Sublime

Madame Lapierre came from an upper-class, highly educated family. For her entire life she had lived in the sixteenth arrondissement, close to Passy, and I struggled to picture Father in those spaces. I imagined him sitting on the edge of a leather couch, or always staring out of a window, wanting to be elsewhere. I was relieved he wasn’t from Paris

There comes a time, H. L. Mencken said, when every normal man is tempted “to spit on his hands, haul up the black flag and begin slitting throats.”

“Lady Liberty,” said Wednesday. “Like so many of the gods that Americans hold dear, a foreigner. In this case, a Frenchwoman, although, in deference to American sensibilities, the French covered up her magnificent bosom on that statue they presented to New York. Liberty,” he continued, wrinkling his nose at the used condom that lay on the bottom fl

He warned the students against any effort by an editor to inject his own point of view into a writer’s work or to try to make him something other than what he is.

(Alexander Pope: “A little learning is a dangerous thing; / Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.”) Without appropriate medical experience, I couldn’t place myself in this new world of information, couldn’t find my spot on the Kaplan-Meier curve. I waited, expectantly, for my clinic visit.

It was a cinch, he thought, to be a leader of men. All you had to do was find a good story and tell it whenever the occasion arose.

In May 1941, Arthur Hays Sulzberger had spoken words to affirm that he and the American journalism establishment could not “turn our heads away from those who suffer.” He spoke of a need to confront the horrors of other people’s suffering in order to keep alive “spiritual values” to be once again embraced “when all this nightmare is over.” And yet,

New York City is a place where one can weep on the sidewalk in perfect privacy.