The Powder of Sympathy

The title references a 17th-century pseudoscientific remedy: the powder of sympathy was supposed to heal a wound by applying salve to the weapon that caused it. Morley, a Rhodes scholar and founding editor of the Saturday Review of Literature, applies this strange logic to his own essays, suggesting that the right treatment of ideas, places, and people might mend what modernity has broken. The collection gathers pieces written for newspapers, alive with the rush of daily observation but aiming at something more permanent. There are meditations on Oxford and Manhattan, encounters with literary ghosts like Pepys and DeQuincey, meditations on Santayana riding the subway, and sharp, funny pieces on the craft of journalism itself. Morley writes with the ease of a man who believed thinking should be entertaining, and that the dividing line between high culture and daily news was artificial. These are essays written in an age when columnists still aspired to be Essayists, and the reader was expected to keep up.