A Cursed Blessing

Despair was more than just a manifestation of sadness for Soren Kierkegaard; it marked a “spiritual sickness,” as he put it, in which we no longer know ourselves. This was the subject of his great late work, The Sickness unto Death—now newly translated by Bruce H. Kirmmse. In her review of the translation, Clare Carlisle examines Kierkegaard’s theory of despair but also the world that inspired it. For Kierkegaard, despair was “neither a medical issue nor a reaction to life’s vicissitudes.” It was “the human condition, and we are in it all the time.” Written in a moment of great spiritual doubt, the book also marked a turn in his thinking and mounted a much more strident attack on the Christian church in which he had been raised. “Generations of readers,” Carlisle writes, “have found that this book has changed their lives too, by shaking them awake to the question of what it really means to be a human being. Kierkegaard’s answer, in a nutshell: It ain’t easy.” Read “Søren Kierkegaard Dared to Ask”

Hard Times

In the 1930s, American art and American politics were inextricably linked. Under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration, all manner of art was produced: paintings, prints, murals, dances, and photographs. A new exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Art for the Millions,” invites viewers to look at this period with fresh eyes, considering not only the political clarity and sense of urgency that defined the era’s art but also the inherent ambiguities and tensions. Examining everything from Philip Guston’s murals to Black Americans’ painting of the period to the rise of modern dance, the show, Rachel Hunter Himes writes in Books and the Arts, “reflects the era’s pluralism and diversity.” In it one can find artists not only breaking through in fits of creative experiment and imaginative expression but also working under the confines and limits of their troubled age. “By working within such constraints,” Himes notes, “artists like Guston discovered new modes of representation and irony.” Read “The Radical Art of the Depression Years”