The lively discussion prompted by last week’s post, as well as the post itself, lacked an important ingredient, namely, some kind of connection to the present. A backward glance is all very well, but what of the Babbitts of today and tomorrow?
It is difficult to overestimate the influence of the all but forgotten Sinclair Lewis novel in the period between the two world wars, a stampede of adulation which culminated in the Nobel Prize in Literature awarded to the author, the first American to receive it.
Yesterday was the thousandth day of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. I published an article on Newsmax entitled “1000 Days of Fratricide” and thought it might be a good idea to present its overarching contention here.
For my wife’s birthday the other week we took a trip to the countryside to visit a famous vineyard, with Giulio doing the driving. There was another couple to lunch, English people from Sussex, she a bubbly IT specialist, he a teacher at a school near Cambridge. His name was Larry and he said he taught drama.
I am grateful to fate that my life as a journalist has never swerved from the path charted at the start, a way of looking at the world without grasping for pegs on which to hang stories. The peg for every story written today – inescapably, thunderously, deafeningly – is the result of the American election, a result unknown to me at this writing yet one, I concede, that may well decide the future of Western civilization.
I am not somebody, of all people, who would ever forget St. Luke’s admonishment that “a man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth,” but when it comes to the possession of a good bottle of cognac, covetousness proves the stronger.
Webster’s defines “platitude” as “the quality or state of being dull or insipid,” which is unnecessarily judgmental and, ironically, platitudinous.
Life experience shows that causal connections do exist, though not as overtly as science would have us believe.
Chiasso, the cozy little bar I frequent in the old town, tucked away behind Piazza Borsa… But let us not be overhasty in judgment.
The subject of “election interference” is of late the media equivalent of tulip fever, notwithstanding that free competition of opinions and ideas, which interfere with and undermine one another, is what a proper electoral campaign ought to be all about.
