In troubled times, it’s often good to get back to the basics.

These are the sorts of troubled times which I dreamed of, as a foolish and romantic child. Times in history when things were uncertain and exciting and up in the air and one well-timed move might bring the whole circus down.

That’s an easy dream to get behind until you learn intimately just how hard it is to build anything, any damn thing at all.

But we learn things, even in the playgrounds of our dreams, about how to live, and the fantasies of my youth might have taught me a bit after all, especially since I fed them as much history as I could cram in with the stories and songs.

So I’ve been reading various stories, each one true in at least some senses, about people in difficult times and hearing what they are telling us, over the distance of culture and time, over the border of myth and fiction and even history.

“The problem is always how to live in a decadent society.” Not entirely true, because sometimes the decadent society can’t be lived in. Then what? Now, surviving a decadent society is a different matter. That’s a thing to learn.

So I have just a few thoughts worth sharing about how to be good in a bad time.