Thirty years after his death, C. S. Lewis remains a Celebrity Author: the complacent professor who churned out zui~zsome childrens fiction and quotable religious apologetics. That image, confirmed by the recent celluloid treatment, Shadowlands, trivializes the weight and worth of Lewis's achievement, as zuell as the struggle behind it.
t was the practice of Clive Staples Lewis, everything he read. Of course, this declaration wlule at Magdalen College, Oxford, dur- would be met with incredulityand...
o these many years later, the question has lost none of its power to stun: If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be? We never expected Barbara Walters to give Socrates a run for his money, but this? In retrospect, the question probably signaled a defining moment in the devolution of the TV interview. And yet its empty-head- edness is rather appealing today, when we routinely expect our interviewers to follow the baton right to the knee, the knife to its target flesh. The cocktail of c...
Any conventional list of the great modernist poets would begin with Eliot and Pound, Rilke, Valery, and Rirnbaud. These were not the only important poets of their era, possibly not even the greatest. One thinks of such others as Stevens, Frost, Montale, and Yeats. But the ones designated as modernist are credited with changing our whole mode of feeling, the voice and vocation of poetry itself. It is therefore sur- prising to recall that in 1926 two by no means negligible poets and com- mentators...
The Greelcs referred to those who lived
outside the realm of public life and politics as
idiots-~6i(O~ai. In our unthinking acceptance
of the idea of race, whose birth and development
Ivan Hannaford here chronicles, we in the
modern aye inay be guilty of a kind of collective idiocy. Genuine public life-not to mention a genuine solution to racial problems-becomes
impossible when a society allozus race or ethnicity to displace citizenship as one's badge of identify.
510 B.c.)shows the...
George Caleb Biizgham.
'Close to 3,000 books and articles have been published on the subject of leadership, mostly within the past three decades," notes business writer Richard Luecke-in a new book that adds to his statistic. Perhaps no coincidence, these same three decades 1mve given rise to a consensus that great leaders no longer move among us. Our authors here propose that the usual ways of addressing the leadership question might themselves be a problem.
46 WQ SPRING 1994
What's Wron...
visible occasionally among tlie numbing political advertisements of tlie 1993 election season was a commercial promoting tlie New York City ballot initiative proposing term lim-its for elected officials. The spoken text was reasonably predictable, but the visual image was striking: several enormously fat men sit- ting together, chomping on large cigars, and chortling-as if expressing tlieir contempt for tlie law, or the people, or both. Wlietlier tlie commercial had anything to do with tlie over-...
?
t's at least sometl~ing to think abo~~t, the valtle-and often t11e superiority-of what
now that the 20th century is behind us, a century that, by historian John Lukacs's reckoning, began in 1914 and ended in
1989. Thatmostvertipousof centuriesbganwitl~ a resounding bang, one that dealt a near-n~ortal blow to all the big ideals and to all t11e gods.
In fact, the only god that came through the horrors of Verdun and the Somme unscatlied was irony. Not merely unscathed, it rose within the pantl~eo~~.
After W...
In the 20th century, German history has done its best to obscure German poetry. Murder makes better copy, and when foreign troops march into your country you are not in a mood to read their bards and classics, unless of course you work for intelligence. Nor does your interest get much of a boost from those troops' defeat. Nearly 50 years after World War II's carriage, we are still more familiar with the names of the Third Reich's leaders than with those of Else Lasker-Schuler, Gottfried Benn, Gunter Eich, Karl Krolov, Ingeborg Bachmann, or Peter Huchel. Apparently, the dust hasn't settled yet.
uc11 has been written about the first
100 or so years of railroading in
America, when the industry roared forward in tandem with the U.S. economy. Sel- dom discussed, like some embarrassing relative who went to pot, are the years since 1940.
For the most part, railroad literature consists of individual histories of the dozens of railways that sprouted during the industry's heyday. Many of these books-and there are literally hundreds of them-are more anecdotal than lus- torical, and, as often a...