From ghostlike particles, astrophysicists have pieced together a new map of the galaxy we live in.
For now, that map of the Milky Way is blurry and incomplete. But as more data is gathered, it will become clearer and will help illuminate galactic convulsions like the expanding remnants of exploded stars, providing clues to mysteries that are difficult to solve with only observations from conventional telescopes.
Early in Lorrie Moore’s new novel I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home, the protagonist, Finn, notes that while white schizophrenics are allowed relative freedom in New York, “black schizophrenics huddled under blankets and cardboard on sidewalks against the façades of skyscrapers. Pieces of paper rolled into jars with scrawled writing facing outward: I am not homeless. This is my home.” It’s the only time in the book the unusual title is ever specifically referenced, and, of course, the title itself is slightly more mysterious and open-ended. That moment soon flashes past in the cavalcade of Moore’s narrative, but it turns out to be something of a touchstone for the central characters, none of whom ever seem completely at home as living creatures on planet Earth.
In a scene in the 2022 movie Tár, a Juilliard student declares to his professor: “As a BIPOC pan-gender person, I would say Bach’s misogynistic life makes it impossible” to play or conduct the German composer—in part because of the 20 children he obliged his two wives to bear. It is a caricature of woke excess: There has been no serious attempt to cancel Bach for living in the era before birth control. The response from the professor, the film’s protagonist Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett), is a caricature of power: She launches into a semi-coherent rant, insulting the student and extolling Bach’s greatness. At one point, the two sit together on a piano bench while Blanchett tries to demonstrate the value of Bach, playing the opening of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier and crooning that “there’s a humility in Bach, he’s not pretending he’s certain about anything. Because he knows it’s always the question that involves the listener, and never the answer.” The film is clever, and her arrogance only sharpens the knife. The viewer feels the despair of a closed system—both sides are right on their own terms, and both are loathsome.
An alternative, more hopeful view can be found in the musicologist Michael Marissen’s new book Bach Against Modernity. In Marissen’s telling, Tár’s misty portrayal of Bach as a great liberal humanist is wrong. Her characterization sounds okay—questioning is one of our toothless pablum virtues—but it’s hardly true of Bach. Marissen, a professor emeritus at Swarthmore, takes issue with a dominant trend in Bach scholarship to present the composer as “one fantastic modern liberal” and instead portrays him as a pre-modern religious person whose beliefs, by our standards, were extreme. Not only did Bach have answers, he had biblical certainties. In this sense, to portray his music as “questioning” is absurd. Marissen’s joyfully rigorous, often funny critique is a lesson in scholarship and in lost opportunities—to understand Bach’s music, first and foremost, but also to grapple with the genuinely illiberal aspects of the composer’s work.
One glimpse of social media can feel like peering into a monetized confessional booth. “A Flat Place: Moving Through Empty Space, Naming Complex Trauma,” by literary scholar Noreen Masud, offers readers a counterpoint to that atmosphere of abundant divulgence.
My gift—bow carefully splayed
by the lady at Dillard’s, ribbon pulled
so tight its thin satin hardly makes
a crease—placed at the pile’s edge.
Words on breath, they dance so light,
Like whispers on a winter’s night.