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.
The task before me is daunting. More difficult yet than attempting to persuade the gentle reader that a Pax Ukrainiana is upon us, with merry paysans et paysannes frolicking in the evergreen groves of liberty beneath boughs laden with golden fruit.
Russia’s military humiliation in Ukraine, especially if viewed through the magnifying lens of the West’s collective response to the invasion, is the most hopeful geopolitical event I have witnessed in my lifetime.
Though my innate contrariness rebels against creeping literalism, it would be perverse not to mention the six-day war in which Putin’s army has already sustained greater human losses, 6727 dead and wounded as of this writing, than in either of the two Chechen wars or after a decade of fighting in Syria. I can, however, lessen the injury to my authorial ego by at least beginning from afar.
As the gentle reader has surely noted, in my sketches of the last few weeks I sought to uncover some unacknowledged – I could even say hushed up – producers of dopamine and all the other happy hormones in the brain of modern man.
