It is my mother’s way to see life, past and present, in terms of a standard comic exaggeration. If she had spent four years in Buchenwald, she would recollect it so: “So I said to him: listen, Mister, if you think I’m going to eat this stuff, you’ve got another think coming.” . . .…
Typically each Wednesday I have been posting The Moviegoer quotes and extracts. It dawned upon me the significance of the day (WP fans will know what I’m referring to). So from now on all the WP quotes and extracts will be posted under the rubric of WP Wednesday. A good rotation. A rotation I define…
Sometimes when she mentions God, it strikes me that my mother uses him as but one of the devices that come to hand in an outrageous man’s world, to be put to work like all the rest in the one enterprise she has any use for: the canny management of the shocks of life. It…
At last Win Riley’s superb one hour documentary is now available for viewing at your convenience and at a reasonable price. Sign up is free and the proceeds go directly to Win — enabling him to make more great content. Tip: best to use Chrome as your browser. If you have any queries check out the…
Yet loves revives as we spin homewards along the coast through the early evening. Joy and sadness come by turns, I know now. Beauty and bravery make you sad, Sharon’s beauty and my aunt’s bravery, and victory breaks your heart. But life goes on and on we go, spinning along the coast in a violet…
What is the malaise? you ask. The malaise is the pain of loss. The world is lost to you, the world and the people in it, and there remains only you and the world and you no more able to be in the world than Banquo’s ghost. You say it is a simple thing surely,…
Being a creature of habit, as regular as a monk, and taking pleasure in the homeliest repetitions, I listen every night at ten to a program called This I Believe. Monks have their compline, I have This I Believe. On the program hundreds of the highest-minded people in our country, thoughtful and intelligent people, people…
FOR SOME TIME NOW the impression has been growing upon me that everyone is dead. It happens when I speak to people. In the middle of a sentence it will come over me: yes, beyond a doubt this is death. There is little to do but groan and make an excuse and slip away as…
A regular young Rupert Brooke was I, —full of expectancy. Oh the crap that lies lurking in the English soul. Somewhere it, the English soul, received an injection of romanticism which nearly killed it. That’s what killed my father, English romanticism, that and 1930 science. A line for my notebook: Explore connection between romanticism and…
AN ODD THING. Ever since Wednesday I have become acutely aware of Jews. There is a clue here, but of what I cannot say. How do I know? Because whenever I approach a Jew, the Geiger counter in my head starts rattling away like a machine gun; and as I go past with the utmost…
manwithoutqualities 