Although I usually spend at least an hour every day reading the news, it has been years since I have held a newspaper in my hands.  But my son-in-law Emile, and his father, my friend Henry LaFargue, like to sit and “read the newspapers.”   They are stacked up on the kitchen table:  The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal,[Read More…]

I come awake to the rattle snake sound of the cicadas, nuanced, orchestrated, ebbing and flowing on the air; the buzz of lawnmowers, the swish of tires puckering up from the tarmac.The dog barking in the yard completes the suburban symphony that plays daily in the well to do communities of Northern New Jersey. I have been here two weeks,[Read More…]

It is not the case that we can live long in places without them becoming part of us and we becoming part of them. I am not here talking about countries or cities, but the quarters in which we live and to which we return daily to satisfy our most basic needs. Our spaces shape our thoughts and feelings, and[Read More…]

It should come as no surprise to me, but it does, that after decades of studying the thinking of the ancient Greeks, I have begun to think like them. In saying this I am not merely speaking of their philosophy but also in reference to their religious beliefs, which, no less than their philosophy, set great insights about Being before[Read More…]

Sooner or later- sooner if they are rude and later if they are polite enough to wait until we have developed a relationship that would allow them to ask a personal question, Russians  will inevitably ask  “Why are you here?”  Some in a tone of suspicion or contempt,  will ask me as if they were throwing down a gauntlet  The[Read More…]

They are the sources of the paced slivers of sound played across seasons, sounds I awaken to, sounds that inform my days, Their sounds, although varying in tone and intensity, are always paced, steady, sure. This summer morning it is the soft swish of small tree branches, cut and tied to a wooden pole. There has been a storm in[Read More…]

If James Joyce’s The Dubliners are stories about people who cannot escape their unhappiness, and Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools is about those who believe that they will find happiness when they arrive at their destinations, this story is about immigrants to Russia who once believed that when they arrived here they would find love, money or adventure. Instead,[Read More…]

Without my glasses the trees outside the window are misconceived mosaics.  No young breezes have come to play among them, nor has the west wind come to make them dance.  It is only the residual droplets of water that create motion and a semblance of sound.  The birds are quiet.  It is a distinctly cold morning in Moscow.   It is[Read More…]

I am from New York City, and what that means is that I know a good pastrami sandwich when I see, or more properly, taste one.  For those of you who do not know what pastrami is, let me give you a quick course in Jewish cuisine.According to David Sax, author of “Save the Deli,” pastrami is not actually a[Read More…]

It is late spring in Moscow, and the day is exquisite.  I sit on my balcony and drink my coffee and watch  a mischievous breeze run through the trees.  It brushes against them, makes them bob and sway like off balance dancers.    When it scuttles away, the branches slide back into the sun, hold still, and the space we share[Read More…]

There is something in the white trunked birches of Russia that dumbs my mind and irritates my flesh.  Every May, their leaves, still small and weak from just being born into the world, provoke me to exhaustion and the coughing and sneezing begins.  This 11th spring of my Moscow years, is the worst, and the congestion becomes a bronchitis which[Read More…]

Back in the day, ten years ago when I first set foot in Moscow, when the Moscow Metro was the home of the Minotaur from which I felt myself lucky to escape each day; when the Russian language was tumultuous; when I could not ask for what I wanted and needed, when the sophisticated splendor of the city sent me[Read More…]

Monogamy and growing old produce the same results.  Sleeping with the same person over and over again takes the razor sharp blade of passion and dulls it flat.  So too, living in the world, truly living in it and not just in one small cell of it, reduces the sharp peaks of our emotions, rounds them out into dull stones[Read More…]

Of course, one never knows the degree to which what one sees is distorted by “subjectivness”; the extent to which one projects oneself upon the screen of existence.  But it does seem to me that Moscow, from Tverskaya Boulevard to the streets of KitayGorod, to the familiar paths of Perovo Park,  a great stillness has descended upon the people.  A[Read More…]

Three things have occurred simultaneously to bring joy to the hearts of the Babushki of Perovo on this Sunday morning:  the sun is shining brilliantly, the fierce cold of the past months has subsided, and the paths are clean enough to walk.  We emerge from our apartments to walk and sit in the sun in Perovski Park. My bones and[Read More…]

It is all about the Russian election now: the world press, the Russian press is filled with articles about the upcoming elections.  Of course, the position of the West, which views Putin as Public Enemy #1, focuses on the fact that except for a brief hiatus when his friend Medvedev served as Prime Minister, Putin has led Russia since 2000. [Read More…]

In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, in his Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel drove home the point that one thing does not replace another, just like that, plain and simple.  Rather, that which has been is carried forward, moved from one level to another in an ongoing evolutionary process.  So it is with the Soviet Union; it is not[Read More…]

  I read with some interest a piece on CNN today https://edition.cnn.com/2018/03/14/europe/russia-us-election-compare-intl/index.html, which compared the “happiness” of people living in Russia and America in regards to factors such as wages, housing, the status of women, etc.  While I would like to address all the factors, I cannot do so without writing a small book.  However, I would like to address[Read More…]