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Beyond Politics and Prose: French Leaders Caught Between Fiction and Finance
French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire, who fervently penned “Petite Jaune Lettres,” has recently precipitated a significant tumult. In Paris, Marseille, Lyon, Bordeaux, Saint-Étienne, and Montpellier, a surge of dissent against the Macron administration’s policy of retirement postponement has been tumultuously echoing since the onset of this year. The proposed pension reform scheme, spearheaded by French Prime Minister Elisabeth Bornet, aims to elevate France’s retirement age from 62 to 64. Yet, why did the protesters single out the finance minister? The novelist stands in solidarity. French Prime Minister Bornet elucidated the implementation of the retirement reform initiative, asserting: “If left unaddressed, the fiscal deficit will burgeon, inexorably leading to a…
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Unveiling Emily Dickinson’s Soul: Flowers, Verses, and the Secret Garden
There existed a luminary in the American poetry milieu during the 19th century—a true maverick in her own right. Though shrouded in obscurity throughout her lifetime and ensconced within the familial manor past the threshold of her thirtieth year, the corpus of nearly 1,800 surviving verses that emerged posthumously served as a seismic tremor within the literary sphere, fashioning a novel legend amidst the prevailing tide of romantic verse. This radiant luminary of poesy was none other than Emily Dickinson. The famed aphorism “I could have endured the darkness if I hadn’t seen the sun” found its genesis within her quill. Enigmatic verses penned by Dickinson have ensnared the imagination…
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From Novel to Reality: Istanbul’s Museum of Innocence Unlocks Layers of Love and City Life
When I read Pamuk’s novel “The Museum of Innocence” in 2010, I felt a surprising joy. The narrative of the work is dense, bright and sad. It not only talks about love, but also talks about what an ideal person looks like. I wrote a review about this at that time, called “When Will Great Writers Start Talking About Love”. In 2012, I learned that Pamuk had actually built a “Museum of Innocence”, which I found very interesting. He had materialized literature, and Istanbul became a place I clearly wanted to visit. In short, I came to visit the Museum of Innocence with mixed emotions as I had a good…
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My Distant Homeland: A Personal Journey to Britain
Although my stay in that country was not of considerable duration, it marked the commencement of my perception of the world and became an irreplaceable distant homeland. In my junior high school’s British and American culture class, I witnessed Big Ben, Buckingham Palace, and Madame Tussauds for the first time through a documentary broadcast. From the small window of the television screen, an entirely unfamiliar world across the ocean unfolded before me. To this day, I vividly recall the vintage lecture theater with its lofty ceiling, creaking scarlet wooden floor, and a gathering of naive and inexperienced middle school students. Among them, I sat with eyes wide open, brimming with…
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Do You Have to Read a Lot to Write Well? The Importance of Aesthetics and Sympathy in Literature Education
Do you have to read a lot to write well? The answer is obvious. of course not. This is an overly categorical question. So the more common expression is this: My child likes to read, why can’t writing go up? Asking questions like this points to a crack in this logic, that is to say, liking reading should help writing, but now writing is not good, there must be something wrong. Once you think about it, you will find the fragility of this problem. There are too many rhetorical questions that can follow. Does the child really enjoy reading? Or is it just a sign of academics, or even of…
