In the wake of recent events in the Middle East, George Gilder, some of whose thoughts all those years ago I thought original enough to publish in the magazine I was editing, has just updated his book The Israel Test. I had not read the book when it was first published, in 2009, and now I thought I’d catch up with the intellectual evolution of the acclaimed author of Wealth and Poverty.
When there’s no money in the house, as happens often in the lives of a couple who are both what the Italian taxman calls liberi professionisti – people with no regular income, to you and me – I console myself and my family with the thought that however little we are paid for our labors, it’s all in gold.
Doubtless the gentle reader has no illusions about my knowledge and understanding of sport, given that on more than one occasion I confessed to have but limited mastery in only two fields, chess and badminton.
“Cloudily enwrapped in allegorical devices” was how Edmund Spenser described to his readers the plot of The Faerie Queene.
We have all written about love, from Plato to Dr. Fleming and back again, but at this fandango to the music of love friendship is the wallflower.
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.”
My paternal grandmother’s family was from Vitebsk, where it was well remembered that as a callow youth Marc Chagall made a living painting shop signs in that provincial town. It turns out, however, that the canvases Chagall produced in the years preceding his emigration to France are perhaps the only pictures of lasting value – of genius, a more impulsive chronicler would say – ever painted on the territory of the Russian, and then Soviet, empire.
Children are often asked by adults, especially by those who have made a stinking mess of their own lives, what they want to be when they grow up. Mercifully, before the child is able too speak for himself, there are parents on hand to answer the question. I always say I want Vasily to become a painter.
Of the many, possibly apocryphal, stories about Diogenes, I like the one where he came to visit Plato bearing a basket of figs, which everybody in Athens knew were the man’s favorite snack. Diogenes meant to treat him to a few figs in the basket, but instead Plato wolfed down the lot, leaving none for Diogenes and leading him to exclaim: “You just can’t control the animal in you! And you call yourself a philosopher?”
A venerable old derelict who washed parked cars up and down the little street where I first lived in London had been born in a house next door to Winston Churchill’s. His only character flaw was drinking sixteen pints of bitter every evening, and as I never owned a car he felt he could talk to me with a frankness that rose above mercantile niceties.
