon. Bloom saw Kipling as a myth maker and gifted story teller, especially in his short stories. On the other hand, he found his poetry “scarcely bear reading.”

While I find merit in both Nabokov’s and Bloom’s arguments, I lean towards Bloom’s appraisal as more balanced. I have long resisted either/or equations, particularly as to the political or aesthetic. Over a lifetime, I have frequently found reasoned judgment occupies a middle place. I have given my own arguments earlier in this essay for his belonging in the canon.

Whatever a reader’s verdict, Kipling was a singular voice, very much his own man. In short, authentic. As he said in an interview shortly before his death,

“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. To be your own man is a hard business. If you try it, you’ll be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself” (Qtd. in the Kipling Journal, June 1967).

rj

Thoughts After Reading Virginia Woolf’s Diary

I’m almost done reading Virginia’s Woolf’s Diary, 1918-1941. She means much to me ever since Howard Harper, a Woolf authority at UNC, introduced her to me.

Such a scintillating intellect. Writing didn’t come easily to her, frequented with anxiety, sensitivity to criticism, writer’s block, and bouts of depression. Without husband Leonard, I doubt she’d have pulled off her prodigious achievement.

The Diary serves largely as her workbook of creative struggle—getting things right, the interplay of new formulations, the unleashing of her interiority.

The Diary catalogues books she’s reading and plans to read. It teems with recall of literary and artist luminaries she knew intimately, many associated with the Bloomsbury Group to which she belonged—Strachey, Forster, Keynes, and her sister Vanessa Bell among them. Henry James, George Meredith and T. S. Eliot were frequent household guests.

She’s opinionated about several of her rivals, Joyce for instance. She adored Proust: “My great adventure is really Proust. Well—what remains to be written after that? You can’t go further than that.” And, of course, there were Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and not least, Dante, to whom she turned often.

She read Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, and Euripides in the original Greek and continued so throughout her life. I have her essay, “On Not Knowing Greek.”

Woolf spoke French fluently and read Proust, Gide, Flaubert and Maupassant in French. I hadn’t known until reading the Diary that she read Dante’s The Divine Comedy in Italian.

Largely self-educated apart from courses in the classics taken at the Women’s Department of King’s College (Women were excluded from Oxford and Cambridge), her intellectual achievements are extraordinary.

I introduced my students in Modern Novel to her “A Room of Their Own,” a feminist classic elaborating the interiority of female consciousness and exposing the barriers silencing women’s voices. And then, there was Mrs. Dalloway and To a Light House, now canon staples of English literature.

Nonetheless, in reading the Diary I found myriad passages that grieve me. She could be elitist, contemptuous of the working class; condescending towards blacks; antisemitic: “I do not like the Jewish voice: I do not like the Jewish laugh”; she felt uncomfortable in the company of the disabled.

In many ways, her views were not atypical of the mindset of the snobbish British upper class in the days of Empire.

Despite these faults, I try always to separate the artistry from the life; otherwise, there would be few artists to pursue, given the human proclivity to misbehave.

And so, over the years, I keep coming back to Woolf—her ability to recreate the inner life, to make universal the world of the quotidian; the beauty of her lyrical prose, her experimentations with narrative, her wrestlings with life’s frequent inequities.

Dare I Read a Nora Roberts Novel?

Parodying T. S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock, I ask, Dare I read a Nora Roberts novel?

I ask this after coming upon Lulu Garcia-Narraro’s NYT interview with the author (November 19, 2023). Now 75 and still writing, Roberts indisputably reigns the queen of today’s romance genre, authoring some 250 novels, 224 of them making the NYT best seller list, and half a billion copies sold.

Roberts isn’t into harlequin narratives, her female characters resolute, resilient, independent women who may enjoy the company of men, but not their dominance.

Often fighting against the odds in a patriarchal world, they exemplify courage, daring and resourcefulness. They aren’t perfect, but this lends to their plausibility.

Feminists have criticized her for her preoccupation with romantic relationships, but Roberts, a self-declared feminist, sees nothing wrong in a partnership of equals: “Whether it’s a man or another woman, it’s someone you love that you build a life with,” Roberts says.

In real time, Roberts is politically engaged. She is incensed with frenzied book banning. Eight of her own books have been removed from shelves.

I remain conflicted. Do I want to enter a genre of preeminent feminine sensibility where in real life I may be resented as an intruder?

Then, too, I’ve always been suspicious of prolific novelists who seem to write effortlessly with sales in the millions. But then there was the Victorian Anthony Trollope, who could flush out a novel on a train ride, composing forty-seven of them, along with short stories and essays. Today, his books, celebrated as canonical, are admired and studied for their political and social insights.Genre writers, nonetheless, don’t win or get nominated for the literary awards that matter to the Academy, e.g., the Booker, National Book Award, Pulitzer, and Nobel prizes.

It’s grievously unfair, the line between the literary and the popular often porous. Take science fiction, for example, and writers like Wells, Huxley, Bradbury and Clarke. I think their prescience and literary acumen quite stunning. And yet they and their cohorts haven’t secured any of these prestigious awards, apart from two exceptions, science fiction and fantasy writer Ursula Le Quin for her YA novel The Farthest Shore (1973) and the PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the short story {2002). Le Quin was a fierce opponent of genre discrimination.

The other exception is Margaret Atwood, winning a Booker in 2000 for her Blind Assassin (2019) and in 2018, the Golden Booker for her dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, selected as the best Booker in fifty years.

I find this frequent condescension toward genre writers as faulty as it is snooty. It bothers Roberts, who now simply defines herself as a novelist.

But returning to the romance genre, the classical exemplum is surely George Eliot, whose Middlemarch excels in its delineation of relationships fulfilling or frustrating the human longing, not only for reciprocal love, but to be heard understood and free to pursue one’s authenticity.

I’ve read Roberts excerpts. She writes a nimble and witty prose.

Writing often clarifies things for me. Yes, I’ll dare to read a Roberts novel, but with this caveat—perhaps just one novel for now, knowing so many vibrant books, fiction and non-fiction, that stretch the mind, I still have yet to read.

rj

Reading Told Me I Belonged


It’s important we find time in a busy world to pursue what gives us joy.

Over a lifetime, it’s been growing flowers and hostas, studying languages, reading and writing. Arthritis has ended my gardening days, but those other interests compel me still, especially the reading of books that stretch my mind, grant me new awareness, and open unanticipated conversations.

I discovered reading early, resorting as a youngster to the Montgomery Street library—it’s still there—to escape Philly’s sultry summer streets, foreclosing on a boredom that promised mischief.

Reading became another world, generating deliverance from what might have become a narrow mindset, igniting new vistas redolent with expectation, though often tinctured with youth’s unbridled idealism

Favorite writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald, taught me “that is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.”

Ever since, I’ve been all in.

rj

Banning Books: An American Tradition

America has a stubborn tradition of banning books. The First Amendment may guarantee free speech, but we’ve never stopped trying to police it.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Ulysses were once blacklisted. More recently, schools have targeted Harry Potter, The Bluest Eye, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Kite Runner—and, with no sense of irony, 1984.

This isn’t new. Aristophanes’ 2,500 year-old comedy Lysistrata, in which women withhold sex to end war, was banned here from 1873 until 1954 under the Comstock laws. The crime? Mailing “lewd” material.

Easy to blame the Right. But the Left has been just as eager to censor.

In California, a liberal bastion, To Kill a Mockingbird was pulled from schools for its depiction of racism.

Progressives mirror conservative groups like Moms for Liberty. Campaigns such as We Need Diverse Books and Disrupt Texts demand the removal of classics: Huckleberry Finn for racial slurs, To Kill a Mockingbird _for “white savior themes,” Little House on the Prairie for its portrayal of Indigenous and Black people. Even Harry Potter  is shunned—not for witchcraft this time, but for J.K. Rowling’s views on gender.

The real answer isn’t banning. It’s conversation.

Read the books. Put them in context. Argue about them. That’s how we confront uncomfortable truths—and maybe even learn something from them.

rj

Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others: A Review

Deborah Feingold/Corbis via Getty Images) Susan Sontag (Photo by Deborah


Taking photos is now so universally accessible via our smartphones that we’re likely to take it for granted.

Until recently, it required buying a dedicated camera, inserting a film roll, setting the lens, then waiting—perhaps a week or more—to see the results of a distant lab.

I think of photos as a freeze on time, lovers as Keats reminded us, still fresh in their youth; sons and daughters, children still; parents and grandparents as we remember them. But photos, buttressed with videos, do even more, providing a window on what ails us.

Susan Sontag in her splendid book I’ve just read, Regarding the Pain of Others, argues that the visual not only helps us remember, but sensitizes us to the plight of those who acutely suffer while we warm ourselves under the blankets on cold winter nights, our bellies full. A moralist and cultural critic, she takes on the scourge of war’s ravages, a predominantly male enterprise it seems, unleashing the human capacity to inflict limitless evil, often with impunity.

Photography reminds us of Hiroshima and Nagasaki viewed aerially following their atom bomb devastations, incinerating 200,000 civilians within minutes; of emaciated prisoners released from Nazi death camps, the residue of 12 million exterminated; of ethnic strife in Bosnia in 1992, culminating in Srebrenica; of the dead and dying of 9/11; the machete butchering, killing 500,000 Tutsis in Rwanda. We cannot afford to let their horrors be relegated to the dumpsters of oblivion.

I remember Vietnam and My Lai (1968) and the American massacre of 500 villagers, the burning of their village, that consolidated American resistance to a needless, barbarous conflict consuming 64000 allied lives and 900,000 Vietnamese, ending a president’s re-election bid. Without film crews, we would have lacked evidence, much like when unleashed Soviet troops raped 130,000 German women after taking Berlin.

The trail is long. Much of Sontag’s narrative isn’t pleasurable reading to be sure, but without photography’s capability for exactitude, man’s inhumanity will never be addressed and perhaps, though distantly, vanish like slavery from the human repertoire. It is our duty not to turn aside, but remember and, beyond acknowledgement, understand war’s antecedents and protest their repetition.

I mourn Sontag’s passing from us in her prime—her cerebral introspection of what ails us, delivered always with compassion and unceasing hope that we can and will do better.

After reading her book, I thought of Palestinians in the Gaza strip, desperate for food, killed daily, many of them women and children. As I write, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) informs us that 900 Palestinians seeking food have been killed since mid-May. Unlike other conflicts, the foreign press has been banned from access to Gaza.

I think, too, of Putin’s accelerated nightly aerial assaults, on Ukraine, targeting civilian infrastructures: hospitals, ambulances, apartment buildings, shopping malls and, by day, farmers plowing their fields.

Photography offers documentation. Sontag was right: without photography, we are denied access to the truth and the scourge of war is assured its continuence.

—rj





Remembering Edmund White (1940-2025)

I’ve just come off reading Edmund White’s 2005 New Yorker essay, “The Women I Dated as I Tried to go Straight.”

Whatever your sexual orientation, reading Edmund White’s essay is worth your time—the unchecked wit; the metaphoric grace; the vivid, often astonishing anecdotes; the shimmering brilliance that makes experience palpable. Like essayists Orwell, Woolf, or Sontag, he has that rare ability to make you pause, reassess, change course.

Above all, there’s his candor.

This morning I was heartened to see The New York Review of Books commemorating him by featuring six of his essays, written for them over the years.

Just a few weeks ago, June 3, 2025, White slipped into eternity. He had long faced declining health: a heart attack, a stroke, and his decades-long reckoning with HIV. He was 85.

I read somewhere that Vladimir Nobokov, that other preeminent prose prodigy, admired White’s literary acumen, so much like his own. What writer wouldn’t relish Nabokov’s compliment, bestowed upon so few.

White was the high priest of gay literature, writing prolifically on its themes and torments, addressing with fearless clarity the culture’s imposed shackles of shame.

Across five decades, he authored thirty books—novels, memoirs, plays, hundreds of essays, many of them distilling the gay journey into a language of self-acceptance and grace.

A devoted Francophile, he spent nearly twenty years in France, where he would write his erudite The Flâneur and Genet: A Biography.  

In A Boy’s Own Story, a blend of fiction and autobiography, White chronicles the interior landscape of a young gay man confronting the burden of identity.

His 2005 autobiography, My Lives, unflinchingly narrates his first 65 years.

With the essay “The Women I Dated as I Tried to Go Straight,” White reflects on his early sense of same-sex desire, repressed under the weight of cultural condemnation: “In the past, when homosexuality was still considered shameful, I was slow to confess my desires to anyone.”

To atone for those hidden desires, “the fire in the crotch,” White dated women—many drawn to his intellect, good looks, and sensitivity. Empathy pervades his essay as he recalls these women, acknowledging the structural inequities they faced, confronted with a patriarchal hegemony: “I came to think of men as monsters with absolute power, the darlings of the Western world, and of women as their unfortunate victims.…This was what distinguished me from the straight men I knew, who, it seemed, were united in their ability to treat women badly and then laugh it off.”

White’s sympathy undoubtedly owes its genesis to the gay community’s own troubled quest for validation.

I found his retrospective vignettes of women moving, bringing alive each woman’s individuality in vivid, lyrical prose replete with introspective finesse:

Sally was celebrated for her big breasts and her face, which was that of the Apollo Belvedere—bow-shaped lips, a long, straight nose, a wide, domed brow, an ensemble that was classical and noble and oddly mature. She looked like a woman, a grownup woman, not a raddled adolescent. She said little, but she smiled dreamily with veiled eyes. Her smile had a way of lingering two beats too long, after the conversation had moved on to a different mood. Was she lost in her own thoughts and not paying attention? Had someone told her that she was at her best when she smiled? She never guffawed or squealed or made violent movements, though catty classmates told me that when boys weren’t around she was a real sow, rolling on the floor, drinking beer, and giggling with the other girls at obscene speculations about penises they had known or divined through Speedos.

He thinks that had he not been gay, he might have fulfilled their myriad longings: “Unhappy women! How many of them I’ve known. Sniffling or drinking with big reproachful eyes, silent or complaining, violent or depressed—a whole tribe of unhappy women have always surrounded me.”

For most of my life I’ve been a shoulder to cry on, and all of that time I’ve wished I could do more to ease the pain of the women in my life. If I were straight, I could have married one of them. I would have known how to comfort her. I would have worked hard to provide her with the security and even the luxury she required. I would never have run off with another woman. I would have been as sensitive to her needs as a sister, as protective as a father. And I would always have told her where I was going and exactly when I’d be coming home. This was what distinguished me from the straight men I knew, who, it seemed, were united in their ability to treat women badly and then laugh it off.

White remembers falling in love with fellow schoolmate Marilyn Monroe, a recollection tender and adolescent, full of longing and projection:

In the middle of my sophomore year, I was sent to boarding school, at the Cranbrook School for boys, in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where I fell in love with Marilyn Monroe. I knew that she was the most beautiful woman in the world, and yet she was in pain, in need. She was unhappy. I believed that I could help her. My fantasies weren’t specific as to what I would actually say to her or do for her. I never got beyond her little smiles of love and recognition, which burned with a brighter and brighter glow.

My favorite daydream was that she’d come with me to my senior prom. All the other guys would be astonished: the toad, Eddie White, was really a prince. I pictured her on my arm, her sequinned gown glittering, her voluptuous body undulating as we entered the dining hall, which had been transformed by crêpe paper into a ballroom. It was like a mermaid’s visitation. The thin boys with their brush cuts and spotty faces, their dinner jackets and burgundy cummerbunds with matching bow ties, would gape at us. No way, man, the biggest dweeb of them all with . . . Marilyn!

Fortunately, not all the women in his life were unhappy. Some lived fulfilled lives outside a dependency on men, easing his guilt:

What I loved about Anne and Marilyn {another Marilyn}, even Alice, Sally, and Gretchen—was that they weren’t unhappy. Marilyn wanted nothing from me but my friendship, and she has it still.

Because she and the others I’ve written about here were the first women I knew who weren’t unhappy, who never once made me feel guilty, they showed me the way to friendship with women. 

White’s essay emerges a paean to women across the years who were there for him in the hard places, lending solace and fostering courage.

I will miss Edmund White keenly, a voice in the wilderness.

—rj

 

Reading Ove Knausgaard at 4 AM: A Friend to See Me Through the Night

I woke up at 4 a.m. this morning, dawn’s light still absent, an annoying habit of mine, worsened by turning-in too late, despite ardent resolve to do better. God knows, I need more than four hours of sleep, and I pay for it, drifting off repeatedly as day unfolds.

To cope, I try teasing myself back to slumber—whatever works—like counting up to 100 in Italian, gleaned from daily Italian lessons. Or better, groping for the iPad beside me to resume my daylight read, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s massive My Struggle, despite blue light barriers to sleeping well.

I read a lot—mainly books I often list in Brimmings each New Year’s Day. Right now, I’m deep into Book Two of My Struggle, part of a six-volume series totaling nearly 3,600 pages—or three times the length of War and Peace.  In contemporary writing, only Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, at roughly 2,000 pages, come close in length. (Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past runs to 3000 pages across seven volumes.)

Overall, Book Two details Knausgaard’s move to Sweden, his family life with second wife, Linda, and their three children; the tensions arising from his obligations to family life and dedication to writing:

Now I had everything I had dreamed of having since I was a teenager: a family, a wife, children—yet none of it made me happy. On the contrary, I was constantly on the verge of tears, I was always angry, always tired.”

The love I had for Linda was not stable and warm but consuming and often destructive.

I’m attempting all six volumes. I wonder how many have done this and for what reasons. My guess is very few have climbed the mountain, but I’m liking the climb.

In his penchant for recalling past event, interspersed with personal reflection narrated over several volumes, Knausgaard has often been compared with Marcel Proust.

While his prose may lack Proust’s lyricism, it compensates with acute playback of places lived, voices heard, and life’s everyday ironies. It’s like he’s sitting across from you, filling the room, talking to you directly.

Though he’s won several Scandinavian literary awards, he’s yet to take home a prestigious International Booker translation prize or Nobel.

Writing in Norwegian hasn’t helped. There are only 5.5 million Norwegians. It’s the uphill climb all non-English writers face in an industry still dominated by native Anglophones.  And so I commend  The New York Review of Books for its continued effort to revive works originally not written in English.

Some critics think Knausgaard narcissistic for his self-focus, but they forget: he’s writing memoir. Anyway, when is writing anything but a quest to be heard or validated? I think they’re being simplistic.

In Norway, readers were shocked at Knausgaard’s inclusion of family and friends, names unchanged, intimate details not held back. An uncle threatened to sue and former wife, Linda, suffered mental distress, requiring therapy.

Knausgaard can make anyone uncomfortable. He doesn’t hold back about life’s often brutal truths. But to me, that’s his strength. I like writers who unflinchingly deliver human experience.

Knausgaard writes what’s known as autofiction, a blurring of the distinction between the factual and the fictional. Memory, subject to filtering, is unreliable. We cannot even say we fully know ourselves. By this yardstick, even autobiography becomes an act of arbitrary inventory—selecting, omitting, fabricating—and, hence, approximates fiction, or as Knausgaard puts it, memory “is not a reliable quantity in life” as it  “doesn’t  prioritise the truth, but rather self-interest.”

I admire his directness and minute detail. I revel in his feel for nature’s splendors, vignettes of people and their eccentricities, the fiery fever of first love; thoughts on today’s politics, obsessions imposing self-censure, the ennui often accompanying contemporary existence, and not least, the myriad burdens of the writer’s life.

I always longed to be away from it. So the life I led was not my own. I tried to make it mine, this was my struggle, because of course I wanted it, but I failed, the longing for something else undermined all my efforts.

The foregoing passage helps explain the series title, My Struggle, with its provocative echoes of Hitler’s Mein Kampf.  Knausgaard’s struggle, however, is an existential one—that of locating oneself in a world often hostile to individuality, of finding balance between writing and family, each under pressure of cultural conformity.

…perhaps it was the prefabricated nature of the days in this world I was reacting to, the rails of routine we followed, which made everything so predictable that we had to invest in entertainment to feel any hint of intensity?

Knausgaard’s critique of cultural homogenization, creeping across Europe like some unchecked fungus, especially resonates with me:

There was the revulsion I felt based on the sameness that was spreading through the world and making everything smaller? If you traveled through Norway now you saw the same everywhere. The same roads, the same houses, the same gas stations, the same shops. As late as the sixties you could see how local culture changed as you drove through Gudbrandsdalen, for example, the strange black timber buildings, so pure and somber, which were now encapsulated as small museums in a culture that was no different from the one you had left or the one you were going to. And Europe, which was merging more and more into one large, homogeneous country. The same, the same, everything was the same.

Thoughts arise of  a visit to Moscow’s Red Square with my students, of fast-food chains—TGI Friday’s, McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, KFC—littering its periphery, exporting America’s consumer culture and eroding local identity; memories of a journey to France—a student lamenting time and money visiting Europe, only to find blue jeans, blaring American music, and global brands echoing home.

There ‘s a humility clinging to Knausgaard’s narrative, a confessed reticence to assert himself in a society indifferent and perhaps judgmental in its appraisal of those differing from the norm:

I subordinated myself, almost to the verge of self-effacement; some uncontrollable internal mechanism caused me to put their thoughts and opinions before mine.

I saw myself as the weak, trammeled man I was, who lived his life in the world of words.

My Struggle abounds in quotable reflections that I hasten to underscore like this hauntingly melancholic passage, evoking a past where dignity, nature, and artistry coexisted—however harsh the drawbacks of its era:

…if there was a world I turned to in my mind, it was that of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with its enormous forests, its sailing ships and horse-drawn carts, its windmills and castles, its monasteries and small towns, its painters and thinkers, explorers and inventors, priests and drugstores. What would it have been like to live in a world where everything was made from the power of your hands, the wind, or the water? What would it have been like to live in a world where the American Indians still lived their lives in peace? Where that life was an actual possibility? Where Africa was unconquered? Where darkness came with the sunset and light with the sunrise? Where there were too few humans and their tools were too rudimentary to have any effect on animal stocks, let alone wipe them out? Where you could not travel from one place to another without exerting yourself, and a comfortable life was something only the rich could afford, where the sea was full of whales, the forests full of bears and wolves, and there were still countries that were so alien no adventure story could do them justice, such as China, to which a voyage not only took several months and was the prerogative of only a tiny minority of sailors and traders, but was also fraught with danger. Admittedly, that world was rough and wretched, filthy and ravaged with sickness, drunken and ignorant, full of pain, low life expectancy and rampant superstition, but it produced the greatest writer, Shakespeare, the greatest painter, Rembrandt, the greatest scientist, Newton, all still unsurpassed in their fields, and how can it be that this period achieved this wealth? Was it because death was closer and life was starker as a result? Who knows?

Knausgaard has this way of arresting you mid-thought and making you reassess your values.

Book 2  emphasizes the fissure between the expected of you and living your true self. For writers living in a world of the utilitarian with its compromises, the challenge of finding equilibrium can be daunting :

To write is to carve a path through the wilderness. It is to find something that has not been said before, something you can believe in, something that gives meaning to your life.

Again, the unstinting honesty, whether commenting on contemporary mores, engaging in philosophic reflection, or offering informed opinion separating the trivial from the significant.

They say Book 6, 1000 pages long, is steep in philosophical reflection. Whatever, I look forward to the climb.

The New Yorker critic James Wood praises Knausgaard’s ability to extract the profound from the mundane as “hypnotically compelling.”

The Atlantic’s William Deresiewicz applauds Knausgaard’s philosophical depth as a “contemporary Proustian endeavor.”

Life is never simple for Knausgaard in his dense weave of mystery and randomness, of inheritance and free will, of human frailty and moral striving..
I find that compelling.

And so, even when I awake, the silent stars my sole companions, I find pleasure in his company, a friend to see me through the night.

–rj

 

An Owl’s Story: Carl Safina’s Alfie and Me

There exist those books you wish wouldn’t end. Carl Safina’s Alfie and Me: What Owls Know and Humans Think was that kind of book for me.

I had read Safina’s excellent View from Lazy Point several years ago, impressed with its detailed oberservations of wildlife and an arctic indigenous community across four seasons. That same concern for indigenous well-being and the plight of animals in a changing world continue with Alfie and Me.

Safina, a widely published ecological author and Endowed Professor of Nature and Humanity at Stony Brook University, is an expert in marine biology and recipient of many honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship, sometimes dubbed “the genius grant.”

In all his writings, Safina’s focus is on how humans relate to nature, a theme manifestly central to Alfie and Me, chronicling the story of an orphaned Eastern screech owl found in Safina’s Long Island backyard in 2018. Over the course of eighteen months, Safina and his wife, Patricia, nurtured the owl—whom they named Alfie—until her eventual release, creating a rare, intimate portrait of interspecies connection and nature’s resilience.

Safina becomes nearly a helicopter parent, monitoring Alfie’s daily development, torn between fostering her independence and protecting her from the harsh realities of the wild: “… I knew—as she did not—the relative meaninglessness of a life without risks.” An estimated two thirds of young screech hours die shortly after leaving their parents’s nest.

I found myself anxious for Alfie’s survival. Would she learn to fly, to hunt, to mate? Could she survive storms, drought, and the many predators that lurk in her world?

Species survival today depends not only on healthy ecosystems, but increasingly on humans recognizing their relationship with nature as essential to mutual survival.

Safina criticizes Western philosophy for severing this connection, beginning with Plato’s split between the material and spiritual worlds—deeming the material inferior and ultimately fueling nature’s exploitation: “Plato and his followers were perhaps the first people to feel revulsion toward the world. By forever separating our material world from the realm of perfection, Plato propounded a stark dualist doctrine,” Safina says.

For Safina, “This might be the most consequential idea in the history of human thought, its implications almost literally Earth-shattering. Most fundamentally, we are left with: an existence at odds with itself.”

Descartes and Bacon subsequently embodied a modern mechanistic view of nature, oblivious to nature’s sanctity and evolutionary intelligence, leading to its objectification. “The great blindness of the West is to grope the world as inventory,” Safina writes.

In contrast, Safina draws richly from Eastern traditions, which emphasize the unity of all life and the reverence owed to the source from which we came. Although his book is replete with references to Hindu, Buddhist, and Taoist thought, he finds Confucianism especially compelling for its focus on relationships.

Safina also turns to Indigenous cultures as contemporary models of living in harmony with nature. Their ways often involve mindful observation and sustainable stewardship rooted in mutual respect: “For most of human history, Native peoples, more intimate with their existence than we with ours, perceived that Life and the cosmos are mainly relational,” Safina says.

Reading Alfie and Me, I couldn’t help but think of the estimated one billion birds projected to die globally in 2025. According to the Audubon Society, North America alone has lost 25% of its bird population since 1970—about 3 billion birds. Contributing factors include climate change, deforestation, pesticides, habitat destruction, urban structures, insect decline, and free-roaming cats.

Safina’s book appeared in 2023, or before the current avian flu outbreak, which over the past 18 months has led to the confirmed deaths of millions of wild birds in North America—many of them common backyard visitors. The virus has now reached poultry as well, despite the culling of over 166 million birds. A future in which birds no longer sing at sunrise, once unthinkable, now feels disturbingly plausible.

This avian decline is largely human-made, driven by an economy that prioritizes profit over preservation

Why write about birds, some might ask. Shouldn’t human needs come first?

Safina answers with the words of Catholic monk Thomas Merton: “Someone will say you worry about birds: why not worry about people? I worry about both birds and people. … It is all part of the same sickness, and it all hangs together.”

Alfie and Me is not only a poignant narrative about an orphaned owl, but also a powerful meditation on our shared existence, affirming Safina’s truth: “that no isolated separation is possible. We are participant members in one existence—of life, of the cosmos, of time.”

–rj

When the Shades Are Drawn: The Decline of Literary Reading

I’ve been an avid reader of cerebral Virginia Woolf for many years, enjoying not only her novels, but her highly polished essays such as “A Room of Her Own.” Thanks to the Yale Review Archives, I’ve just read “How Should One Read a Book?” (September 1, 2026). It was a different world then, absent of electronic media.

Today, reading is in sharp decline. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (February 2025), 33% of eighth graders lack basic reading skills, and only 14% of students read daily. Among adults, just 40% read a literary book.

This trend exacts a cost, as literature cultivates empathy and instills humane values. Active readers are more engaged in civic and cultural life. They contribute to their communities. In contrast, electronic media foster shorter attention spans and weaken intellectual skills (National Endowment for the Arts Assessment).

With AI increasingly doing our cognitive heavy lifting, our ability to think critically is further eroding.

If Woolf believed literature offered us a window into the world, today it seems the shades have been drawn.

—rj