OK. Time to donate money to the Obama campaign again. Being abroad while all this electioneering is going on makes me feel nostalgic for, and protective of, the United States. I remember feeling the same way when I was in Germany in 2003. I keep writing emails to people saying things like “Keep Baltimore real for me,” but what I really want to say is, “Don’t let the Tea Party take over.” They’re at just under a million donors now–you can watch the counter go up.

What Would Julian Barnes Write, continued:

“Later that day—or perhaps another day—we had a double English period with Phil Dixon, a young master just down from Cambridge. He liked to use contemporary texts, and would throw out sudden challenges. “ ‘Birth, and Copulation, and Death’—that’s what T. S. Eliot says it’s all about. Any comments?” He once compared a Shakespearean hero to Kirk Douglas in Spartacus. And I remember how, when we were discussing Ted Hughes’s poetry, he put his head at a donnish slant and murmured, “Of course, we’re all wondering what will happen when he runs out of animals.” Sometimes, he addressed us as “Gentlemen.” Naturally, we adored him.”

– Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending (2011)