I rang the bell several times, but no one answered. Sometimes he would listen to his old 78s and it would take him a while to get to the door. Just as I was beginning to despair and thinking of →
Countless times
Archibald Iratus lived in an austere turn-of-the-century building along Jungfrugatan in Östermalm, Stockholm. A curious peculiarity of the address was its diffuse location. I could wander around for a long time before I found the unnumbered gate, and once last →
The journey to India
The Orient, and India in particular, has long been regarded by us Westerners as a remote and mysterious place, steeped in ancient wisdom and millennia-old traditions. Indian culture stood unbroken for over 5,000 years. They had no Christian religious conversion →
The do nothing president?
From the political right, the sabers are now being sharpened against Trump. He was the president who had a unique chance, but he failed, he did nothing. Biden and his men may not agree, as they have large piles of →
Right and wrong
Slavery is considered wrong and reprehensible, but there is a historical background that may shed some light on the matter. In ancient Greece, prisoners of war or criminals were often enslaved. The penalty was labour instead of imprisonment. Prisons were →
The age of the machine is coming to an end
What is this modernity, which forever reshaped our society after the Great War of 1918, and guaranteed that architecture with a Corinthian order or flowering facade ornaments would never again be built, and where art, poetry and culture would no →
Introvert era of psychologists and yogis
On a daily basis, we can read about the US President Donald Trump’s mental state, written by people who doesn’t know him, or never even met him. They are neither psychologists nor psychiatrists, yet they attribute various diagnoses to the →
The Industrial Revolution in Ancient Alexandria
What if the Romans had not conquered the eastern Mediterranean, but left the Greeks alone to develop steam engines, astrolabes and all manner of architectural and mechanical novelties, in prominent cities like Alexandria, Syracuse, Athens and Ephesus? Could the industrial →
The building blocks of the present
To those who have visited Rome, Athens or Pompeii, it seems obvious that Western culture is built on pagan Greco-Roman foundations. From the Greek colonization of the eastern Mediterranean around 700 BC to the fall of the western Roman Empire →
