LAWRENCE WESCHLER

Lawrence Weschler won the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism for his book Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences. If you have never read anything by Weschler then you are really missing out. He sees things that others do not. Then he points them out to those others, oftentimes with tongue firmly planted in cheek.

He is fond of what he calls convergences: juxtapositions, associations, or similarities between oftentimes disparate images or concepts. In a brief essay entitled "Those Wacky Htoo Twins," he compares the Johnny and Luther Htoo, twin twelve-year-old leaders of the Myanmar rebel group God's Army to the cherubs in Raphael's Dresden Sistine Madonna. I looked at the pictures he placed next to one another, read his thoughts on them, and just laughed. There is a resemblance.

In "Branching Out Yet Further," he notices the dendritic patterns common to trees, brains, "family trees," and visual representations of the Internet. In "The Graphics of Solidarity," he examines the logos and posters of Poland's Solidarity movement, placing them within context—political, social, religious. In "Torso as Face, Face as Torso," he walks us through the looking-glass that was the cover of the November 14, 1999 The New York Times Magazine, and how it inverts Rene Magritte's 1934 painting Le Viol.

He shows us how the imagery of Ground Zero in the aftermath of 9/11 really had been "dreamed" prior, as Jean Baudrillard suggests in The Spirit of Terrorism and Slavoj Žižek posits even more strongly in Welcome to the Desert of the Real. When you see the image of downtown Manhattan minus the Twin Towers juxtaposed with an image of Vermeer's View of Delft, painted in 1658—or a worker at the cleanup site presented above an image of Rodin's Adam sculpture—it is then that you realize that 9/11 was both a unique event and something that we have seen throughout history. Warfare is nothing new. Rebuilding after an attack or series of attacks is nothing new.

Sometimes, however, it takes another set of eyes to point out even the simplest of concepts to us. Sometimes, it takes another to remove the scales from our own eyes. Weschler does that in Everything That Rises, just as he has done in previous collections of criticism, such as Vermeer in Bosnia: Selected Writings. Congratulations to Lawrence Weschler for his award. It is well deserved.