Category: Wednesday’s Child

I am often at a loss when challenged on my conclusion that diversity, in the world we inhabit today, is a synonym of conformity.  My opponents in the argument make me feel like a conspiracy theorist, someone who has some truths to impart but needs a better broom to sweep them back from under the carpet and into the light of day. It’s not that he doesn’t have the facts, it’s that the facts are too many. What I want, I have often thought, is an illustration, a “meme” as is now fashionable to say, something with the simplicity of...

“I have never been so keyed up!”  I think I won’t be very far from the truth if I say that what most Americans know of Royal Ascot is Audrey Hepburn’s rendition of this line in My Fair Lady, in 1964 the most expensive film ever made.  Remember?  “Ev’ry duke and earl and peer is here, ev’ryone who should be here is here,” she gavottes, At the gate are all the horses Waiting for the cue to fly away. What a gripping, absolutely ripping Moment at the Ascot op’ning day! When I lived in England, I never missed a day...

Young Nietzsche declared that tragedy was born from the spirit of music, but this proposition – as in the case of most nineteenth-century paradox mongers – may also be safely read in reverse.  Surely one can argue that music was born from the spirit of tragedy?  In fact, in an essay written a year earlier than The Birth of Tragedy, this is just what Nietzsche himself seems to have argued.  Anyway, my wife, who is a musician, agrees, which is why she told Mario’s father that what the boy needed was to be better acquainted with the idea of tragedy....

We had snow in Palermo for the first time in fifty years, and the young barman in a truck stop where I go for coffee whenever Signor Baldo, my provider of choice, is indisposed, finally spoke to me of something other than the weather. “You’re Russian,” he said, because that’s what I’d told him the day before. Then, in a confidential tone, as though imparting some lifesaving news, he continued:  “In Russia, you beat Hitler.”  I often wonder about what the average man knows.  Reading Russian viewer comments on YouTube the other evening, after watching some stupid police drama, I...

What’s next, a thoughtful reader was asking in reply to my musings last week, a ban on cotton?  Well, since toilet paper had been put forward the week before last as a candidate for the ban, I suppose cotton is not that far afield, but I would argue that books is something we need to look at more urgently.  And not just new books, either.  The burning of libraries, private as well as public, would surely send a powerful signal to paper producers all over the world to stop despoiling our natural habitat, at the same time providing vegan workshops...

“If you want to become an optimist and really understand life,” thought Chekhov, “stop believing the things that are said or written about it and just try seeing it for yourself.”  As I’m down with the ‘flu, and all I’m seeing at the moment are the wooden posts and canopy of my Chinese opium bed, it’s a little difficult to understand just how optimism has wormed its way into that sentence. In the morning my near and dear crowd around the bed like bearded worthies in Rembrandt’s anatomy lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, reproaching me for past crimes against health...

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...