My reading this past week brought me past George Bernard Shaw and this quote, a propos fearmongering and The Culture of Fear:
“Newspapers are unable, seemingly to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization.”
Indeed. And how appropriate given the hysteria many papers, especially the tabloids, exhibited by the press about cycling and ‘safety’.And I returned, for reasons nothing to do with cycling, to Philip Larkin’s great death poem, Aubade:
“Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others.”
Courage means not scaring others. Boy, there are a lot of people out there who should reflect on that.
While we’re in brevity mode, I can recommend a book of bicycle poems by Paul Fattaruso called… “Bicycle”.Brilliant stuff. Simple, elegant poems about bicycles. Example:
“Of all the hidden cities, the city of abandoned bicycles is the most perfectly hidden. One can listen a long time to the indistinct whispers of abandoned bicycles in the streets.”
