How to learn Swedish in 1000 difficult lessons

When I was in Greece, I was reading Down There on a Visit by Christopher Isherwood. He's an excellent memoirist, most of the books of his that I've read are very autobiographical, and he's written much about Berlin in the early thirties. But as I read this book, lying on a beach next to the husband and who knows how many others reading their own books or sleeping or talking, I thought to myself how the world today is so much a smaller place, people are so much closer together that the kind of war - and build up to it - that he writes about wouldn't happen now. I thought how different those times were, and wondered if he lived with a sense of foreboding as to what might happen, and thought how I live absolutely in a time where I have no sense of foreboding about anything other than the next week's work, that life these days is so sure. And now, of course, the surety is gone, at least in part. Just how much, that is the question.

The Swedish word for the day is kriget. It means the war.

- by Francis S.