Travel in a foreign country asks the traveler to adapt. Humans can be very adaptive. Or frozen, by patterns of past experience, those impossible expectations paralyzing the mind, and then spinning like a top, after energy is spent, wobbling to fall over. It is Sunday morning, I compose these lines at the end of…
The day three, another outstanding breakfast at our hotel. The French feature of flakey, buttery pastry and fresh fruit, plus a charcuterie board is impossible to beat by my breakfast standards. My standard of what makes a good breakfast has been elevated. Today is Sunday. We arrived at the church of Saint Augustin, where…
This is to be our second day in Paris. I have a strange sensation of being in a country, and a city that in my fathers time suffered four long years of German occupation. I cannot exactly describe the feeling of walking along the Seine yesterday afternoon, the air filled with the sounds of…
Sunday morning, and it is Father’s Day. I feel puzzlement each year when Father’s Day arrives. What a mother does is something that is easy to feel. Is that Illusion? I am no female. And if I were, would I be up to giving birth? Is everything simply one more delusion, another fantastic and…
According to legend, Helen of Troy was ‘the face that launched a thousand ships’… I have no idea whether Homer’s Iliad reflects actual events, or whether it is a tribute to the mind of a brilliant story-teller. The tale of a prolonged conflict between the Greeks and a city state is profoundly human, psychologically…
I like to lie here where the children play, beside the ruined wall, among thistles and red poppies. I am still a scholar to the children, and also to the thistles and red poppies. They are innocent, even in their wickedness. But to the sheep I am no longer a scholar: so it is…
Like a white ox I’d like to see him, which, snorting and lowing, walks before the plough-share: and his lowing should also laud all that is earthly! Dark is still his countenance; the shadow of his hand dances upon it. Overshadowed is still the sense of his eye. ~*~ His deed itself…
We watched a film, The Long Good Friday, an Aurora Film Society showing, in company with a room full of other film buffs. Yes, this was a chilling gangster film. The leading man in the tale is Harold Shand played by Bob Hoskins. Harold’s girlfriend, Victoria, is played by Helen Mirren. The film reminded me…
According to the myth of Christianity, the eschaton signals the ending of an old order. ἔσχατος means the end, last, and is often associated with doomsaying that the earth is to ‘end in fire.’ In a manner of speaking, the sky rains fire these days. Circumstances force a choice. Each in his/her heart is…
I offer some lines and phrases from the story-poem Stardust by Hisham Bustani. Tired of turning the dials of history. I LOOK AT THEM: they are motionless and shackled, sap sucked dry, faces covered with imbecilic smiles. Who are these people… (First answer) Physical systems change…from highly ordered to more disordered. Entropy The entropy…
