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...Catherine Adams in January 1815, having received a letter from her husband, John Quincy Adams, inviting her to make the journey from Saint Petersburg to Paris. Her husband had not specified a time limit, but Mrs. Adams began making arrangements for her immediate departure, accompanied by her seven-year old son. She was thrilled to be leaving Russia after having suffered the wearying expense of expatriate living, the oppressive politesse required by her regular engagements at the Tsar’s imperial court, and six years of seemingly endless winters. But she faced a two-thousand mile journey in freezing...
...enjoyment inflated out of proportion by my respect for his vigorous old age? Occasionally he’d falter a fraction, and I’d hastily scribble something like, “he’s mellowed; he’s not his former, razor-sharp self.” But this is too critical. His drumming rang with every ounce of his vast experience. Perhaps most telling was his playing during a bass solo. Haynes chose to pare his palette down to just one cymbal. Stripped bare with nowhere to hide, he shone with unobtrusive inventiveness, sending...
Every poetic career follows a different trajectory. Yeats’ style evolved and improved throughout his long career; Wordsworth composed his greatest works in his youth, but continued writing through his old age. The deterioration of poetic talent must be one of the greatest fears of an aging poet. Although Derek Walcott—who turned eighty this past January—is a Nobel Laureate and the author of over twenty published volumes of poetry, the dread of losing his poetic ability permeates “White Egrets,” his newest collection. He writes...
...poetry, however, that he displays the heights of his lyrical abilities. As he gazes once more at egrets taking flight in the distance, he compares them to the poems that he is sending forth into the world: “they are the bleached regrets / of an old man’s memoirs, printed stanzas / showing their hinged wings like wide open secrets.” The “bleached” quality of his thoughts is not due to his age alone; the poet is presenting himself to the world—starkly and without dissemblance...
...Representative Roscoe Bartlett, a Maryland Republican with a background in engineering, is EMP's Chicken Little. "We're going to be attacked where we are the weakest," the 83-year old lawmaker told the Navy's top officer at a recent House Armed Services Committee hearing. "How much fighting capability would remain if you had an EMP lay down of 100 kilovolts per meter, which is about half of what the Russian generals told the EMP commission [created by Bartlett himself six years ago] the Soviets had developed and the Russians had available?" (The admiral said he'd have...