Since my school days, a poem by Hilde Domin has accompanied me.
Don’t get tired,
but
quietly hold out
your hand to the miracle, like a bird.
Tag: <span>society</span>
The picture of the older gentleman, sitting alone, enjoying his cappuccino. All dressed up, showing the world that he doesn’t care or ask for our approval. Overdressed? I don’t think there is such a thing. One can never be overdressed if you have the confidence to be comfortable -no matter what you wear.
“As a white man,” Joe begins, prefacing an insight, revelation, objection or confirmation he’s eager to share — but let’s stop him right there. Aside from the fact that he’s white, and a man, what’s his point? What does it signify when people use this now ubiquitous formula (“As a such-and-such, I …”) to affix an identity to an observation?
The suffering of people, how hard it is to watch. A report of the starving children in Jemen, just a few days before Thanksgiving rattled me, a few days later our table was overflowing with food.
It all started out with an old soup dish that I found at a resale shop, it reminded me of the soup bowls we used when I was a child. They were so much smaller than the ones I have in my kitchen cabinet now. Come to think of it, everything was smaller back then and so were we.
Margaret Atwood awarded the 2017 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade
The Canadian author, essayist and poet Margaret Atwood was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade today at a ceremony attended by roughly 1,000 invited guests in the Church of St. Paul in Frankfurt. The speech honoring this year’s recipient was given by Austrian writer Eva Menasse. Margaret Atwood gave the speech in German.
“Why aren’t you in school? I see you every day wandering around.”
“Oh, they don’t miss me,” she said. “I’m antisocial, they say. I don’t mix. It’s so strange. I’m very social indeed. It all depends on what you mean by social, doesn’t it?
I had this iron rule. I would not hire anybody with a felony for a violent crime, and I would not hire an addict. And now guess what? Exactly! I hired a new helper for my workshop, and she is both. She is an addict, and she spent one year in prison for a violent crime.
If you look at the world map, you will see that Europe is rather small. I grew up 10 minutes away from the Italian border, could drive to Germany in about 2 hours and Switzerland, Lichtenstein, Czech Republic, and Hungary were just a few hundred kilometers away. Different cultures, different languages, and different looks lived just around the corner and were rather appealing to me; it never scared me.