Skip to main content

First Knight

Holding my breath on the edge of a language precipice, what a way to plunge into writing in anything else than my mother tongue.
Mr Ambrose Bierce, would you like to have written "The foreigner's dictionary?"
Labels:

Comments

Post a comment

Popular posts from this blog

A dog's life

This is going to outrage dog lovers, but I think that humans’ tyrannical nature is revealed not just when it enslaves other humans, but also when it enslaves dogs. We never say 'free as a dog", do we? Just 'free as a bird'. Dogs and humans, not all what it seems. We take a wolf at heart and spend lots of time and energy teaching it to obey and react to commands.  (To be more historically accurate, the 'taking' happened a long time ago, and it succeeded, so very different from cats.) We are prepared to downsize our vocabulary to a few words in order to achieve that.  We literally put up with shit.  All in the name of training, while the true purpose looks more like having a totally obedient living being under our control, one emitting apparent devotion.  In humans it’s called the Stockholm syndrome.  Even the basic freedoms of sniffing and running are restricted anywhere near human habitat. It takes a trip back to the wild
1 comment
Read more

Death, statistics and reality

 They are usually buried deep in official statistics folders, far away from awareness.  Death figures are not something anyone likes looking at on a regular, let alone daily, basis. Not even actuaries, presumably. It changed with Covid-19 (why 19 when the pandemic started in 2020, but that's another question). Daily death figures are everywhere. They do not make comfortable reading, listening to or talking about. For anyone who lost a relative or a friend, they are horrifically painful. If not, fear for one's own fate is a powerful enough trigger. Starting with the ancients, not just classical Greece and Rome, death was a topic to ponder and draw wisdom from. Every thing that was left undone, all the words that could have been spoken, the impermanence of life, they were brought to the forefront of consciousness, or so we like to think. It's not modern philosophers who invented "Memento Mori", nor are these two Latin words widely quoted. How could they be? They are
Post a comment
Read more

Why are cats so popular? It's envy, guys

  Question of the day: how come cats are so popular on every social media platform?   Answer of the day: popularity is just disguised envy. Cat owners, more acutely, and the rest less affected, due to lower exposure, all wish they were like cats. Free, independent, vaguely domesticated. Doing what they please, when they feel like it, and unflinching when confronted with an obstacle. All of the above has been already said, written and read many times. I claim discovering the feeling behind general fascination with cats.  Envy, that is. Without going all biblical about it, let us agree envy is one constant layer of human composition. This one ingredient is lurking behind an adoring gaze: if only we could be like cats. 
Post a comment
Read more