First things first: season three of Downton Abbey began last night on IPTV. I enjoy this show in spite of myself. It is so...British. Perhaps what I appreciate most is the tension between the past (the house itself a relic of an earlier, outdated age) and the future (women's rights, technology, disdain for the monarchy, etc.).
Currently, I am reading a wonderful biography on ex-Beatle John Ono Lennon, written by Ray Coleman. It is wonderfully well-written and engaging. As charitably as Lennon is presented by his biographer, in the end it is painfully clear that this was a conflicted and difficult man. I vacillate between sympathy and disgust--his acerbic wit, derision toward the weak and physically challenged, and almost pathological meanness make him a difficult guy to like. Yet the man suffered greatly and surely was dealing his entire life with the failings of others in regard to love and acceptance (his dad left him very early in childhood, and his mother gave him to her sister to raise).
I'm listening to Abbey Road right now. "Oh! Darling" sounds something of the pain and longing. John at one time suggested that the Beatles were, among British youth anyway, more popular than Jesus Christ. This brought upon him and the Beatles a firestorm of vitriol from the American public. I wish more than anything that John Lennon had known Jesus Christ as his Lord.
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