On another day in another place.

The gray sky hangs low, pressing you into the ground, opening out the horizon and forcing everything else to admit its insignificance.
Yet on this unpreposing canvas the reds and yellows of the trees glow. Green grass seems brighter. Buildings are whiter, and every little scrap of litter on the ground shines out in lurid [...]

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On щи.

Today you spent fifteen whole minutes letting the Star push the door shut and then grasp the door handle to pull it open again.
Now there’s a game that doesn’t seem to get old.
Neither does Babushka playing with the light switch for his enjoyment. On. Off. On. Off. On. Off. On. Off. On. Off. On. Off. [...]

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On Solzhenitsyn.

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn died last week.
You thought the reactions to his death in the West were quite interesting.
Considering that people held in prison by repressive regimes the West disapproves of who subsequently spend a lot of time and energy denouncing the same are usually accorded irreproachable sainthood status, some of the commentators were surprisingly grudging.
For [...]

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On Sergiyev Posad.

Sergiyev Posad is one of the Golden Ring towns. That is, it’s one of twelve towns floating around Moscow which are historically significant and are recommended as worth a visit if to anyone who is going to be in the region for any length of time.
You’ve actually been to two. The other one was Suzdal.
But you tended to [...]

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On humanity.

So there you are about to recommend a book in a thread as a result of Midnight Jester’s very thoughtful and sensible post on the nature of responsibility in war. Suddenly you realise that you have done this so frequently over the last few years that rather than wear out the keyboard and encourage people to read it one at [...]

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On comparative linguistics (again).

It’s the Easter concert term at your choir, and you are having a Mary fest. The lynch-pin of this is Dvorak’s Stabat Mater.
The blurb to your copy of the score says that during the period he was writing it no less than three of his children died. I think this is supposed to lend poignancy to what is, after [...]

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On more things to be in favour of.

There are a number of things which colour your attitude towards the whole debate about whether or not Muslim women should be allowed to follow their religious duties and impose their dress codes on the rest of the work force, not least of which is that your stubborn puritan streak puts you much more in [...]

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On being in favour of inequality.

You are no longer convinced about the value of the concept of equality.
This is mainly because there’s a common misconception that in order to be equal, things have to be the same.
You can claim until you are blue in the face and ready to stick a fork in someone’s eye that, say, feminism – to take a concept entirely at [...]

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On comparative linguistics.

If you needed any more proof that there’s a predictive text function hardwired into our brains it’s come from trying to sing The Chichester Psalms, which happens to be in Hebrew. This is a language you have no idea about and it turns out to be astonishingly difficult to even attempt to put the words in [...]

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On the rewards of persistence.

After turning on the TV, the second thing you and B did in Moscow was visit B’s newlywed friend A and his bride. Which was a lot of fun.
About halfway through the evening, A said, giggling, “Do you remember the time we went to the monestary?”
Sure do:
The social call to B’s monk at his monestary had [...]

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