Philosophy begins in response to the Delphic injunction, "Know Thyself." The essay begins more modestly, with Montaigne's ques- tion, "What do I know?" The tentative, questioning nature of the essay permits it to explore the doubts, terrors, and hopes that arise during periods of great change. According to 0. B. Hardison, this explains why the essay-along with the office memo-is the most widely read form of writing today.
by 0.B. Hardison, Jr.
The ancient god Proteus knew t...
America's muscular response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait has temporarily stilled all talk of American decline. Yet the national alarm over the expense of Operation Desert Shield, the urgent demands for more help from U.S.
In late July, 1863, in the middle of told me about you."' the Civil War, an imposing man The president's visitor was, of course, with stern features arrived at the Frederick Douglass, the editor of a re-White House hoping to meet Abra- spected abolitionist newspaper, a man in- ham Lincoln. Describing their in- ternationally famous for his oratorical terview later, he declared that, powers and anti-slavery activities. A self-though he was the "only dark spot" in the- taught former...
To return to the Soviet Union or not to return? That is the question now facing one of Russia's most popular novelists. On August 15, 1990, the citizenship of Vladimir Voinovich-as well as that of Alexander Solzhe- nitsyn, Joseph Brodsky, and other Soviet artists-in-exile-was restored. But going home poses problems. Voinovich describes his dilemma.
by Vladimir
If you want something good to hap-
pen in Russia, said the Russian
writer Kornei Chukovsky, you have
to live a long life. Chukovsky to...
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The Wild West looms nowhere nearly sb large in the American imagination today as it did only a generation ago. Children whose parents were reared on Bat Masterson during the 1950s now dream of Masters of the Universe. On those rare occasions when Hollywood still deigns to put on spurs and six-shooters, it is more likely to deliver comic send-ups like Blazing Saddles and Silverado than heroic sagas like High Noon and The Magnificent Seven. The western myth was popular- ized by moviemakers,...
he tragic god of the indus-
trial West was once Prome-
theus, who still holds the
place of honor at the Rocke-
feller Center skating rink. If a-
statue for the year 2000 is needed, it perhaps should be of King Tan- talus, son of Zeus, who according to one account brought secrets-information rather than fire-from the gods to human- ity. For this theft he was cruelly punished in the netherworld: The water in which he was condemned eternally to stand would recede whenever he leaned over to...
Ithink of Warrenpoint as a town, not as a village. In my private diction-
ary a village is a community sur-
rounded by fields: The people are
farmers, or they serve farmers and
their families as shopkeepers, nurses, doctors, teachers, priests. At Sun- day Mass the men wear caps, not hats, and after Mass they stand around the church to chat, gossip, or stare at the hills. A town, small or large, is not dependent on the, land that surrounds it; it opens on a differ- ent world. Tullow, in Co...
n just five years, much to the aston-
ishment of professional Sovietolo-
gists, the Soviet Union has gone
from being the world's most men-
acing superpower to a weak ag-
glomeration of states uncertain of its very future. Why were most Moscow-- watchers so ill-prepared for this dramatic transformation? The fault lies partly in what may be called their "Copernican" view of the Soviet Union, a view which has dominated the field since the 1960s. Ac- cording to Copernican Sovietology, al...
Peter F. Klarkn
he Real Life of Alejandro
Mayta (1986), Mario Vargas
Llosa's fictional portrait of
a Peruvian revolutionary,
captures in its opening
pages the desperate poverty that has become commonplace throughout the South American nation. The narrator of the novel, a writer himself, is out for an early morning jog through his neighbor- hood when he comes across "stray kids, stray men, and stray women along with the stray dogs, all painstakingly digging through the trash looking for...
he Real Life of Alejandro
Mayta (1986), Mario Vargas
Llosa's fictional portrait of
a Peruvian revolutionary,
captures in its opening
pages the desperate poverty that has become commonplace throughout the South American nation. The narrator of the novel, a writer himself, is out for an early morning jog through his neighbor- hood when he comes across "stray kids, stray men, and stray women along with the stray dogs, all painstakingly digging through the trash looking for something to...