Category: Wednesday’s Child

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.

One night when I was young, foolish, and poor – some qualities that are yet mine own – I was on a Metro-North train from Grand Central Station in New York to New Haven, Connecticut, where I lived after university.

It occurs to me that while “The Politics of Fashion” is common pabulum for talk shows and women’s magazines, nobody writes on “The Fashion of Politics.” Yet it’s a serious subject worth exploring.

When the hero is a martyr to boot, first tortured for months on end and finally speared by the tyrant’s own hand, a timeless vista opens on the struggle of good and evil. It’s the stuff of the vitae of Christian saints, pure and simple.

The standard view of education, as applied in schools the world over, is that the knowledge which children are to acquire is like a sewing kit with different spools of thread whence the required color is drawn. Specialization is the rule from an early age, with toddlers taught not to confuse apples and oranges.

It’s a sight that breaks one’s heart, like chancing upon a woman one was in love with and has not seen for half a century.

Every time I set foot in the First World, I feel like the Last Man. It starts, as if filmed by a student of Kusturica’s, with the guards by the X-ray machine at the airport checking the shoes of my two-year-old for plastic explosive. That, and the ritual command to “remove the belt,” is the great propylaea to the world beyond Palermo. They are afraid the traveler will hang himself with the belt while they screen him.