7 Comments

Thank you for this elegant metaphor for culture. You have synthesized our common experiences and created a new way to visualize something more meaningful. I will be looking for archipelagos that don’t celebrate football or Christmas.

Expand full comment

It's kinda like: where do you want to spend your vacation time, in air-polluted Athens or sailing around the islands.

Expand full comment

A wonderful and useful perspective. Thank you.

Expand full comment

Awesome! I’ve often brought up the analogy of a federalized system. But I love your picture of archipelagos and now you’ve created a manifesto-essay about Substack and how it should view itself in the wider bustle of the inter webs.

Expand full comment

Culture flows from 'cult' - either the cult of false gods, or - what?

I was aged 18, at a convent boarding school in the UK when the news of Kennedy's death came through.

I wrote a sonnet about it some years later from my old school magazine, which I will copy out here if you like.

Expand full comment

You are correct sir.

Expand full comment

I wonder whether the archipelago can hold against centripetal pressure, and your compelling metaphor withstand reality. I hope so, of course.

(Culture as you describe it overlaps a lot with ritual, too, it seems. But that's another post, I guess.)

Expand full comment