Arts Articles
Poem: Quaker Meeting
This is the time when we climb up God All of us on one rope, silent and looking up, Struggling through darkness to light…
Letter from Leningrad
Liebschen, forgive me one last letter out of lands bereft of God. Such frost, such cold, I hardly write through hollow blackened fingers here between the blizzards and those guns, eternal casual guns we live to hate. Eyes iced with bitterness that twists and locks each bone
A ragged doll
(A recreation from an incident in Sergei Nikitin’s How Quakers saved Russia.) They came from a far away country. I don’t know how. They did not speak our language. A few words perhaps. Kwakera or something. I remember that now. Foreigners are rare these days. Strange faces but...
Peace
The peace lily in my bathroom has one white flower: it bows down like a white flag. We have not known peace, do not know its contours, its colours, whether it is shaped like the earth, like the sky...
The Gospels: A new translation, by Sarah Ruden
Like Scrooge, Elizabeth Bennett and Sherlock Holmes, Jesus arrives in our imaginations via the word. Our imagination shapes such characters mysteriously and, we find, mysteriously they shape us. They may not have a life without us, but equally we would not be who we are without them.
Muting for worship, a Shakespearean sonnet from the pandemic
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought, By host assigned, I join the breakout room; My sighs and teacup’s clinks make others fraught, If I neglect to mute myself on Zoom.
Strange meeting (after Wilfred Owen)
And suddenly we came upon fellow men, sipping tea in a basket of darkness underneath a hollowed gentle moon. Their voices overcame the stillness of the silvered glade, the whereabouts of mystery
The Struggle for India’s Soul: Nationalism and the fate of democracy, by Shashi Tharoor
This book was precipitated by Narendra Modi’s second term as prime minister of India. The country is becoming more autocratic, like Hungary and Turkey. The title suggests that something mystical, or at least spiritual, is in danger of being lost, but that is not what Shashi Tharoor is arguing...
The body of truth
Each season the cannibals selected one truth to kill. We eat its eyes, its lungs, the soft seed of the heart. They spoke to us so honestly we asked, ‘And how do you select which truth to sacrifice? The truth of hatred or of greed?’
Compassion and suffering: Clive Ashwin has some lessons from the arts
Landscape with Man Killed by a Snake, by the French seventeenth-century painter Nicolas Poussin (on display at the National Gallery, and pictured) tells a curious and macabre story. In the foreground a man lies dead at the edge of a lake, in the coils of a huge serpent. A second...