“I Write to Please my Self,” Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of New
castle, declared in her “Orations of Divers Sorts” (1662). A shy, solitary woman with a passion for poetry and scientific inquiry—what did she see when she peered inside “Natures Cabinet, the Braine”? She saw “Fans of Opinion,” “Gloves of Remembrance, Veiles of Forgetfulnesse,” “Pendants of Understanding” to adorn the ears of the wisest women. She saw “Black Patches of Ignorance, to stick on/The Face of Fooles.” Brightest of all were the “Ribbons of Fancies.” By “fancy,” she meant the wild, inventive faculty of the mind which allowed her to see forgetfulness as a veil or
the brain as a cabinet in the first place. From her cabinet tumbled some of
the strangest prose and verse of the seventeenth century, beginning, in 1653, with her “Poems, and Fancies”:
When Nature first this World she did create, She cal’d a Counsell how the same might make; Motion was first, who had a subtle wit, And then came Life, and Forme, and Mat
ter fit.
Do not be fooled by these sweet couplets. They were the prelude to an enormously ambitious philosophy of nature’s diffuse, uneasy vitality. Across almost three hundred poems, Cavendish speculated about how atoms joined
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة February 05, 2024 من The New Yorker.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 8500 مجلة وصحيفة.
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هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة February 05, 2024 من The New Yorker.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 8500 مجلة وصحيفة.
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INSIDE JOB-"Hit Man"
Years before Hannah Arendt coined, in the pages of this magazine, the phrase \"the banality of evil,\" popular films and fiction were embodying that idea in the character of the hit man. In classic crime movies such as \"This Gun for Hire\" (1942) and \"Murder by Contract\" (1958), hit men figure much as Nazis do in political movies, as symbols of abstract evil.
WHATEVER YOU SAY
Rereading Jenny Holzer, at the Guggenheim.
SUBCONSCIOUSLY YOURS
Does every generation get the Freud it deserves?
BY A WHISKER
Louis Wain and the reinvention of the cat.
Beyond Imagining
Bessie, Lotte, Ruth, Farah, and Bridget, who had been lunching together for half a century, joined in later years by Ilka, Hope, and, occasionally, Lucinella, had agreed without the need for discussion that they were not going to pass, pass away, and under no circumstances on.
STATES OF PLAY
Can advocates use state supreme courts to preserve-and perhaps expand-constitutional rights?
THE LONG RIDE
The surf legend Jock Sutherland's unlikely life.
ARE WE DOOMED?
A course at the University of Chicago thinks it through.
GOD EXPLAINS THE RULES OF HIS NEW BOARD GAME
Guys, want to play this new board game? It’s called Life. No, it’s not “one of God’s impossible-to-understand games that take three hours to learn.” It’ll be fun, I promise!
RED LINE
With the election approaching, the U.S. and Mexico wrangle over border policy.
