April 2019 While working on a post about the king of travel literature, Patrick Leigh Fermor, I'm reading another author who also ostensibly figures among the ranks of travel literature royalty: Robert Byron. I first read The Road to Oxiana some 15 years ago, with print book in hand containing lots of illustrations. Pictures are indeed worth a thousand words, I come to find out. Over the past few weeks I've been working my way [...]
April 2019 One of the things we human beings seem to do best is take things for granted. Our attention span is miniscule in the scope of the wide world. We forget what we're about as soon as some other bright, shiny object crosses our field of vision. That tendency is at diametric opposites with the reality and processes of geology. In geological reality a human lifespan doesn't even show up on the clock. So [...]
April 2019 Here in the Philippines where I've been living for the past two years I've become used to being an anomaly. The fact that I have no kids is considered so outrageous by some people that they think I'm just making it up. It's as if kids were like weather -- a given of daily existence rather than predictable products of Cause A yielding Effect B. After the initial shock there usually follows a [...]
April 2019 I need to be honest with you. When I looked at the topic list for the month's blog posts I saw I was down to a choice between writing about Hannah Arendt's insights on totalitarianism and their applicability to the current political landscape -- both in Europe and the United States, so great is our misfortune -- or doing a piece on the French Baroque. I spent more hours than I care to [...]