Category: Access

9

Back to the Future II: The Olympics

I haven’t paid much attention to the Olympics for years.  It.   has been a long time since the Games were a genuine amateur sport.  All my life they have been big business that guaranteed endorsements and jobs to the winners.  When the allowed professional basketball players in, it was a public declaration that they were giving up the pretense.

0

Back to the Future

I’ve been in 15th century Florence, to be precise, colloguing with Petrarch, Pico della Mirandola, Savonarola,  Cosimo and Lorenzo de’ Medici, Machiavelli, and others.  As a traveler in time and space, I was eager to share my thoughts on the American present, which for them is an unimaginably distant future.  

3

Wednesday’s Child: Peace on Earth

Two kinds of ideas animate the world. One kind is private, hermetic, sovereign; I would go as far as to call it anaerobic, by analogy with the bacteria that perish when exposed to air and light. Fedor Tiutchev, Russia’s most original nineteenth-century poet, had this variety in mind when we wrote his “Silentium”: “Keep silent, secret, and obscured / Thy thoughts and dreams without end, / And let them rise like stars, inured / To darkness regnant in thine head.”