My purpose holds to sail beyond the sunset, and read more books.  It may be that Moby Dick has first claim to my attention; the great white whale has been waiting for me to finish his story for…a long time.  I cannot remember exactly how long.  But there is another book that I want to tackle concurrently and that is keeping my busy at the moment.  Jacques Barzun’s monumental (or is “statuesqe” more accurate?) work on the last 500 years of Western culture called “From Dawn to Decadence”.  Well, it is only about 900 pages, but extremely dense.  There are three aspects that makes it impossible for me to put it down: (1) the interesting facts and tidbits that Barzun keeps turning up, (2) his original perspective on history, (3) his writing style.  And of these three, I would have to say that the language of the book is the most compelling, followed closely by the author’s opinions of the preceding half-century.  It is pointless to describe it here, but I hope to discuss some of his interesting views here, especially how many, perhaps most, of them pertain to current events.  My steely resolve to be in bed by 10 has faltered, but I took two naps during the course of the day (it was a public holiday!), so I’m not too worried.  Well, a little.