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Moving With the Times
I have been turning my thoughts back to a few of the literary and philosophical works I read as a youth, having recently been reminded of my pleasure in reading Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in my early teens. This is one of those titles a deep reader can pick up time and time again, and always find something new to consider, some aspect that had escaped them during an earlier reading, some relevance to today. This is also one of those works which almost failed to come into being, until a publisher, without anticipating any real commercial value or financial gain, finally brought it…
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In Whom Do You Place Your Trust?
In the days of my youth – and much of my time now, as an old person, is spent remembering youthful years – people who wanted to have their books published either had to go through the rigours of a publishing house, with or without an agent on their side, or pay a vanity press to publish the work for them. Vanity presses advertised in what we would call the gutter press, the yellow press, the tabloids; those publications with little intellectual depth, plenty of not necessarily serious advertising, and a high readership; something which has, sadly, not disappeared from the world to this day. A few years ago things…
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A Most Respectable Lifestyle
I suspect it depends a great deal on a person’s interpretation of Respectable, and whether it can be accepted for many different ways of life, or just from those in certain professions, and the former landed gentry but, as a child, it was a lifestyle which appealed to me. The fault is undoubtedly that of my grandmother – mother’s side – who talked of the old ways of the professional tramp, and the morals and standards some of them lived up to. How they traversed the country, seeking odd jobs and short-term employment in return for sustenance and a quarter to rest in, before moving on to new areas; unbound,…
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A Place For Everything
I am fairly sure that most people, perhaps more likely the older, but younger may have been subjected to this too, know the phrase: ” A Place for Everything, and Everything in its Place.” I heard it constantly uttered as a child, but always from my grandparents, never anyone else. Perhaps it is a thing which springs over a generation now and then, as those on the receiving end vow never to repeat what they have experienced in their youth, and bring their children up differently, or perhaps it is just me. Regardless of which, as I get inevitably older, it is a sentence I have begun using to myself…
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Fielding the Three Big Questions
There is a certain attraction to traditions, especially when visiting foreign lands, which draws tourists and others into a spiral of mixed feelings. On the one hand, it is good to see that the old ways are being respected and upheld. On the other the question of why people cannot simply let go, especially when it comes to traditions filled with outdated pomp and circumstance, costing the taxpayer a fortune without bringing them any benefits. Just as not everything which is new is good and worth pursuing, so it is with the old; there comes a time when traditions need to be consigned to the history books, taught in classes,…
