In describing my jeweler friend from London last week I neglected to mention that he is one of four siblings. A common enough occurrence, the gentle reader may reflect, but as an only child I discover many things about large families rather late in life.
FB friend Patrick Mulvey posted a great comment on my previous scribbling:
“It may a small sample size but many of my babyboomer contemporaries and younger extended family members who suffer from ‘real’ mental illness…manic depression, bipolar disorder and worse…….all used illegal drugs regularly in their teens, 20’s and 30’s. I’m not saying this is the only cause of mental illness but one only has to look at our homeless problem and know that lack of housing is not the major reason.”
What is important to note in this first bit of history is his willingness to give different accounts and explanations and to allow readers to make up their own minds. It is not that he does not have opinions that he freely expresses, and he certainly, by an artful narrative style, leads us in one direction or another, but the final judgment is left up to the reader. Would we had such a writer to day.
Weakness, corruption, and the ongoing failure to control the peaceful settlement of non-Romans…
Last week’s post, its shabby ambience notwithstanding, has opened up a path – if not to the gentle reader’s heart, at least out of potential writer’s block – and so I tread it once more. This week I reveal myself as a feminist sympathizer, admittedly in a rather particular sense.
Sunday’s Internet Front Page of the Washington Post featured an article showing the dangerous delusions of our rulers. They’re upset that 100 percent of Americans don’t accept with Stalinist certainty the legitimacy of the recent plebiscite.
Some people on FB are gassing on about what a stinker Hemingway was, and concluding therefore that he couldn’t write. Treating novelists as either heroes or demons, ideologues or intellectuals, is a grave mistake that is generally made by people who do not read, much less understand literature.
I came to agree not only with the conclusion, that it was time to get out of the warm but also with the premise, which seemed to echo Forrest’s statement that war means fighting, and fighting means killing. Americans should not get involved in a war, so I thought then and now, unless they will be defending their vital interests, and, if something is important enough to fight for, the only restraints should be moral and not political considerations.
