
To the Lighthouse
At a summer house by the sea a trip to the lighthouse keeps being postponed, and Woolf gets so close to how a mind works that years pass and grief arrives in passing.

At a summer house by the sea a trip to the lighthouse keeps being postponed, and Woolf gets so close to how a mind works that years pass and grief arrives in passing.

Science fiction has been raiding its designs for a century: Lang built a vertical city and a metal woman in 1927, and both are still turning up in new films.

It won the only Academy Award ever given for Unique and Artistic Picture: Murnau's camera never stops moving, and the film is astonishing to look at a century on.

Philosophy forgot to ask what it means for anything to exist. Heidegger rebuilds the question around the ordinary human being, thrown into a world he did not choose and running out of time.

Carmichael whistled the tune to his band at Gennett and cut it fast; Parish added the lyric two years later.

Wordless humming answered by a pocketknife slide, an 1792 hymn tune NASA put on the Voyager Golden Record.

No vocal, the melody withheld until the final chorus, and Beiderbecke's cornet solo transcribed note-for-note by Fletcher Henderson's orchestra.

Two French priests give their lives to a diocese in territorial New Mexico. Cather dissolves plot into landscape and legend, and their friendship carries decades of desert riding without a raised voice.
Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.

Harry Haller believes he is half man, half wolf: too fine for bourgeois life, too weak to leave it. A dance hall woman leads him into jazz, drugs, and the Magic Theater.

Miley's growl trumpet, Nanton's plunger-muted trombone, and a Chopin funeral march closing out the 1927 Victor side.

One cup of coffee, one glove still on, and a window behind her that reflects nothing but two rows of ceiling lights.

Pooh is a bear of very little brain, moving through the Hundred Acre Wood by way of honey, a heffalump trap, and Eeyore's lost tail. The goodbye at the end undoes adults.

In 1714 a rope bridge in Peru snaps and five travelers fall to their deaths. A Franciscan who witnessed it spends six years reconstructing their lives to prove God chose them.

A murdered woman on a divan, a calm man listening to a gramophone, and two men with a club and a net waiting outside the door.

The odalisque rebuilt in the machine age, all gleaming curves against deep red, sensual and cold at exactly the same time.

Cleared of poisoning her husband because her family closes ranks, Therese rides home through the pine forests of the Landes trying to explain herself. Mauriac makes provincial Catholic marriage feel like slow suffocation.