I hardly ever read introductions to classic works of English or American fiction; however, the farther removed we are a literary tradition, the more we may feel the need of a little preliminary exposition. The Athenian poet Sophocles was born a few years after 500 B.C. and would have been about thirteen years old when Xerxes led the Persian army into Greece and burned the temples on the Athenian acropolis.
It is through the rituals of common meals, common worship and common work that a family discovers its identity as a family. The pleasures and opportunities, no less than the pressures of modern existence threaten this identity.
This was the first of a number of “sermons,” a play on Horace’s term (sermones) for his satires plus an implied rebuke to the poet’s tendency to preach.
The Household is not just a “castle” but a little commonwealth. When Cain was expelled from his father’s polity of hearth and home, he realized that exile from the community of kinfolks was a fate at least as bad as death. ”My punishment” he declared, “is greater than I can bear….I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth; and it shall come to pass that every one that findeth me shall slay me.” The family is primarily an expression of blood-ties and the affections they engender. In a broader sense, however, the household is a model for...
Leftists who claim to deplore consumerism, can only offer more government, while Libertarians and Classical Liberals, whose ideology of individualism began the process that culminates in Marxist-feminist-transgenderist consumerism, can promise only more servility and the degradation of the human person into an object for twisted scientific experimentation.
In 1935 there appeared, to no great acclaim, a book of essays whose title asks a question that is still of vital importance to the dwindling remnant of Americans and Europeans who wish to think for themselves: Who Owns America?
The modern American household is a far cry from the family “castle” that even the King dared not enter. It is a set of cubicles, where individuals stash their stuff and listen to their own music or watch their own programs….
Biden was refreshingly candid. At last the American people get to see the real Joe, a nasty, lying, slandering little reptile with a fixed grin on his face begging for someone to knock it off with a well-aimed blow of the fist.
Lying awake, I half-dreamed a novel plot in which an ordinary man dies, technically, on the operating table. The doctors revive him, and after weeks of slow and painful recovery, he goes back to his old life.
