1300-2020
Self-Portraits
Acquisition and Time
Sunday, January 26, 2014
Working on a talk to be given at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum – about the collection of Italian pictures that Gardner acquired with significant help from Bernard Berenson – has been the occasion for thinking again about the collector’s passion. When one stands in a gallery in front of a picture one is not only affected by the passions of the painter, or made aware of the forces of history, one is directly confronted with provenance, namely, by what combination of human passions did this object come to be here ?
Isabella Gardner’s letters to Berenson [...] read more
Thin Air
Tuesday, July 2, 2013
We are in the air. The baby and I. She sleeps in my right arm; I type with my left thumb. Clouds below discrete cotton floaters, at our level cirrus band and behind that at sky's horizon higher piled. Despite glimpsed majesty, in airplane capsule thoughts inward, my mother, her grief, my father's study, which I cleaned while home, naturally, as if straightening a desk nearly my own, books and notes, small discoveries, the text by Confucius, a picture of my sister her head thrown back in happiness.
I forget that I am often in [...] read more
Autobiography Today
Friday, April 26, 2013
When I was teaching more, my students, undergraduates and graduates, people who were somewhere between eighteen and seventy-six years old, were all writing their memoirs. I railed against this at first, particularly with younger students; such was my reputation for impatience with the form that I even had students hesitatingly ask if it would be all right to use the first person. I did see that this was a somewhat ridiculous position for an admirer of Montaigne and David Foster Wallace to be in.
I conceived of different ways to explain the distinction: between essays full [...] read more