Category: Wednesday’s Child

The twilight hour before bedtime which any sensible boy hopes will never arrive is the high point of his day, and young Vasily, who will be two next month, is no exception. We watch music videos – more or less the same playlist night after night after night – while I smoke my Toscano and savor my brandy, if there is any. The miracle is that I never get tired of these musical selections, whereof by now I know every darn word by heart, and anyone who has ever experienced a true miracle wants the world to hear about it.

Some years ago, I recall, a great deal of postprandial talk in England revolved around the term “nanny state.”  This did not come from libertarians, anarchists, or some other political fringe, but was very much a mainstream Tory gripe. The state meddles, they complained as they passed the port to the left, it interferes and stifles.

“Today I harvested honey,” a reader has written apropos of last week’s post, and naturally I envied him the instant I read it. As an adult I always lived in and was drawn to cities, as this chimed in with my nostalgia for civilization on the wane, but the bucolic, which I had richly experienced as a child, ever beckoned the prodigal to return.  Civilization is temporal, like our life itself.  Nature is like our afterlife, eternally kind to some and eternally brutal to others.

The gentle reader is no doubt familiar with the genre of mind game wherein a wholly hypothetical situation, such as being marooned on a desert island, is combined with a highly specific dilemma, such as which book or recording one would take there if one could. The field of speculation is almost limitless.

“Homage to Catatonia” was, at least apocryphally, the title that clinched the commission of an article about pub crawling from the editor-in-chief of a middlebrow newspaper, whereupon the journalist went off to sample his usual boozers right up to the evening of publication. Seeing the article up on the screen, however, the night editor scratched his pate, remembered that George Orwell’s title was “Homage to Catalonia,” and corrected the typo in the headline. Thankfully, we don’t have a night editor.

The duty officer at the carabinieri station looked like Rembrandt in the famous self-portrait at Kenwood House, all noble lines and wrinkles, but appearances can be deceiving.  It transpired that he fancied himself a thoroughly modern man of the world, roseately au fait with the digital revolution, and it gave him evident pleasure to put me down as a country bumpkin because when he said emay, I said “What’s that?”

‘Tis the Silly Season, as British journos call the news doldrums of August, and I’ve got something that fits the bill.  Only the exterior involucre of the item on display is a silly shade of pink, however, as the heart of the matter is dark and venomous and repugnant enough to take us well into the autumn.

Some years ago I needed to find a notary public in Palermo, and the memory of that quest is indelible. My parents were then in the poorest health, both of them, their life support in New York being an Uzbek girl my mother had engaged, first as a cleaner and then as the all-around, hands-on savior she later became.

When the mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, a pioneer in the field of differential and integral calculus among his other accomplishments, stuck his impressively large nose into metaphysics, we all remember what a ridiculous result this produced.  He assured his contemporaries that the world approaches – tends is the term used by his fellow mathematicians and designated in calculus with a horizontal arrow – perfection, a state that, logically enough, the world’s first optimist named the optimum.

Hoping to find him in a sympathetic rather than critical mood, today I offer the gentle reader an English version of what is arguably the most important poem written in Russia in the last century.