Some may find it hard to believe, but there was a time in living memory when most writing depended on liquid ink. If you had a good pen, good paper, and good ink, writing by hand could provide a certain satisfaction which you can’t obtain with a ball-point, let alone with any kind of typewriter […]
One surprising thing I have discovered lately is that everybody has a philosophy of life, and that most people, if you ask them, are quite willing to share theirs with you. Why does this surprise me? Somehow, I had assumed that having a philosophy requires deep thinking, which not everybody is capable of, or even […]
The ability to make fire is one characteristic which distinguishes Man from animals. Yet I must admit that, although I’ve always heard stories about the primitive methods by which this can be done, I deserve to rank with the animals – because I still don’t know how. In the days when even intelligent people smoked […]
Those of you who’ve seen the 1967 movie The Graduate may or may not remember it very well, but if you were asked to quote a single word from it, I think I know what it would be. There’s a scene towards the beginning of the film where the hero, Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) is […]
It doesn’t take much to make me happy. One of my simplest joys is finding a coin in the street – usually a penny, but sometimes something larger, and, once in a great while, a paper dollar or more. I bring these treasures home, and put them in a row on top of a bureau. […]
This may or may not need explaining, because it seems so intuitively obvious – but there appears to be a universal preference for smoothness, as opposed to roughness. The first example which jumps to mind is SKIN. Nobody wants to have, see, or feel, a skin with pimples, warts, or any other kind of bumps. […]
“Adventure!” There’s something exciting about the very word – which advertisement-writers well know. You can have Travel Adventures, Romantic Adventures – even Restaurant Adventures. In fact, dining out in different eating establishments may be all some people need to satisfy their adventurous yearnings. But there’s an age factor at work here. The younger you are, […]
Is there such a thing as Fate, or Destiny? If so, apparently, I wasn’t destined to believe in it. On the other hand, I’m not a big fan of Free Will either. Within limits, it seems, we can make small choices. But overall, there’s simply too much going on for you or me to have […]
You’ve probably heard the joke about the marriage broker who’s been telling his client all the attractive features of a prospective bride, but then adds, “There’s one more thing I’ve got to tell you: She’s just a little bit pregnant.” In at least this one respect, being “OK” is like being pregnant. You can’t be […]
Perhaps you have come across this recommended method for making a sculpture of an elephant: You just get a big block of rock, and chip away everything that doesn’t look like an elephant. More poetically, some great sculptor is said to have explained that the image he wished to create was already sleeping there inside […]
Most people would agree that courage is an admirable quality. The word came originally from the Latin word for “heart” – as in Richard, Coeur de Lion, or “Richard, the Lion-heart.” Dan Rather, once a leading TV news “anchor-man,” used to sign off with that single word, “Courage!” (His predecessor and mentor, Walter Cronkite, would […]
From those marooned by Shakespeare’s Tempest to Coleridge’s becalmed “Ancient Mariner” (“as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean”) to the imperiled baby rocking in the tree-top, to the tornado which blew Dorothy from Kansas to Oz – the wind, or lack of it, has wound its way through our culture in any […]
Most people have probably forgotten why we call psychiatrists “shrinks.” (I had a friend who used to call them “trick-cyclists.”) But the term “shrink” is really a contraction of “head-shrinker,” and comes from the notion that, dealing with our heads as they do, they are like the natives of primitive tribes, who used to shrink […]
When electricity was still a novelty, it was discovered that a slight electric impulse could be passed down a long line of people, all holding hands. You might think that some bright person, with this knowledge, could have figured out, that here was possibly a new way of transmitting messages virtually instantaneously. If human flesh […]
Isn’t it remarkable that the vast majority of all the games we play involving physical activity are focused upon an object, usually round, which we call a “ball.” It can be small as a marble, or large as a bowling ball, light as a ping-pong ball, or heavy as a “medicine ball,” a sphere, as […]
In England it is, or used to be, a big event to turn 21. At my 21st birthday party I made place-cards with verses for each of the guests, who represented different eras in my young life. One was for a fellow-student at University College, London, where we were undergraduates, studying for what was called […]
Food has no educational value, no sex appeal, no ethical significance, and very little connection with underwear. Like us, it just sits there, waiting to be consumed by something greater than itself. The Great Alimentary Canal is part of the Universal Chain of Being, Nature’s Grand Design for recycling everything. But what would Food be […]
As far as I know, there is no legal penalty for forgetting. That is why “I just can’t remember” is so frequently adduced during testimony in court. It is the perfect excuse. The beauty of it is that there is no reliable way of proving whether you remember or not. “Lest We Forget” is a […]
One of my favorite proverbs says, “God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb.” I take this to mean that, if you’re in an unfortunate position (like the poor lamb who’s just had his protective fleece removed), the chances are that things will now get a little better for you, rather than worse (so the […]
One of the questions children are most commonly asked is, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” It was once mainly boys who were asked, because all good little girls, people assumed, would naturally want to be wives and mothers. Being a shy little boy, I myself didn’t often get asked, but […]
When Robert Frost wrote, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” he was thinking of the difficulty of maintaining barriers. Nature builds much more successful ones, in the form of mountain ranges, oceans, and deserts, which need very little maintenance. Nevertheless, humanity sees every barrier as a challenge. Still, we need borders, to separate […]
I’m sure you’ve come across the expression, “a place for everything, and everything in its place.” It makes a lot of sense. It sums up the whole idea of neatness and order. You can’t put things away properly, if you don’t know where they go. And you can’t find anything very easily, unless you know […]
I’m sure you’ve come across the expression, “a place for everything, and everything in its place.” It makes a lot of sense. It sums up the whole idea of neatness and order. You can’t put things away properly, if you don’t know where they go. And you can’t find anything very easily, unless you know […]
My closest experience to living a dream come true was being hired to teach on board a cruise ship converted into a “floating university,” and sailing with it twice around the world. I had long fantasized that, one day, travel and education would be combined in ways like this – but to become part of […]
We fall in love. So why don’t we fall in hate? But we all know that “falling” is much more complicated than that. There is, for instance, a big difference between a “fallen soldier,” and a “fallen woman.” Slipping and Falling too is acknowledged to be a major cause of death and injury, especially among […]
Some time ago, somebody at the Guinness Brewery (headquartered in Dublin, Ireland) had a brainwave. People in pubs were always arguing about the most this, or the longest or tallest that – but there was no handy authoritative way of settling these disputes. Why not publish some kind of reference book, to be available in […]
I am thinking of founding a religion in which everything is permitted. It would be the First Church of Anything Goes, and its followers would be known as Any’s. Wouldn’t it be great to have perfect freedom, sanctioned by the Almighty! But I must admit that this idea, attractive as it may seem at first […]
You probably know that the last four months of our calendar are wrongly named. “Sept,” “Oct,” “Nov,” and “Dec,” mean, in Latin, 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th, whereas those months are actually our ninth, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth. How did this happen? – and, even more to the point, why, for two thousand years, has […]
It was Edward Gibbon – himself one of the world’s great historians – who said that History was little more than a record of “the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” I don’t know about crimes, but you might put my own academic career, which included two degrees in History, among my personal follies and […]
One of the most famous pieces of literature in the English language is about a talking bird. No, it’s not a parrot or a mynah – and I don’t mean Edward Lear’s accomplished Owl who eloped with a Pussy-Cat, and could sing and play the guitar while operating a sailboat. The particular bird I am […]
One of the most famous pieces of literature in the English language is about a talking bird. No, it’s not a parrot or a mynah – and I don’t mean Edward Lear’s accomplished Owl who eloped with a Pussy-Cat, and could sing and play the guitar while operating a sailboat. The particular bird I am […]
You have to wear clothes, at least enough to cover your private parts. It’s generally the law, in most civilized places. In fact, such laws almost define civilization. “Naked savages” populate the lowest level of the social pyramid. But the garb of those on the upper levels, especially (for some reason) the female of the […]
It has always seemed puzzling to me that in some situations we have great respect for the dead, while in others we couldn’t care less. In general, the determining factor seems to be time. The more recently dead you are, the more you can expect to be handled with care, and referred to with some […]
Here and there in your life, you may have come across the expression “A Message to Garcia.” It’s one of those phrases useful in such a wide variety of situations that the original meaning has largely been forgotten. Those words became a cultural icon after appearing as the title of an essay, published in 1899, […]
Why? Why should I do it? Because. Because why? Because They said so. And who are They? They are your Authority Figures, in the shape of your parent, your teacher, employer, minister, officer, judge, ruler – or even your spouse (remember that rash promise to “Love, honor, and obey”?). A powerful bunch, I must say […]
As far as I know, God never bothers about what’s right and what’s wrong. Even so, we’ve always been gifted with self-professed intermediaries, from the days of Moses descending Mount Sinai bearing holy commandments inscribed on tablets of stone, all the way to the “televangelists” of today, telling us in no uncertain terms how God […]
If anybody asked you (for some diabolical reason) to use the word “unpremeditated” in a poem, you might think it a considerable, almost an unfair, challenge. The word isn’t very poetic-sounding, is it? But prepare to be flabbergasted: That word happens to appear in the first stanza of one of the most famous poems in […]
I was eight when planes piloted (in my comic-books) by sinister-looking Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Even before then, “Made in Japan” reputedly meant “cheap and shoddy.” During the war, of course, Japanese were simply our diabolical enemies. And, thanks to war-movies like God Is My Co-Pilot, the image of evil Japanese pilots was strongly planted […]
You may remember an old campfire song containing repeated vows that “I ain’t gonna grieve my Lord no more,” interspersed with a lengthy list of ways in which “you can’t get to Heaven.” One of those ways, which I have always remembered (perhaps because this is one case in which I strongly agree with the […]
Maybe you’ve seen this bit of sagacity somewhere before: “YYUR YYUB ICUR YY 4ME” The “translation” is: “Too wise you are. Too wise you be. I see you are too wise for me.” Very clever – but so what? For one thing, if true wisdom is really all it’s cracked up to be, how can […]