by Jochen Szangolies

It’s no fun being sad. Indeed, great swaths of our culture seem aimed at fencing our little emotional gardens off against the intrusion of sadness, seeding them instead with what we think will germinate into little joys, grand hopes and profound happiness. ‘The pursuit of happiness’, after all, is enshrined in the American Declaration of Independence, and happiness economics is being touted as a balm for capitalism’s alienation of the working masses. The Kingdom of Bhutan tailors its governmental policies according to a ‘Gross National Happiness’-index, and yearly rankings of the World Happiness Report prompt breathless articles in the press asking what the Nordic countries do better than the rest of us. Clearly, we should strive for happiness, and where the weeds of sadness grow, uproot them and cast them out.

Yet, throughout my life, I have been drawn to the melancholia of sad songs, to a longing for I know not what, the gravity of overcast skies and rainy days. In a world that lionizes the pursuit of happiness, it’s easy to feel as if the strange comfort that sometimes hitches a ride with the oft-invoked ‘bittersweet’ nature of melancholia signals something deeply wrong with you, some malady that sets you at odds with the multitudes who, you’re given to understand, desire nothing so much as to be freed from the oppression of sadness, to emerge liberated into happiness.

I don’t think that’s right at all. Melancholia, to me, is a certain kind of surrender in the face of the unconquerable vastness of the world, and while that sounds negative at first, it at least holds the virtues of honesty and universality. Honesty, because the world really is vast and unconquerable, and you a spark caught up in its blaze, propelled upwards on the winds towards your eventual extinction. Universality, because so is everybody else. Read more »

Side of a very old railway carriage parked on a siding in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.

by Nils Peterson

On a small paper bag maybe from a bookstore, one side Romeo’s soliloquy, “But soft! What light from yonder window breaks?” On the other side, these words: “Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer’s wife. Their house was small, for the lumber to build it had to be carried by wagon many miles. There were four walls, a floor and a roof, which made one room; and this room contained a rusty looking cook stove, a cupboard for the dishes, a table, three of four chairs, and the beds. Uncle Henry and Aunt Em had a big bed in one corner, and Dorothy a little bed in another corner. There was no garret at all, and no cellar–except a small hole dug in the ground, called a cyclone cellar, where the family could go in case one of those great whirlwinds arose, mighty enough to crush any building in its path. It was reached by a trap-door in the middle of the floor, from which a ladder            the small, dark  hole. When Dorothy stood in the doo                 she        nothing but the great gray…”

The open spaces are where an illustration of the feet of the wicked witch sticking out from under the fallen house, intrudes upon the text. 

No wonder Oz looked so green. I read the book when I was a boy. That’s a lot of years ago. I had forgotten how bleak the opening of the book was. This is what you lose when you just remember the movie and not the text. Oh, yes, the opening of the movie was in black and white, but it was not this black and white. There are no farm hands, no Bert Lahr, Ray Bolger, or Jack Haley giving Uncle Henry a hand. Of course no running water or plumbing, therefore an outhouse. Dorothy likely is an orphan unless her parents had so many children they couldn’t take care of them all. Also, she was a young girl, not yet a teen. That’s why Judy Garland found the role uncomfortable to play. Her breasts had to be bound.  Read more »

by Derek Neal

I’ve recently started playing pickup basketball again. When I was younger, I played basketball all the time. At two or three years old, we had a toy hoop with a bright orange rim, white backboard, blue pole, and black base. It was, I believe, a “Little Tikes” brand hoop; I’ve just looked it up online, and my research seems to confirm this. In any case, I will now remember it this way—the vague memory I hold has solidified into one canonical version. But it might have been a different brand, the base of the hoop might have been a different color.

When we moved to a new house at four years old, my parents installed a hoop in the driveway. It could be raised to 10 feet, regulation size, or it could be lowered to 7.5 feet, allowing you to dunk. I played every day. Later my parents discovered that the neighborhood association didn’t allow for the installation of permanent basketball hoops with cement, but at this point it was too late. The basketball hoop is still there. I am 30 years old.

Some years later a full-size court was created along with a small park up the street from my house. We played 2 on 2, 3 on 3, or 5 on 5 full court if the group was big enough. Sometimes we just shot around or played horse. This location became known simply as “the courts,” plural even though there was only ever one. In addition to basketball, it also served other purposes. The park was accessible from two separate bike paths, which connected two different neighborhoods. If I was headed to the courts with the guys from my neighborhood, we could reasonably expect that the girls from the other neighborhood might be there as well. Read more »

by Terese Svoboda

What says grief to you? Probably not a sunlit meadow. What about the scent of too many lilies, a blank stone, netting over the eyes, an all-black outfit? So chic, all that black – but nothing says dead better than pavement. The premier Parisian color, it practically insists Dig Here. On the other hand, sympathy cards declare the overwhelming woodenness of my feelings, folded, with only the lick on the envelope possibly authentic. The thank you cards in response even come pre-printed. Few eulogies are delivered with the stamp of cynicism or irony that might authenticate individual mourning, as distinguished from the above puddle of saccharine responses. To soften the blows of grief, survivors pull linguistic veils over their brains, even unto the word itself, death. “Passing” replaces it, as if life were something given up bowels-first, completely ignoring the visceral start “death” gives the griever, feeling the dead suddenly present, which is instinctual grief,  really just a variation on mouse-  or snake-fear. What can you say back to grief?

You mount the pulpit and look over the heads of the grieving and see a bobbing white form afloat in the ether. Your job as eulogist is to conjure this ghost back to life by retelling the tangle of mishaps and crazy love and signature tics that made up the dead him or her or they. You’re very sad that you can’t go on forever cherishing this singularity because like sea foam, the details quickly disappear. To capture it temporarily, you create a story about the deceased in which good things happen, which will put him in whatever bed by means of your largesse, forgiveness, and perhaps exaggeration. You’re probably mourning yourself at the same time anyway – this could happen to me! That bit of self-administered horror provides a little thrill, mid-sadness, and makes the life of the dead you mourn more poignant. Haunting even.

When my mother died, the officiator said no speeches were allowed either at the funeral or the viewing.  He wanted total control, no messy emotions. No one should get carried away except the dead. The only occasion left for us to say anything was over cookies and milk in the church basement, not conducive to the kind of toasts that might make her sound as difficult as she was. What my dad wanted at his funeral was any rendition of “I’m a Coca Cola Cowboy” played loud and long on the organ. Although his service was held in a Catholic church,  we compromised with “Onward Christian Soldiers,” the tune he liked to sing while marching with his drip pole. Just telling you that cheers me up, signals my grief all over again. Read more »

by Rafaël Newman

I’ve been visiting Ontario this month. Which is a wildly non-specific thing to say, since the province of Ontario, though only the second largest of Canada’s constituent divisions, boasts a surface area greater than those of Germany and Ukraine combined. But while I would normally designate as my destination the city in Ontario in which I mean to stay during my annual visit to my home and native land—as for instance Toronto, the provincial capital, where I went to high school and university; or Kingston, once Canada’s Scottish-Gothic capital, where my brother has settled with his family—the particular reason for this year’s sojourn, which began with a brief visit to relatives in Montreal, was my niece’s wedding, on August 12, celebrated at her fiancé’s family home in Frankford, with guests put up in the towns surrounding that hamlet on the River Trent, in Hastings County, the second largest of Ontario’s 22 “upper-tier” administrative divisions. Which all feels to me quite uncannily foreign, not to say unutterably vague. Hence simply: I’ve been visiting Ontario this month.

Ontario at large, small-town Ontario, Ontario beyond “the six,” Toronto without its vast suburbs, so-called for its prestigious area code, feels foreign to me because it first came to my attention, when I was around eight years old, as a vast, unknowable hinterland, the beginning of Canada proper, somewhere to the west of the province of Quebec, whence my entire immediate family hales—more to the point, to the west of the city of Montreal, where I was born, and which seemed to me, in my early years, the only real place in the country: Montreal, with its distinctive rows of duplexes, its outdoor staircases, its smoked meat sandwiches, its bagels, its maple-sugar holidays and its antiquated French dialect. “Ontario,” generally, had no culture, no flavor, no flair; it was too Anglo, too American, too goyish. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Untitled, July 2020.

Digital photograph.

by Jeroen Bouterse

The cover of Martha Nussbaum’s Justice for Animals (2023) shows a humpback whale breaching: a magnificent sight, intended to evoke both respect for the animal’s dignity, and interest in its particular forms of behavior. Here is a creature which has moral standing, without being a direct mirror of our human selves.

It is more than mere illustration of the argument. Nussbaum consciously relies on pathos as well as on philosophical reasoning: she announces from the outset that she seeks to awaken wonder and compassion in us with respect to our fellow animals, and productive outrage about how we treat them (9). No objection so far; our treatment of animals is, in many contexts (factory farming in particular), not at heart a philosophical issue, in the sense that there are no tenable metaphysical, anthropological, or ethical theories that can take a serious shot at justifying it. It is an issue that requires attention more than it requires deep or subtle thought.

This notwithstanding, Nussbaum also believes she has something to contribute on the theoretical side: several chapters of Justice for Animals are devoted to the case that her Capabilities Approach (CA) is more suitable than several alternatives in clarifying why and in what sense animals deserve moral consideration. The three alternatives she rejects are:

1. That animals matter because they are like us (and to the extent that they are like us);
2. the utilitarian perspective, that animals can experience suffering and pleasure, and this always counts (i.e. utilitarianism);
3. the Kantian perspective, that animals, in pursuing goods, reveal themselves to be sources of value.

Of these three, she says the third (represented by Christine Korsgaard) is the closest to her own position, and her qualms about it are more metaphysical than ethical. The CA she herself defends is “about giving striving creatures a chance to flourish” (81). A theory originally centered around the capabilities of humans, it applies to animals because they are striving creatures, too. Though they strive for different things and this needs to be considered, there happen to be a lot of similarities: humans and other animals all strive for life, for instance, and for health, bodily integrity, and the use of our senses.

Is this indeed better than utilitarianism? Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Gus Mitchell

The idea for this essay came not just from Thoreau, but from a conversation between Professors Robert Pogue Harrison and Andrea Nightingale of Stanford University. That conversation can be heard here. I gratefully recommend it to everyone.

1. Sometime “early in ‘46” Henry David Thoreau sets out to measure the depth of a pond. He is at the end of his first year at the cabin in the woods. 

2. Winter ice still covers the water. Thoreau uses only a “compass and chain and sounding line” to make his investigations. Walden – “that truly illusive medium” – is said to have no bottom. Perhaps it reaches clean through the centre of the earth to the other side; some Concordians have lie on its bank, fancying the source of the Styx opening from below.

3. “Be it life or death”, he writes early in Walden, “we crave only reality.” And morality, philosophy, imagination itself are all seeded and cultivated in observation and participation of the natural world, the true face of which is “wildness.”

4. The incuriosity of his fellow Concordians bothers Thoreau. He does what nobody else has thought to do with Walden Pond: “taking the trouble to sound it.” It’s done “easily, with a cod-line and a stone weighing about a pound and a half.” Being able to “tell accurately when the stone left the bottom, by having to pull so much harder before the water got underneath to help me.” He ends up measuring the depth of the pond, “a reasonably tight bottom, at a not unreasonable, though at an unusual, depth,” as 102 feet (adjusted to 107 feet once the water-level rises in Spring).

5. These experiments generate a host of hypotheses. Thoreau maps carefully, putting down soundings – “more than a hundred in all.” He wonders about larger, universal laws through which the depth of bodies of water might be inducted. He finds the intersecting lengthwise and breadthwise lines on his map meet at exactly the point of greatest depth in the map’s centre. From this, he moves to speculation on “the deepest part of the ocean as well as of a pond or puddle.” And might these rules apply to the height of mountains, as well as to the depth of valleys?

6. This is the concluding set piece Walden – a book made of set pieces – each one illustrating some aspect of the “truth” of which Thoreau has become “convinced.” He is a man both deeply practical and deeply extravagant. Read more »

Self-portrait by reflection in the window of a restaurant in Brixen, South Tyrol.

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

Dear Peridot Child,

Cupped by mountains, you are thirty-two-something degrees North in latitude. You are of raw seasons, placed as a story within a story, a fledgeling in the rorschach nest of the imagination, the wordy part of the planet wound around your ears. You are your own battlefield, fired up to fifty degrees Celsius then doused by torrents of Monsoon rains. You are chrysalis and oak, simmer and lull. In 1947 you are coming to a world of wars.

Grains of dust in a new country are upturned mirrors. You are one, you are many: Thirty two million on the day of your birth.

You washed up alone, wishing for a desk with empty drawers, a green gem on your finger.

The Peridot is the gem of youthfulness

and wisdom

Khizer, the saint of lost travelers appears here:  by this roadside, in this market, on the balcony of this mosque. This means everywhere. He has an ancient white beard and youthful eyes. His robe is green. The city of your birth opens to thirteen gates, of which one is named after Khizer. Doves peck at prayer beads, broken and rolling across the threshold.

Peridot ranges from a springtime

 yellow green to a warm olive green.

There are ledgers under the yellow-green mustard fields. Names float to their owners and hang around their necks. There are tunnels that muralists paint, and underneath, a map of sacrifice.

The ancients believed that peridot can

inhibit enchantments,

At your birth the earth is a chessboard.

The peridot protects the wearer

 from evil spirits

We are  bricks on a sheer veil.  By nightfall, the mirrors dissolve into a phoneme large enough to hold the day’s garden, its smallest tendril and dot.

It glows in the dark.

by William Benzon

Some years ago I went to a concert by the Gordys, a local group in Hoboken, New Jersey, that performs an eclectic mixture of folk, rock, and klezmer music. The performance had been an annual event and this was, I believe, the 11th or 12th such concert. The concert was held at 7 in the evening in Frank Sinatra Park, which is located on the Hudson River in full view of Manhattan.

I’d been to a previous Gordys concert two years ago and knew how it would go. In particular, I knew that there’d be lots of families with children and that, near the end of the concert, when they went into klezmer mode, there would be dancing. That’s what interested me this time, the dancing. I wanted to see what the kids did.

I had my camera with me and took a number of pictures. Since I had a particular interest in young children I paid close attention to what a half-dozen or so of them were doing for a nine-minute stretch during the evening. At one point I noticed that one boy seemed a bit distressed for no reason that I could discern. When I had returned home and began rendering the photos on my computer I was again struck by that little guy and came up with a story about what was going on. Here’s that I figured out.

First I’ll say just a little more about the Gordys. Then I present a run of photos with descriptive comments. I conclude with a bit of thinking. Read more »

by Bill Murray

With earth set on a slow rolling boil through the rest of the summer, now might be a good time to mentally transport oneself to the cold. How’s about a winter weather sailor’s tale?

St. John’s, Newfoundland and the Grand Banks

People feel pain but too often fail to appreciate its absence. There are solid, evolutionary, survival-dependent reasons to prioritize pain – flee that sabre-toothed tiger, and fast! – but how much fuller life would be if we could celebrate time spent pain free. And what do you know, here is an island full of people who do just that. Welcome to “The Rock.”

Newfoundland marches to the beat of its own drummer, or at least to the ticking of its own clock. An hour and a half ahead of the U.S. east coast, the island they call “The Rock” is an island alone. No one shares Newfoundland Standard Time, which is a half hour ahead of the rest of Atlantic Canada and a half hour behind the nearby French territory of Saint-Pierre et Miquelon.

At 400,000 square kilometers, Newfoundland and Labrador comprise a province triple the size of the other Canadian maritime provinces of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island combined. Newfoundland is the sixteenth largest island in the world, larger than Iceland, or Cuba. Read more »

by Tim Sommers

Judges judge. The way to tell that someone is a judge, as opposed to a legislator, is to examine whether the judge judges actual ongoing controversies between particular people who have incurred, or will incur, specific harms – or not. In that sense, the difference between legislating and judging is locus standi – or “standing.” Article III of the U.S. Constitution extends to the judicial branch of the US government only the power to decide “cases and controversies.” To seek a judicial remedy, one must demonstrate a sufficient connection to a harm to them personally that is a result of a law, or action, that is the subject of their case.

Civil Rights Activists were forced to commit civil disobedience, to openly break laws, and be punished for doing so, because “law testing” is (or, rather, was) not allowed. To have standing in cases where people of color were denied the right to be in certain spaces, someone of color had to go into and physically occupy those spaces, then face the legal, and often actual physical, peril that resulted. In other words, Civil Rights Activists were not allowed to challenge the Constitutionality of laws in an American court without standing. And they couldn’t get standing without breaking the (relevant) law.

But that’s all done with now. Now, you are free to pursue a case all the way up to the Supreme Court on the theory that hypothetically someone might one day break that law or merely disagree with it on policy or political grounds. This is what I mean by the death of standing. I’ll just give two examples from the last session of the Supreme Court. But there are other recent cases suggesting standing is no longer a thing. Read more »