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...
Like those time-lapse nature photographs that show the flower bud opening into a full-blown blossom only to shed the petals one by one in a matter of seconds, each successive visit to London reveals an acceleration of its decomposition. We may be horrified by the ravages of time on the features of an old friend when we meet a him after many years on different continents, but should his face have the same effect on us after a mere month’s absence, then either we need better glasses or else we’re looking at a picture of Dorian Gray. The scandal upon...
There is something out there, in the depths of the cyberworld, called TripAdvisor, and it occurs to me that modern culture increasingly resembles it.
The idea of the melting pot, in my view, has done more to harm the United States than any other. There are probably as many foreigners per capita in Britain as in America, but society there encourages them to keep to themselves, to stick to their aboriginal ways and exotic garb, to cross the stage every once in a while – extravagantly costumed and, as it were, becomingly inscrutable – instead of going after lead roles.
My son has written to me from London. This alone shows how much he was affected by the spectacle he had just witnessed, since young people today only ever write WhatsAp messages or graffiti, depending on their economic status and social origin
I’ve scarcely mentioned the Salisbury poisonings here, though the story is interesting not only from the geopolitical, but also from the social and cultural point of view. Let me fill in some of the blanks.
On the last day of August a momentous event took place, a historic meeting of the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople with his Moscow counterpart. Prompted by that encounter was yesterday’s convening of the Holy Synod, which will conclude its deliberations and publish its resolutions tomorrow. A great new schism is in the offing, undoubtedly good news for all true Orthodox believers.
