Hail, Hardy, and Musical Introspection

To start yet again with the weather, today was a most interesting spring-like day. I woke up before nine, when it was cloudy. In the course of the morning -- which I spent reading about the Academy Awards and looking at the dresses, drying the dishes, doing beginners' Latin exercises (exciting stuff, about the domina receiving convivae at her villa), and leafing through the Feuilleton section of the Berliner Zeitung -- the sun intermittently appeared. I eventually went for a walk, blithely expecting the sun to emerge again from what I realized at the Rathaus (Schöneberg) to be a sky entirely blanketed with pearly grey. After turning a small round at the Rathaus, where isolated flower and clothing and bakery booths formed the remnants of the matinal market, I returned. Then a light sprinkling of rain began, intensifying into pelting precipitation, and rapidly reaching the stage of thick driving hail. I did not mind this at all, though the hail forced me to blink. By the time I had taken off my scarf and jacket back in the apartment, the hail was perhaps half a centimeter deep, and the green Hauptstraße median and the rooftops looked as if it had lightly snowed. But then the sun did come out again, and a universal dripping began -- quite lovely, in fact.

Throughout the rest of the day I was inclined to be cross, especially because I've been hanging around at home too much, but I didn't become openly disagreeable. I read articles in the New York Review of Books about the Hungarian Uprising in 1956 (which we learned about in History 12) ; Thomas Hardy; James Laughlin, the publisher; and Pedro Almódovar and Volver. Of Thomas Hardy's books, I've read The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and the Return of the Native. When I first read the first and third books they were a sort of revelation to me, because there was something (I don't know what) in Hardy's writing that I felt I had missed everywhere else without knowing that I had. At the same time I'm still uncomfortable with the moral turbulence of the books. On the whole I like The Mayor of Casterbridge the best, probably because I am callous as to what happened to the unfortunate mayor so long as his daughter didn't meet some tragic end. Also because Donald Farfrae and Elizabeth provide the matter-of-fact grounding that I like every book to have -- and that is, for instance, a trait that I find really appealing in Jane Eyre. By the way, I don't think that my opposition to the ending of Tess of the D'Urbervilles is solely based on the fact that it is unhappy; I think that it is melodramatic and unfair to the character of Tess, even in a desperate state.

I found the article on Thomas Hardy interesting and there was much information that was new to me. But parts of it verged on "too much information." Altogether the articles in the NYRB that deal with the private lives of well-known cultural figures interest me to a certain extent and repel me beyond that. One might say that I shouldn't read them then -- well, I do skip over parts or stop reading. I don't really care about the sex lives of great people, for instance. It may be my years of Victorian-era reading, but I think that there is much of the personality and the intellect that has nothing to do with sex, and that can be discussed interestingly, tastefully, and with respect for privacy. It similarly annoys me when character flaws of the dead and living are picked out with annihilating efficiency. Is it really fair that people who are famous are not only besieged with scrutiny while they live, but also subject to scrutiny and more often than not misinterpretation when they are dead? That said, the character criticisms of the Review are probably mostly just and sometimes amusing, but I think they could be more sparing.

For dinner Papa made delicious sweet and sour pork and chicken. The colours, appearance, flavours -- everything was harmonious. I made rice on the side; it turned out beautifully, though my method only consisted of boiling the salty water, dumping in the rice, stirring it twice, then leaving and forgetting it so that Papa had to take care of it. It contrasted agreeably with the irregularly done brown rice I made a few days ago, which much resembled gruel.

In the evening I played the piano, but not very well. My fingers are cold, and above all I'm not attuned to the music. I have been thinking a lot lately how well I can play, and my browsing of classical music clips on YouTube has greatly helped. In the end, I think, my understanding of the music and the originality with which I sometimes interpret it are unusually good, but my technique and lack of incisive intelligence as well as mental clarity present obstacles that I could only overcome if I really, truly wanted to pursue it. My pedalling is bad, trills and ornaments of every sort uneven, tone often muddy, fingers uneven and not strong or agile or quick, hands not able to reach more than an octave plus one, arpeggios particularly bad. I still tend to think of notes one at a time, rather than as sets of four, for example; my mind is not quite quick enough to play notes in quick succession above a certain low level. I haven't properly memorized a piece in years. I don't know anything about harmony or counterpoint, and little about the history of music, though I do know the "rudiments" of theory. And I don't have the patient, relaxed persistence that allows me to experiment with fingering, for example, as I should. Instead I rely on flashes of intuition and general mental development over time to correct my playing. All in all, when I play at the piano, it seems to me that the music emerges in spite of my hands, and not through their mediation.

Well, I'll see again tomorrow, but it seems to me that this is not an attempt at self-deprecation but an honest assessment as far as I can make it. Either way, I'm not in bad spirits, because I've read a nice online novel.

A Visit and a Story

It's a cloudy, rainy, sombre day. I only woke up at around two o'clock, though I had gone to sleep at around midnight, perhaps because I hadn't slept very well.

But when I did wake up, my aunt S. came for a visit, followed by uncle W. and my cousin A. Over cake and coffee, we talked about German television (the crime shows Tatort and Ein Fall für Zwei, people's-judge and Jerry-Springer-type shows, as well as the American-Idol-imitation Deutschland Sucht den Superstar), Japanese animé and culture in general, literature in school (Gi. and Ge. have to read Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf), shao lin, etc.

Now Papa and Mama, perhaps with help from Gi. or Ge., are setting up the metal storage boxes that we will use to hold art supplies, papers inherited from our grandfather, and other odds and ends left in our moving boxes.

In the meantime I am revolving a new story idea in my mind. The main character, based on one of the students at UBC who seemed quite unusual and interesting, is the scion of the royal family of an imaginary country. His parents were killed by radicals in the eighties, so he is being raised by his grandparents in a sort of "splendid isolation" in their large, rambling rural house. This house, to be precise, is located on the northern shore of Elk Lake (I have a specific one in mind; a light brown one surrounded by cottonwoods, perceptible in the distance from Brookleigh Rd.), in Victoria. His grandparents are very aristocratic in their tastes; they have the best food, listen to the best music, read the best books, and so on and so forth, trying in essence to live their lives as if they were still in Europe. So their grandchild's existence is completely out of touch with the surroundings, though he is intelligent, well-read, and he has many interests. He goes to a normal school (I need to figure out some reason why he wouldn't go to a private school, which I don't want to describe because I don't know what it's like), and, while respected by everyone, keeps mostly to himself. Then one or both of the grandparents die(s) during the main character's last year in school. And then he enters university, intending to study medicine. That's as far as I've gotten.

To be quite clear, I'm not killing off so many characters to add superficial excitement, and I certainly hope that I won't write about it callously. It is simply easier to write about the difficulties of life if they have a tangible cause; I think that many people only understand trouble if it comes in the shape of a bad relationship, death, poverty, or disease. I, on the other hand, agree with George Eliot's comment in the Mill on the Floss that the sorrows of childhood, even from trivial causes by adult standards, are as real and severe to a child as any other. Or, to quote Shakespeare, "The poor beetle that we tread upon / In corporeal suffering feels a pang as great / As when a giant dies." But in this case I think that outright tragedy -- though not in the simplified and etherealized form common in theatre -- is permissible.

Piano, Homework, Dinner and Virtuous Resolves

Today it was a quiet, busy, cloudy day. I got up in the afternoon, well rested and not at all uneasy of conscience. I played the piano, starting with Czerny exercises and continuing with scales and the fourth Preludium in the Well-Tempered Clavier, Vol. I. It wasn't a brilliant session by any means, and I was absentminded most of the time, but I enjoyed it. I went shopping for dinner later on; the dinner consisted of oven-grilled lamb, couscous, Greek salad, flatbread left over at Mama's work, olives, figs, and feta cheese baked over with paprika. Now I make the Greek salad without any onion, and I think it is no great loss.

I've been thinking as usual about pulling myself together and undertaking something. The day before yesterday I decided to try to have a short story published in the New Yorker. I want to write several short stories, decide which is the best, leave that one alone for a month and then proofread it again, and then submit it per e-mail. Since the magazine staff prefer to have only two short story submissions per year, I was planning to have one story written by May, and another written by September. I do also want to take a look at the published stories in the magazine from time to time, so that I know what they're looking for.

Another way of pulling myself together is to start learning things again. One of the things that was good in university is that I had to read a certain number of pages and absorb a certain amount of information regularly. I want to do this at home, too. I think that it is really the lack of mental occupation that brings out the slow-witted, self-absorbed, and whiny elements in me. At the same time I do want to go to lectures, concerts, museums, art exhibitions, etc. It is not so easy because I feel ill at ease spending money, whether it is logical to do so or not, and because, oddly enough, there is not always something going on that interests me. But it doesn't bother me so much any more if no one comes with me, though I would certainly prefer if someone did.

Anyway, in the evening J. and I did part of his Spanish homework. He had to look up websites of different large Spanish shopping centres where one can also buy products online, and answer questions about them. First of all, I thought that the assignment is advertising, which has no place in a school. Secondly, I thought the assignment is impractical. J. groaned much of the time. Stupid school. Soon uncle W. came to visit, and, procuring a handful of pistachios, J. decided to stop working, and retired from the field with a listless and weary expression. Such is life.

And now I shall return to my pious nineteenth-century novel, A Face Illumined (I am now reading Gutenberg books by authors whose last names start with R). Not the author's best, I would say.

Stirrings of Spring, and Schoolyard Psychology

Today it was bright and sunny, altogether spring-like. Before I went to sleep yesterday night I already heard the birds twittering outside. When I went to the St. Matthäus graveyard in the Großgörschenstraße yesterday, small but very pretty purple crocuses were growing all over, three daisies grew bravely from their flattened leaves, a cluster of white hellebores ("Christrosen") was in full bloom, the drooping branches of a low tree possibly belonging to the cherry family were beaded with pale pink buds, a row of Oregon grape bushes was crowded with fringy yellow blossoms, the birds were singing and a fly buzzing, and a tiny brown shrew was scampering to and fro around one of the graves.

I played the piano, went to the Staatsbibliothek at the Kulturforum and blogged about it, and read the beginning of the Principles of Chemistry (published 1970 but still helpful today (c: ). It was only today that I realized that isotopes, having different numbers of neutrons, must necessarily also have different atomic weights. In my defense, I never took Chemistry in school and my knowledge derives from my Science classes from grades 7 to 10 (we were introduced to the atom in Grade 8, if I remember correctly; Chemistry 11 is where I would have learned the sad truth that an atom does not truly look like a planet with electrons orbiting around it circularly like moons). In the afternoon W. came over, and we ate "Berliner" (jam-filled doughnuts sprinkled with sugar) and drank coffee as well as champagne in honour of Rosenmontag ("Rose Monday," which is a significant day for Catholics but I don't know why).

For the piano lessons, I've tried to develop a new routine. I'll begin with finger exercises, continue with a set of scales (D major and minor today), play a prelude and fugue from the Well-Tempered Clavier, then go on to practice my pieces as intelligently as I can. The day before yesterday I watched delightful lectures by Leonard Bernstein analysing Shostakovich's ninth (?) as well as Beethoven's pastoral symphony, and they gave me a whole new perspective (or more than one) on music. So today I looked at the first movement of Schubert's B major sonata with this approach in mind: I tried isolating different motifs, identifying the key of these motifs as well as the key's relation to the tonic key, and looking for transformations of the motifs. I'm not generally fond of theory, but this, in moderation, proved quite acceptable. Then I worked on technically difficult bits, such as the transition between chords without using the pedal.

But I am generally in a discouraged mood. My life still hasn't changed much from the way it's been for fifteen years -- it's still isolated and not very fruitful. I've been thinking about this isolatedness and the underlying problem, I believe, is this:

Even though I'm not in school any more, I still understand society the way I got to know it there, and it has really gotten in the way of getting to know people around my age -- or any people at all. The unspoken rule, especially for girls, was that an unpopular person should not speak to or in any way approach people higher in the social hierarchy unless he is spoken to first or unless it is absolutely necessary. It is an honour to associate with popular people, and a disgrace (leaving one open to teasing) or at best a necessary evil to associate with unpopular people. The exception to the rule of non-communication: an unpopular person may carefully ask popular people (indirectly, of course) to take him on at least as a second-class friend. If they are receptive, they might still ask him directly or indirectly to change his appearance or behaviour -- e.g. his clothing (as my friends did at my 13th birthday party), the type of music he listens to or the television shows he watches -- in order to have more in common with them. Usually the unpopular person changes these things of his own initiative. I was too inflexible to do this, and I don't think that a friendship on such terms is worth much anyway.

Sometimes I did want to be friends with popular people in school and university; some were really unusually nice, and some were not only nice but also intellectually my superiors. But I was too fearful of being obtrusive to even speak to them. Besides, in school (not in university) it would have been impractical to be friends with a popular classmate because I would have had to fit in with the friendship circle of that classmate. And, to be honest, out of the hundreds of students whom I've known and usually liked in school and university, only a handful really interested and impressed me.

Anyway, this analyzing has probably much reduced the workload for a future psychotherapist, and now I feel that I can move on to a delightful pious nineteenth-century novel. (c:

My Hundredth Post

To celebrate the occasion, I will make this an odds-and-ends post.

Music

Yesterday evening Papa, Mama and I watched (on television) Daniel Barenboim performing three Beethoven sonatas at the Staatsoper. He began with the Moonlight Sonata, though we only heard the second and third movements, the latter of which was faster than I had thought, but it worked except that there didn't seem to be much of a point to the movement. He continued with Sonata No. 19 (?), one of the pleasant short sonatas that I know well because Papa played it often when we were little. At the end, appropriately enough, he played Les Adieux (earlier today Papa tried it out too). I must say that I prefer Papa's way of playing Beethoven's sonatas; when his mood is right he plays them fairly slowly, so that the music has time to sink in, without any artificial attempts at effect, and in a very sympathetic and nice way. But Mama remarked this morning that she did find Mr. Barenboim's playing quite "empfindsam" (sensitive, I suppose it would be in English). Anyway, the camera angles for the concert were occasionally hilarious, zooming in on Mr. Barenboim's thumb or on his pinkie, or rotating from above so that Mama and I made jokes about feeling seasick.

Travel

In the New York Times there was a nice article about Oxford, where T. and I went nearly two years ago. I enjoyed the following anecdote:

One 20th-century student reputedly demanded a flagon of claret during his exams, having discovered an ancient rule in the University Statute Book entitling him to. The invigilator was able to annul the request because the student was improperly dressed: according to another statute, he should have been wearing a saber.

Politics

This evening Mama and I went to a lecture by an Israeli professor, Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, about binationalism. It turns out that the term binationalism is not synonymous with a two-state solution. Instead it is an older concept, in circulation before the modern Israeli state even existed, propounded first in the 1920s by a small circle of intellectuals within the group Brit Shalom. An opposite of the colonialist concept of planting a Jewish state in the middle of Palestinian territory, the idea was to find a common cultural and, if I understand correctly, even national identity with the Arabs. It also means a rejection of a "two-state solution" in which Israel and Palestine become wholly alienated neighbours, which simply cannot work out well. The professor brought up the dichotomies inherent in the present-day Israeli population, even the non-"Arab" portion, and Jews in the past: Western vs. Eastern, Ashkenazi vs. Sephardim, secular vs. religious. There is no reason why a middle ground should not be found. Gershom Scholem, for instance, seems to have identified the West with colonialism and oppression, and exhorted the Jews to stand with the East. And, just as Jewish does not inevitably mean Western, religion does not inevitably mean ultra-Zionist. So binationalism addresses not only the rift between Israeli and Palestinian but also the rift between Israelis of different origin. Binationalism would be very difficult to translate into political reality, but using it as a premise for discussion would, the professor argued, be helpful today, and such a discussion is certainly still relevant at a time where the unilateral-Jewish-state vision has brought about such an unendurable situation.

Weather

Rainy and cold. Cotton wool clouds in night sky.

Film

At the Konzerthaus at the Gendarmenmarkt there was evidently a Berlin Film Festival (Berlinale) event. A fenced in corridor, a tented photo shoot area, an umbrella-carrying crowd, shouting, camera flashes, and a red carpet leading all the way up the really high stairs of the Konzerthaus. I must confess that I have rather felt like "gawking at celebrities," as I like to put it -- the Sony Centre is just up the street. And I read lots of news articles today about the Grammy and Bafta Awards. A profound intellectual on an elevated plane of existence I am not.

Books

I've reached the "M" authors on gutenberg.org again. I was re-reading bits of Harold McGrath's books. Yesterday I did also read part of a review-essay by Thomas Macaulay about a historical book by Henry Hallam, which -- even a hundred and fifty-odd years after it was written -- made me want to read the book. I've never understood how the authors of certain Victorian history books that I've read could justify perpetrating so many implied lies and half-truths in their pursuit of a moral view of the past, so Mr. Hallam's apparent impartiality much appeals to me. It was also interesting thinking about the role of a historian.

Then I began reading the memoirs of a French aristocrat, who was born in 1772, married a M. de Lescure at the age of 18, when the Revolution began fled to Paris (of all places!) and was well received by the Princesse de Lamballe and stayed on until the Louvre was overrun and until clergymen and aristocrats were being murdered in the street, then went to the south of France where her husband fought and died in the Vendée. To me the woman seemed incredibly stupid despite her intelligence, with some inexplicable predilection for the most dangerous areas in France. To be fair, she stayed on in Paris out of loyalty to Their Majesties. Later, however, I kept on expecting her to emigrate, but she didn't! The strongest argument in her favour is, I think, the contrast between her as well as her husband and the aristocracy of Poitiers. As she describes it, the young Poitevin nobles were plotting a grand rebellion, but at the news of the king's failed flight to Varennes (if I remember correctly), though the Poitevin peasantry supported them, they stampeded out of the country like a flock of scared sheep.

Poem

Perhaps there is
some page of some book,
or some tablet in a mind,
where it is written
who fails
and
who succeeds.

The tiny steps
an author takes
-- the books he reads,
the poems he writes,
the way he revises line after line
(criticism heard and acted on) --
do these steps tend to some end
or are they simply progress on a road
that, neverending, leads nowhere?

What is it we are looking for?
-- To others, fame; to others, fortune.
What it is that I am searching
is some expression of the world
that is all mine, yet open to all,
and something good and something true
that will give my life some meaning,
that will give my life some end.

All that I can do at present
is ponder shadows of the future.
What will be real and what illusion?
When will the answer at last be given?

Reading, Riches, and Poverty

Today it was a delightful sunny day. Of course I stayed immured in our apartment like the lazy mole I unfortunately tend to be. But at least my mood was lifted, if my feet were not.

I've showered, made my bed, played Chopin mazurkas and waltzes, read The English Orphans by Mary Jane Holmes online, read newspaper articles online, and eaten. My hands are not perfectly healthy yet, but they're much better. Yesterday I read the introduction and first chapter of a book (my uncle's Christmas present) by Rick Gekoski entitled Eine Nacht mit Lolita. It's about the author's encounters with various books, and the history of the books' publication.

I also read two articles from the New York Review of Books, one being David Grossman's speech at a memorial service for Yitzhak Rabin, and the other being about Marie Antoinette and fashion. There was an interesting phrase in the latter article about the court being a place where affected sentimentality took the place of any real emotion; also, I found it illuminating to read that the Queen could not reach for a glass of water herself if she wanted one, and was forced to request someone else to give it to her. Of course neither idea is an innovation, but I hadn't thought of them as clearly before.

The general idea about Versailles and other courts is that it has little relation to the "realities of life." But certainly the life of a court lady or gentleman would not have been any more unnatural and un-human than the life of a pauper of the slums. If the "realities of life" means "the unpleasantness experienced by the lower classes," certainly the pauper would know more about those; but that is not, I think, all that reality is about. I often wonder what reality is. Most people seem to think of it as a set of shared experiences. But, after all, everything that happens is reality. Anyway, I think that if I actually read philosophy I would be able to spare everyone my tentative speculations! (c:

I'm still thinking about my French Revolution story. The d'Eules family is currently expecting an elderly aunt from Paris, who will hopefully turn out not to resemble Betsy Trotwood or Lady Catherine de Bourgh or any other pre-existing ladies of literature. But I've been thinking that I haven't been writing the book "in my own voice" so far, and I want to re-write it anyway.

As for other projects, I want to donate blood some time soon, and research more about applying to university (personally, I find the former less painful). I still have "existential angst," or whatever it is, off and on (though not as badly as just before I wrote my last post), and I've been seriously considering doing volunteer work for the very selfish aim of not feeling that my life is useless. I've been wondering, for instance, if there are any orphanages in Berlin. That may sound like I'm still stuck in Dickens and that I'm trying to emulate Little Dorrit or some other pious heroine, but the real reason I'm wondering about them is that I've read unsettling things about orphanages in Russia. The other thing is that I have no real idea what's going on in the poorest parts of the society in which I live, and I think I should. But it seems to be so difficult to really help. For example, is it really helping to serve food in soup kitchens to homeless people? Couldn't some of them do this themselves, and be paid for doing it? Still, maybe if I actually tried it out I would see the rationale for it, instead of which I am still entirely an armchair philanthropist, who doesn't even donate money to charities.