Last week, as young Vasily and I walked the Via Maqueda, the gentle reader may recall the sharp turn we made on reaching the railway station. This brought us to the Chinese quarter, and to urban blight of a different kind.
Via Maqueda is a Spanish name, which the street takes from a viceroy of Sicily who was called – rather fetchingly, if you ask me – Bernardino de Cárdenas y Portugal, Duke of Maqueda. So originally the “que” was pronounced as “k,” but the Sicilians pronounce it the way an English speaker would read it.
The experience I’m about to relate is little different from Tom Sawyer’s in the famous episode of painting the fence. The point Mark Twain makes – that something is only fun when it isn’t a job – is far from incidental to the great American writer’s thinking, but instead runs through all his works, from his stories to his sketches and travelogues.
I know I test the gentle reader’s credulity when I say that I was among the first in the world to own a mobile phone, but it’s true. It was a Motorola flip job in matte black, and I received it as a gift from my father-in-law of the day, who in turn had received two samples of that novel contraption as a gift from the manufacturer.
I share the gentle reader’s annoyance at the newfangled spelling of place names, and on coming across “Kyiv” or “Turkiye” it always seems to me that, like Rip Van Winkle, I had fallen asleep for many years and woke up in another world, bizarre, irrational, and just plain irksome.
I heard that before the war and the concomitant impoverishment of the Russian oligarch, wideboys from Moscow and points east used to rent whole villages in Sicily for parties, which they had learned from their betters to call corporate entertainment.
This week I continue with my son’s boozy epistles. They help me to keep off the subject of the war in Ukraine, which I follow with maniacal devotion. Yet as the gentle reader will likely agree, even a confounded zealot needs a break, if only for some virtual communion with his kin. Here Nikolai describes his stay as a houseguest in the home of a family in Mazères, near Bordeaux.
I wonder if the gentle reader has had occasion to remark that, first in middlebrow newspapers and now almost universally throughout the media, the paragraph is disappearing. As in all properly constructed, literary prose, the paragraph in the service of journalism once played the same role as the order of service does in church liturgy.
All through my childhood, people around me – that is to say, in my parents’ social circle – spoke of “listening to the voices.”
Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is a big book, six bulky volumes in all, but only two things about it have stayed with me after so many years. One is that I have not known a better English stylist, before or since, and so when I think of what Rome must have been in its glory, I think of Gibbon’s galleried prose. The other is the story he tells of Attila, king of the Huns, who boasted of never having had bread pass his lips.
