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1 week ago | 
thesaturdaypaper.com.au | Stan Grant
Whatever we may be remembered for, if we are remembered at all, I would suggest it is not magic. It is not that I believe we are without awe, that we have no sense of wonder or imagination. We are human after all and what was true for our ancestors is true for us: magic is essential to ward off despair. What we lack is not magic, really, but the words for magic. We have surrendered the language of the soul. We have locked it away in the cupboard of childish things.
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3 weeks ago | 
thesaturdaypaper.com.au | Stan Grant
I first glimpsed mainland China from a train window on a cold Christmas morning. Our new home in Beijing was calling and, rather than fly, I wanted my children to travel across country, to feel this land open to us, to let us in. I woke early in our sleeper cabin, lost in wonder and the romance of being a stranger in a foreign place. Inside it was cold. Steam rose from my breath. With the back of my hand, I smeared the condensation on the glass and peered out.
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1 month ago | 
thesaturdaypaper.com.au | Stan Grant
Bad manners tend to diminish people. Decency is our defence against tyranny. It is what we owe each other in anything attempting civil society. So the spectacle of United States President Donald Trump and his vice-president, J. D. Vance, rounding on Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office offended all of us who might still at least pretend that grace and dignity have a place in our world. Each failed a test of civility.
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1 month ago | 
thesaturdaypaper.com.au | Stan Grant
The leaves on the elm trees near my house are turning from green to red. On a dawn walk recently, I caught a slight chill in the air, and I smiled. The sun already sits lower in the sky. I like this. I like autumn. Winter even more. The cold suits my ageing temperament. Not that I will choose, but I do have a romantic notion that I might go gently and gratefully to the end of my life in the golden hour of a winter’s afternoon as the earth settles.
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2 months ago | 
thesaturdaypaper.com.au | Stan Grant
SHARE Copy Link Bluesky Facebook X LinkedIn Recently it got into the head of one of my sons to do a DNA test. “Why?” I asked. “Just talk to your grandparents.”That’s how I learnt about my genealogy, from my Elders. It was passed down in stories, a dash of myth and a few hidden skeletons. I suppose this is where our generation gap reveals itself. My son won’t believe it until he sees it.
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2 months ago | 
thesaturdaypaper.com.au | Stan Grant
Reading W. E. H. Stanner’s book on Aboriginal religion, I came upon an intriguing reference to the Murinbata, or Murrinh-Patha, in the Northern Territory, as a people with no history. Stanner, one of the most acclaimed Australian anthropologists, had studied the cosmology of the Murinbata, who, he had concluded, had no idea of a god that called life into being. Earthly life, he revealed, was a cycle “between mystical source and mystical goal, but there was no first cause or final end”.
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Jan 17, 2025 | 
thesaturdaypaper.com.au | Stan Grant
SHARE Copy Link Bluesky Facebook X LinkedIn New York is a better place than most to contemplate the world. This city is a final destination. This city is a goal. I am indebted to E. B. White for that description. He’s a good starting point to read about New York. The doyen of literary style, grace and grammar walked its streets, breathed its air and eavesdropped on its conversations. He wrote about it in a concise essay, published in 1949.
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Nov 29, 2024 | 
thesaturdaypaper.com.au | Stan Grant
Franz Kafka is said to have asked how he could identify with his Jewish heritage when he had hardly anything in common with himself. Typically, Kafka revealed a modern conundrum. How can any identity contain our multitudes? Modernity is the finality of becoming. From Heraclitus telling us we cannot step into the same river twice to Hegel’s historicism, we are defined by movement. Yet at what point does becoming slaughter being? Does endless becoming render us incoherent?
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Nov 15, 2024 | 
thesaturdaypaper.com.au | Stan Grant
Winston Churchill supposedly said democracy is the worst form of government, apart from all the others. In fact, Churchill was attributing that inanity to some unnamed source. In any case, it is facile and far too often repeated. I have heard it again as pundits try to process Donald Trump’s United States election victory. To some, this is the death of democracy and a slide into American autocracy.
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Nov 1, 2024 | 
thesaturdaypaper.com.au | Stan Grant
Whoever wins next week, America loses. One candidate is grotesque and the other insipid. Donald Trump’s television-inflated personality and proto-fascist flirtations divert focus from the inadequacy of Kamala Harris, who until recently was a near-invisible vice-president. She is a calculated, accidental candidate, who was resoundingly rejected by the Democrats the only time she sought the nomination. Each candidate is morally vacuous.
