On June 16, 1904, Leopold Bloom is making his way along the Liffey, and what carries him there is not his will but his feet. James Joyce’s original phrasing is, in a sense, devastating: “His slow feet walked him riverward.” Here, the feet do the walking, and he purely follows. Such tiny grammatical inversion between…
My grandmother would kneel in the garden for hours. She had a way of looking at things that made them seem more themselves—more real, more present, more full of meaning. She would pick up a single seed and hold it in her palm, turning it over, examining its shape, its colour, the tiny ridges on…
In my favorite memory of my Heart, she is making me tea in glass jars in her house with white white walls, lots of air and plants in glass jars on walls in Zanzibar. She flutters around in her kitchen grating ginger into a jar, throwing in dry hibiscus/rozela petals, some lemon, some honey. She…
The sun bounced off the dark blue water and the wind rustled the leaves of the palm trees – the day Inigo Philbrick was placed into handcuffs and taken to New York to face prosecution for fraud. Inigo, the swashbuckling and charming art dealer/ fraudster, happy to pay his penance for living the high-life for…
Literature has always been fascinated by morally questionable people. We follow murderers, liars, narcissists, tyrants, thieves, and cowards through hundreds of pages, sometimes knowing perfectly well that they are doing terrible things. Yet we continue reading. More strangely, we sometimes begin to understand them, sympathize with them, and even love them. This is one of…
Eugène Ionesco confessed that he wrote “Exit the King” in order to learn how to die. I keep returning to that confession and to this play while watching Europe rehearse the same lesson without appearing to learn it, mistaking spectacle for revolt and resignation for peace. In Ionesco’s play, King Bérenger moves through three stages…
Somewhere between the hills and the highway, we lost the ability to do nothing. Here’s what that’s costing us. There’s a stretch on the road from Bilaspur toward Shimla, just after the hairpin near the Gobind Sagar lake, where the phone signal dies without warning. One bar, flickering, gone. It happens every single time, and…
Before we fought them to wear belled collars and itchy sweaters, cats have always been curious outsiders. Whether it be their moon-eyed stares or the general aloofness of the local goth kid, cats became linked with witches through the imagery of old wise women sitting by the fire, their “familiars” curling up beside them to…
Are we lost or simply prevented from finding our way? The ‘Lost Generation,’ the cohort that came of age during World War I and the 1918 flu pandemic were not literally lost. These young adults who had experienced quite a lot of trauma before their lives had even begun were disoriented, cynical, and stripped of…
The term stream of consciousness can be defined as a narrative fiction technique that captures the awareness and consciousness of an individual character through a “flow of myriad impressions—visual, auditory, physical, associative, and subliminal.” This technique was coined by psychologist William James in 1890 and soon gave birth to the psychological novel that many recognize…