In a lecture at Cambridge in 1959, C. P. Snow famously complained of the division of the intellectual and university worlds into two cultures, that of the sciences and that of the humanities. He put his point bluntly:
A good . . .
Canada was eliminated from the contest at the outset, after such a dismal performance that the team name became synonymous with tanking, as in, “Singh is playing like a Canadian today.”—Stephanie Nolen, the Globe and Mail, March . . .
for C. H.
I knew the afternoon was coming to a close—
and it’s all right that you weren’t there with me—
as I made out a star from my window.
But that was fine. There is no afternoon . . .
Mýdalur, Iceland
If, off that cliff, you dogpaddled for days, nay years, due south strafing shipping lanes, you’d brush no other landmass until Antarctica: hobbling from waves threshing through the creases between rocks onto the hem of nothingness. Save a . . .
Near Land’s End in Cornwall, the westernmost point of the island of Great Britain, where the rocks and cliffs of terra firma put up a heroic resistance to the incessant waves of the Atlantic, the landscape ends with some of . . .
I often open Samuel Beckett’s More Pricks Than Kicks, raise it to my face, close my eyes, and inhale. The pages are as pungent as a dry old asiago. I stole the book from a guest house in Mexico. . . .