Feuilles d'Automne et du Journal

Since Tuesday evening I've been in the countryside to house-sit for and visit Uncle Pu and Aunt K. Autumn has arrived triumphantly in their garden, where brown acorns litter the ground, bright green horse-chestnuts shower down from their wrinkly-leaved bronze tree and shatter apart to display the dark nuts, the crowns of most trees are splashed with yellow and red and brown, and the corrugated orange-brown leaves of the beech are beginning to scatter themselves. The sunflowers still bloom brightly on their towering stalks but the orange marigolds are beginning to wither, the zinnias and Cosmos bipinnatus are still tall and colourful, the purple and yellow pansies still run wild and free, and the deep purple lavendar, paler oregano, and milky white bean blossoms are still discernible in the flower-beds. On the lawn, the small spring flowers -- violet horehound, white chickweed, pale pink mallow, daisies, and a host of others -- have reappeared from the well-watered grass. In the forest, tender dandelion leaves have reappeared, and around the house stand clusters of mushrooms, -- tall, tufted, whitish-grey caps and round, gnarled, dark brown discs.

On Wednesday the sky was intensely blue and billowy white clouds sailed over the sky, growing slowly larger and greyer as the day advanced. This morning it was all grey and gloomy, and the green grass glowed hectically from the mist. It was also much colder than yesterday.

Yesterday, which was the day of the house-sitting, I read through a whole issue of Die Zeit, minus two sections. I began with a fashion supplement, with many photos, and articles about Christian Dior and the renovation of the Madeline Vionnet brand, as well as, if I remember correctly, an incongruous brief interview with former chancellor Helmut Schmidt about the "Machtwort".* Among the photo series, there was a black-and-white one of a male model leaping off Berlin monuments which perplexed me. In one shot he leaps from the front steps of the Reichstag, which is shown at a low angle with the pillars soaring above him to the sky, and "Dem Deutschen Volke" clearly visible. When the pomposity of the building at that angle, the words, the fact that the photo is black and white, and the air of machismo that is usually found in photos for male fashion, are combined with the fact that the model accidentally raised one arm at an unfortunate angle, I think I'm not being hysterical if I say that the photo has a distinct thirties-ish flair and should have been better thought through. And -- the monuments that formed the background of the next photo were two towers of the Olympia-Stadion with the Olympics logo suspended in the middle (Olympics -- 1936 -- hmm). But, if one ignores this, the Reichstag-photo was excellent in composition and detail, down to the two or three tourists who appear, in a touch of subtle humour, in the bottom right-hand corner.

Then I read about the US financial crisis, the Venice-Simplon Orient Express, an interview with the CEO of PSA Peugeot Citroën on the occasion of the launch of a new Peugeot car, André Gorz and his new book about his wife D., low-income housing in a slum in Mumbai, an interview with Germany's minister for human rights about the Sudan, the proposed "blue card" for immigrant workers, etc. The writing style was mostly stodgy, and many English words (oh, horrors!) were used where they were not necessary. But I'll admit that when I trawl through the New York Times, Manchester Guardian, and Globe and Mail online, it's only about once a week that I'll find an article whose style I really admire. The politics of Die Zeit don't appeal much to me either -- self-satisfied and tending to what I'd consider the right wing, and written from the perspective of an expensive German or American armchair with a very limited view on the world. The article on the US financial crisis was only one example of the illusion that the US government can do no wrong unless it's so obviously wrong that a five-year-old who watches the news once in a month can't overlook it (I exaggerate). This loyalty and willingness to give the benefit of the doubt is charming in itself, but if it is only granted to rich, powerful men living in perfect comfort and safety in their own luxurious spheres, and not to their millions of victims, I think it is no longer a virtue but a serious flaw. Still, one great virtue of Die Zeit is that the articles are consistently deep and detailed (it is, after all, a weekly publication), whereas too many articles in my beloved regular newspapers are column-filling fluff.

I re-read The Swiss Family Robinson on my train ride home. In the S-Bahn between Ostbahnhof and Friedrichstraße someone offered the street magazine again, but this time he spoke quite heartily, and had a Turkish accent (the voice tends to be rather deep, the difficult soft "ch"s pronounced "sh," etc.). I still didn't give any money (I never do), but it was less depressing than usual. On the one hand I think that being overly sensitive to the visible aspects of urban poverty (not only here; also in Victoria and Vancouver) is silly and useless, if I don't do anything to improve matters, and if it bothers me more to see than to know about the poverty. On the other hand I might still end up doing something -- like donating to homeless shelters when I have a job.

When I was at home again, it began to rain outside. But I felt again the odd dichotomy of fall and winter: the colder and wetter and darker it is outside, the more magnificently comfortable it is inside. It's like reading about winter in the middle of summer; it gives me a cuddly feeling, and tales of frostbite and subzero temperatures call forth little sympathy. Rain tapping on the windowpanes, to give a specific example, is also deeply soothing, though I do detest dripping-wet umbrellas and bags and rain-coats, especially in buses.

My previous anxiety about the approach of winter (especially the grim limbo of January and February) has also been much alleviated by the prospect of studying then; in UBC, the work was so absorbing and agreeable that it seemed like winter lasted a week or two, then the cherry trees and magnolias were blossoming again. (Besides, the central heating of my dorm room kept me so warm that I usually kept the vents closed; even outside, the climate was phenomenally mild, due to the sea that laps the edges of the campus, and to the rainclouds for which Vancouver is famous.) I'm mentally preparing to do more difficult and joyless work here, but I think that doing any instructive work with people who are half-way agreeable is better than doing nothing, and occupies the mind beautifully well.

There is also the prospect of Christmas. Though it is ridiculous that the Christmas Stollen and Lebkuchen and Marzipanstangen and Dominosteine have stocked the shelves of Plus since the first week of September (we've bought Nürnberger Lebkuchen but conscientiously avoid the rest), I like that it makes me feel that Christmas is not so far away. This feast, to me, is not so much about the presents and deeper religious significance of the day itself. It's about the preceding month: the food (nuts, mandarin oranges, chocolate, marzipan, etc.), lovely music, old dark-tinted paintings illumined with gold, fir branches and holly berries, letters to and from friends, winter literature, and the sense of domestic comfort (i.e. no school). All of this will brighten my hours and hover pleasantly in my consciousness until roughly the Epiphany, when sober reality strikes again.

* Machtwort = "word of command" [literally: word of might; roughly equivalent to "ultimatum"]