Ian on Sunday

I will very soon be 78. A young man once wrote – or rather sent an email – to me asking about the magazine Kyk-Over-Al which I used to edit once upon a time.

The world is suffering from giganticism.  Bigger is considered better and biggest best. 

The poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins – glancing and incandescent – is some of the most extraordinary to be found in English.

I am not a horse-racing fan nor a lover of horses however thoroughly bred into strength and beauty they may be but once a friend of mine and connoisseur of many of life’s artistic achievements, including that of great horse-racing, sent me a piece of marvellous writing which has ever since figured right at the top of my list of the best sports articles I have ever read.

In Caribbean literature there has always been a vigorous strain of oral composition existing alongside the written tradition.

A few nights ago I had a vivid dream of my father.

Karl Popper, one of the very greatest thinkers of his, or any, age, was modest in expressing his philosophical findings.

It was announced last month that Derek Walcott had won the T S Eliot Poetry Prize for 2010.

The original Treaty of Chaguaramas which established Caricom in 1973 carefully provided no machinery for exercising central powers of implementation.

Many days I pass our National Library, and I never fail to bestow a silent blessing on those who work within its rooms quietly, rendering service of inestimable value.

The Guyana Olympic Association kindly invited me to speak at their recent Annual Awards ceremony.

Everywhere in the world the ordinary man in the street has been brainwashed into supposing that the only thing that matters is economic success.

An important part of my life in the sugar industry, particularly the latter part, was spent battling the absurd concept that free trade is a universal good.

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.

If the multitude of establishment executives spent one half the time spent at cocktail parties doing something constructive or creative Guyana would be an infinitely better place.

Many of us, at some time or another, generally as a new year beckons, have resolved to “keep a diary,” probably as part of some grand and comprehensive plan to organize one’s life better and achieve great things – plans, I am afraid, which very soon run aground on the dangerous

The best words for Christmas are from TS Eliot’s marvellous poem, ‘The journey of the Magi.’

I was distressed in conversation with a friend whom I admire for his level head, his learning, his insight, and his wit to hear him speak of his sense of being cramped for intellectual space, of his boredom with what seem to him the narrow opportunities in the country, of his disgust at the eternal back-biting which crowds out any hope of civil discourse.

On December 13, thirteen years ago, Martin Carter died. You know how it is when suddenly there is low voltage and the lights flicker low. 

I have always been impressed by the advice the great French philosopher and mathematician, Blaise Pascal, gave a gambling friend of his who was inclined to doubt the existence of God.