Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is one of the great records of 19th-century American consciousness. Ruminating on the concept of whiteness, Melville writes: Not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and more strange and far more portentous––why, as we have seen, it […]
“A line comes back to Marie-Laure from Jules Verne: Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.” ––All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr, pg. 328 “The rise of a popular press and […]
There are plenty of reasons why I should hate (or at least vehemently dislike) Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, but I was surprised by this novel’s ability to ingratiate itself to me despite propounding a set of perspectives and values that seem anathema to mine. I am neither a military enthusiast nor a scholar of […]
“The root of our morale is: ‘Everybody works, everybody fights.’ An M. I. doesn’t pull strings to get a soft, safe job; there aren’t any. Oh, a trooper will get away with what he can; any private with enough savvy to mark time to music can think up reasons why he should not clean compartments […]