Activity

In high school I was learning how to read for symbols in addition to surfaces, and I read Lolita as a symbol for the things we love but cannot keep. I was old enough to know, if not accept, that my hormone-fueled infatuation would dim, just as Lolita’s charms fade into a banal adulthood. (She looks…

Beauty, like love, requires effort. When I think of “difficult” art—art that requires work to appreciate and understand—I think of the two maddening weeks I spent reading Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove, unable to make sense of his syntax, crashing against unyielding paragraphs, making out the …

But what is it that makes something worth doing? In a lecture delivered in 1900, meekly titled “What Makes a Life Significant?,” William James tries to find the line between ennobling, purposeful activity and its enervating opposite. He has just spent a week at Chautauqua—a kind of fin-de-siècle TE…

“Why? Why? Why?” your child asks, and you don’t know the answer. Your task as a parent is to keep human life going a little longer, but sometimes you find yourself wondering, what’s so great about human life? Why do we need more of it? Raising kids makes this feeling more acute. Not just because yo…

“Then just play the song, and I won’t be mean.” I knew I was in the wrong now, but I couldn’t bring myself back into the right. I had too much momentum.

“I don’t wanna play the song.”

“JUST PLAY IT!” I saw Julian’s face crumple first, his chin wrinkle, before I heard how my voice sounded: g…