Too, Too Much

Some days there is too, too much news: too many shocks to the system. Days when, for me, it can be enormous fun to run across an author who finds a solution than works for him:

“Angus had little taste for the moral disaster that the public realm had become, and had come to the realization that there was no essential merit in knowing what was going on in this fraught and distasteful arena. If he did not follow the parliamentary debates in the Scottish Parliament, did it make the slightest difference to anything? It did not he decided. If he declined to read what the president of France had been up to, would this be noticed in Paris? Or anywhere else? He thought not.

“And so in search of inner peace, he had instituted a new custom: On one day each week he would neither read a newspaper nor listen to the news on the radio, nor watch it on television. Isolated from the world events, he would give his attention to the world itself; he would inhabit his moment and his place, rather than the fevered world reflected in the news. And with that detachment he was delighted to discover a sense of peace and resolution that in the normal course of events eluded him, and eluded, too, he suspected, many of those who were enmeshed in the world of current event.”

Alexander McCall-Smith, The Peppermint Tea Chronicles, Anchor Books, 2019, pp 195-6.

           Thank You for reading, JoAnnLordahl.com    

[My apologies: Reading, Writing currently consumes most of my dwindling energy.]