As you probably know by now, one of my favorite poets is A.E. Housman. And his whole outlook is summed up rather neatly inA these four lines: “The troubles of our proud and angry dust Are from eternity, and shall not fail. Bear them we can, and, if we can, we must – Shoulder the […]
I’ve told you I’m a realist. But that’s not the whole story. Reality is too hard to face all the time. That (I presume) is why we have sleep and dreams. But even when I’m awake, I like to think of life as a game. Games create their own reality. Within the game, nothing outside […]
You may find this hard to believe, but it wasn’t until after I had gone all the way through the British school and college system, and emigrated to the U.S., with a bachelor of arts degree in history, that I became aware of the fact that “education” is a subject which can itself be studied […]
Having been brought up English, I was a tea drinker from an early age. But I didn’t realize that I was actually an addict, until my doctor told me to cut out all caffeine from my diet. Only then did I learn what is meant by “withdrawal symptoms” – which in my case were very […]
The 1964 Simon & Garfunkel song “The Sound of Silence” must seem redolent of an ancient era to many of my younger readers – but the haunting melody, combined with its poetically poignant words, resonates as powerfully today as when the song was born. To me, the part which has always been most meaningful proclaims […]
As a child, I took great delight in string. My mother, who patiently taught me how to tie bows, used to tell people, “Give him a piece of string, and he’ll be happy.” True enough, I could spend hours just tying and untying knots. I was never a Boy Scout, and never “learned the ropes” […]
The first question I am usually asked: “Is Ashleigh Brilliant your real name?” Yes, it is. My father was Victor Brilliant, and he came from a whole family of Brilliants. The origins are Russian and Jewish. Around the time of Napoleon, Jews were allowed to choose their own surnames. Many chose pleasant-sounding names, such as […]
SUPPOSEAll my life I’ll cherishSo much I can’t forget –The things that didn’t happen,And the girls I never met. I wrote those lines a long time ago. But for most of us, the sentiment, no doubt, remains true, no matter where we are in life. The great question of how different things might be now, […]
I have never been much of a hobbyist – but for a few years in my teens, I was very keen on postage stamps. This fizzled at about the same time I got interested in girls – but to this day, whenever I receive a letter with a stamp I haven’t seen before, I tear […]
“Fair Play,” as I understand it, means abiding by the rules. But what if the rules are unfair? That, in a sense, is the human predicament. No matter how honorable and decent you are, a tornado (which I like to think of as God’s air-raid) can wipe out everything you have, including your life – […]
It seems odd that, after centuries of agitation forequality, so many countries still have social systems in which some “royal” person is considered to be at the top. The word “royal” derives from the French word for king – and, although France no longer has a monarch, many other advanced countries still do. In fact, […]
This story begins with a confession: I didn’t know how to be a villain – and never got over it. When I was eleven years old, my Hebrew school was bringing out a magazine, and needed contributions. I somehow volunteered to write on a topic someone had suggested – “How to Be a Villain.” No […]
People sometimes flatter me by saying that I am their hero – because I have managed to make a living by the unconventional means of marketing my own thoughts. There may be some merit in inventing – so to speak – a new profession. But, in general terms, I don’t consider myself a heroic character. […]
One of the most famous lines of all poetry (originally written in Persian a millennium ago, but first translated into English in 1859) comes from a book called the Rubaiyat, and is about a “moving finger,” which “writes, and, having writ, moves on” – and nothing we can do can bring that finger back, to […]
It isn’t often that I make my Psychiatrist laugh – but he did, when, telling him about the events of a recent day, I said, “I was so busy, I forgot to take my anxiety pill.” Yes, I do actually take (in small doses) a pill that is supposed to have a calming effect, and […]
When General Sir Charles Napier captured, for the British Empire, the Indian province of Sindh (now a part of Pakistan) in 1844, he reportedly announced this achievement in a one-word telegram. That single word was not English, but, in those days, when every upper-class Englishman received a classical education, the message would have been intelligible […]
Don’t let them fool you. All roads do not lead to Rome – at least, not anymore. But: there is always a close connection between any road and whatever travels on it. Most of our roads today began as animal tracks. Animals didn’t need motels, or scenic views. They bought no souvenirs, and never wrote […]
“The square on the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides.” – Pythagoras At the equivalent of High School which I attended in London, we all had to take basic Mathematics, consisting of Arithmetic, Algebra, and Geometry. I could do them all, and more […]
In 1949, the British writer, George Orwell, published a novel titled 1984 – the name of a year which was then as far in the future as it is now in the past. The society he depicted has been characterized as a “dystopia,” meaning the opposite of a Utopia. The name “Utopia,” the title of […]
At the time of World War I, I hadn’t even been born yet, and in World War II, I was still only a child. But those two catastrophes have shaped all our lives. Between the official end of the First, and the outbreak of the Second, was only 20 years. But it was enough time […]
Most of us have twenty digits, but the upper ten get nearly all the attention. Once we’ve outgrown the days of “this little piggy goes to market,” the lower ten are usually hidden in some protective footwear, and little account is taken of them – until something goes wrong. The classic case of something going […]
Warning: I am (in all likelihood) about to change your life. Not in any big significant way, but in the same slight, but probably permanent, way that mine was changed when, not long ago, I made the discovery which I am going to share with you here. First, a little background: Somehow, I had managed […]
No doubt you know I don’t believe in you – but that’s OK, because, for all I know, you probably don’t believe in me either. Still, out of consideration for everybody else who may be reading this, I am obliged to respect you, not take your name in vain and even, to the extent possible […]
You’ve probably heard Ogden Nash’s immortal observation on the relative merits of two different methods of seduction: Candy is dandy, But liquor is quicker. Unfortunately, he omitted a third well-known amatory aid, which I now offer you as a suggested last line: And FLOWERS HAVE POWERS. I myself have never been particularly susceptible to those […]
My home, since 1973, has been almost literally a stone’s throw from an area so celebrated for its beauty that calling it “picturesque” would be an understatement. In one sweeping panorama, you have the ocean, the mountains, a lovely rose garden, tall gracious trees, and a broad green sward leading up to the cloistered front […]
In a popularity-survey of some of my recent “Thoughts and Ideas,” the winning line said, “One advantage of living alone is that you never have to be reasonable.” Although these words expressed my own feeling, I was surprised how many others also apparently feel the same way. I suppose it means that living with other […]
How do we determine the value of things? Is it only the question of what people will pay? Some American railroad tycoon of the “Robber Baron” era spoke in terms of exacting “all the traffic will bear” – meaning that he charged not what seemed fair or reasonable, but simply as much as he could […]
The worst ice cream I ever had was in England, when my family had recently returned there from the U.S., just after World War II. As a special treat, my sister and I were taken by relatives to some kind of ice cream parlor. Whatever we had there came with a tasteless wafer. It was […]
One of the most popular words in the lexicon of modern society is “care.” People in general don’t like to be handled roughly. Of course, there are exceptions, such as arranged fights, or episodes of sexual passion. But we are delicate creatures, in comparison with the hard surfaces of our natural and man-made environment. When […]
One of the advantages of outliving people you knew is that you can write freely about them. The worst best friend I ever had was named Nathan Povich Mensh. We were kids when we met in 1941 in Washington, D.C., where our houses backed onto each other, with an alley between. I was eight, and […]
“It takes a heap of living to make a house a home” is probably the best-remembered line of Edgar Guest – even though – as I’ve often found when my own work is (mis-) quoted – that isn’t exactly what he wrote. The public has an ability to improve upon things it likes, often by […]
One of my earliest memories was of somebody saying to me, in a kindly tone, “MUSTN’T TOUCH!” I don’t recall anything else about the incident – but those words – and even that tone of voice – have lingered with me as a mild rebuke whenever I’ve been tempted to put a finger someplace where […]
One mark of a civilized society is a code of manners, part of which involves rules of hospitality. How should one behave when one is a guest or a host? We are not usually taught such things at school. There are books of “etiquette” – but, if we learn these rules at all, it is […]
Some people seem to need a “Supreme Being” in their lives. Others appear to get along quite well without one. If these were only private matters, the world of human society would have been a much less troubled place than it has always been over the past millennia. But unfortunately, such matters are anything but […]
Life is full of beginnings and endings – and sometimes they are so memorable that we tend to forget what comes in between. For example, I could not quote you any other words of Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities – but I know it begins with “It was the best of times – It was […]
Nature is so full of miracles that we tend to take some of them for granted, especially if they are there all the time – like our own bodies – or if they, at least, come and go with predictable regularity – like the sun and the moon. But there are others which tend to […]
Why is so much hair wanted where it isn’t, and not wanted where it is? Many of our ideas of beauty, of grooming – even of sexuality – are hair-related. It’s one of the things we have in common with our fellow mammals. (Many non-mammals – even some insects – may appear fuzzy – but, […]
No matter how much the world changes, buyers and sellers will always need each other. But what we have called “stores” were in a way like the dinosaurs – they got bigger and bigger until, so to speak, they ruled the earth, and then something happened, and now, in our own time, we see them […]
Until quite recently, when you wanted to destroy paper and make certain that nothing on it could ever again be read, the preferred method was to burn it. That is still your surest recourse – but burning is now generally in disfavor, because it means polluted air. So, a relatively new manner of destruction has […]
I may be the only kid on my block who can recite from memory the first words of the very first “Prince Valiant” comic. Actually, the term “comic” is totally inappropriate here, because “Prince Valiant” was very different from all the other features of that genre. For one thing, there were no balloons coming out […]