What We Live For

Good Morning. A couple of items for the senses today.

• Last week Orhan won the Nobel Prize for Literature. His writings draw their force from his experience as a man torn between the traditional pull of his ancestral East and the rational push of the West — and his ability, through his novels, to turn that experience into an inquiry that illuminates a central problem of our time: How can East and West converse without going at each others’ throats? Or, as one of Pamuk’s characters put it in “Snow,” one of his greater novels: “Can the West endure any democracy achieved by enemies who in no way resemble them?” See "Pamuk's Nobel..."
  

• Whatever happened to arts and music education in schools? What traditional inattention hadn't reduced to a pitiful few exceptions, No Child Left behind massacred. But it isn't all bleak. Here's a personal elegy to "What We Live For..."

As always, keep your eyes on Candide's Latest, updated daily and throughout the day. Thanks for reading.pt