Ian on Sunday

It is necessary to repeat again and again that in the background of all our lives there exists a fundamental and dominating lie.

In Guyana, as indeed elsewhere in the world, most of what is considered worthy of notice is shallow and of no long-term importance.

Nothing can compare with the beauty and warmth of life at home.

Toronto is a calm, clean, well-ordered, cosmopolitan, peaceful city.  If during a long weekend in this city of two and a half million people there are a couple of murders it would be an alarming law and order crisis. 

               “The unexamined life is not worth living” – Socrates. When I was no more than twelve or thirteen the feeling grew in me that it was important not simply to live life day by day but somehow to give greater meaning to it by recording what was happening every one of those days and by planning how I should shape and what I should make of my life in the future.

                                                      for what else is there                 but books, books and the sea,                 verandahs and the pages of the sea                 to write of the wind and the memory                                          of wind whipped hair                 in the sun, the colour of fire.

Intermittently through the year, and especially during memorable times up the immense and soul-redeeming Essequibo, I like to read Shelley – as we all should do from time to time since he is pre-eminently the poet of hope.

Seventy years ago – can it be so many years, gone so quickly, insubstantial as a dream?

At a time when we mourn with their families the brutal murders of Isaiah and Joel Henry and Haresh Singh and Prettipaul Hargobin, I give my column to the words of Gladson Henry, father of Isaiah and uncle of Joel.

Seamus Heaney, the great Irish poet, whose marvelous collection of essays The Redress of Poetry I like to re-read, wrote that W.H.

I have been re-reading Martin Carter as one should regularly do.

My tutor at Cambridge, Professor Nick Hammond, authority on the history of ancient Macedonia and on the life of Alexander the Great, used to coach me on what he called “exercises of the mind.”

 There is nothing more valuable in man than an ability to write well. 

“We receive three educations, one from our parents, one from our schoolmasters, and one from the world.

Apart from having the luck in life’s lottery of inheriting good genes there are two sure ways to live a longer and healthier life.

Svensson Knut, Canute the Great, King of England from 1016, King of Denmark from 1018 and King of Norway from 1030 until he died in 1035, was perhaps the most successful and effective of the early rulers of England.

The debate on improving educational standards never ends. Let us consider what is meant by giving a child a good education in the total sense of the word.

The Stabroek News feature “History This Week” used to provide readers with a most valuable series of vignettes from Guyana’s past.

I divert from my usual Sunday column to make a few comments on the 2020 General Election which seems (but who knows) to be entering its final stage after suffering a tortured history since that day on March 2nd when everyone – everyone – was happy with a well-run, transparent, credible day of voting.

The insights of others continually add to our understanding of what is going on and how the world works.