About the Author-Emily Lodge
Over the last thirty years a fascination with public policy has taken Emily into government, journalism, business and academia. As a print journalist, she focused on law and the courts. As a speech-writer for a US Congressman and a US Ambassador to France, her domain was foreign policy. As an award-winning television documentary researcher for 60 Minutes, she helped prove someone innocent. Emily won an Emmy Award for a CBS News Special Report about education. On moving to Europe, she became a correspondent for Brussel’s leading monthly business magazine. Her ParisVoice features column were known for their witty and perceptive observations about public figures. She has helped create a major fund-raising drive for INSEAD, Europe’s premier business school. A graduate of Georgetown University in diplomatic history, she is writing news analysis from the Middle East while promoting her second book, The Falcon Diaries.
Ask Emily
What inspires you at the moment?
One philosopher said that all of life is about learning how to love. I come back to this all the time. We must all carefully take apart the preconceptions we were taught as children and learn to see the inner human being, whatever their race, creed or color. Music inspires me and at the moment, Bach’s Sarabande, Mozart’s Sonata No. 1, and Chopin’s etude no. 4. I am inspired by disciplined professionalism combined with peace-seeking, like Israeli-Palestinian orchestras playing together, as they do under Daniel Barenboim’s baton. Courage inspires me—those who do not fear, who put their convictions on the line in the service of others, like those in Gaza recently who demonstrated unarmed for their rights, knowing they could be killed or maimed for life. I admire great oratory—Socrates, Churchill, FDR. I seek out people who have a sense of humour especially when combined with humility and kindness. I consider what it means to live by faith, to believe in oneself, to go to the edge of a precipice and stretch out one’s hand to another human being. I am inspired by people who believe there are more important things than money—who love nature and who make the hard choices aimed at resolving the dangers of climate change, committed to saving the planet. I walk alongside those who are seeking the truth and who embrace a life of activism.
What books do you enjoy reading?
Beautiful writing, well-structured books, inspire me like those by Somerset Maugham: The Razor’s Edge, Selected Plays, Cakes and Ale. Philosophical explorations of what constitutes reality: Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, Varieties of Religious Experience by William James, all of Virginia Woolf, Portrait of a Lady by Henry James and The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton. I love history and have recently been reading Ilan Pappe’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Bernard Lewis’ The Middle East: 2000 Years of History from the Rise of Christianity to the Present Day, The Dawning Moon of the Mind by Susan Brind Morrow, Jerusalem by Simon Sebag Montefiore, Miko Peled’s The Israeli General’s Son, and Diane Johnson’s Lulu in Marrakech and Persian Nights. I also enjoy reading (and writing) poetry, particularly John Donne, Rainer Rilke, and T.S. Eliot.
