Category: Correspondence

Were the contemporary Paris audience of The Gambler to hear, as the curtain went down on Jean-François Regnard’s minor comic masterpiece of 1696, that the apparently chance sequences of dice values in a game of hazard like backgammon can be shown to obey certain mathematical laws, which are knowable, they would have laughed more heartily...

I live in flag country.  Here in east-central Illinois, amid the corn and soybean fields, the whistle-stop towns on their grid of well-maintained blacktops, the Stars and Stripes are as common as blue jeans.  The banner flutters from angled rods on the pillars of wraparound porches, flies from big poles in front of white two-story...

In Huysmans’ Against the Grain (1884), the precious hero Des Esseintes has “the idea of turning dream into reality, of traveling [from France] to England in the flesh as well as in the spirit, of checking the accuracy of his visions.”  He orders a servant to pack his bags, calls a cab, and stops in...

In articles dealing with the 2002 presidential election in Serbia, I have made passing references to Zoran Djindjic as “Serbia’s kleptocratic prime minister” and to his “corrupt establishment” that “controls the economy and the media more stringently than Milosevic had ever done.”  While such designations would be considered unremarkable by most of Serbia’s impoverished and...

Kazan was preparing for her 1,000-year anniversary last August when Russian President Vladimir Putin arrived to address the World Tatar Congress in what once had been the center of a Tatar khanate.  The goal of the congress was the “spiritual unification” of the Tatars, scattered across Russia and the world.  I do not know whether...

Morphine puts you to sleep, explains a pompous savant in Moliere, because it is a soporific.  By this tautology is the great dead void at the core of Western civilization exposed, finally and, I dare say, mercilessly.  What vitality, what resistivity, what transcendent stubbornness our spiritual truth once possessed (“Even if it were proven me...

Since the Middle Ages, the Balkan region of Kosovo-Metohia has witnessed firsthand the confrontation between Christianity and Islam.  Metohia is a Greek word meaning “the Church’s land,” and Orthodox Christians consider Kosovo an outpost of their civilization.  Muslims, on the other hand, continue to regard the region as a precious remnant of Islamic penetration into...

Worried about your civil liberties?  Concerned that the Potomac sniper’s terror, though now concluded, will lead to the shredding of the Second Amendment?  Then spare a thought for the helots Down Under, who are facing the prospect of unlimited gun confiscation after the horrific shooting spree of October 21, 2002, which killed two students and...

We used to go there on every Memorial Day—a small national cemetery off the road a piece in the woods.  It was usually warm; the woods, deep, green, and moist.  We would walk down a dirt path to the stone wall encircling the graves, sometimes passing others who had just visited there before us.  My...

“Save your fundraising mailing lists, for the San Fernando Valley shall rise again.”  For now, secession has failed.  In the November 2002 elections, a referendum to separate the Valley from the City of Los Angeles and to create the City of San Fernando Valley passed 51 to 49 percent in the Valley but lost 67...

Another eventful night at Aspinalls, and, somewhere between four in the morning and daybreak, for the thousandth time, I catch myself asking the same thing.  How do I explain to a normal person, to a disinterested layman who has never walked down Curzon Street, what goes on in the gambler’s soul?  Doubtless this can be...

The reason I am loath ever to set foot in the casino of Venice is that, in mournful contrast to just about everything else that fast moors me to her flooding shores, the Casinò di Venezia at Palazzo Vendramin is not an anachronism.  The Italian state, which runs the place along with several other, still...

The mid-December 2001 E.U. summit in Laeken, Belgium, will probably be remembered most for its “prosciutto war,”  which began when Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi refused to approve the new food agency to be located in Helsinki, Finland, since he was convinced that the Italian city of Parma was best suited to house the E.U....

It was one in the morning, and my headlights were cutting a tunnel of light above the road through the woods by the Whissonsett turn, when an image suddenly dropped right in front of me like a slide before the lamp of an old-fashioned projector.  It was a hare: not a young, sedentary, Dürer hare,...

I had sworn I would not buy any carpets, and, in the end, I did keep that promise, but then one scorching hot day my friends finally came to pry me loose of the snug little corner of the hotel bar.  Before I knew it, I was in the market, buying a preternaturally heavy wrought-iron...

Avenida 21, number 3014, is a nondescript house in an Havana suburb.  The paint is peeling; the walls are plain; the rooms are sparse.  Inside lives Elizardo Sanchez Santa Cruz, a Cuban dissident working to free the Cuban people.  The task is not easy.  Despite the collapse of communism elsewhere, here “political repression has been...

Storms and other phenomena of nature have their own distinct sounds.  Those who have survived a tornado often say that it sounded “like a train.”  A volley of cannon fire accompanies every thunderstorm.  The gale-force winds of a hurricane howl at nearly 200 miles per hour, as the rain strikes objects with the velocity of...

In Kuwait City, Kuwait, the outdoor souk or market offers a little of everything, from cosmetics to electronics to sandals.  Hanging prominently is a prayer rug picturing the Nativity.  The Christ Child smiles down on Kuwaiti traders as the Muslim call to prayer blares in the background. Americans sometimes forget that other countries restrict religious...

When Russia sold Alaska to the United States in 1867, most Americans were not convinced that the purchase of such remote real estate was a good idea.  It was called “Seward’s folly” or “Seward’s icebox.”  (William H. Seward was the secretary of state who negotiated the deal.)  Until then, America had only acquired contiguous territory,...

It was hot out there, the sun glaring down on us in our suits and ties.  The air was sort of smoky, the way it usually is down here near the Gulf Coast.  A parade of suits and uniforms marched behind the fire truck.  The casket was sitting in back, and the sun glared off...

Downtown Montreal was full of revelers last March 10.  Despite subzero temperatures, they hit the streets, some wearing little more than a smile.  But each had a maple leaf somewhere, on a flag, a piece of clothing, a sign, or even in place of the proverbial fig leaf. Such was the scene described by Macleans...

For a political party that celebrates diversity, it is certainly an odd choice.  The Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) Party of Minnesota, like the Democrats nationwide, has celebrated its role in promoting multiculturalism and massive immigration.  Yet the ticket the DFL has nominated to run for governor and lieutenant governor this fall—State Senate Majority Leader Roger Moe and...

On June 23, the Italian daily Corriere della Sera reported that Italian police had smashed a Milan-based Islamic terrorist cell that was planning an attack on the Basilica of San Petronio.  This church, the most important in Bologna, is dedicated to its patron saint, and it contains a fresco showing Muhammad being tortured by demons...

The most readily saleable kind of merchandise a writer keeps on offer is his natural gregariousness, with the widely advertised consequence that so many writers drink themselves to death.  In this steady though unprofitable trade of ours, I am pleased to say, I have some distinct advantage over the competition, as I never went to...

“Whether or not [sic] it is advisable to completely [sic] shut the door on native-language instruction is a decision that has to be made at the point of instruction,” U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige said on a recent trip to Denver, where he stopped to promote President George W. Bush’s educational-reform agenda. Colorado voters...

My father told me about his combat experience in World War II just once when I was a boy.  I must have been under ten, and we were in a car at night.  My clearest memory of what he told me is the story of the deer his unit killed with their carbines, and of...

The sun is breaking through, the dark green grass shimmering as it is swept back and forth by the wind like the mane of a wild mustang running along a plain.  Down here, near Madisonville along I-45 South, the rains had come hard and heavy.  The roadside is aglow in the white sunlight with the...

I heard the latest twist in the story at the end of our two hours of teaching English at the Catholic mission.  We volunteers taught the Latin American students—six simultaneous classes at different levels—in one big, noisy room.  The noise of our lessons subsided when Sister clapped her hands to get everyone’s attention then started...

For the last 20 years of the world’s bloodiest century, Lech Walesa, along with Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II, was a man on a pedestal in my pantheon of contemporary heroes, one of those who had helped bring about an end to communism in Eastern Europe and the demise of the Soviet Union. ...

The sun is shining on a typical warm day.  I roll my sleeves up, let the window down, and watch the train go by.  The battered Union Pacific, Southern Pacific, and Santa Fe boxcars roll past, clackity-clacking and swaying just a little on their way to “Cow Town.” Then they are gone, so I turn...

“And there was a great cry in Egypt.” —Exodus 12:30 A friend, though less in the sense of an intimate confidant, perhaps, than that of the famously urbane hobgoblin that was the guiding spirit of the old New Yorker, writes: Having just plowed painfully through your latest (and last!) May 2002 “Letter From (so-called) Milan,”...

Until the mid-1970’s, public education in Louisiana, like that in much of rural America, was solidly and successfully based on traditional methodology and philosophy, which emphasized academic excellence, an honest curriculum, discipline, and civic responsibility.  Administrators and teachers considered themselves to be true professionals with an accompanying moral obligation not only to provide quality education...

Talk about the economy is hotter than the coffee served at the truck stop in West Memphis, the third countertop we’ve visited in the last 12 hours.  It’s the graveyard shift, and the waitresses are filling the half-gallon thermoses as fast as truckers can place them on the counter.  The Java Cows in the kitchen...

Last year, I wrote in favor of establishing a Midwestern dairy cartel (“One Man’s Idea is Another’s . . . ,” Vital Signs, August 2001).  As a call for controlling one’s regional, economic, and cultural destiny, it was well received.  As a matter of economics, however, it was not a very practical idea.  A man...

In the years just before America’s entry into World War II, thousands of people, shaken and scattered by the Great Depression, made their way to Houston, where the shipyards were booming. My people wound up there, too.  The place they lived was called West End, rows of little white houses set up on cinder blocks,...

In summer and autumn 2001, as Iain Duncan Smith, Michael Portillo, Kenneth Clarke, Michael Ancram, and David Davis slugged it out to see who would become the new leader of Britain’s Conservative Party, colorful stories began circulating about Duncan Smith, who was widely regarded as the right’s great white hope. An ex-Army officer and the...

On March 12,  I was kneeling at the back of the vast 11th-century abbey church of Fontgombault, France, where I formed exactly one third of the congregation at a mid-week, mid-Lent, mid-morning Mass.  At the other end of the nave, the monastic community had processed in with identifiably Benedictine decorum, taken their places in the...

As in some picaresque dream, the carousel that has been spinning out a tale of broken hearts and mistaken identities begins to slow down, the roulette wheel grows disenchanted with the last bourgeois revolution, and all of a sudden even the drum of the concrete mixer that is shadowing the Venetian’s limousine all the way...

In 1986, I enrolled my oldest daughter in the same public school that my husband and I had attended.  I knew from my experience in public education that there were problems, but I was hopeful that, with our participation in her schooling, she would be fine.  During the next few years, I went from being...

From the West End, to the Square Mile, out into the most featureless South London suburbs, London is full of political resonances and the memories of old controversies.  From all kinds of streets, roads, avenues, broadways, high streets, rises, hills, crescents, parks, mews, and terraces, native or adoptive Londoners have gone out into the world...

The hawk, golden wings rustling in a stiff, cold breeze, floats above the prairie, eyeing its prey.  A tiny movement in the sea of grass probably stirred the majestic beast from the powerline that served as a makeshift perch: The hawk takes to the air with a speed that defies my poor eyesight’s ability to...

The proprietor of the restaurant M——A——, known as “Ricotta,” likes to share with his intimate friends—for the most part fecund, avuncular family men who, between them, did upward of a thousand years in the high-security Section 2 of the city’s thistle-shaped Ucciardone jail, awaiting trial on accusations of various victimless crimes, usually involving government building...

“We love our children, but we need food,” says Masih Saddiq, a 50-year-old brickmaker, explaining why none of his 13 children were in school.  They range in age from one-and-a-half to 25; all seem destined to spend their entire lives making bricks, as have their parents. The brickyard sits outside central Lahore, Pakistan’s second-most populous...

A poem written by Sir Alfred Lyall in the mid-19th century and quoted by King Abdur Rahman Khan in his 1900 biography, The Life of Abdur Rahman Khan, Amir of Afghanistan, reads: The Afghan is but grist in the mill, And the waters are moving it fast, Let the stone be upper or nether, It...

We’ve crammed the Suburban with about as many people as it can carry, driving the fence line on a section of land not far from Meridian, Texas, on a cool Sunday afternoon during deer season.  My brother left a message even before we made it home from church, asking us to come with his family...

A decade ago, Celeste Dell’Anna, to this day the only interior designer in Milan with a world reputation and a beautiful wife, was doing our new house in Knightsbridge.  We became great friends, initially because I appreciated the tragic spectacle of this man of culture being baited, like some great white stag personifying the Italian...

I awoke again this morning to an entirely clear sky.  It is cold early in the morning in late summer in the mountains of South Chile, about 45 degrees.  We are suffering through a very long dry spell.  There has been no significant rain for over two months, and the clear sky is mostly obliterated...

“What is the purpose of your journey to Canada and how long do you plan to stay?” That is the question anyone traveling across the Canadian border has to answer to the border guards, no matter where he crosses.  For myself, it was at the Pigeon River (which divides Minnesota and Ontario near the beautiful...

I am fumbling in the console, looking for my Jim Reeves Christmas CD, when I notice the wall of rolling, gray clouds approaching from the east.  The sun is sliding slowly beneath the horizon in the west, shooting shards of orange-red hues into the purple-blue sky, presenting a striking contrast to the dark gray wall,...