Sara Mansfield Taber

Edward Said’s reconciliation with being “out of place:” I occasionally experience myself as a cluster of flowing currents. I prefer this to the idea of a solid self, the identity to which so many attach so much significance. These currents, like the themes of one’s life, flow along during the…

For the global nomad, every place brings to mind somewhere else, as Andre Aciman so deftly conveys:  I could never understand or appreciate New York unless I could make it the mirror—call it the mnemonic correlative—of other cities I’ve known or imagined. No Mediterranean can look at a sun­set in…

After a sojourn in America, Milosz finally gains a sense of home, back in old Europe: But it was not the same as it had been in America; it was not only nature that cured me. Europe herself gathered me in her warm embrace, and her stones, chiseled by the…