Miettes 2025 – The Last Journey: Pill-grim-age

English is French mispronounced! 8000 French words in English. How many English words in French?

Anarchism
Rugby is to soccer what Anarchism is to Marxism. Marxism is all head (ideology) and feet (marches of history, the proletariat, and March 1871, the Paris Commune, All for one. One for all (un pour tous et tous pour un’). Anarchism is full bodied passion, dangerous to know, but prone when given the chance to settle down into the pastoral where harmony is based on mutual tolerance. It is joyous, looking out rather than unlike Marxism, which is in a constant state of self-examination (show trials the outcome). In soccer when a penalty is awarded the ref’s withering crooked finger is pointed at the offending side. In rugby it flourishes towards the winner.
My Anarchist/Marxist analogy, I know, is a bit baggy in a Stephane Mallarme sort of way, but one counter resemblance stands out, I think. Marxism can be standardized and made international (which is why it won the great ideological battle between them in the second half of the 19^th century). Anarchism defines itself within the confines of a closed, preferably small community.
 
Simone Weil
‘Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity’

Denis Donoghue,
With a poem or a novel, it’s not whether you agree with it or not, but if you are willing to read it and let it, provisionally at least, read you. The opinionated self must not take over the experiencing self.’

Time
does not pass when you're doing nothing. The mind and body clock stops

Will power with the James's:
**Alice said, 'I can't'. William said, 'you mean, you won't' but Henry corrected them saying 'say, you will'.    

Morale
**It’s cheering to know you have the right and means to kill yourself. The cheering up means you don’t.
 
Wake-up Call
 In my dreams I am accountable to others, not myself. Sleep is a show trial. Awake I can be reasonably just.  
 
News of the World
History's nightmare is a counterblast to global warming. Hu-maniacs in the West are restoring the Cold war. But the polar circles are melting, and deterrence is a dead duck. So, nukes could be on the ready to supplement climate change. Power play is back, and the extreme right is in its element. Not least in Europe and America.  I hope this is just a rant. If not, the world is done for.
 
‘The Law
 in America is anything which is boldly asserted and plausibly maintained,’ said Ed Dorn (1988). Now it is maintained by appeals if the accused is rich enough. And the bold assertions are considered illegal. So, another procedure takes over.
The Trumps in the USA need a fool to be born every day. Thus, their mania to defuse the Roe and Wade Law 2022/24)
 
For Edmund’s Four Score
I thought Edmund was my older brother,
even though he is two years younger,
because his advice was like no other,
except for our mother.
I took it, avoiding many blunders.
His precociousness was a wonder.  
 
Extreme Right-wing Lovie Dove
The mascot of the Front Nationale is a woman called Colombes (Dove) aged sixty. She worked in several national charities but has been thrown out as their rules require political neutrality.
 
Talk or Action
I think of Michael Collins dictum ‘There are those that say and those that do’.
The sayers are ‘suit-your-selfish’.