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Oscar Wilde said
I never steal other people's limes without attribution, which leaves me open to the charge of name-dropping when I quote. The fascist zoo-keeper John Aspinall, I recall, whenever he wanted to strengthen a point would preface whatever he wanted to say with
Shakespeare stole - it's how you steal that matters, I contend, to comfort myself.
If cities could be fogeys Havana, like many Communist cities, would be one. So would Bucharest. But Communist and post-Communist cities are not young fogeys, but old ones, aged by being cut off from modernity, beautiful and tragic.
It is only the modern that ever becomes old-fashioned.This is true and I accordingly think that young fogeys probably never grow old. I am told I am one and if so we shall try the experiment.
I never steal other people's limes without attribution, which leaves me open to the charge of name-dropping when I quote. The fascist zoo-keeper John Aspinall, I recall, whenever he wanted to strengthen a point would preface whatever he wanted to say with
As Schopenhauer once said...However, I did break my own rule twice. Once when I quoted an anodyne remark by Robert Graves about sex being secret to a girl and she recognised it. She had read it in my commonplace book. And once when I purloined the expression
nothing is as old-fashioned as a future that has failedand sowed it into my account of a my first visit to Havana, where it fits very well.
Shakespeare stole - it's how you steal that matters, I contend, to comfort myself.
If cities could be fogeys Havana, like many Communist cities, would be one. So would Bucharest. But Communist and post-Communist cities are not young fogeys, but old ones, aged by being cut off from modernity, beautiful and tragic.
I lived and worked for a number of years in Bishkek and have gone back there most summers since my wife is Kyrgyz. The exception was the summer of 2013 which I spent in the countryside of Kyrgyzstan. Since there is literally almost nothing in Bishkek itself that dates before the 1920s the city does not seem old. Rather it seems stuck in the decades of my youth, the 1970s and 80s. That isn't old for a city especially when the cities in neighboring Uzbekistan such as Samarkand and Bukhara date back a considerable ways.
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