Gallery of Clouds

Rachel Eisendrath’s Gallery of Clouds reads like strings of improvised images in the margins of Sir Philip Sidney’s Elizabethan romance Arcadia. Or a diary at times inspired by her muse Virginia Woolf and elevated to an urban essay on the English Renaissance, European art, failed American pastoral dreams, and the dissonances of modernity. Eisendrath’s illuminating sketches—wise, changeable, compassionate—resemble Constable’s watercolor sky studies with transitory Turneresque bursts of sun between. —Susan Howe

Susan Howe, Susan Howe

What is this mysterious harmony that a lamp has with a book? It is as if the lamp knew and shared in the silence that lies at the heart of the book, beneath all the eager little words.’ So writes Rachel Eisendrath in this transporting marvel of a book, a wide-ranging demonstration of the art of making thought out of dreamy inquiry and reflection. An underground spring in the book—if such can be said of a gallery of clouds!—is a deft, unforgettable portrait of the child and the girl the author was who dwell so delightedly in her still, avid for insight and all the crucial refreshment that beauty, literature and art bring to life. I’ll be sharing Gallery of Clouds with lucky friends starting now and for the rest of my life. —Alice Quinn

Alice Quinn, Alice Quinn

Gallery of Clouds is a rare and singular achievement. An ecstatic meditation on Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, it is also a space—one concise and yet vast, precise and yet its effects are indeterminable—where subtle echoes between gestures in art and literature are revealed and attended to by an exceptional mind. Rachel Eisendrath is a close and astute reader who possesses great learning and vivid gifts, all of which she wears lightly. Her ideas are communicated with eloquent clarity and directness. Her authority is powered by doubt and a restless searching, one troubled by timeless questions concerning the meaning of things, the uncertainty of those meanings, and the fleeting and connected nature of life. Soon one realises that what is taking place here is a sort of an experiment in living and reading. With such acute lucidity and intellectual elegance, Eisendrath has mapped out an unlikely geography of feeling and ideas that culminates into a passion for the life of the mind and the life of books.—Hisham Matar

Hisham Matar, Hisham Matar