Category: Essay

Climate is what you expect; weather is what you get.(Mark Twain) Climate change (CC) is not exactly a new phenomenon: the climate has been “changing” for four and a half billion years, “change” being what climate does. However it was officially discovered as an imminent threat to the planet and

WATERSHED CONSCIOUSNESSThe Danube: A Journey Upriver* Nick Thorpe acknowledges Gary Snyder up front. In this book he brings over to “the shoulders of the old Danube” (Thorpe’s phrase) some of Snyder’s ideas on ecological and cultural bioregionalism. Snyder has been writing about reclaiming the home watershed, from his farm in

Multa novit vulpes, verum echinus unum magnum. (“The fox knows many things, the hedgehog knows one big thing” was popularised by Isaiah Berlin, who had taken the saying from Archilocus, the classical Greek poet. It implies that there are two types of individuals, foxes, who seek knowledge in a variety

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.” Oscar Wilde, De Profundis (1897) It is an intriguing title, Der gelernte Österreicher (Braumüller, 2013), with its allusive irony, as in a gelernter Tischler (trained carpenter) or (like the current Mayor

You are one of those people I count among the great gifts of this world. Karl Jaspers As an immigrant in a nation of immigrants, it is in America that Arendt affirms the new-found love of the world. Exuberant, she tells Jaspers that she will name her new book on

It was toward the end of the sixties when a yellow submarine emerged from the murky waters of the Danube at Novi Sad. Before long, a round hatch on its back snapped open and a bearded head appeared. The man scanned the surroundings with binoculars, then instructed the crew in

You are one of those people I count among the great gifts of this world. Karl Jaspers There are a few moments in life when the height and depth of the significance of the occasion become too great for utterance, when the thrill of electric sympathy touches the whole generation at once, and brings us to our feet with a spiritual-intellectual shock. Two of

I I often wonder about how concepts of the Danube and Central Europe overlap. For me, the Danubian and Central European regions are not one and the same, yet I also feel a closeness between the two. This also applies with regard to that experience of difference that characterises the