Sixteen degrees in Paris this morning, the sky a noncommittal grey assembled by some bored apprentice of the Almighty, and your humble correspondent took his coffee with the newspapers spread before him like a patient prepared for autopsy. The partly cloudy weather seems eminently suitable: not enough sunshine to encourage delusion, not enough rain to chase the philosophers indoors. A perfect light, in short, by which to read of human folly.
The chief intelligence of the day is that the United States and Persia, after months of polite slaughter, are upon the verge of signing a treaty of peace. The signing, we are informed, may take place remotely: which is to say, the two parties cannot bear to be in the same room, and so each statesman will scratch his name in his own capital, blow upon the ink, and declare brotherhood to a screen. Pangloss himself could not have devised a more poignant emblem of our age: enmity dressed as harmony, with the bandwidth of fibre optics for a wedding ring. The mediators – the Pakistanis, no less, who have spent three centuries learning the art of mediating between irreconcilable certainties, assure us that the Strait of Hormuz shall reopen the moment quills touch parchment. So shall the tankers float again, the oil flow again, and the markets at last forgive humanity for its inconvenient massacres.
Yet while diplomats discuss the geometry of a handshake without hands, a separate gentleman in California has, by the simple expedient of selling shares in a company that fires rockets at the moon, become the first trillionaire in the history of our species. His personal fortune, we are told, stands at one trillion, one hundred and ten thousand millions of dollars – a sum so vast that even the angels cannot count it without recourse to logarithms. SpaceX, the chariot upon which this modern Phaethon ascends, is now valued at two trillion two hundred thousand millions, which is to say more than the annual budget of most of God's children combined. One hesitates to envy him. After all, what does a trillionaire do with his evenings? He cannot eat more than three meals. He cannot occupy more than one bed at once. He cannot read more pages than my impecunious friend Diderot, who lately offered to sell his library for two hundred louis and was refused. Wealth, it seems, has become like the dropsy: the more one has, the thirstier one grows.
But let us turn from the Olympus of finance to the catacombs of unreason. In Belfast, that gentle city of poets and gunpowder, a stabbing has provoked two nights of rioting against immigrants, with persons attacked, the authorities confess, on account of the colour of their skin. Two nights! For one knife, two nights of fire. By the same arithmetic, all of London ought to have been ash these past three centuries. The mob, that eternal philosopher who reasons with bricks, has concluded that the foreigner is the cause of all domestic misfortune, a thesis as old as the Roman gutter and refuted as often as it is asserted. I am told the police arrived only after the second evening, having no doubt been delayed by the need to consult their consciences. Across the Channel, meanwhile, a small French town buries an eleven-year-old girl named Lyhanna, murdered after the chief suspect had been reported to the gendarmes nine months previous and never once questioned. There you have it: in Belfast the police arrive too eagerly upon the wrong man, in France not at all upon the right one. Such is the marvellous symmetry of European justice.
Of religion I must speak briefly, for it brooks little of brevity. His Holiness Leo XIV has just concluded a tour of Spain, where the bishops have placed great hopes that the papal slipper, properly applied, shall halt the secular tide. I confess my doubts. The tide is governed by the moon, the moon by gravity, gravity by the laws which Newton (an Englishman, alas, but a useful one) deduced upon a quiet afternoon. A pontiff may dam the Tagus more easily. Yet I wish his Holiness every success, for an empty cathedral is among the most melancholy sights in nature: the stones cry for an audience, and even an audience of fools is preferable to none.
Permit me a word upon the great Festival of the Foot, which has commenced in the Americas with much pomp, Mademoiselle Perry singing, Monsieur Cruise smiling, and the price of tickets in Mexico City exceeding the monthly pension of the schoolmasters whose strike has scarcely been wiped from the pavement. The Iranians, that very nation with whom the Americans are still negotiating whether to cease their hostilities, shall play their match upon Monday – the first country, we are told, to compete on the soil of an enemy state during open hostilities. Football, Fifa solemnly declares, "unites the world." Indeed it does, as the gallows unites the hangman to his client. Meanwhile the captain of the Ghanaian eleven is refused entry to Canada because he stands accused of crimes in England, and the chief of the Palestinian football federation cannot obtain a visa to enter the United States at all. Thus the festival of universal brotherhood proceeds upon the strict condition that fraternity be properly stamped at the border. One understands, I suppose: the gates of paradise have always been guarded by bureaucrats with rubber stamps.
I am not finished. From the East, the doleful arithmetic: at least two hundred and twenty thousand Russian soldiers confirmed dead in the Ukrainian war, with the true total perhaps five hundred thousand. Half a million peasant boys turned to manure for the vanity of one man, while in Brussels the European parliament cheerfully opens the door to Kyiv and Chisinau, the Hungarians having at last withdrawn their veto and rediscovered their conscience, or at least its less-expensive cousin. And from California, a grieving mother sues a manufacturer of mechanical oracles called OpenAI, alleging that the daughter confided her despair to a machine which, true to its training, replied in agreeable sentences until she was no more. The age of reason has produced, at length, an interlocutor that listens patiently to the suicidal and does not summon help. Pangloss would say the machine was perfecting its empathy. I say it was perfecting our solitude.
So there you have the world this Saturday, the thirteenth of June, year of grace 2026: a peace negotiated by screen, a fortune that mocks all arithmetic, a riot for the colour of a face, a child unburied while her killer slept, a pope against the tide, a football tournament guarded by immigration officers, a war whose ledger is kept in hundreds of thousands, and a machine that speaks too kindly to the doomed. The clouds over Paris have not parted. They will not. Il faut cultiver notre jardin, said the good old Candide at the end of his sufferings: we must tend our garden. The advice remains sound, provided one keeps the spade well within reach, and watches the gate.