As a child, I lived in a Pennsylvania town where, on hot summer nights, we would be clobbered by thunderstorms. These were not gentle light displays. They were explosions of fury that sizzled the sky. They made me feel like a cartoon character who’d stuck his head in a cannon.

The arrival of such a storm always sent my brothers and me into a terror. The air would slow and thicken, coiling in on itself. Far away, near Allentown, the sky would flicker. For a minute or two, the lights would pause, like maybe the storm had skirted the hills around us. Only then would it roll right over the Lehigh Valley, detonating over the roof of our house.

I wish I could say it was a delicious pleasure, sitting on our back porch in the blurry darkness, waiting for the first clap and lightning jolt. My parents seemed to think so. They were young, I now realize—not even forty—probably drinking an after-dinner cocktail, enjoying the cozy feel of the family as one, me and my brothers in our pajamas. The dog whimpering.

I’ve been reminded of this time a lot lately. I am not making light of this pandemic, one that will kill many thousands of people before it is brought under control, or the economic panic that is now scorching through markets. But the way it has unfolded, the deep variation in who finds it scary and who doesn’t, and how it seems perhaps far enough off—as I type this, that’ll change—it reminds me of those muggy summer nights.

If you are reading this and feeling afraid, this is just to say you are not alone. Panic is, of course, one of the great contagions of a contagion. But turning away from information feels, sometimes, equally alarming. What might happen while we’re not looking?

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Guy Davenport (Photo by Thomas Victor)

After leaving high school in tenth grade for Duke, studying at Oxford (where Tolkien’s tutoring bored him to death), and finishing a Ph.D. at Harvard on the incarcerated Ezra Pound, Guy Davenport took a job in Kentucky in 1961, far away from much of the culture he would go on to write about. Years later, when asked why he chose Kentucky, Davenport famously said: The farthest away and the highest pay.

From his remote seat in Lexington, Davenport produced some of the most astonishing prose ever written by an American: Hobbits, Picasso, the history of the Mediterranean, spy novels, John Ruskin’s life, and Wittgenstein’s last words all fall under his purview. As with so many of the greatest essayists (Montaigne their progenitor) the anecdotal, historical, factual, and mundane mix easily, lightly even, to reveal the depth of his insight.

Davenport’s best-known essay, “The Geography of the Imagination,” introduces us to such a rich and diverse imagination that we are forced to expand the limits of our maps. New countries emerge, spanning centuries and disparate continents. As he puts it at the very beginning of the essay:

The difference between the Parthenon and the World Trade Center, between a French wine glass and a German beer mug, between Bach and John Philip Sousa, between Sophocles and Shakespeare, between a bicycle and a horse, though explicable by historical moment, necessity, and destiny, is before all a difference of imagination.

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Robert Stone. Photo: © Greg Martin.

Robert Stone is one of the most powerful and enduring writers of the late twentieth century (also called sometimes the American Century), and in the latter aspect is now thought by many to have come to an ignominious end. Stone’s work chronicled both the peak and the decline of a great many aspects of U.S. world dominance, as practiced abroad and reflected at home. In recounting the struggles of the particular individuals who peopled his imagination, he also told us the story of our time. Stone was an artist, not a reformer, but he had a very unusual ability to engage his fiction with the most urgent social issues of his time and ours, while living in the midst of them, and to do so without artistic compromise.

When Stone mustered out of the navy in the late fifties, the United States had perhaps reached its zenith in terms of economic success and dominance, political hegemony worldwide, and a vibrant and vigorous culture, ripe for exportation in multiple embodiments: from serious literature and high art to B movies, pop music, and Coca-Cola. It seemed a national moment free of self-doubt—although a considerable dysphoria would soon begin to express itself, as the social upheavals of the sixties began. Stone, who did not begin the world from a position of privilege, was quicker than most to see the shadows cast by the rising American star. In his work, he would repeatedly portray those bright aspirations set off by a surrounding darkness that was likely in the end to devour them. Read More

Still from Elia Kazan’s Panic in the Streets (1950)

Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky… A pestilence isn’t a thing made to man’s measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away.

—Albert Camus, La peste (1947)

The plague that gave Albert Camus’s novel its title is the plague but it is also, as Stephen Spender put it in his 1948 New York Times review, a “Social Catastrophe.” In that sense, The Plague is a political allegory with a large cast of quasi-allegorical characters—the perfect prototype for a disaster movie. Camus started writing The Plague under German occupation. The novel was published in 1947 when he was thirty-four and already, thanks to The Stranger as well as his writing for the underground resistance newspaper Combat, a cultural icon—the Humphrey Bogart of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

French critics mostly read The Plague, which, after many deaths, ends by defining “plague” as “just life, no more than that,” as a metaphor for the human condition. It was also understood as an allegory of the German occupation, with France separated from the West—although the references to crematoria and concentration camps scattered throughout have intimations of something more. Read More

Covers of The East Village Other

As I pack the FedEx box addressed to the Interference Archive in Brooklyn, New York—a nonprofit study center for “objects created as part of social movements by the participants themselves: posters, flyers, publications, zines, t-shirts and buttons, audio recordings…”—I am holding a poster that says FUCK COMMUNISM and suddenly find myself in tears.

My collection of printed matter from the sixties and seventies has followed me across decades and miles, from East Coast to West. By packing these items off to this worthy repository in my native city, I am letting go of those miles, those years, and these fragile things on yellowing paper. “Imagine no possessions,” says John Lennon. “Does it spark joy?” says Marie Kondo. But this personal downsizing is more elemental than any kind of tidying up.

These items are handcrafted artifacts of the late twentieth century’s analog era—a road I followed, and in some small ways contributed to making. Now, in the early twenty-first century, that road tapers off into the digital ether, leading who knows where.

So I feel compelled to take one last look at a few of my treasures before sending these things off. Read More

Francisco Goya, El sueño de la razón produce monstruos, 1797–1798, etching and aquatint, 8 1/4″ x 6″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

—William Shakespeare,The Tempest

Sleep

I once read about someone who had a mirror installed above his bed for use at night. He wanted to see himself while he slept.

The thought is not as absurd as might appear to be at first glance. There is probably not one of us who has not tried at some point or another to catch hold of that exact moment when we fall asleep or to observe ourselves while in the state of sleep. In any event, I myself have attempted both these things many times. More than once I experimented with how I might be able to track the exact process of falling asleep: to accompany myself, as it were, following from behind, watching my own self slowly growing sleepy as I left a state of wakefulness. To watch it slowly lose its contours and turn into something about which I have almost no knowledge. The one thing I can say about this entity is that it certainly cannot refer to itself as “I.” The rest is just a kind of obscure feeling, something that would have a kind of floating, trembling, spongy substance, protruding and then holding back on itself. There were many times when I wished to lie in wait for it. Read More