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On Zbigniew Herbert Bài viết cuối năm là về 1 vị fb không tiện nêu tên có gì tương tự với ZH. Và cũng để tưởng nhớ TTT. Chỉ mong được tuyệt tích giang hồ. "Ta chọn, đừng"   Zbigniew Herbert lived most of his life (1924-98) under regimes that were inimical to what we can loosely call freedom of expression. His writing bears evidence of his historical situation as a man trying to live out a poetic and intellectual vocation in a hostile environment. The traces can sometimes be overt — for example, in his satiric counterattacks on the regime — but are more usually concealed by ironic masks or Aesopian language. Herbert was not a poet-martyr as, say, Osip Mandelstam was. Nevertheless, the record shows a lifetime of principled opposition first to the Nazis, then to the Communists. Until well into his thirties he led a fringe existence, with none of the rewards that someone of his education and talents might have expected. After the 1956 thaw, his growing reputation opened u...

Comment As if Times Weren’t Unsettling Enough, Saturn Is Losing Its Rings The rain it raineth every day, as Shakespeare noted, apparently even on Saturn. The cosmos, it seems, is no comfort at this moment. By  December 22, 2024 Illustration by João Fazenda If anything seemed solid in a melting and mutable world, surely it was the great big outer planets of the solar system. There they were, Saturn and Jupiter, stately if a little foreboding, hanging around close together, impossibly large and bright, in the Great Conjunction, as it was called, visible for the first time in decades four winters ago, in the pandemic year of 2020. You could go outside then and stare at the gassy planets on the empty streets at midnight, their presence suggesting, if not a benign purpose, then at least a superintending one—the permanence of the cosmos itself—while we chafed and fretted below. But now news has leaked out—it has been known to astronomers for a while but only recently reached our shared, ...

A Reporter at Large Alice Munro’s Passive Voice The celebrated writer’s partner sexually abused her daughter Andrea. The abuse transformed Munro’s fiction, but she left it to Andrea to confront the true story. By  December 23, 2024 Andrea was nine when the abuse began. She later wrote that Alice “loves and protects the most destructive person of my life.” Photograph by Andrea Modica for The New Yorker “Iam a writer or used to be a writer,” Alice Munro wrote in 2014, in one of the last stories she tried to compose. A year earlier, she had won the Nobel Prize in Literature. But she had Alzheimer’s and had been in decline for several years. Her partner of four decades, Gerald (Gerry) Fremlin, had recently died, and she was living near her daughter Jenny, in Port Hope, east of Toronto. “I’m a writer, as I said, and I suppose that sticks for a while even though you don’t  due   do  due it anymore,” she wrote, in shaky longhand. “I am going to write what happened yesterday...