When the future spoke—as it did every day now—it spoke through jukeboxes. In the paradise of affluence Dionne Warwick was always signing a Burt Bacharach song, as a Greek island came into view at starboard. The stars—movie actresses, pop singers, grizzled dissipated novelists, intellectual fashion designers—got hilariously drunk in ship’s bars, alternately fell half-naked down casino steps or announced their intention of filming the work of Genet or Ouspensky. The planet was their plaything. Having the power of free movement to and from anywhere, they jetted between Corfu and Bhutan and Seychelles, colliding briefly with one another to invent new psychic spaces, to share the new fun of the incandescent future.

The rainbow shirts contrast effectively with the verdant lawn. The beautiful young people dance on the meadow in springtime. The pond nymph is radiant in the beflowered heat. A man sits on a rock and exhibits tranquility. Another man leaps in the air and exhibits exuberance. Man and woman and child sit naked on the grass to illustrate the familial tenderness of the new age. A goateed man, his hair in pigtails: the shaman. And so on: the juggler, the magician, the extravagant pirate, the spontaneous light-footed maiden symbolizing life energy. You get lost in the thick of it.

The killing and the talk of killing went on continuously now. Death, by assassination or suicide or police brutality or mistimed explosion of revolutionary matériel, had become a form of punctuation. Friends amazed themselves by making lists of the deaths. The only question was what could top what they had already witnessed. They felt ready for anything: plague, ice age, neo-Nazi putsch. Perhaps the recent cataclysms were part of a master plan to soften them up for the impending apocalypse—an event about which they grew more and more curious. If that was to be their fate, they might as well get on with it.

My job here is a strange one. The description I found in the classifieds read: “Overnight counselor-in-residence for developmentally disabled teenagers with behavior problems.” I didn’t know exactly what that meant. But it went on to read: “Some meal preparation required; counselor is able to sleep during shift.”

At the time it seemed that it might suit me, the sleeping part in particular.

“Hey!” I shouted, “slow down!”

“Dad!” he was calling. “There’s a guy!”

“What?”

“There’s a guy in the creek.” He was gulping.

“What are you saying?”

“It’s like he’s stuck under the bridge. He’s not moving.”

He led me on his bike back to the park. I didn’t call out to anyone to follow us. I think, like many others, I resist being alarmed until there’s no other choice.

The girl, once she had reached the priest where he stood at the foot of the altar, took the host in her hand in the modern way. But instead of putting it in her mouth, she covered it with her other hand as if it were alive, like a grasshopper, and might escape. She walked away like this, and then, rather than turning down the aisle to return to her pew, she went straight ahead and pushed through the side door with her shoulder.

It is not the primary thrust or purpose of these essays to serve as autobiography. The strictly autobiographical portions are to be approached with caution. This is not to suggest that they are not true, but veracity is hardly the issue or the point. The autobiographical parts often serve the same purpose as notes in a symphony or passage of music: simply to get from one place to another. The personage I am in some of the essays, to borrow Henry Adams’s metaphor, is simply a manikin on which I model some suitable clothes for the occasion… I am a critic and it is best for the reader never to forget that, even if at times I appear to be playing other roles.

I heard several black men on a local black radio call-in program complain rather vociferously the Monday following the Miss American pageant. One caller, who writes for the local black newspaper, thought Ms. Williams to be “politically unaware” because she refused to be a spokesperson for her race, and he considered her “ a liability to the black community.” Another caller voiced the opinion that the selection of Williams as Miss America was further proof that white America wished to denigrate black men by promoting black women. It is with a great degree of dire anticipation that I await the response from these quarters once it becomes generally known that Ms. Williams has a white boyfriend. She will no longer be simply “politically unaware” or “an insulting hindrance to the ascendancy of black men”; she will be a traitor, “sleeping with the white boy just like the slave women used to do on the plantation.”

If he had written nothing but poetry he would have been one of the most renowned writers in twentieth-century America. But Hughes also wrote novels, short stories, travel pieces, translations, plays, scripts, song lyrics, and journalism. And he managed this kind of productivity while still maintaining an extremely energetic social life and conducting extensive lecture tours. Hughes almost never refused to read his poetry at any sort of institution, a college, an elementary school, a retirement home, a cocktail party, on a street corner. And he did not let a little matter like someone’s inability to pay his fee stop him from appearing. He was virtually a literary Johnny Appleseed, dropping poems on the public as if, when he awoke every morning, he could comb them out of his hair.

Even as they entered, he could feel the place envelop him like a vapor with a smell of heavy, overcooked food, privation and dust. The lady taking tickets, old and wigged, with big bosoms, conspicuously switched from Yiddish to German, putting the interlopers on notice that they had been spotted. Eyeing the overblown placard for the play, showing a giant Jew with maniacal eyes throttling some stricken Gentile, he again wondered, Why did they huddle so, these people? And all the while he kept hearing this coarse, splattery jargon, so animated, with that catarrh as though a fishbone were stuck in the throat. There was a man selling hot tea from a samovar and another vending sticky cakes and ices. And the eating—everybody eating, gnawing apples and chewing sweet crackling dumplings from greasy sheets of brown paper. And that marshy barn-warmth of people huddling. It was too close for him.

At least Russell felt he had allies and forebears. Unlike Wittgenstein, he saw himself as part of a tradition, one of a line of thinkers who had stared at various walls, wondering what remained to be done—or more likely demolished.

By persistence or brute force a wall might be assaulted, but it would not be breached by imagining it was not really so high or formidable. Still, even Wittgenstein would wonder at times if a given wall even existed—that is, if a problem was truly a philosophical problem, and not instead one of the wards of psychology or science. Russell, by contrast, was more wily. Philosophy, he would say with a wink, was traditionally a case of weighing theft—the theft of assumptions and givens—over honest toil. Wittgenstein despised this attitude. He said the problems must be squarely confronted, not sent a Trojan horse. And here Wittgenstein would see himself as both the betrayed and the betrayer, knowing, as Russell did not, that their walls were really quite different. Shameful arrogance, but true, Wittgenstein would think. Russell did not have his ear to this wall, and if he did, he could not hear it surging with the outer sea.

Looking out the window as the train crept into Vienna, Wittgenstein could see the massive city huddled under clumps of low winter clouds. A smoky bluish gray in his memory, Vienna now seemed singed at the edges like an old photograph, everything begrimed from the cheap coal they were forced to burn, when coal was available at all. In the station, with its resounding marble ceilings, the lights flickered ominously and the marble stairs echoed with wooden-soled shoes, leather, like most other commodities, being increasingly unobtainable. By the men’s room, a pudgy man with a soiled suit darted out from a vestibule. Sir, he hissed. Do you have any cocoa, spirits or other foodstuffs you might like to sell or trade? The man opened a valise crammed with cans and packages. Look. I have some lovely bacon and tinned milk. Choice tobacco? Silk for your girl?

…after dozens of visits, I stopped buying the paintings. Scenes of bright peasant life, or lovely little children in uniforms filing into school, pictures of grand bourgeois families dancing in a hall beneath towering hi-fi speakers, or of shocking voodoo ceremonies in blacks and reds with decapitated chickens flapping in blood and women writhing, panoramas of bustling, abundant markets, paintings of primeval forests, with lions, giraffes, panthers and other animals no Haitian has ever seen at home, where the wildest animal is the crocodile or the flamingo, or the tarantula. It’s hard to keep looking at those paintings, but these Haitian artists paint them over and over again, as though they can’t get this nightmare out of their system. For months, a vendor tried to sell me this one painting, of a church interior, because I made the mistake of looking at it. He started at thirty dollars, laughably high but negotiable. Still, for a long time I couldn’t bring myself to buy it, no matter how badly the stooped and stuttering art dealer wanted to get rid of it, no matter how low he would go. I had promised myself no more paintings.

People whose dead have enemies resort to all sorts of tricks to stop their deceased relation from being turned into a zombi. They build strong graves of stone; often the construction begins long before the death—the costs are high, but it’s worth it to avoid becoming a zombi. The dead man’s people throw rice into his casket, so that the deceased will have to count each grain, and because he is concentrating on the counting he will not respond to the bokor’s call to arise. They seal the corpse’s nostrils to stop his soul from escaping. But if, by some ruse, the bokor manages to trap the dead man’s soul, the game is up. The zombi rises, and thenceforth he must serve the bokor, or whoever has commissioned the zombification, as a virtual slave.

The brigades had erected barricades throughout her neighborhood to stop the Macoutes and the Army from driving through at unsnail-like top speed and spraying the houses with machine-gun fire, as they had done in other neighborhoods and in other towns. We got to one barricade, and I couldn’t go around it. Worse, I was suddenly unable, in my panic, to put the car into reverse. It was a new car. My colleagues in the backseat were screaming, “Journalis! Journalis!” at the boys at the barricade, but the boys had seen a car where there should have been no cars, and they came around the barricade with their rocks, and it was only seconds that I found reverse and got us out of there.

My colleagues were not pleased.

“Learn to drive,” said the Chicago Tribune.

When in 1679 a London woman swung at Tyburn for bestiality, her canine partner in crime suffered the same punishment on the same grounds. King James I ordered a bear that had killed a child to be baited to death, and rural shepherds frequently hanged dogs caught worrying their flocks. The Merchant of Venice included a reference to “a wolf, hanged for human slaughter” sufficiently cursory to suggest that Shakespeare’s audience recognized animals as appropriate participants in formal judicial proceedings.

The ultimate measure of the tiger’s unregeneracy was its fondness for human flesh. Many tigers living in the populated parts of India and Ceylon routinely preyed on domestic animals and occasionally became man-eaters. Some turned to human prey because they were too sick or old to catch faster and less dangerous quarries. Most, however, were thought to be “cattle-lifting tigers” who had once “summoned up courage to attack the herdsmen,” and thereby added a tasty new item to their diet.

The most natural way for most visitors to interact with the animals was to feed them, an act which symbolized both proprietorship and domination. Most zoos encouraged this activity. The first elephants in the collection of the London Zoo were reported to “have a keen relish for buns and biscuits, which are vended on the spot for their benefit and the gratification of visitors.” Their successors shared the same tastes. When the celebrated Jumbo was about to depart for the United States, his admirers expressed their regret with farewell gifts including fruit, cake, oysters, and a variety of alcoholic beverages.