Finding a line in shifting sands
Thoughts, like water, are essential to sustaining life but they are similarly difficult to shape. Writers must always struggle with the possibility - no the probability - that the texts they pour their ideas into will take a different shape in the minds of their readers. For me, as a writer, this is my greatest struggle: to find forms for my ideas which have enough structure and integrity to sustain their approximate shape as they pass into the minds of others. The significance of this struggle has been foremost in my mind as I have reflected on whether to publish the post I wrote last week. What I wrote responds to the sentiments of Mikhail Gorbachev published last month in a letter ofcongratulations (p.26) to the United World College movement on the occasion of the movement’s 50 th anniversary. Gorbachev writes about how little he feels has been achieved since the end of the cold war; he argues that, instead of striving to make the world a better place, the last twenty ye...