What people miss when they talk about village life is usually not village life.
They miss the picture of it. The smell of bread. The stove ticking in winter. Chickens scratching in the dust. A man coming home with dirt on his hands and knowing exactly what he has done that day. A woman pulling preserves from a cellar shelf. A table with real food on it, not something extruded, … Read the rest
By Eric Le Roy
One of my students put this article under my nose yesterday during a class discussion. He is Swiss, and the original article was in German. So here is a translation of the gist of it:
Germany: In front of a nursing home for people with dementia in Duisburg, a fake bus stop has recently been installed. A fictitious timetable hangs on the typical bus … Read the rest
Athens, in the middle of the sixth century before our era, was not yet the museum city of marble postcards. It was a place of dust, olives, arguments, and men who could recite laws in the morning and break them politely in the afternoon. The Athenians had recently received a precious gift: rules that were meant to be stronger than families. Solon, the lawgiver, had tried to take a city … Read the rest
Europe is very easy to insult.
From a certain angle, the continent looks like an aging museum with Wi-Fi: polite, overregulated, uncomfortable with power, lost in its own procedures while other players move faster and hit harder. If you lived here in the 1970s and come back now, the contrast feels almost obscene. Where once your memory stored quiet town squares and local accents, now it finds the familiar … Read the rest
Why “Traditional Values” Never Existed
Let’s face it: every time someone says we must “return to traditional values,” I look around in confusion, wondering which exact century they are referring to. Is it the one with the public latrines and communal sponges, or the one with corsets so tight that women fainted during polite conversation? People love to imagine some golden age of virtue, but history—being its usual uncooperative self—refuses … Read the rest
