Content 18+
My wife Liuba is from Omsk, and many hard, frozen, poverty-stricken years there did nothing to damage her health.But all it took was four winters amid the belching smokestacks and poisoned atmosphere of Moscow for her to contract a chronic bronchial infection. During her last two years in the megapolis, often amid endless bleak rains that more and more prevail there because of climate change, our apartment was … Read the rest
Content 18+
I am blessed by the fact that my students and other friends are always sending me interesting things to read. One I got recently was an excellent article by a writer I hadn’t heard of named Cody Delistraty on the theme of what he termed the “relentless, competitive” quest for ‘Happiness” and how people today often make themselves miserable trying to obtain it.
I use the word “obtain” … Read the rest
Content 18+
I remember flying into Moscow in 2007 with delicious misgivings. Brought up in America during the Cold War, the Soviet Union was always presented to me as the Factory of Godless Communism, and I knew I would never see the inside of it. But I was curious (a common response to Russia on the part of non-Russians everywhere then and now).
Then suddenly, after becoming a teacher … Read the rest
Content 18+ I went out on the balcony, and suddenly I saw that stars are visible here… for me, being born in a small town squeezed between the sandy desert and steppe vastness fuelled by oil underneath, the view of the night sky full of stars was something common and familiar. I used to dream of them, trying to guess if there is a life out there. Soon after my … Read the rest
Content 18+ I can remember my undergraduate days more than a half century ago and sitting with friends until the wee hours having philosophical discussions about things like 'God'. The memory grows fuzzy, but it seems to me that we gave God at least a 50-50 chance of existing. Maybe, mixed in with the residue of an upbringing that took the reality of Heaven and Hell for granted, we were … Read the rest
Content 18+ I have just finished a splendid old book by the famous Czech author Milan Kundera called in English The Joke. Kundera is a master writer, of course, not a pamphleteer or agenda-pusher, and so when I say that I was much struck by the similarities between the characters in the novel and those of the 'postmodern' 'Woke' Society, I am not pushing an agenda either.
I mean to … Read the rest
Content 21+ Mercifully, I live in Europe so I am spared — aside from what I masochistically choose to read on the various sites — the usual avalanche of American nonsense about the Christmas Holidays — and yes, I continue to refer to them pointedly as such: The Christmas Holidays.
Thanksgiving has just finished and I feel safe in imagining that millions of American people celebrated joyously in the customary … Read the rest
