Robert Fagles, the iconic 40-year Princeton professor whose historic translations of Homer and Virgil enjoyed unprecedented commercial and cultural success in the 1990s and 2000s, died on March 26th following a long struggle with cancer.
During breaks from Princeton, instead of lounging on the couch, I can be found somewhere on Route 95, clutching a Ziploc bag full of carrots and heading to northern Massachusetts with my mother. It’s our ritual—a necessary pilgrimage to visit the members of our family who are too big to live at home with us, but no less loved for it.
I never sleep well when I am home. This is usually due to physical—not mental—distress: in eighth grade I inherited a three-quarter sized bedframe from the eighteenth century, a Sharpless heirloom that my grandparents wanted to get rid of. Rare is the vendor in this century that sells a mattress fit to its arcane proportions, so my parents threw two futons on it and told me it was temporary.
There is a stain on our wall in Wilson and we haven’t spoken about it for a few days, my roommate and I. Streaked and coarse, a stain ground into the whitewash like graphite. It’s not visible if you don’t look for it, not something Building Services would fine us for. A stain, the length of two bobby pins held end to end. The diameter of a champagne grape. It doesn’t come out with Windex or Seventh Generation dish soap or OxiClean, left instead as a perpetual effigy of my fury and my guilt.
Why would I want to believe (if I do believe at all) in a God who requires blind faith and has destructive ethics, for whom we must be violent in order to show devotion?
If there were a billboard advertising you, what would it say?” The final question of the Residential College Adviser application was the one I thought about the most, and I was actually rather proud of my answer. While the application was … Read More
While I am crowded into the park with my Hong Kong friends, awaiting the moment to begin our procession from Causeway Bay westward to Central, I wonder: Why is it that I, a black American who does not even understand Cantonese, who has lived in Hong Kong for less than one month, am out among the crowds supporting the protests?
“Why does it happen that our time in Warsaw culminates in this very room, face to face with a novel that seems, much like the Palace of Culture and like the current incarnation of the city of Warsaw, to plant itself resolutely on top of a history that has no monuments, no voice to speak for itself?”
