"A Kind of Genius"

From the Profile of Freeman Dyson in the New York Times Magazine by Nicholas Davidoff:

Around the Institute for Advanced Study, that intellectual Arcadia where the blackboards have signs on them that say Do Not Erase, Dyson is quietly admired for candidly expressing his doubts about string theory’s aspiration to represent all forces and matter in one coherent system. “I think Freeman wishes the string theorists well,” Avishai Margalit, the philosopher, says. “I don’t think he wishes them luck. He’s interested in diversity, and that’s his worldview. To me he is a towering figure although he is tiny — almost a saintly model of how to get old. The main thing he retains is playfulness. Einstein had it. Playfulness and curiosity. He also stands for this unique trait, which is wisdom. Brightness here is common. He is wise. He integrated, not in a theory, but in his life, all his dreams of things.”

"Melville's Withdrawal"

From Updike's Essay, "Melville's Withdrawal" from Hugging the Shore:

No writer, not even Dickens, invents from whole cloth; but Melville was especially an embroiderer, who needed the ready-made fabric of either his own recalled adventures or an account of someone else's to get his needle flying. His sense of truth held him stubbornly close to the actual; he was, in a style we can recognize as modern, both bookish and autobiographical. Though such a writer can never run out of other men's books, he can run out of autobiography. (93)

By bowing to that organic fall, and abstaining from a forced productivity, and turning to public silence and private poetry, Melville preserved his communion with greatness, and enhanced with the dignity of a measured abstention the communion we enjoy with him. (105).

"The Secret King"

Two Passages From Adam Kirsch's New Yorker article on the relationship between Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger:

Arendt on what she knew of Heidegger before she met him:

Little more than a name was known, but the name made its way through all of Germany like the rumor of a secret king.

In 1929 after the affair had already begun, Arendt ran into Heidegger at a train station, and, for a moment, he failed to recognize her:

When I was a small child that was the way my mother once stupidly and playfully frightened me. I had read the fairly tale about Dwarf Nose, whose nose gets so long nobody recognizes him any more. My mother pretended that had happened to me. I still vividly recall the blind terror with which I kept crying, but I am your child, I am your Hannah. -- That is what it was like today.