Bare the Iron Hand

Non ignara mali, miseris succurrere disco.
No stranger to misfortune, I have learned to relieve the sufferings of others.”

– Dido, Aeneid 1.630

It must have been sometime in April that someone first said it to me: “Honestly, I kind of hate anyone who isn’t in New York right now.” On that occasion it was a friend, recounting her attempt to be sympathetic to someone she knew who was weathering the COVID-19 pandemic on a ranch in Montana. Later on it would be echoed by my coworker who mistook the tree outside my window for a yard and thought I’d left the city, by my friends around the city with similar levels of lawn-envy, and eventually I would begin to echo it too, somewhat in spite of myself.

Continue reading “The Sufferings of Others” →

Passing stranger! You do not know how longingly I look
upon you
You must be he I was seeking, or she I was seeking (it comes
to me as of a dream,)…
I am not to speak to you, I am to think of you when I sit alone
or wake at night alone,
I am to wait, I do not doubt that I am to meet you again,
I am to see to it that I do not lose you.”

– To a Stranger, Walt Whitman

This morning, my roommate and I ventured out to a coffee shop for the first time in over two months. After weeks of worrying that they were going to close permanently, my favorite of our local coffee shops, the Hungarian Pastry Shop off 111^th St., reopened today for takeout only. It’s a staple of a bygone era in New York: cash only, with no Wi-Fi or background music, always spilling over with customers, many of them Columbia professors. Naturally, the experience was different now: we waited outside in a socially distant line, and when we finally got in it was just us at the counter with one other customer, a far cry from the usual confusion of who’s paying next and who’s ordered what. It felt deeply alien, but it was also one of the nicest experiences I’d had in weeks. Continue reading “Some Blessed Hope” →

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.”
– W. H. Auden, “Funeral Blues”

Continue reading “Pack Up the Moon” →

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—:
‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’”

– Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

Continue reading “Refusing to Be on the Side of Pestilence” →

Be still, be still, my soul; it is but for a season:
Let us endure an hour and see injustice done.”

– A. E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad

Continue reading “Teach Us to Care” →

Over the breast of the spring, the land, amid cities,
Amid lanes and through old woods, where lately the violets peep’d from the ground, spotting the gray debris,
Amid the grass in the fields each side of the lanes, passing the endless grass,
Passing the yellow-spear’d wheat, every grain from its shroud in the dark-brown fields uprisen,
Passing the apple-tree blows of white and pink in the orchards,
Carrying a corpse to where it shall rest in the grave,
Night and day journeys a coffin.”

Continue reading “A Sprig of Lilac” →

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained…

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only…

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States, for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners, refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither…”

— The Declaration of Independence

Continue reading “So Many Shrouded Ghosts” →

For my grandmothers, both of whom had children by the time they were my age. I don’t know how they did it.

Regarding
incarceration, she believes

she has been a prisoner since she has been a daughter.”
– Louise Glück, “Persephone the Wanderer”

Continue reading “Calling Eurydice” →

“White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this—which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never—the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.”

-James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

Continue reading “On Love and Antisemitism” →