This is essentially a letter from Munich, where my wife and I flew last week – I to celebrate the composer Vladimir Genin’s sixtieth birthday, Olga to take part in a grosse Jubiläumskonzert in honor of the occasion. This took place on Sunday evening in Munich’s Gasteig, incongruously – for anyone familiar with Genin’s music – a modernist monstrosity along the lines of London’s Barbican and the new Seine Musicale in Paris.
It took a confluence of two lies, the capitalist lie and the Marxist lie, to produce the total mendacity we know that neither system achieved by itself.
Condemned to hope’s delusive mine,
As on we toil from day to day,
By sudden blasts, or slow decline,
Our social comforts drop away.
Once there was a little boy whose name was Robert Reese;
And every Friday afternoon he had to speak a piece.
So many poems thus he learned, that soon he had a store
Of recitations in his head and still kept learning more.
If any of Trump’s supporters thought they were voting to restore they old American Republic, this is a time for bitter repentance. If they merely hoped they would get someone to play the man, they still have reason to hope that on balance they did the right thing.
Although the revolution did not take place all at once, the Christian doctrine of “one flesh” influenced virtually every aspect of marriage. Celibacy remained the highest ideal in the Middle Ages, but marriage was an institution created by God for the procreation of the human race, though the pursuit of sexual pleasure for its own sake was condemned even in marriage.
Svmer is icumen in
Lhude sing cuccu
Groweþ sed
and bloweþ med
and springþ þe wde nu
Sing cuccu
Jesse James was a lad that killed many a man,
He robbed the Danville train,
He stole from the rich and he gave to the poor,
He’d a hand and a heart and a brain.
They say that truth will always out in the end, but the truth is that awls can be hidden in sackcloth for generations. Take the ordinary umbrella – the kind without a poisoned tip – and tell me honestly if a more ineffectual contraption has ever existed; and yet no wife, mother, or grandmother ever neglects to remind the man of the house to avail himself of one whenever it looks like rain. In London, of course, it always does. Rain has a mind of its own, which is called wind, and consequently, however large the umbrella, within ten minutes...
As I sat at the café, I said to myself,
They may talk as they please about what they call pelf,
They may sneer as they like about eating and drinking,
But help it I cannot, I cannot help thinking
How pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!
