The worst enemy of the West is itself, and the same goes for our democracy. We are so arrogantly certain of our survival and superiority, we in the Western democracies, that we never give a moment’s thought to how we appear to others. We don’t ...
Like several other countries in the West, Britain has given up on the sordid and vulgar activity of making things and instead gone in for the more refined and sophisticated life of service industries. In the case of Britain, however, there is a ...
One of my few remaining ambitions is to catalog my library—if that is not too grand a word for my accumulation of books. Certainly, I have known municipal libraries with fewer volumes, especially now as they can’t wait to dispose of those ...
Opening my copy of the French newspaper Le Figaro recently, there was a long article titled “With Gustave Thibon in the Ardèche: the Saint and the Peasant.” I was in the Ardèche at the time and therefore decided to read the article—for such ...
When someone is said to be lacking in ambition, it is usually meant as a criticism, as if people had a transcendent moral duty to be ambitious. How else but by ambition will mankind advance? I grant that ambition is sometimes, or often, necessary, ...
Chekhov says somewhere that a writer—a real writer, that is—ought to be able to write a story about anything, an ashtray for example. Actually, I don’t think that that would be so difficult a task: Ashtrays in the old days would have ...
Our cleaning lady in France brings her dog with her. The dog has been a great solace to her during a difficult stage in her life. She bought her from a breeder who used her as a mother of puppies, but since she (the dog) was well past her peak ...
Some years ago, in Australia, I appeared on a platform with a prominent intellectual, many times more famous than I. We were asked what it took to be good. The famous intellectual, who had had a brilliant career, answered that in order to be good, ...
It is said that there is a world shortage of bees, but it has not so far affected our house in France, where most summers, when we return, we find a swarm that has constructed a nest between one of the windows and its shutters. They are magnificent ...
Today I received a most kind, unsolicited offer on the internet to “amplify my potential” with, or by, ChatGPT. At my age, however, I think it’s a little late in the day to “amplify my potential”: I have reached, or failed to reach, ...
Driving through what my sister-in-law calls la France morte—the France that is dead—my wife and I were struck by the peculiar gloom of so many of the small country towns that would once have provided services for the farmers of the surrounding ...
Politeness is a virtue. But, as with all virtues, it becomes a vice when carried too far. It is not merely that it can be oleaginous; it can be pusillanimous, the cowardly avoidance of uncomfortable disagreement when such disagreement becomes ...
