No blog yesterday because we went to a matinee an hour away. We saw "Six", a musical about the six wives of King Henry, the 8th. I was curious to see what a musical about six wives in the 1500's would be about. I looked up the show, the authors and the women. I learned the six word summary: divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived. Catherine Parr survived Henry's death.
I noticed that I am getting older and I hear that the world changes. I have been looking out for just what changes, if any, I can see. I have been lifted up by books since I was a little kid and I have learned from Tom Wheeler's From Gutenburg to Google, Gordon Howe's What Hath God Wrought and Elizabeth Eisenstadt's Divine Art, Infernal Machine about the spread of language through books and libraries. My recent review of my younger reading included Jacques Barzun's "The House of Intellect" and he makes clear that literacy, a gift from education and schools, once divided those in power from those not, far more than it does today.
You don't have to ask what these kids are doing.
I was struck when looking at books I remember fondly but not accurately that books I read with enthusiasm in college are "old". As my businessman brother-in-law informed me, some things are "not in the demographic" of interest.
I have read about current alternatives to marriage, alternatives to becoming a parent, greater longevity being forces and movements to reckon with today. One of the results that matters of covid-19 has been Zoom, Facetime and other tools for meeting with others from home or office.
