New York Review of Books

In the Review’s March 7 issue, Robert Pogue Harrison reviews two recent books, by Costica Bradatan and Geoff Dyer, about failure, humility, and death. Losing—and a head-on confrontation with the sense of losing—might, Harrison offers, help us “gain insight into the mortal, fallible, and ultimately doomed nature of embodied life.”

By way of example, in Bradatan’s book, the fallibility and self-conscious frailties of Simone Weil, Mahatma Gandhi, Emil Cioran, and Yukio Mishima (four people united “by a loosely shared vision of the vanity and superfluity of human existence”) are taken to offer lessons in how a person might “metabolize” failure on the road to death. Dyer’s book, meanwhile, “speaks from within the finitude that holds sway over every human attempt to defy the odds and make a success of one’s life or art”—the will to create in the face of defeat and death.

Below, alongside Harrison’s article, we have compiled a selection of essays about Weil, Cioran, Mishima, Gandhi, and the late styles of D. H. Lawrence and John Coltrane.

Robert Pogue Harrison
At Ease Amid the Ruins

Costica Bradatan and Geoff Dyer explore the virtues of failure and humility in the face of the next-to-nothingness of human existence.

Geoff Dyer
Catastrophic Coltrane

“While Coltrane’s was a last rather than late phase, bits of Adorno’s defining analysis of late style—‘In the history of art late works are the catastrophe’—flared into view.”

Anita Desai
A Different Gandhi

“The picture that emerges is of someone intensely human, with all the defects and weaknesses that suggests, but also a visionary with a profound social conscience and courage who gave the world a model for nonviolent revolution that is still inspiring.”

Charles Simic
Insomnia’s Philosopher

“Man, for Cioran, is an unhappy beast banished from the animal kingdom with just enough imagination to make his life miserable. His quarrel with philosophers is that they ignore the reality of the body, that most terrible of all realities, and its mental and physical pain.”

Doris Lessing
‘The Fox’ of D. H. Lawrence

“He had the defects of his qualities: he had no defects, he was a genius; he is at the heart of English literature; he is secure in his place in world literature; he is a misogynist and a scumbag. But pick up a Lawrence tale and the old magic begins working.”

Susan Sontag
Simone Weil

“Such writers as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Genet—and Simone Weil—have their authority with us because of their air of unhealthiness. Their unhealthiness is their soundness, and is what carries conviction.”

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