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Letters & Essays: V-Z

Letters & Essays of the Day

Women Sweeping

By Ishion Hutchinson

The woman in Édouard Vuillard’s Woman Sweeping, painted between 1899 and 1900, is Marie Michaud Vuillard, the painter’s mother. She is tall and stocky, her posture—that slight give of the back to the broom, without bending—marking a nonchalant style of carrying out a chore that routine hasn’t made any less complex. As Madame Vuillard sweeps, her gaze seems to fall on the broom or the floor. We might detect deference or humility in such a pose, but the turn of her head, her face ringed with a whitish glow as if lit by an inner ardor, conveys ease. We cannot see her gaze; we are given only the black slash of her eyelashes, which suggests an almost closed-eye intensity. Madame Vuillard is invested in her work and in herself, though perhaps in this moment she does allow herself to be mildly flattered by her painter son’s attention. The slash also conveys a quiet authority; you know that she need not look up to be heeded.

Milking the Moon

By Eugene Walter

Eugene Walter was one of those personages who turn up in life and leave, well, an indelible impression in which all personal characteristics—manner, speech, dress and so on—are memorably distinctive. The first time I saw him was in the spring of 1952—an apparition standing in the doorway of the cramped Paris Review office on the rue Garanciere. He was wearing a faded linen suit, the kind plantation owners traditionally wore, at least in the movies, set off with a white panama hat.

The Paris Review Sketchbook

By Eugene Walter

The Paris Review Eagle, or “the bird” as it was referred to, was designed by William Pène du Bois, the magazine’s art editor, in the spring of 1952. The symbolism is not difficult: an American eagle is carrying a pen: the French association is denoted by the helmet the bird is wearing—actually a Phrygian hat originally given a slave on his freedom in ancient times and which subsequently became the liberty cap or bonnet rouge worn by the French Revolutionists of the 19th Century. 

A War of Religion?

By Simone Weil

Men have often dreamed of putting an end to the problem of religion. It was the dream of Lucretius: “How many crimes have been inspired by religion!” (1). The Encyclopedists thought they had done it, and in fact their influence made itself felt in every country and across every continent.

And yet there is scarcely a human being now in the world who does not experience every day in his own inner life the reverberations of a great single religious drama that has the whole planet at its theatre.