✳flâneur — a map of the web's best reading

Gimme Welter, by Becca Rothfeld

harpers.org · 1,889 words · saved by 1 readers

We've recently updated our website to make signing in easier and more secure From All Things Are Too Small, which will be published next month by Metropolitan Books. “A ll things / are too small,” begins a poem believed to be written by the thirteenth-century Dutch mystic Hadewijch of Brabant. She goes on—“to hold me”—but she did not have to. All things are too small—not just to hold me, but to hold anything. Cups are too small, which is why they demand such relentless refilling. Bodies are too small to encompass more than a sole inhabitant, except in rare cases of mysticism or possession (or the more familiar but no less astounding case of pregnancy). Books can be big—most of the best ones are—yet even the most encyclopedic affairs are too small to encompass the whole of the world’s wild machinery. Moby-Dick can’t reach its arms around a whale—although Herman Melville aims, as James Wood writes, to touch every last word. I once saw a man in a restaurant finish his pasta, order the sam

March 2024 Issue [Readings] Gimme Welter Adjust Share by Becca Rothfeld , From All Things Are Too Small, which will be published next month by Metropolitan Books. “All things / are too small,” begins a poem believed to be written by the thirteenth-century Dutch mystic Hadewijch of Brabant. She goes on—“to hold me”—but she did not have to. All things are too small—not just to hold me, but to hold anything. Cups are too small, which is why they demand such relentless refilling. Bodies are too small to encompass more than a sole inhabitant, except in rare cases of mysticism or posse

Explore this link on the map →

saved by

related reading