Perhaps one needs to be a writer, or at any rate a storyteller by temperament, a habitual raconteur, to feel it, but for a man of such disposition there is no greater frustration than trying to relate an anecdote to the driver of a car while in the passenger seat
While Joe Biden’s fading consciousness was playing puppetmaster to the other six of the G7 supposedly prosperous democratic nations, as he waited to jockey with Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin – his own country was coming apart.
Freedom is not “just another word for nothing left to lose,” with a tip of the hat to the late pop singer B.J. Thomas.
The news from my alma mater… Ah, but the gentle reader may not know that as a young man I spent many years in litigation with Yale University, which sought to shut down the literary magazine I edited for publishing poems that rhymed and, more generally, for airing views unsuitable to a modern place of learning.
Some years ago I knew a lady, gainfully divorced from a Russian oligarch, who turned to me with the plea to find her an honest lawyer in London. This made me privy to the substance of her predicament, which was basically that the fortune she kept in a famously named Swiss bank had been pilfered
Zaatar, as the gentle reader may recall from his travels, is a blend of herbs and seeds popular for centuries throughout the Middle East. Sprinkle it on toasted flatbread with a spray of olive oil and, even if you aren’t wearing a checkerboard towel round your head, a delicious breakfast awaits you
I set this conundrum once before, in another forum over which our founder was then presiding. It bears being repeated, however, all the more so as it is to do with the intertwining of friendship and family ties which has been my subject here of late. But permit me to start from a little farther afield.
In “1984,” Emmanuel Goldstein is the Enemy of the State necessary to bring cohesion to the totalitarian regime. The Two Minutes Hate directs society’s rage against the exiled traitor. Goldstein now is aiding Oceania’s current enemy – Eastasia or Eurasia, depending on the day – with whom we always have been at war.
Book III gets down to the business of Cambyses, Cyrus’ successor, and the invasion of Egypt in which he displays signs of madness, which might just be interpreted as the indications of the tyrannical character that is created when boys are raised without anyone who can say, “NO!”
This is a first sketch. If you read nothing else, you must read the Boethius text. If you have questions or comments, you this post and subsequent posts on the same subject.
