postal service

Gimbling in the Wabe – A Rather Petty But Nonetheless Tragic Tale of Woe (and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson)

This is a tragic tale of procrastination, of frustration, of yet another good intention ground into the paving stones of Hell. It is a rant meant to exorcise demons. It is a cry in the wilderness, which yet echoes against the oppressive mountains of indifference, in the dark gloom of […]

A Month of Letters Challenge

So, when I took the parcel I was going to send out for the first day of the 2016 A Month of Letters Challenge to the local post office, I was the 10th or 11th person in line. There was only one person working at the counter, and she was […]

Gimbling in the Wabe – In Praise of Letters

I promise, I won’t make this a diatribe on the lack of personalization in society today, nor will I bemoan the loss of the art of letter writing, or even shed a tear at the passing of cursive writing. That’s something my grandmother would do, and even though I loved […]

Birthdays

On this day, June 21, in 1905, Jean-Paul Sartre was born in Paris, France. This champion of existentialism, which posits that beliefs come from not from merely thinking about life, but through feeling and acting upon it, was drafted into the French Army in 1939 and captured by the Germans a year later, spending 9 months as a POW. His 1943 treatise, Being and Nothingness, written to prove that free will exists, remains a monumental philosophical work. Politically active throughout his life, he refused the Nobel Prize in 1964 because he felt a writer should not become “an institution.” Long time companion to feminist Simone de Beauvoir, he died of edema of the lung in 1980 at age 74.

Birthdays

On this day, December 3, in 1857, Joseph Conrad was born in Berdichev, Imperial Russia (modern
Ukraine, then a part of Poland). While he settled in England and wrote in English, he always considered himself a Pole. Heart of Darkness, one of the most famous of his 20 novels (which explores colonialism and the attitudes regarding what constitutes a barbarian versus civilized society) is considered one of the best English novels of the 20th century, as is his novel Lord Jim, which chronicles a crew’s abandonment of its disabled ship. Conrad died in England in 1924 at age 66.