Why 'Slender Threads'? Rationale Behind This Newsletter/Website

View of Life, History, and Current Events

In 2010, I was standing next to ancient city walls in “Christian” Constantinople, now “Muslim” Istanbul, Turkey, on the Asian side, just a 10-minute boat ride across the Bosporus Strait from “Christian” Europe. I began to ponder the global historical importance of those walls. Symbolically, this city has always been the crossroads between Western and Eastern civilizations and ways of thinking, between individualism and collectivism. There’s a modern European section, an Asian section, and a section for the ancient city of Constantinople.

What would have happened if these walls had not held…if, for example, Christians had succeeded in dominating the Middle East and North Africa, or conversely, if Islam succeeded in dominating Europe?

Living and teaching overseas, traveling to more than 40 countries, and studying their histories and cultures, I began to see the world as a fragile place. The forces that separated, connected, disconnected, and shaped people — languages, economics, religions, history, culture, politics, borders, ethnic and national identities — seemed both simultaneously small and large, intertwined with fate, destiny, and fortune.

When I saw a quote from Alexander Dumas’ classic, “The Count of Monte Cristo”: “On what slender threads do life and fortune hang,” I thought first of all that’s a great narrative technique for creating drama in writing fiction that can also be applied to non-fiction and current events, to the drama of history and to the lives of all of us.

We are who we are as humans and as citizens of nations because of slender threads — chance encounters or global forces far larger than ourselves as individuals. One challenge of life is to make those seemingly invisible forces visible. We can do this by studying history, reading literature, traveling widely, and listening empathetically to the experiences of others, especially people different from ourselves.

Jungian analyst and depth psychologist Robert Johnson, in his memoir, “Balancing Heaven and Earth: A Memoir of Visions, Dreams, and Realizations,” described “the mysterious