There is a passage from Franz Kafka’s notebooks that reads:

I can swim just like the others. Only I have a better memory than the others. I have not forgotten the former inability to swim. But since I have not forgotten it, being able to swim is of no help to me; and so, after all, I cannot swim.

By all accounts, Kafka was a good swimmer. ...

Madre de piedra, espuma de los cóndores (mother of stone, semen of condors): that was Pablo Neruda’s impression of Machu Picchu, the hot literary take of 1950. Machu Picchu has inspired poetic, philosophical, and patriotic works over the years. More recently, however, it has also invited fears of catastrophe, as reports and opinion pieces from around the world have denounced Peru’s shortsighted and venal plan to build a new airport near the site. President Martín Vizcarra of Peru “is determined to destroy this sacred place,” read an op-ed in the New York Times this past year. That project would, the author wrote, “irreparably damage the heartland of the Inca civilization.” ...

The last decades of the eighteenth century saw a rush to conquer new altitudes. In June 1783, the first successful hot-air balloon flight took place in Versailles, attended by the royal family and an audience of sixty thousand, as the brothers Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier set afloat a balloon carrying a sheep, a cock, and a duck. A piloted flight quickly followed in October that year, with Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier, a chemist, on board. The flight was a success, hailed by the press as “a spectacle, the like of which was never shewn since the world began.” ...

The term “social distancing” trickled into the US news at the end of January, and by mid-March had become the governing creed of interpersonal relations for the time being. It surfaced in the midst of early doubts about the efficacy and ethics of the quarantine in China. The media began to recite it, wrapping it in scare quotes. ...

On 13 March, or roughly a century ago, some newspapers published the photograph below of a banner placed outside the Maria Nuova hospital in Florence. The bilingual sign, which according to the news sources was made by four Chinese boys, reads: “Doctors and nurses, modern heroes with no poets to tell of your courage. Thank you from the heart.” ...

At the museum, I am standing with my spouse in front of a Flemish vanitas scene. There is an old man hunched over his accounting books, surrounded by gold coins and jewels; a skull sits on his desk, and Death himself perches undetected above his shoulder. What, I ask her, is the “takeaway” of such scenes supposed to be? That one would do well to start thinking of one’s soul, she says. ...

When I was a child, there was a book about the Polish artist Balthus in the small library at our country home. It was dad’s book, big and heavy. The skin between my thumb and index finger stretched taut when I took it down from the shelf. Sometimes I would sit at the table there in the library and page through the book. The table was by a window that looked out on a forest of firs. ...

On display at the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation in Dearborn, Michigan—amid the lacquered black metal of Model Ts and the hanging flanks of the first planes to fly over the poles, just feet from Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion House and the bus seat made famous by Rosa Parks, mere yards from the chair in which Abraham Lincoln was shot and the limousine in which John Fitzgerald Kennedy was also, yes, shot—is a small, clear, and seemingly empty test tube, once rumored to contain the last breath of Thomas Edison. ...

In the late summer of 1941, a young woman identified by the initials J. B. wrote to the editor of the wildly popular crime magazine True Detective with a story about her father. “Whenever Dad came home from work,” she begins, “he usually found me huddled in a chair reading a mystery magazine.” Her father does not approve. To him, the stories in the magazine—lurid and sensational tales of real murder cases, complete with vibrant illustrations of partially clothed women—are “just trash.” ...

In 1796, when he was fifty-one years old, the Spanish artist Francisco Goya began a visual meditation on monsters, reason, and the relationship between these phenomena. After multiple drafts, the final etching proved to be among the most magnetic images in Western culture. It has inspired endless commentary, suggesting that however many words are dedicated to analyzing its power, the secret of this print will never quite be solved. ...