The other day I behaved badly for once: not very badly (I should hardly have confessed to that), but still worse than I like to think that I normally behave. It was in a busy railway station. I was more than an hour early for my train and, now acutely (and chronically) aware of the fast ...
Returning recently to France from Germany, where I had given a talk on the ideological roots of ugliness (which might seem to some a rather peculiar and even inexistent subject), I was struck once again by the sheer inhuman hideousness of Paris: not the center, which remains the City of Light, but ...
People often claim to have cultivated their inner child as if this were a good thing to have done. They are proud of it, in fact. The "inner child" that each of us supposedly has somewhere deep within his being retains his fundamental goodness and innocence: he is like the little boy who ...
I slept through the only riot I was ever sent to cover as a reporter. Having traveled a long way I was very tired, and by the time I woke the riot was almost over. Still, I was able to describe with some vividness the acrid smell of burning rubber in the streets and the smashed glass and emptied ...
We all, I suppose, live in a tiny world of our own construction, whose size and character depends upon what interests us. I realized the other day just how peculiar my own little world is, statistically speaking, when I saw on the front page of my newspaper that Robin Williams had died by his own ...
"Are you ready for life changes?" the advertisement that came through the Internet asked me. In general, the answer is "No, I am not ready." I don"t like change, and though I know it is coming whether I want it to or not, it always catches me unawares. For example, when I look ...
Recently I gave evidence in a tragic case in which a young man died whose life might have been saved if only the doctors had thought of the right diagnosis. It was not an easy case, and the doctors who missed the diagnosis were mortified, though in what proportion by the tragic outcome of the case ...
The brother-in-law of a friend of mine died recently. He was 76, a good age considering his lifestyle. He had spent many years from morning till night sitting in a corner with his Spanish red wine, smoking and watching television. It was not a way of life that attracted me, but it was his choice ...
Whether it is more painful to be justly than unjustly accused is a difficult question to answer: sometimes I think the one, sometimes the other. Likewise, it is uncertain whether success or failure in life, wealth or poverty, is the greater test of character. But on the whole I have preferred the ...
Among the many ways of dividing humanity into two is to slice between those who love, and those who detest, questions that are intrinsically unanswerable. Of the latter were the logical positivists, who believed that a question with no answer even in principle was not really a question at all, ...
