Category: Andrei Navrozov

If reading the Gospels has taught me anything, it’s that there is no recipe – no algorithm, a scientifically minded person might say – for the salvation of the soul.  Although Christ said many times that He had come to uphold the law, no one can ponder the events described by the evangelists without seeing that He, not the law, is the Savior.  This is why the Gospels are populated with every form of lowlife, from prostitutes to thieves, and why the virtuous and the strong are so often depicted there in moments of abject weakness.  What we most remember...

A columnist, but really just about anybody in the talking heads corner who voices opinions with the regularity of a grandfather clock, must be a fool if he doesn’t harbor a measure of remorse.  Opinion in general has something of a sleight of hand about it, in that it presupposes the choosing of subjects on which one believes one has something to say and the leaving out of other subjects, with the result that one appears more confident of one’s view of the world than one really is. Well, I thought that since we’re all on holiday, for today’s peroration...

Another impression I took home after that fortnight in London was of being trapped in an elevator of the 1980’s.  This is really a new thing in the city most people associate with reserve, politeness, and tranquility, that one is everywhere and at all hours surrounded with “music.”  Needless to say, it’s not music at all, but a cousin of what during my American years I heard played in elevators, shopping malls, and offices of the more vicious kind of dentist. I read recently that the American original was called Muzak because its inventor had been so taken with Kodak...

Like those time-lapse nature photographs that show the flower bud opening into a full-blown blossom only to shed the petals one by one in a matter of seconds, each successive visit to London reveals an acceleration of its decomposition. We may be horrified by the ravages of time on the features of an old friend when we meet a him after many years on different continents, but should his face have the same effect on us after a mere month’s absence, then either we need better glasses or else we’re looking at a picture of Dorian Gray. The scandal upon...

There is something out there, in the depths of the cyberworld, called TripAdvisor, and it occurs to me that modern culture increasingly resembles it.