These post hits "Now," i.e. in the last three hours mean something to me because the posts mean something more than usual to me, especially the first one. I thank whomever checked on them.
Who read those posts? The honest answer is I don't know. However, it seems we can correlate it pretty convincingly by the countries of readers over the same three hours.
Who read those posts? The honest answer is I don't know. However, it seems we can correlate it pretty convincingly by the countries of readers over the same three hours.
The odds are overwhelming that some Russian readers read those posts. This is not the first time I have seen Russian clicks on posts which are personal to me. I don't know why a Russian would click on "Swords Against the Mountains" and I am always ready to jump to conclude that where there is a Russian there is mischief. Maybe they despise me, as I despise them, and are finding out as much as they can in this blog. But I don't think so. This is something of a pattern now and I prefer to conclude, and I do conclude, that they find those stories of some interest. And that makes me much less despise them and...Oh, I don't care if they despise me. "It is good to have enemies" I have written frequently and Russians are particularly good to have as enemies.
"Swords Against the Mountains" was part of a series that was purely personal but which I tried to make into something writ large, biblical even, the human experience with some elementary forces of nature: water, mountains, land, fire. I tried even to write in a not too transparent KJV style. We humans don't win those contests with nature much and nature definitely won those I wrote about. The human swords drew nature's blood, and its wrath, and left scars, but the swords were beaten and dulled and were left rusted carcases and the humans fled, the battlefield, as it were, in defeat, crushed and ruined and three times didn't leave at all but were drowned dead.
"You can never go home again," Thomas Wolfe wrote, and I found it difficult and disconcerting, a bit painful, to write about Barnesboro and Cambria County Pennsylvania and the writing was difficult and I didn't want to go home anymore and I stopped. But I wrote what I wrote in the manner I wished to write it, that is the Russian Tolstoy, and I am grateful that somebody still occasionally reads those posts and if a Russian, I am very touched and I thank you.
