Leonard Cohen’s songs, a friend said recently, offer “music to die by,” and as soon as I heard that, I realized one source of their Buddhist radiance. Death, loss, renunciation toll through every stanza of the benign hymns of passage on his latest record, Ten New Songs, and yet they’re accepted, even embraced, as warmly […]
Rohinton Mistry writes what could be called Neo-Realist novels, in honor of the simple, rending tales of struggle and affliction that distinguished the Italian films of the early Fifties (and continue to this day in, say, the films coming out of Iran). Though Mistry has lived in Toronto since 1975, when he emigrated at the […]
Were an alien, in a happy state of ignorance, to drop out of the skies today and pick up a piece of the large, and daily increasing, oeuvre of William F. Buckley Jr., he would, I think, come to some interesting conclusions. Freed of preconceptions, knowing nothing of the face that has hosted Firing Line […]
The foreigner in Japan, more than anywhere, stands at the edge of an intimacy that is closing slowly in his face. He walks along a beach, perhaps, as darkness falls, with a young, a beautiful girl, and they talk of loneliness, and all the places he has seen, the nights. The girl offers to introduce […]
For far too many people, the world changed irreparably five weeks ago; holes were left in hearts and lives–in whole cities–that can never be repaired. And for those on both sides of the fighting in Afghanistan, these days are like no others. When lives are suddenly overturned by a rising of the waters or a […]
If writing were a religion, V.S. Naipaul would be its most steadfast monk. Arriving in Oxford in 1950, as an 18 year-old scholarship boy from Trinidad, he already looked old beyond his years, haunted by an outsider’s uncertainties and yet determined to make his way in the world. After his father died three years later, […]
Several years ago, a book arrived on my doorstep, and it was like no other novel I could remember reading. Its characters were all spirits of a kind, rootless, and drifting far from home, and all of them had gathered, like partial ghosts, in a shelled nunnery at the end of World War II. At […]
I look around me sometimes in the Japanese suburb where I choose to live and all I can see are versions of the most passing surfaces from the America I came here to leave behind. The area in which I make my home, doing its best to approximate to the San Fernando Valley, has no […]
Stay too far away from a spiritual teacher, the Tibetans famously warn us, and you cannot feel the heat; draw too close, and you get burned. The fire warnings grow especially urgent when that teacher attracts students through her warmth, and all the more so when the students, in turn, try to put words to […]
