Recent events in the Middle East – and over the decades preceding October 7th and the Israeli war in Gaza – have given me pause to consider a dense thicket of ideas as I try to understand conflicting viewpoints.  It’s a controversy that many people come to from a deeply personal place; but I’m not one of them, and in considering so deep and fraught an issue as Israel/Palestine, affecting so many people, the personal only goes so far. Which is, in fact, the main point of this post – but I’ll get back to that in a moment. 

Today – but not just today – I’m at a loss for words. I’m not talking about the several hundred in this post that failed to elude my grasp, but the ones that remain in their hideouts. It’s not the best of news for a writer, but I sometimes have trouble nowadays locating certain words. These elusive words live in my brain but evade my search, hiding in obscure neural pathways, under synaptic rocks or bushes, only to emerge much later – often too late for useful application in, say, a sentence. They shame me (and themselves) by their tardiness. 

I cut my teeth as a writer by doing book reviews, mostly of nonfiction works. It was both enjoyable and, in hindsight, a good idea. My book-reviewing days are now over, for multiple reasons. I’ve moved on, first to writing books and then to essays. I value cultural criticism in all its forms but didn’t particularly enjoy criticizing bad writing or bad books; and my aversion was compounded by a particularly bad, and unfair, review of one of my own books. Writers are like that.