Just after publishing the immediately-preceding post, I read Pankaj Mishra’s essay, Welcome to the age of anger. It is a brilliant combination of erudition and a quality not oft-alloyed with erudition – so-called “common” sense.
3 CommentsCategory: word power
This post highlights three interesting essays on the above.
Only one author is primarily a journalist; the other two are, respectively, an English physicist/cosmologist and an Australian (of Greek ancestry) who is best known for his provocative literary fictions.
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A Qualup Bell – simply being itself – is lovelier than any jingle bells, jiving. Religious leaders’ “seasonally appropriate” platitudes ring as hollow as electioneering politicians’ “motherhood statements”. But you are one click away from a beautifully poignant, perceptive perspective on motherhood…
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An obsession with celebrity does not lie quietly beside the other things we value; it takes their place.
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What elephants may be lacking most of all is not language but the Rosetta Stone to prove they have it and clue us in to what on God’s green earth they’re talking about all the time…. They have a vocal range of ten octaves (a piano has seven), and up to three-quarters of the sounds they produce are inaudible to human ears.
2 CommentsPolitics has a way of reducing everyone, including the most brilliant – especially the most brilliant.
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When someone next to you answers the phone and starts talking loudly as if you didn’t exist, you realize that, in her private zone, you don’t. And slowly, the whole concept of a public space — where we meet and engage and learn from our fellow citizens — evaporates.
Comments closedThe teachers do their rounds
And they are mostly kind, you know.
But the language ain’t the same.
They cut my hair and changed my name.
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Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
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