Category: Wednesday’s Child
When I was a child, custom required small children to nap for an hour in the afternoon, the Quiet Hour being the accepted euphemism for these postprandial outings in the poppy field. The rather surprisingly bourgeois practice was also mandatory in Soviet kindergartens, in young pioneer camps, in short, wherever parents, older siblings, or staff wanted to regain a life of their own for at least a portion of the day. Here in Italy I often think back on that Soviet version of the siesta, which sheds light on a whole variety of goings-on in a country that in so...
Some fields of cultural endeavor are divided between two gurus, who spring to mind together like Abbott and Costello. Freud and Jung are a classic example, and when the charlatan who is taking a friend’s money isn’t a Freudian, then in all likelihood he’s a Jungian. Another such pair are the Russian directors Stanislavsky and Meyerhold, who divided twentieth-century theater between them as if it were an inherited set of silver spoons. Stanislavsky worked by induction, holding that if a certain reality is in the actor’s brain, then it will duly materialize on stage. Meyerhold held an opposite, deductive view,...
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...
Perhaps the gentle reader remembers the oath I swore a few months back, when, like the ghost of Banquo that passes among the revelers to haunt Macbeth, containers for differentiated trash collection appeared to me on the terrace of a seaside restaurant. Basically I said that sooner will Birnam Wood come up to Dunsinane than the abomination arrives in Palermo, but that if it does, I shall move to Morocco or Tunis forthwith. Autumn turned to winter, and suddenly it seemed like no sooner were the words out of my mouth than the huge steel garbage disposal containers all over...
For Christmas dinner we had ordered a roast baby goat, and consequently the teenage daughter of one of our invited guests regretted on the grounds that she is “a Vegan.” When the animal, just shy of sixteen pounds in weight, arrived from the local fornaio, resplendent in a cloud of rosemary and a jubilation of potatoes, I must confess I felt a trifle abashed at the spectacle and glad that the girl would not be coming. The serving platter took up the entire dinner table, with cutlery, plates and wine glasses huddling around its edges like poor relations, and the...
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...
It may occur to the gentle reader to ask why a congenital rake like me should want to observe the minutiae of religious practices long vanished from most civilized places and enlightened minds. One possible answer lies in the psychology of Christian belief.
“In an instant I had my lifelong foe by the throat. After so many years of waiting and longing, he was mine at last. I tore him to shreds and fragments. I rent the fragments to bits. I cast the bleeding rubbish into the fire, and drew into my nostrils the grateful incense of my burnt-offering. At last, and forever, my Conscience was dead! I was a free man! I turned upon my poor aunt, who was almost petrified with terror, and shouted: ‘Out of this house with your paupers, your charities, your reforms, your pestilent morals! You behold before...
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...
While I was in London, an old friend of mine and I had what can be described as an emotional misunderstanding, and since then I’ve thought of little else. Particularly in view of the fact that had it not been for this friend’s nearly infinite kindness to me over the years, I probably wouldn’t be here now writing about it, or about anything else for that matter. So I could do worse, I figured, than to extrapolate the misunderstanding and extract a moral out of its reflective depths. The moral is that modern civilization has compromised sentiment. In about the...
