As a child, the writer and activist Sarah Schulman memorized the whole of Bertolt Brecht’s Weimar-era play The Threepenny Opera, with music by Kurt Weill. “I glommed onto that record so bad,” she tells Parul Sehgal in her Art of Nonfiction interview in our new Spring issue. “I listened to it over and over and over and over and over.”

I thought of Schulman when, a few days after we sent the Spring issue to the printer, I visited my partner, who was on a long stay in Berlin, and we went to see the play at the Berliner Ensemble. Back in New York, the endless mounds of snow were studded with excrement and turning dark gray, as if they too were absorbing the foul news. Berlin was so clean—an escape from everything! I felt like I was on the run. But as we found ourselves enmeshed in the exploits of the con man, murderer, and rapist known as Mack the Knife, who evades his crimes through his connections with the powerful elite, we glanced at each other, eyes wide with recognition, and were reminded that there was nowhere to run to.

When my colleagues and I began working on this issue, no. 255, I had hoped that it might offer our readers a kind of reprieve. Yet as Brecht’s Peachum sings, “We would be good, instead of base / But this old world is not that kind of place.” And as I look over the pieces in these pages, I am forced to admit that they do not exactly offer the spiritual remedy that I had in mind. In fact, the issue carries its own freight of greed, irresponsibility, and moral injury. (Worse, as fans of Schulman’s Conflict Is Not Abuse might observe, the perpetrators often see themselves as victims!) Here are stories we fought over, stories we couldn’t shake, stories that have a way of taking things we’re supposed to love—innocence, books, solidarity—and toying with them disconcertingly.

It’s somehow fitting, then, that the cover for this issue, a painting by Cecily Brown, should make a fairground of the very idea of received wisdom. Entitled How many proverbs can you find in this picture and riffing on Pieter Breughel the Elder’s Netherlandish Proverbs, Brown’s scene is crowded with figures: crying over spilled milk, throwing stones from glass houses, tipping a baby out with the bathwater, holding a bird in the hand, pining for greener grass—so many figures, in fact, that it’s hard to locate where one proverb ends and the next begins, or to notice when we might inadvertently be inventing our own. As Inger Christensen writes, in a new translation by Denise Newman that also appears in this issue, “the eye forms a gateway”:

and in the midst of this gateway facing nothing

or facing a landscape that is not yet finished being drawn,
we shall see the deer bearing History forward,

History as people’s testing of good and evil,
as the meaning we attach to this testing on a daily basis.

Emily Stokes is the editor of  The Paris Review.