Life is rife with disappointments, none more bewildering, perhaps, than the crash of adolescent illusions. Ever since the distant days of youth I have had a soft spot for the nostalgia of the Russian gypsy song, those early twentieth-century laments that, rather like a gypsy fortune teller, seemed to foretell the impending loss of our homeland and of our liberty.
In a world growing evermore progressive – I suspect the Gadarene swine thought this tendency marvelous as they went off the cliff – one has to work hard to stay in place.
Summertime and the living’s not just not easy, but when, even in the shade, it gets hot enough to fry an egg sunny side up it’s pretty much impossible. July, as the gentle reader may have read, was globally the hottest month since records began, and it now looks like August will be even hotter. You just can’t beat this kind of heat with mint juleps.
“The staff of life,” meaning bread, apparently gained wide currency in English in the wake of a misquotation of the Book of Psalms by a seventeenth-century Nonconformist, though I note that Jonathan Swift had used it some decades earlier. “Bread is the staff of life,” wrote the great English satirist, as therein is contained, “inclusive, the quintessence of beef, mutton, veal, venison, partridge, plum-pudding and custard.”
We’re now in what British journos call the Silly Season, and what could be sillier than the silly invitation for silly President Zelensky of Ukraine from silly U.S. President Biden to come and see him in Washington at the end of August, when Congress is in recess and there’s nobody to say they’re being silly?
Though now back in my own bed, thoughts of the fancy hotel where we stayed in Apulia keep me awake at night. What is it about such places? The first answer that comes to mind is that it has something to do with the success of “virtual worlds,”
It was like something out of a movie, one of those Eastern European flicks of vaguely subversive import in fading color from directors with names like Tomasz or Janos which in my childhood the dissidents of the day so cravenly admired.
The gentle reader, I’m sure, will not be surprised to discover that my understanding of professional football – or soccer, as he probably knows it – is limited to the encyclopedic fact that the game is played, predominantly with the players’ feet, using a ball once made of pigskin and since the Orwell year 1984 manufactured in synthetic material.
I had planned to be late with this week’s post to recount something of Rome, but our visit here developed in ways so spectacularly unforeseen – such as five hours on the train from Naples to Milan to meet one friend for a saffron risotto and then another three hours to make it to Rome in time for a spaghetti amatriciana with another – that I decided to throw in the towel and just write what’s on my mind. And what’s on my mind is the reading I’ve done during those eight hours on the Freccia Rossa.
