Arts & Letters – Spirituality

In “The Unwomanly Face of War,” an oral history of World War II, the Nobel Prize-winning writer Svetlana Alexievich recounts a strange little story. A woman leaps into dark water to rescue a drowning man. At the shore, however, she realizes it is not a man she has hauled from the water but a gigantic sturgeon. The sturgeon dies. Censors initially cut the scene from Alexievich’s book. You’re not asking about...

Alexandra Coghlan explores the history and enduring appeal of musical settings of the requiem mass At some point during the 20th century death disappeared. The dying were discreetly removed from our communities and homes, taken to hospitals with short memories and wipe-clean walls. Mourning blacks faded before vanishing altogether; the elaborate funeral monuments of the 19th century shrugged off curlicues and cherubs and arranged themselves into unobtrusive, apologetic sobriety. Coffins —...

DESPITE THE FACT that people who are bilingual or even multilingual have been around from time immemorial, the study of literary translingualism has only very recently begun to emerge. Some of this delay stems from the disciplinary limitations and boundaries of academic scholarship, but it’s become increasingly hard for the world of organized intelligentsia to ignore the fact that writing in an acquired language has become more commonplace — in...

“I AM NERVOUS as fuck,” read the text message. It was from Igor Levit, my friend and the renowned pianist, who’s played concert venues from Carnegie Hall to the Berlin Philharmonie. But he wasn’t about to step on stage. He was about to begin a livestream on Twitter. In what he called his first “social media house concert,” he played Beethoven’s Sonata No. 21 in C major, Op. 53, commonly...