“It is the spirit of humanity, that which animates both so-called savages and civilized nations, working through a man, and not the man expressing himself, that interests us most,” writes Henry Dav...

Volume 25, Issue 1, February 2020, Page 108-111.

“Said is missaid,” Samuel Beckett declares in his 1981 “Worstward Ho.”1 This is an inflammatory condensation of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s paradoxically vindicating retraction of the argument of the Tractatus: “My propositions elucidate insofar as he who understands me recognizes them finally as senseless, when he has climbed through them—on them—over them..”2Said is missaid because, as Wittgenstein shows in a book Beckett owned in two German editions and one English translation, saying cannot say itself: “No proposition can say anything about itself, because (...) the propositional sign cannot be contained in.. (shrink)

If Shakespeare made the human, according to Harold Bloom, Jonathan Bate will explain what first made Shakespeare, the Classics. That a Classical education was decisive for a writer during the renai...

Though Robert Musil declared Franz Kafka to be “a special case of the Walser type,” it is Robert Walser who still gets justified as a special case of the Kafka type. Kafka gave his confidante Max B...

From first steps to last legs, walking is a defining human enterprise. Children’s first shoes and elders’ last staffs frame the peculiar dignity of our bipedal species. Walking forms the basis—a wo...

Under prolonged confinement in a tight shelter, an overtaxed orderly threatens to desert the invalids withering in his under-resourced care. Time feels suspended, rations are dwindling, everything...

The MIT Senseable City Lab simulates autonomous vehicles hurling through downtown Boston intersections unimpeded by traffic lights. Or pedestrians, or cyclists, or even a bus: in one of the busiest...

Annabel Abbs’s father told her that she was “an experiment” in the application of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s educational doctrines, hence her rough-scrabble pastoral upbringing on the Welsh coast, hom...

“Christ awaketh the church,” my Victorian edition of The Authorized Version glosses the fifth chapter of The Songs of Songs, but what an awakening: “I sleep, but my heart waketh: it is the voice of...

Volume 25, Issue 1, February 2020, Page 108-111.