Grounded in reality: This week, Harper Review cofounder Surya Gowda contributes to this quarter’s letters prompt, “The ivory tower should endure,” recounting a recent trip from her new home in New York City to Banasandra, the small village in southern India where her father comes from. Though her ancestral connection to Banasandra “runs deep,” the unfamiliarity she experienced in its superstitious village politics and agrarian customs was troubling. Banasandra, Gowda writes, with its mud-floored buildings, entanglement with the toughness of agricultural life, and dependence upon religious ritual, was the “real world.” Life in New York City, in contrast, is filled with trivial worries and whims, concerns “about which ClassPass plan will best help us ensure we’re getting our heart rates up frequently enough” and philosophizing “simply because we enjoy it.” And yet, Gowda writes, “life is pleasant here.” Disconnected and unaware as it may be, Gowda is not ready to descend the ivory tower of New York City just yet.
Declan Rexer, senior editor
Divine love: On the slopes above Delphi live a mysterious old woman and her even more mysterious son. The old woman is an outcast, a former “pythia”—high priestess of the oracle of Apollo—banished from the city for her unforgivable crime against God. Resigned to her lot, she passes her life in peace, until one day when a strange traveler mounts the slope and presents himself at the door of her hovel. She welcomes him in, whereupon he tells her of his own crime against God and of the eternal curse that was placed upon him for his transgression. In answer to this, the old woman relates her own history of how an encounter with the divine changed her life forever.
Told almost entirely in two monologues, Nobel Prize-winning author Pär Lagerkvist’s novel The Sibyl is a meditation on humanity’s relationship with the divine. As each narrative unfolds, Lagerkvist shows us not a loving and merciful God, but a possessive and vindictive one, who demands obedience to His inscrutable whims and insatiable desire for appeasement. By the novel’s end, the reader is shaken, left with the disturbing suggestion that God’s love for us is grounded not in compassion, but in a jealous insistence on absolute submission.
Told almost entirely in two monologues, Nobel Prize-winning author Pär Lagerkvist’s novel The Sibyl is a meditation on humanity’s relationship with the divine. As each narrative unfolds, Lagerkvist shows us not a loving and merciful God, but a possessive and vindictive one, who demands obedience to His inscrutable whims and insatiable desire for appeasement. By the novel’s end, the reader is shaken, left with the disturbing suggestion that God’s love for us is grounded not in compassion, but in a jealous insistence on absolute submission.
Will Dudley, contributing editor
Loving one’s country: Back in the fall, I wrote a letter arguing that you should not love your country but love its people, why nationalism can hurt the exact people it should protect, and at the same time, why it is so difficult for us to transcend past the nation as an international framework. Patriot, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s posthumously published memoir, exemplifies the complexity of loving a people and the nebulous concept called a “country.”
Navalny died a political prisoner in a Russian Arctic penal colony in February 2024. The memoir is a collection of a manuscript he began writing in 2020 after a near-fatal poisoning, along with prison diaries he kept under strenuous conditions. His wife, Yulia Navalnaya, eventually compiled them into the finished work. Early in the memoir, Navalny recounts a conversation with his wife while he recovered from his poisoning in Germany. In response to a question from The New York Times about whether he would return to Russia, Navalny responded, “What a dumb question, of course I will.” Should Yulia answer the Times? “Yes,” Navalny said, “but not the bit about it being a dumb question.” Navalny battled apathy with participation, refusing to give up on the Russian people even when their country has fallen into authoritarian and dictatorial hands. As a dissident, Navalny opposed Putin’s co-optation of Russian patriotism all his life. In Patriot, he speaks from the grave about the never-ending nature of the fight.
Navalny died a political prisoner in a Russian Arctic penal colony in February 2024. The memoir is a collection of a manuscript he began writing in 2020 after a near-fatal poisoning, along with prison diaries he kept under strenuous conditions. His wife, Yulia Navalnaya, eventually compiled them into the finished work. Early in the memoir, Navalny recounts a conversation with his wife while he recovered from his poisoning in Germany. In response to a question from The New York Times about whether he would return to Russia, Navalny responded, “What a dumb question, of course I will.” Should Yulia answer the Times? “Yes,” Navalny said, “but not the bit about it being a dumb question.” Navalny battled apathy with participation, refusing to give up on the Russian people even when their country has fallen into authoritarian and dictatorial hands. As a dissident, Navalny opposed Putin’s co-optation of Russian patriotism all his life. In Patriot, he speaks from the grave about the never-ending nature of the fight.
Elena Eisenstadt, contributing editor
Image: Manohar, Black Buck, mixed medium, 1615-20 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).