Made-up names with no consideration of
family traditions and continuity, social propriety, or the meanings and
allusions they bear.
Concerts for Funerals, Christmas, New
Year or any other special occasion which are merely composed of the same
popular music as one hears all the time on radio, in elevators and
supermarkets.
People who wear the same informal
clothing when they go out for dinner, attend an opera or go the beach.
Someone who says “in all history” and
means wither “in my life time:” or perhaps “over the past few
generations”. This is narcissism or
solipsism.
Another who says “Evolution” or
“Nature hardwired us” as though a natural process were not only animated,
coherent and consistent, but sentient and wilful. This is nothing but determinism.
Then those who treat their animal pets
as though they were not only human, but their own children or best friends.
Aggressive vegans. Let them eat pebbles,
salt and paper.
Where does all the gluten go which is
now regularly removed from food?
Anyone who is calm, logical and
patient in our world must be crazy.
New Year’s Day, 2016. Stabbings in Jerusalem. Car-rammings in Etzion. Shootings in Tel-Aviv. The media press cannot find a
motivation. Perhaps, may we suggest,
anti-Semitism?
An Ethical Conundrum: From mystery
misery, without mastery; from confusion fusion, without theory or
connection. Each day we almost die by
mistakes, accidents, unperceived wishes.
Years later only, should we live so long, the circumstances become
evident and the motives embarrass us.
What it is impossible to dream away, conscience invalidates. What we
lose to sleep, however, lets the delusions continue.
The travelling detective discovers
wherever he goes new mysteries. He
identifies clues and draws inferences the local experts cannot. Then, having exposed part of the truth, he
moves on, unable to enjoy the benefits that accrue to safety and security. Having gained more skills with each episode,
he finds the greatest riddle of all why his coming to a place causes so much
pain and misery.
The question is not just why certain
movies and television series endure the test of time and can be watched with
enjoyment and learning decade after decade, but why some comic characters and
situations cannot be transplanted from place to place, as well as time to
time.
Dracula casts long shadows on the wall
but reflects no images in the mirror.
Memories weigh our minds down and creep like revenants after our bodies,
while doubts and hesitations unconsciously hold us back from the fullness of
life.
The fatuous and the pedantic: one
insists that you follow the strict dictionary spelling and meaning of words,
the other that you follow the original text you are working with, even down to
the errors and variants.
Nothing is perfect. I am perfectly assured of that.
After the North Koreans explode their
next hydrogen bomb, we will all have funny haircuts.
When I was a boy, most of the people I
knew were born in the nineteenth century, or at least before World War
One. There were still horse-drawn carts
making deliveries of milk and ice.
Telephones had dials and radios had tubes. There was no television. Now
young people expect me to know about the digital age and online payments.
Little more than a century old, and
the book that comes across the world—one whole continent, one whole ocean—is
falling apart. The pages are loose and
disintegrate in my hands. Carefully I make my photocopies. Suddenly the text looks clean and
sturdy. Everything reads as though it
were printed today, except for the marks of paper flakes, sewing strings, and
blotches of time. I fast approach that
age, too, yet who will ensure my thoughts are not crumbled and lost?
Children as emaciated as
skeletons. Old people desiccated by
weeks of starvation and years of deprivation.
Cities are devastated by civil war, rebellion and peace-makers
bombs. Emotions swell up, sympathy and
compassion, of course. But thoughts make
me hesitate about a people who for more than half a century have chanted for my
death.
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