Ian on Sunday

Arriving at the age of 80, so suddenly after being born, I recognize very clearly that I am slowing to a jog if not quite yet a hobble.

As golden afternoon transmutes into silver evening and then into velvet darkness fretted by stars I sit to read and think and dream.

Samuel Johnson, that great man of letters and heavyweight of good sense in eighteenth century England, commonly said the people whom we should most beware in the world are those who constantly insist on finding fault, those whose clouds are never lit by silver linings, those who everlastingly “refuse to be pleased.”

Sveinsson Knut, Canute the Great, King of England from 1016, King of Denmark from 1018 and King of Norway from 1030 until he died in 1035, was perhaps the most successful and effective of the early rulers of England.

The younger generation never experienced, and older people tend to forget, how very limited and how very stifled the media was in the last period of President Burnham’s rule.

Last weekend my wife and I went up the great Essequibo to stay at the beautiful river-home of my brother-in-law and his wife.

Consider yourself fortunate if you are right 51% of the time.

Right now the temperature of partisan dispute, and tempers on all sides, are rising sharply.

At eighty years of age one must expect to factor attendance at funerals into one’s monthly (weekly?)

It isn’t an exercise that makes much sense to try and rank poets in a sort of hierarchy of greatness.

I was distressed in conversation with a friend whom I admire for his level head, his learning, his insight, and his wit to hear him speak of his sense of being cramped for intellectual space, of his boredom with what seems to him the narrow opportunities in the country, of his disgust at the eternal back-biting and bitter and belittling rivalries which crowd out any hope of civil discourse.

Many people go to the ends of the earth to find beauty.

I have been reading a book of great beauty given to me as a Christmas gift by my wife: A River Runs Through It, by Norman Fitzroy Maclean.

For God’s sake, what is going on? A young Pakistani girl is shot in the head for trying to educate herself and others like her.

We live in a world which seems to take little interest in joy.

I remember a very long time ago, in the era of Prime Minister, not even then President LFS Burnham, when I was a Director in the sugar industry, I had occasion to enquire from an official at the then State Planning Commission about a request made months before for  approval for the introduction of a new incentive scheme in the industry.

Tradition gathers around Christmas. Pageants and homecomings and longed-for preparations repeat themselves year after year and become treasured lifetime rituals.

Out of infinite pain the mind of man can fashion beauty.

Winston Churchill, exasperated by opposition politicians constantly questioning his policies and his own credentials and frustrated by having to consult and compromise on measures which in his judgement were straightforward and ripe for introduction without hesitation, once exploded: “Democracy is the worst kind of government!”

One of the strangest paradoxes in the history of the human race is that while men have commonly dominated simply by virtue of their greater strength and aggression, women time and time again have been the cause of their downfall and defeat.