Is civility merely a matter of reinforcing status and exclud-ing others? Or is it a lubricant in a polarized world, enabling us to overcome tribal loyalties and cooperate for the common good?
In “A Defence of Pretence,” Indira Ghose argues that it is both.
Ghose turns to the drama of Shakespeare’s time to explore the notion of civility. The theater, she suggests, was a laboratory where many of the era’s conflicts played out.
The plays test the precepts found in treatises on civility and show that, in the complexity and confusion of human life, moral purity is an illusion.
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What We Are Reading Today: A Defence of Pretence by Indira Ghose
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What We Are Reading Today: A Defence of Pretence by Indira Ghose
What We Are Reading Today: Three Roads Back by Robert D. Richardson
In “Three Roads Back,” Robert Richardson, the author of magisterial biographies of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and William James, tells the connected stories of how these foundational American writers and thinkers dealt with personal tragedies early in their careers.
For Emerson, it was the death of his young wife and, 11 years later, his five-year-old son; for Thoreau, it was the death of his brother; and for James, it was the death of his beloved cousin Minnie Temple.
Filled with rich biographical detail and unforgettable passages from the journals and letters of Emerson, Thoreau, and James, these vivid and moving stories of loss and hard-fought resilience show how the writers’ responses to these deaths helped spur them on to their greatest work, influencing the birth and course of American literature and philosophy.
As Richardson shows, all three emerged from their grief with a new way of seeing, one shaped by a belief in what Emerson called “the deep remedial force that underlies all facts.”
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