Art always penetrates the particular fissures in one’s psychic life.

A comparably capacious embrace of beauty and pleasure – an embrace that somehow extends to death as well as life, to dissolution as well as creation – characterizes Montaigne’s restless reflections on matter in motion,...

In short, it became possible – never easy, but possible – in the poet Auden’s phrase to find the mortal world enough.

Compared to the unleashed forces of warfare and of faith, Mount Vesuvius was kinder to the legacy of antiquity.

I began with the desire to speak with the dead.

Our sense that a library is a public good and our idea of what such a place should look like derived precisely from a model created in Rome several thousand years ago.

Poems are difficult to silence.

The quintessential emblem of religion and the clearest manifestation of the perversity that lies at its core is the sacrifice of a child by a parent.Almost all religious faiths incorporate the myth of such a...