Prescience of Immortality

"A mother's love for the child of her body differs essentially from all other affections, and burns with so clear and steady a flame that it appears like the one unchangeable thing in this earthly mutable life, so that when she is no longer present it is still a light to our steps and a consolation.

It came to me as a great surprise a few years ago to have my secret and most cherished feelings about my own mother expressed to me as I had never heard them expressed before by a friend who, albeit still young, has made himself a name in the world, one who had never known a mother, she having died during his infancy. He lamented that it had been so, not only on account of the motherless childhood and boyhood he had known, but chiefly because in after life it was borne in on him
that he had been deprived of something infinitely precious which others have--the enduring and sustaining memory of a love which is unlike any other love known to mortals, and is almost a sense and prescience of immortality."

Far Away and Long Ago: A History of My Early Life, WH Hudson (1918)

le recours aux forêts

"Contre l'Etat technicisé omniprésent...le recours aux forêts réelles ou symboliques où se réfugiaient autrefois les hors-la-loi islandais permet d'affirmer individuellement sa liberté...L'Anarque qui, au lieu de s'opposer brutalement à un pouvoir qui risque de l'écraser, se met en marge de lui par un semblant d'acceptation qui lui assure sa liberté intérieure".

Ernst Jünger

The Light Pours Out Of Me (Magazine)

Occidental Dandy-Club

Old School Ties I

Monks and Grey Flannel

Recent capital market gyrations have encouraged me to rummage round my walk-in closet and get out my banker kit. In the photo (above) I am depicted wearing a pair of Alfred Sargent monk shoes and a grey flannel chalk stripe suit from Brooks Brothers. The current unpopularity of financial workers has probably discouraged some bankers and brokers from sporting the uniform of their profession. Not me. Within the office or without, I sport the chalk stripes with defiance.

The Last of the Montecristos

Women and weed rightly belong to the world of young men. For more settled chaps such as yours truly, their very availability is temptation itself. Resistance, I find, becomes harder to sustain. It was with that thought in mind that two months ago I accepted a box of 25 Montecristo cigars carefully hand-delivered to me from the Middle East via Paris. The picture (above) shows the lone survivor of the initial shipment.

Portrait: Gregor von Rezzori

A Strategy for Living: Pt. I

(i) Today our people exist in a modern techno-managerial state whose increasingly authoritarian form of rule is directly proportional to societal decline.

(ii) To get along, we must be reduced to a lowest common denominator. Any differences or inequalities in thought, culture, achievement, and feeling, must be eliminated. But inequality is the natural condition of mankind; to eradicate inequality we must eradicate mankind.

(iii) I repeat: inequality is the natural condition of mankind. We differ in many things, such as abilities, talents, material success, level of suffering, perception. Each one of us has a place, a part to play. Every one of us has a unique destiny. Yet we are all interdependent. Man is a social being.

(iv) There are those -- perhaps the majority of people--who are happily oblivious to life’s deeper meanings, who are content to amble through life like mere vertebrates. And then there are those people endowed with a penetrating vision that is as cruel as it is clear. These are the poets.

(v) One of the most painful things a man can endure is to be aware of the fundamental absurdity of life. It sets him apart from the masses, for whom physical pleasure is everything.

(vi) Life is absurd and tragic. But in the end we can only set our face to the wind and laugh. That, I think, is the best strategy.

In Praise of Auberon Waugh

J.Press Tie Selection

Silhouette Island, Seychelles, August 2008

During our honeymoon tour of the Indian Ocean and East Africa late last year, my new bride and I travelled in the Seychelles, including a stay on Silhouette Island. My natural excitement at being in the Seychelles with my bride was enhanced by the diverse wildlife to be found in the country.

Silhouette, as I discovered, is home to the Nature Protection Trust of Seychelles (NPTS). The NPTS was established in 1992 as the first environmental non-governmental organisation registered in Seychelles. NPTS aims to restore and preserve viable ecosystems and takes a long-term view of ecology. Much of its work involves monitoring and scientific research. This research is providing new insights into ecological problems and ecosystem management. My bride, knowing my intense interest in zoology, herpetology, and wildlife in general, insisted we visit. However, when we did, we found the NPTS centre closed; I duly left a note with our name and number. That same evening around 9:00PM, as we were headed to the bar, we received a call from the nice English scientist and conservationist who runs the centre. He apologised for having missed us earlier, but had gone to Mahé (the main island) for supplies. He invited us for a tour that night.

The NPTS site on Silhouette features a visitor centre, giant tortoise enclosure, and tortoise breeding compound. In fact it is home to the Seychelles Giant Tortoise Conservation Project, dedicated to the preservation and propagation of the Seychelles giant tortoise. The visitor centre itself contains a thorough exhibit of the local fauna, including a live endangered Seychelles terrapin, incubating giant tortoise eggs, a miniscule tree frog no bigger than the fingernail of your smallest finger, and a ferocious-looking (dead) specimen of the poisonous giant centipede (we had spotted one during our earlier stay on Mahé).