I recently met someone from the country.
This person had always lived in the country. Real country. Cows, vegetable gardens, tree chopping, no running water.
We began talking about country life versus city life, as you do. He had not been in the city for more than a few days and already he missed the country. We […]

In his Travels in England Nikos Kazantzakis talks about “rhythm.”
“Τι είναι λοιπόν ρυθμός; Μια κεντρική κίνηση όλο αρμονία, που κυβερνάει το στοχασμό και την πράξη μας.”
“What is rhythm, then? A single central movement, all harmony, that governs our goals and actions.”
My first response to this is that Kazantzakis’s “rhythm” is equivalent to will. To a […]

Who are you?
A flawed but likeable character, often loved, rarely despised, aware that I’m not the man I thought I was and never will be, and given the chance, I’d slip back into the past, never to return. I’m also English to my coccyx, in the Monty Pythonesque tradition if you will, and sick and […]

Julian Barnes writes in The Guardian about going back to read Émile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin, because the play was about to open at the National Theatre. He finds that 150 years after it was written, the novel — about two lovers who kill a husband and by killing the husband kill their own desire and […]

Mark Twain said: “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.”
So, what’s the possibility of finding your missing, and now dead, sister wedged, upside down behind the bookcase in her bedroom? Well, hardly a real possibility (I mean WHAT are the odds?), but according […]