A reader has a business in the United States but wants to begin traveling and living abroad. He eventually wants to split his time between the US and Colombia. What is the best way to do this? I offer some suggestions.
“All that will be left, eventually, will be the grin of the Cheshire cat.”
I recently saw again the film The Shawshank Redemption (1994), after not having seen it for a few years. It’s always interesting to revisit certain classics (book, film, or work of art) as the years go by, and observe how your perceptions change. I had a chance to read a little bit more about how the director, Frank Darabont, got the film made, and how it was not an immediate success.
It is a pleasant thing to discover pearls of wisdom buried in the tomes of forgotten writers. We are reminded of the persistence of human wisdom, and its ability to persist down the arches of the years in all conditions and environments, whether favorable and unfavorable.
Many years ago I read a book called The Next Ten Thousand Years. The author, Adrian Berry, argued that no matter what happened to mankind–good or bad–he would survive, prosper, and go on literally to reshape the solar system and explore the galaxy.
In 1999, two colonels in the Chinese Army, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, published a treatise that would heavily influence Chinese military planning for the following decades. The book was called Unrestricted Warfare. Its central theses were these:
A reader writes that he is beginning to doubt some of the tenets of the religion he grew up with. He is dealing with doubt, and is not sure how to handle it. He wonders of masculist doctrines can serve as a substitute for religion.
Some statements of philosophers are so transcendent, and so soaring in imaginative power, that they require little or no comment. I found one such passage today in a book that in recent years has come to be one of my favorites: Pascal’s Pensées. I love Pascal because I can open his book at random, any time I feel the need, and feel his spiritual fingers gripping my throat with every sentence. He is not only a philosopher, but a saint.
The great humanist Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch) had opportunity to reflect on the fact that the more he gained in knowledge and experience, the less and less certain he became of his own judgments. These thoughts were recorded in an essay called On His Own Ignorance And That Of Many Others (De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia). Some of these observations are incredibly frank.
I was recently watching the film Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision. It is a 1994 documentary about the architectural work of Maya Lin, the designer of the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial on the Mall in Washington D.C. One of the key figures interviewed in the film was an honest-faced, frank man named Jan Scruggs.
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There is a scene at the end of the film Apocalypse Now where Colonel Kurtz delivers a monologue on the ruthless tactics of the Viet Cong guerrillas. He relates how the Viet Cong had come and “hacked off” the arms of child villagers that the Americans had inoculated as part of an effort to win their hearts and minds.
Quintus Curtius 
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