After five visits, I still get turned around in Rome, but, in Edinburgh, I consulted a map only on the first day. A quick look around from the summit of any one of the city’s hills is worth more than an hour examining a map. By the end of our Convivium, I’ve climbed all the...
“What is the theme of your conference?” asked a potential traveler to Rome. “How republics perish,” I replied. “Don’t you mean democracies?” he persisted, referring to the title of a good but far-from-profound book by Jean-François Revel. I congratulated him on getting the point of the title of our second Rome Convivium. After all, I...
The Black Sea city of Batumi used to be beautiful, and, under a foot of freshly fallen snow, Batumi is beautiful again. Stuccoed terraces of tired 19th-century buildings sit doorstep-deep in white. Chuckling gutters trim the softness draped over corrugated iron roofs. Concrete tenements fade out of focus, their drabness merging with the gray of...
The rugged mountains lifting into the vaporous cloud cap that repeated their tumultuous form on the aerial plane looked familiar enough—sky islands, we call them in the American Southwest. Only these were real islands, rising from blue sea rather than sere desert floor, and the clouds surmounting them were more than atmospheric; they were Homeric. ...
I arrived at the Ft. Lauderdale airport to a line at the Spirit Airline ticket counter so long that I didn’t even contemplate whether to wait. My flight to Laguardia wasn’t until 3:20 P.M., and it was only 11:00 A.M., so, after a leisurely lunch, I dropped my bags off and decided to look for...
STOP SMOKING FAST read the advertisement on the subway car, and it is probably good advice for people such as my father, who continues to smoke even after having had two stents inserted into his badly clogged arteries. I wanted the opposite, however: I wanted to start smoking fast. There are no 12-step programs for...
As I drove into town after supper on Sunday evening, the all-too-familiar boom, boom of some young man’s car stereo assaulted me. Otherwise, it was a lovely fall evening, just dark. I was on my way to church for a bimonthly service of sung Compline, one of the ancient monastic offices that can be traced...
Most Americans appear to have spent their second September 11 anniversary paying tribute to the American ideals of open borders and acceptance of all forms of diversity—religious, ethnic, sexual, moral, and intellectual. I spent it in Novi Sad, attending a conference on Islam and the West. The one-day conference, part of the Rockford Institute convivium...
“Good news!” a friend told me this morning in Rockford. “McDonald’s is closing 16 restaurants in Serbia.” Apparently Serbs, who eat the best “hamburgers” in the world and serve them with excellent bread, have stood up to the fast-food wing of the New World Order more stoutly than they resisted Madeleine Albright (though which is...