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When I was about eleven years old and growing up in Accra my father’s cousin, with whom he was very close, lost his wife to a terrible car accident. Uncle Alfred (his name) was inconsolable. A couple of days after the news, my father gathered us together to tell us that there was a tradition in […]
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Covid-19 has had many people reaching back to the plague which Apollo sends on the Greek army at the very beginning of Homer’s Iliad; Western literature begins with a devastating disease of unknown cause. The Greek commander, Agamemnon, had in fact wronged and abused Apollo’s priest, Chryses: disease is a hidden enemy which must have […]
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On Friday March 20, the Roman poet Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso) turned 2062. In the last decade of his life he was exiled by the emperor Augustus for offences known and unknown to a small frontier town on the Black Sea. There he knew all about the disappointments of spring – and of a spring […]
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In The Age of Anxiety (1947), begun during the Second World War, W.H. Auden observed that ‘in times of crisis, display of even the crudest kind of affection between people can be profoundly ennobling, a symbol of the love the world is so desperately in need of.[1] Indeed, in the trenches of the First World […]
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The relatively brief geological time span of our species’ existence has been punctuated again and again by catastrophic events–volcanic eruptions, devastating climate changes, melting glaciers and consequent rising seas. The eruption of Mt. Mazama in Southern Oregon around 7,700 years ago resulted in Crater Lake forming in its caldera, and still figures in Klamath oral […]
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Cada vez más pequeña mi pequeñez rendida, cada instante más grande y más simple la entrega mi pecho quizás ruede a iniciar un capullo, acaso irán mis labios a nutrir azucenas Each moment smaller my defeated smallness, each instant grander and simpler the surrender my breast will roll over to launch a rosebud, perhaps my […]
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The First World War witnessed the birth of camouflage – both as a word and a developed military practice. But, while soldiers were disappearing into the landscape, the American feminist writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman was arguing that women also needed to become less visible as part of the war against male oppression. It sounds like […]
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The revival of the London plague in 1665 ‘alarmed us all again,’ said Daniel Defoe in A Journal of the Plague Year (1722): ‘and terrible apprehensions were among the people, especially the weather being now changed and growing warm, and the summer being at hand’. Uncomfortable words. Defoe’s book, like Albert Camus’s La Peste (1947), […]
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