● Can science lead to faith? “Even those who are believers, like Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, see their religion and their science as largely separate. (‘If God is outside of nature, then science can neither prove nor disprove his existence,’ he once wrote).”
● Is that all there is? James Wood on secularism and its discontents.
● If God is dead, your time is everything: the philosopher Martin Hägglund, the idea of eternity, and the connection between secularism and socialism.
● The white darkness: at fifty-five, Henry Worsley began a solitary trek across Antarctica.
● The forgotten novel that inspired homesicknessfor an imaginary land: Charles Finch on Austin Tappan Wright’s “Islandia.” “The only other writer who has given me the same feeling of complete familiarity with another consciousness . . . is Proust.”
● The mystery of people who speak dozens of languages: what can hyperpolyglots teach the rest of us?
● Jhumpa Lahiri on learning a foreign language as a writer: “I enter another land, unexplored, murky. A kind of voluntary exile.”
● In parting, a poem:
Can I get used to it day after day
a little at a time while the tide keeps
coming in faster the waves get bigger
building on each other breaking records
this is not the world that I remember
then comes the day when I open the box
that I remember packing with such care
and there is the face that I had known well
in little pieces staring up at me . . .
—“Living with the News,” by W. S. Merwin