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I should say that, at the time and for many years after, I received almost nothing from this class. I remembered almost nothing, consciously, that Bloom said about all the poems we’d read. My marginalia is incomprehensible and almost worthless; the notebook long since lost in an attic. Only when I’…

I should say that, at the time and for many years after, I received almost nothing from this class. I remembered almost nothing, consciously, that Bloom said about all the poems we’d read. My marginalia is incomprehensible and almost worthless; the notebook long since lost in an attic. Only when I’…

What was this desire I felt to kiss her hands? She was declining to subject me to petty humiliations, it was true, but if that was my definition of kindness then I had lost most of my self-respect. No, I thought, this was not gratitude; it was Stockholm syndrome. I should never have been detained, …

I sank into the thought as into a pool of oil-slicked seawater. All of a sudden in place of the boy with the spiked hair I saw hundreds of faces, some of which I recognized from the photographs that accompanied the earliest press reports on the concentration camps: children, multitudes of them, som…

In the previous weeks and months I had begun to wonder whether my profession, for all its insistence on the value of facts, was not in the last instance dependent on dishonesty. If I pretended to care about the boy’s discovery of parkour and death metal, it was because I hoped that my kindness woul…