Joseph Brodsky, the great Russian poet who died at the sadly young age of 56, on receiving his Nobel Prize in the Grand Hall of the Swedish Academy in Stockholm in December, 1987, declared a great truth: “There is no doubt in my mind that, should we have been choosing our leaders on the basis of their reading experience and not their political programmes, there would be much less grief on earth.”
Suddenly I am seventy-nine years old. I find that ridiculous but chronologically it is a fact.
The old Common Entrance is history and, I hope, a bad memory.
The end of the word as some of us know and love it is close.
I once read a good book called The World According to Garp by John Irving.
Again this year the Link Show was a huge popular success.
The world is endlessly fascinating, countlessly full of interesting people. Once at a party long ago I met a visitor to Guyana who turned out to be an expert on grasshoppers.
It happens. It is life. Great contributions are made. Years go by and they are forgotten and those who made them are forgotten too.
So much begins with parents. So much continues in the training grounds.
So much begins with parents. Their daily, persevering, unending love and interest and example teach lessons which reach deep into us; we are nurtured and our minds and souls are formed into shapes and disciplines that last all our lives.
A child who develops a love of reading wins a prize that will last and last until the end of life.
Isaiah Berlin was in my view the most distinguished political philosopher and historian of ideas of the 20th century.
I do not think the new, young, intelligent and opened-minded Minister of Education will mind me delivering little, well-meant lectures to her from time to time.
Some of the most vivid poems in the world are written on a huge rock in a remote forest in Sri Lanka.
Politics being a very serious thing, especially in the aftermath of a hard-fought election, I thought I might see what the Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations (obtained at Austin’s excellent bookstore which every thinking citizen should visit at least once a week) has to say about this important subject.
I hope the young, intelligent and energetic Minister who has been put in charge of education in the country takes a fresh look at what needs to be done.
In a recent conversation with Godfrey, amidst the multitude of evocations that continually cascaded out of his extraordinary memory, he told me about bird-whistling competitions and donkey-cart racing in Guyana long ago, and described to me the hundred and one manifestations of that condition of bewitched infatuation in a man or a woman called typee.
I wish I could convey, in particular to young people, whose mental appetites seem whetted so easily these days by the transient and the trashy – I wish I could communicate the quiet depths, the delights, the leaping excitements of great poetry.
I’ve had the good fortune lately to do one of the things I enjoy the most – browse in good bookstores and buy a stock of books to read and add to my library.
The perception seems to be that sugar is dead in most Caricom countries and dying in the rest.
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