Category: Wednesday’s Child

When asked to name the writer who best described daily life in the United States, my father invariably answered, “Chekhov.”

Strictly speaking, I should’ve stayed home last Saturday, passing time in meditation and prayer, but then how would we have celebrated on Sunday?

I cannot think of any English diminutives for Paul, but one of the Russian ones is Pavlik, functionally equivalent to Paolino in Italy. Saying “Paolino” to an Italian, however, will draw a blank, and it is vain to expect a response along the lines of “Ah, yes, of course, Fra Paolino da Pistoia, Dominican friar and Renaissance painter!” or something yet more recherché. But to any Russian alive today, “Pavlik” can only ever refer to one historical personage.

This week history buffs mark the birthdays of two men who made the twentieth century what it was. Lenin and Hitler were born within days of one another, under the sign of Taurus in the cruelest month of April. The more effete among us, however, mark the birth of Immanuel Kant, 300 years ago as of the day before yesterday, same day as Hitler’s.

“I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars,” George Best famously said. “The rest I just squandered.” There are men in the world who, when young, have proudly lived by this quip, only to undergo a kind of Pauline conversion in middle age, binning the toys of protracted childhood and at length settling down to the life of a Roman emperor in exile.

One day last week I stopped to buy some spring onions, now in season, from a farmer selling them by the roadside. They have sizeable bulbs, which is the part the Italians eat, discarding the tops. It’s a common sight here.

This Monday a great solar eclipse will cross the United States. It is the second such omen in the last decade, which is itself an omen, as one total eclipse so closely followed by another has not been seen in the country since its founding. Hence commentators are quoting the Book of Exodus: “And it shall come to pass, if they will not believe thee, neither hearken to the voice of the first sign, that they will believe the voice of the latter sign.”

I once read somewhere that the tradition of Forgiveness Sunday, with which last week ended for the Orthodox, arose in Egypt, when monks bid their farewells to each other before leaving the safety of the monastery to wander in the desert for Great Lent. In Russian we still use the same word for “farewell” and “forgive.”

They say that learning a foreign language alters the brain or, to use the term favored by soulless materialists, rewires it. In fact, contemporary scientific opinion has it that multilingualism boosts gray matter, increasing the number of neurons in the brain, and heightens the vitality of white matter, increasing the speed at which their impulses travel.