The Love Letter
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LES BARRICADES MYSTÉRIEUSES
HORROR
Every time there’s a new school shooting we get a look at the places American kids are educated these days and they’re always grim — like industrial warehouses, or abattoirs. They seem more fit for holding animals than people, inhuman pens, purely utilitarian and forbidding.
Soulless buildings built by soulless architects for soulless citizens. What a message to the young people of America, one they get almost every day of their lives.
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NEWS FLASH
Emperor Julian, Constantine’s nephew, rejects Christianity, which in posterity will earn him the epithet The Apostate, but turns out to be a pretty good guy, at least as Roman emperors go, which is not saying much.
Although he despises Christianity and wants to re-institute Paganism throughout the empire, he issues an edict that all Roman citizens can practice the religion of their choice, while keeping most Christians out of positions of official authority. His harshest measure against Christians is forbidding them to kill each other for heresy, which by the time of Julian has become one of the most enthusiastic enterprises of the various Christian sects and which they will cheerfully resume after a Christian emperor is restored to the throne.
Source — Edward Gibbon.
PRELUDE TO A KISS
AN A. E. HOUSMAN POEM FOR TODAY
With rue my heart is laden
For golden friends I had,
For many a rose-lipt maiden
And many a lightfoot lad.
By brooks too broad for leaping
The lightfoot boys are laid;
The rose-lipt girls are sleeping
In fields where roses fade.
CANDY CORN
These things are gross and bad for you but you’re not going to stop me from eating them at this time of the year so don’t even try.
DOWN TO THE RIVER TO PRAY
ONE KISS
I fell head over heels in love for the first time when I was 18, a freshman in college. She was a woman beyond me — too smart and too beautiful and too funny. I knew how to talk to her but I didn’t know how to court her. At 18 I just wasn’t man enough for it. She knew how I felt about her, though I never told her, and I think she was touched by my feelings and by my bewilderment.
One night during a drunken party at our freshman dorm I was out in its courtyard and saw her sitting in the window of my room. I climbed up to the window and she pulled me into her arms and into a kiss, a long and passionate kiss.
The next day she acted as though it hadn’t happened, and so did I. I couldn’t relate the moment we’d shared to the real world, couldn’t climb up to that window again. I think I believed — and undoubtedly I was right at that stage of my wayward progress into manhood — that one kiss was all I deserved from such a woman. We stayed distant friends.
Two years later she was killed in a car crash, at the age of twenty. The memory of that kiss, frozen forever in time, remains the greatest romantic moment of my life, and a kind of honor that I still feel I need to live up to. My feelings for her and my bewilderment abide — 46 years on they’ve never changed, not even a little bit.
CAROLINA IN MY MIND
AN LP COVER FOR TODAY
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NEWS FLASH
Constantine embraces Christianity — no good comes of it.
Constantine delayed his actual baptism until he was on his deathbed — a practice followed by many in his time, who wanted to continue sinning as long as possible before taking advantage of the one-time-only guaranteed means of forgiveness for past sins.
The bishops railed against this practice but couldn’t find a theological rationale or a workable process for prohibiting it.
Source — Edward Gibbon.
TO THE WONDER
NEWS FLASH
Constantine has just reunited the Roman Empire under a single head and is now expanding his new seat in Byzantium into what will become Constantinople. At this stage of Roman civilization he can’t find artists capable of making suitable statues so he plunders Greece for its old ones.
Source — Edward Gibbon.