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The Daily

August 19, 2019
The Big Picture

Fra Angelico’s Divine Emotion

By Cody Delistraty

The fifteenth-century Italian artist Fra Angelico invented emotional interiority in art; laid the stylistic groundwork for Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and Mark Rothko; and theorized a utopian world, one in which everything and everyone is ultimately linked.

Fra Angelico, The Crucifixion with Saints, 1441

In the summer of 1873, Henry James visited a former monastery on Piazza San Marco in Florence. Surrounded by a scattering of low-slung, washed-out government buildings and conical Tuscan cypresses, the church and convent were in what is still the city’s center. When James first entered the convent, he saw Fra Angelico’s The Crucifixion with Saints in the chapter room. A brightly colored, semicircle fresco about thirty feet wide, Crucifixion depicts Christ and the two thieves on either side of him, nailed to their crosses, as saints and witnesses grieve below. “I looked long,” James wrote. “One can hardly do otherwise.” As the author moved throughout what had then just become a museum, he felt a spiritual urge, even though he had rejected his Christian upbringing. “You may be as little of a formal Christian as Fra Angelico was much of one,” he wrote in Italian Hours. “You yet feel admonished by spiritual decency to let so yearning a view of the Christian story work its utmost will on you.” Even Angelico’s colors, he added, seem divinely infinite, “dissolved in tears that drop and drop, however softly, through all time.”

Earlier this summer, I visited the convent-museum. It is not difficult to get to—there’s a city bus stop in front—but tourists tend to leave it off their itineraries in favor of better-known cultural attractions like the Uffizi and the Duomo. In part, my reason for going was unrelated to art: a person of particular specialness to me went last summer, and I regretted not having gone with her. I wanted to see what she had seen, to stand where she had stood.

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August 16, 2019
This Week’s Reading

Staff Picks: Cranberries, Canzones, and Catharsis

By The Paris Review

Téa Obreht. Photo: Ilan Harel.

Many things will be said about Inland, Téa Obreht’s second novel. I can only hope to settle my tent with the believers. A Western as far as the eye can see, Inland starts with lickins and bounties and ends with them, too, teasing your sense of exploration like you’re home alone with the radio tuned to The Lone Ranger. But this is not The Lone Ranger; there are no heroes or, blessedly, “complexly wrought antiheroes.” Instead, reading Inland feels like a rare chance to read about people, history, and myth all at once without any part canceling out the others. The book is a marriage between some sort of Howard Zinn history lesson, E. L. Doctorow at his best, and the kind of murkily beautiful folktale that is so vivid in Obreht’s first novel, The Tiger’s Wife. I stayed up very late with Lurie, an outlaw with an improbable, unforgettable camel companion, and Nora, a homesteader with all the plagues, and felt the deep possibility of the impossible. It is a trick of the light that allows Obreht to introduce the sweet, downy Goatie (“Nobody could prove she was really a goat, and nobody could prove she was really a sheep”) while asking broad questions about American settlement, belonging, race, and undying denial of water scarcity. There are newspaper fights and gunfights and ghosts and romance, and I wish they’d all appeared earlier in the summer so I could tell the world THIS IS YOUR SUMMER READ. But in Inland, the past is present and will continue to be so into the fall and the next and the next. —Julia Berick Read More

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August 16, 2019
Arts & Culture

On Proverbs

By Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin’s membership card from the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Take, as a foundation, the image of women carrying full, heavy vessels on their heads without using their hands.

The rhythm in which they do this is what the proverb demonstrates.

A noli me tangere of experience speaks from the proverb.

And through this, the proverb declares its ability to transform experience into tradition. Read More

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August 16, 2019
Arts & Culture

The Real Pirates of the Caribbean

By Michael Scott Moore

Disneyland’s Pirates of the Caribbean ride

The Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland cast a profound, immersive spell on me as a boy, years before the movies existed. The raft floats past a fake Louisiana plantation, where no slaves are bought or sold but real people sit around white tablecloths in a restaurant my mother always said was too expensive. Banjo music, fireflies. Blue twilight on the bayou. A deceptive calm before the raft from the watery parish of “New Orleans Square” to some burning island in the Caribbean. The smell of chlorine.

I know more now about pirates than I did as a child: I was kidnapped and held hostage by a Somali pirate gang from early 2012 to late 2014. I’d made the mistake of traveling to Somalia to research a book. In 2005, when Somali pirates first hijacked a major vessel, they sparked a revival of an ancient crime that had lain dormant in the world, with a few exceptions, for almost two hundred years. The topic had riveted me then as a sign of historical breakdown, a fascinating old-new phenomenon.

Now, more or less recovered, back in California, I found the strange hokeyness of that Disney ride tugging at my memory. So I drove to Anaheim one recent morning and floated through the chlorine canals. We used to wait hours in that snaking line, when I was a boy, for fifteen minutes of dark fascination. But now, the wild interior world, with its animatronic drunkards and growling pirate captains, its blade-killed skeletons on piles of glittering jewels, left me empty. “Ye come seekin’ adventure and salty old pirates, eh?” said a talking skull. “Sure, you come to the proper place. But keep a weather eye open, mates—”

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August 15, 2019
Correspondence

Three Letters from Switzerland

By Zelda Fitzgerald

Between June 1930 and August 1931, after a series of mental health episodes had whittled away at her career, her marriage, and her overall well-being, Zelda Fitzgerald was a patient at Les Rives de Prangins, a clinic in Nyon, Switzerland, where she wasn’t allowed visitors until her treatment had been established. The experience, as one could imagine, was tremendously isolating: once at the center of a lively and glamorous scene, she now found herself utterly alone with her thoughts. Her husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald, sent short notes and flowers every other day. She wrote long letters in reply, tracing the contours of her mind, expressing both love for and frustration with Scott, and detailing, in luscious, iridescent prose, the nonevents of her days. Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda collects more than three hundred of the couple’s letters to each other. Three of Zelda’s letters from Les Rives de Prangins—carefully transcribed with an eye for accuracy, misspellings and all—appear below.

Zelda Fitzgerald. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

[Fall 1930]

Dearest, my Darling—

Living is cold and technical without you, a death mask of itself.

At seven o:clock I had a bath but you were not in the next room to make it a baptisme of all I was thinking.

At eight o:clock I went to gymnastics but you were not there to turn moving into a harvesting of breezes.

At nine o:clock I went to the tissage and an old man in a white stock [smock?] chanted incantations but you were not there to make his imploring voice seem religious.

At noon I played bridge and watched Dr. Forels profile dissecting the sky, contre jour— Read More

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August 15, 2019
Happily

Rumple. Stilt. And Skin.

By Sabrina Orah Mark

Sabrina Orah Mark’s monthly column, Happily, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood.

“I hope you’re not afraid of mice,” my friend Amy says. I am in her car. She clicks open the glove box and a soft shock of fur and paper and string is gently exhaled. A mouse nest. “Hello there,” says Amy. The nest is mouse-less for now, but the mice will return to it when it gets cold. Eventually the mice will eat the guts of the car, a mechanic told her. But Amy won’t disturb the nest. “It’s their home,” she says, shutting the glove box back up, not before petting the little nest that seems so alive I swear it might be breathing.

For years I have kept René Magritte’s The Healer over my writing desk. The bronze man with an open birdcage for a chest. A cane in one hand, and a suitcase in the other. Limp and flee, limp and flee, limp and flee. He is faceless, and his cloak is open. There’s a hat on his nowhere head, and in place of his heart is a nook for doves to rest. Amy’s car moves me the way The Healer moves me. Both tell a story of kindness and protection and ruin. Both will give up their guts to keep the vulnerable ones safe. Months later, I am again in Amy’s car. The nest has doubled in size. The car, for now, still runs perfectly.

Fairy tales are crowded with saviors: the prince on his horse, fairies, gnomes, godmothers, and witches. They appear out of nowhere. They are hidden, like the subterranean and the aristocratic, and then out of a clearing they arrive to save, or erase, or enchant the day. They are not angels or saints. And they are not without flaws. In German, Rumpelstiltskin (or Rumpelstilzchen) means “little rattle ghost.” And it is Rumpelstiltskin who can, unlike the miller’s daughter, spin straw into gold. He saves her, and even adds an escape clause to their contract because he a compassionate gnome: if she guesses his name in three days she can keep her child. He spins like the storyteller spins. And as he spins I wonder whether the miller’s daughter ever hears the whir, whir, whir in his empty chest. For his work, he wants what is missing. He wants something alive. No, the miller’s daughter cannot hear the whir. She has cried herself soundly to sleep.

“I prefer a living creature,” says Rumpelstiltskin, “to all the treasures in the world.”

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