There are few things more dangerous to a peaceful evening than a Marxist in full flow. One minute you’re happily contemplating the head on your shandy, the next you’re being lectured about 'historical inevitability' by someone who’s never held a job long enough to be sacked. The conversation usually begins with the inevitable: “Dialectics is … Continue reading Dialectics, or How Karl Marx Ruined My Shandy
Tag: sadness
Bearing the Broken: Van Gogh’s Good Samaritan and the Art of Endurance
Art imitates life, or so I’m told, but in The Good Samaritan by Vincent van Gogh, life doesn’t just inspire the art - it bleeds into it. You can feel the strain in every brushstroke. This isn’t a tranquil tale of neighbourly virtue. This is what compassion looks like after the cameras stop rolling. After … Continue reading Bearing the Broken: Van Gogh’s Good Samaritan and the Art of Endurance
What Remains After Love: A Reflection on The End of the Affair
There are books that don’t so much entertain as they haunt. They don’t ask for your approval, or even your sympathy - they simply step into the quietest room of your mind and sit there, uninvited, until you are forced to acknowledge them. The End of the Affair by Graham Greene is one of those … Continue reading What Remains After Love: A Reflection on The End of the Affair
Suffering, Song, and the Sorrows of the Mother of God
The Stabat Mater is not a hymn so much as it’s a wound set to music - a gash in the human heart where grief spills out in metre and Latin vowels. It’s Mary beneath the cross, yes, but it’s also every parent who has ever outlived their child; every person who has stood by … Continue reading Suffering, Song, and the Sorrows of the Mother of God
“Drop, Drop, Slow Tears” – A Meditation in the Margins
By a hopeless penitent with a bookshelf and a leaky conscience At the opening of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth, before we meet the orphaned seamstress or the soft-hearted Bensons, we are met with tears. Not sentimental ones, but slow, penitential tears - each drop a silent argument for mercy. The chosen epigraph, “Drop, drop, slow tears”, … Continue reading “Drop, Drop, Slow Tears” – A Meditation in the Margins
Wording 