Emma Bovary; incurable romantic or dangerous hysteric

Flaubert’s heroine didn’t start bad.  She was a lively imaginative girl.  She might have benefited from a bit of maternal constraint, but her mother died when she was just 11 and she was sent to a convent.   There her religious fantasies took a romantic turn.  She began reading the romantic... Read more »

In search of meaning

‘To live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in the suffering. If there is any purpose in life at all, there must be a purpose in suffering and in dying.  But no man can tell another what this purpose is.  Each must find out for himself, and... Read more »

Dulce et decorum est …..

Have you read ‘All quiet on the western front?’  I hadn’t until this week.  It is a remarkable work, shocking, poignant but  at the same time uplifting and hopeful.  It’s a story of survival, but all war stories are of survival.  Remarque’s novel tells it you feel it really was;... Read more »

Theo van Gogh; holding the lonely madness of genius.

Vincent van Gogh is all too often seen as the mad genius who created masterpieces while in a state of ecstacy and infatuation, the man who cut off his ear in despair and took his own life, but that is a distortion.  He was more an intensely driven man,  awkward... Read more »

Epitaph

Reader!   If thou hast a heart famed for tenderness and pity, contemplate this spot. In which are deposited the remains of a young lady, whose artless beauty, innocence of mind and gentle manner obtained her the esteem of all who knew her. But when nerves were too delicately spun to bear the rude shakes and jostlings, which we meet in this transitory world, nature gave... Read more »

Sixty-four!

 Arriving at the watershed  between regret and despair, when fate replaces hope and is companioned by fear, the mind fixes on   the moment of being,   belonging,      not to compete but to repair, less an excursion   as a better way home.     Read more »