Sara Mansfield Taber

Here is Henry James describing Americans’ energy and love of work via his hero Christopher Newman, in the novel, The American: Exertion and action were as natural to him as respiration; a more completely healthy mor­tal had never trod the elastic soil of the West. His experience, moreover, was as wide…

Here is a bit of hemming and hawing about what I love and don’t love about my country: It is strange. The things I love about my country are the very things I hate. I love the rawness of the American spirit and I hate its crudeness. I love Ameri­can…

Czeslaw Milosz on America: All of us yearn for a certain point on the earth where the highest wisdom accessible to humanity dwells, and it is hard to admit that such a point does not exist, that we have to rely only upon ourselves. Nevertheless, in the fall of 1950…

I reflect here on the pleasure of speaking another language: One day I went out marketing with my mother in Tokyo. At each little shop— the butcher’s and the baker’s and the vegetable seller’s—I did the talking, asking for a kilo of carrots or onions, a sack of sugar buns,…

Alice Kaplan on her love of France: Why do people want to adopt another culture? Because there’s something in their own they don’t like, that doesn’t name them. French still calls out to me in the most primitive way. If I’m in a crowded room and there are two people…