A Metaphorical Journey to Tbilisi

I have grown cantankerous over the course of the last week. Whenever I excused myself from something on the grounds of illness and yet must have looked more or less fit as a fiddle, I felt guilty. Yesterday, however, it decided to manifest itself.

I shunned my colleagues at lunch and ate in my corner; a few of them have had colds as well but I wanted to be careful. And I kept restraining myself from lamenting to my siblings about feeling highly diseased; I figured that it's not news they'd like to hear. But I also decided to go to our company's Christmas event yesterday evening.

Being late to finish up my tasks meant that I could take the train to the Christmas market at the Kulturbrauerei alone, which made me happy because I think that transit is a most awkward part of any team event. Also, I had researched the routes, for once.

***

The Kulturbrauerei was a brewery, as its German name makes clear. I imagine that the yeast fumes would have thickened the air back in the day, like the Augustiner brewery I once stayed near in Munich; that delivery trucks rattled in and out leaving potholes in the muddy cobbles and truck exhaust on the bare or plastered garage walls; that steam would have flown in this cold weather from the taller chimney stacks; that buildings in back alleys might have had plywood over disused or damaged windows, and spare car parts or barrel staves leaning against them; and that oily grime and pigeon dirt hazed the glass panes. What remains is a rectangular fort that protects neat quadrangles of red or sienna brick buildings that were elaborated over decades. We wouldn't know that the stables were once the stables, perhaps, if the word weren't there in black lettering on the brick. Apparently the brewery owners afforded frills like angled zig-zag brick decorations underneath windowsills, arches and towers and a white belfry-like cupola; and its old gates and entranceways in their humble way have become the channels to literary event venues, artists' shops and, on the cobbles, market stands. After dark the glowing yellow windows and the regimented silhouettes of the brick buildings are more or less straight out of Maurice Sendak's In the Night Kitchen or a 20th century German children's book.

We were standing at a Glühwein (mulled wine) stall near one exit. Although I didn't order any, most of the colleagues did, and were sipping the dark, rum-spiked drink from cream-and-blue-coloured stoneware cups. I thought we were going to walk along the market and look at the stalls. Instead we stood and talked, which was agreeable until the warmth of walking around wore off and my feet began to feel chilled.

(An older woman came up to us, made a brief speech, and  — after we didn't ask her to take herself off — handed us greeting cards from a pacifist organization that, amongst other things, encouraged us to help achieve peace on earth by demanding of our government that the German army withdraw from its foreign missions.)

At any rate the market was traditional, surprisingly so in my view for modern Berlin. Braziers were standing nearby, and 2-or-3-foot-long split logs were burning in one of them. It wafted wood smoke into the air and scattered cinders and ash like snow over us onlookers and passersby. Many market tables where people leaned to eat their food were designed with plank tops and wood X-shaped frames at the sides, evergreen twigs fixed at the crossing — a decoration I had never seen in real life before, but only in Christmas books. There were stands with elk sausage, more mulled wine, knitted marled yarn mittens and socks and scarves and toques, cheeses, and stationery. They were often Scandinavian or Baltic: Swedish, Latvian, etc. A few young marketgoers were hopping around in safety harnesses on brightly lit trampolines. Gi. and I walked around a bit to warm ourselves up, but at the slow pace we were forced to keep amongst so many other people, it hardly helped.

***

At length three of us left on foot for a Georgian restaurant where we would be eating our Near Eastern Christmas dinner. My colleague's smartphone battery was 6% charged one moment, 0% charged the next. So the trip from the Kulturbrauerei was fraught with geographical uncertainty. When we had finally taken the U-Bahn one station and walked along the streets including the interestingly named — considering that with all his gifts he was also a politically controversial figure, but perhaps more so in the social environment of the United States — Paul Robeson St., we found the restaurant 20 minutes after we were expected.

***

But I liked the exercise and the moment we entered the restaurant, I was happy. It was bustling but you could hear each other speak, it was tasteful from its pale white-yellow plaster façade to the white napkins but not too elegant, I liked the weighty cutlery the moment I lifted it, and having wine and water at the table without asking for them was a thing I've never had before. The waitresses were whip-thin in black trousers and turtlenecks; they passed and repassed tables, pausing and skimming again like hummingbirds gathering nectar and appearing to power away on similar quantities of energy. There were photographs of old Georgian buildings hung on the walls with a touching nostalgia, and a large bar. Later I inspected the bathroom, and a colleague and I were both very pleased with the brightly patterned sink basin, which was like a Mexican pottery bowl. My colleagues were at the restaurant in great number, none of them as late as we were, and although I like all of my colleagues I sat by some whom I feel most comfortable with. Although, again, because of the cold I felt bad about not quarantining myself.

The food was fresh and almost piping hot: fried rounds of dough with cheese inside, a chatchapouri spinati with flavourful spinach mixed perhaps with cilantro, a platter that was like something from the Zoroastrian feast of Nowruz. Beetroot dip, a bean dip in a pale olive green colour, and a dip that glowed green like the spinach; an orange Cape gooseberry in the centre; roasted aubergine (badrijani?); and a gelatinous cheese rind (sulguni?) with a softer cheese swirled inside it. The pomegranate seeds were sweet and bursting with ripeness, and the thin little sprouted greens were tender but crunchy and almost seemed to be woven into the dips. We even had a basket of rolls. It was such beautiful food and the very refined dishes had a stimulating variety of tastes in them.

It was all I've imagined when I see photographs of Middle Eastern food. It was comfort food, too: it had fat and garlic and salt, and the flavours were recognizable and nice ones. The chefs' techniques and the waitresses' timing were also excellent, I thought, and brought out the best in the food. Cheese that is melted and still melty, food fresh from the oven, a flavour that is not exaggerated or ruined with burnt grease or other food — I eat a lot of convenience food and hadn't realized how much I've been longing for the freshly made kind. I was almost tearful with joy. And all at once I felt that here at last I have another one of those experiences where I remember a restaurant or meal or dish decades afterward.

That said, the drawback was like Tantalus' in Greek legend: It turns out that the company had already ordered the food for us, so what my table had ordered arrived in addition to the already generous meal. (The preordering is probably also the reason why wine and water were already available when we came.) It was impossible to eat everything.

***

And, exhausted though I was, the walk back to the Eberswalder Straße and the trip home were also unusual and nice. Young people who looked like they were still in school took up part of the U-Bahn wagon. Besides rolling around an orange that had fallen to the ground with their feet in a way that somehow didn't offend me,* they began to listen to loud music. It was hip hop but, although I find much hip hop that ends up on the Billboard charts saccharine or uninteresting, I thought this was good. It was also American, whereas I find almost all German pop and rap music I hear painfully poserish and, frankly, bad. And the students knew and — aside from one song about 'bitches' that one student loudly protested against hearing again — loved the music so well that they were singing along. The adults in the train were, I think, remarkably indulgent; and the students weren't bothered by me standing right there. So nobody ruined the atmosphere. I was 'reading Candide,' but it was hard to concentrate, which in this case was not bad.

* The greater nuisances I've seen so far are people dropping the contents of a döner kebab — cucumber, tomato, maybe a little sauce — on the floor by accident; and people 'secretly' depositing their emptied bottle of beer on the floor, so it topples and rolls around making an intense racket and trickling sticky froth everywhere.

On The Traces of Egyptian, Turkish and Iranian Modernity

A rather pompous, 'lightning' book review:

Islamic Enlightenment (2017, Bodley Head), by Christopher de Bellaigue:
Voltaire also analyzed his own society; and talking about how backwards the French Catholic establishment was, was riskier but also far better informed and far more enlightened, than any tutting screed against the small-mindedness of this or that fatwa from Al-Azhar in Cairo would have been. I believe — in other words — that it's far more enlightened to tilt against snug preconceptions in one's own society than lazily to agree with many of the prejudices against other societies. So I think that this book might have been more new and interesting if it had been written about foreign interventions in Middle Eastern states at some point in the Early Modern or Modern period. Because the machinations of a London stockbroker in the tobacco market of late 19th century Iran surely continue to have many counterparts in the European financial world of today, they're likely as relevant to present-day political events as e.g. antiquated religious mindsets that already have been replaced by revisionist new mindsets. Anyway, as a primer on modern Middle Eastern historical events, and despite causing me certain flashbacks to papers I read at university, I consider The Islamic Enlightenment abundantly footnoted and respectably written.

Source: Penguin Random House UK, online

Everyday Details: Greenery, Books and Stollen

I woke up earlier today, after six or so hours of sleep, and the sky was the fuzzy, lightless grey that seems designed to nudge us back into bed, in theory. But I stayed awake and slowly got around to brushing my teeth, etc., and arrived reasonably early at the office in Kreuzberg. In the U-Bahn station near home I bought two 'peace lily' plants to brighten up the new room that I am working in; they remind me of anthuriums, sadly, but they lend grace and a much-needed, dark green to my desk.

I had another mini-breakfast at work; today it was biscuits and water and the peppermint/eucalyptus candies that I eat throughout the day. It wasn't filling and I was hungry when lunch came around: chicken, sautéed vegetables like broccoli and pumpkin and eggplant and red bell pepper, and brown-black falafel that were round and tinier than walnuts. This time I ate at the lunch table, which was enjoyable. The more new colleagues there are, the less it feels as if we were breaking off into a narrower clan for no reason, by preferring one lunch room (with one set of colleagues) over another — which has worried me in the past. Now it's more an arrangement of convenience.

Work was a tiny bit exhausting insofar as requests outside of my customary work schedule have come in, which tend to require mental readjusting; working without having any idea of how long the task is likely to take or what new events will interrupt it; and navigating daily work, special requests that are urgent, special requests that are not urgent, etc. It jars on my instincts of caution, but it is usually nicer to feel overtasked than useless. I also gave a small tutorial to a colleague and felt as if it were the most boring thing I have ever inflicted on anyone.

Afterward I peeped into a famous bookstore, on the way home. The shop itself was closed, but the windows were clear of any blinds. After looking at the Moomintroll book in one children's window and glancing at the new adult books in the adult window — Salman Rushdie, and in the past there's been Ta-Nehisi Coates in translation, etc., I went to the U-Bahn station feeling considerably happier.

There I bought pine boughs for my room, and another plant for the workplace; and along the way I had gone into an Edeka and bought After Eights (because I have a weakness for them) as well as Stollen and a few Christmas supplies.

During the lunch hour at work — inspired by a colleague who was reading Samuel Richardson's Pamela, which made me think 'better him than me' — I went to the French National Library's website and reread and re-took-notes-about three pages of a historical source. In general I believe I should begin devoting some 15 minutes of my lunch break to this task, because I might be more in the flow of working and less likely to be distracted in that interval. We'll see!

(And in the morning transit I had read more Candide.)

The Mighty Hammer of Thor

I like to hold my finger on the pulse of modern film by reading reviews on the internet: in newspapers like The Guardian, blogs, or magazines like the New Yorker. Thor: Ragnarok was unfamiliar to me perhaps because, as a second sequel, it was less of a novelty.

Perhaps because of this critic's-eye view, I tend to think of superhero movies as a self-referential, uniform genre, with a few noble examples like the Superman films and also films-as-pop-art like Tim Burton's Batman films. Wonder Woman tried to be different. While I watched it, it felt profound, afterward I didn't feel as if any great lesson had emerged from it after all. I guess it's best to watch it again to tell which impression is truer.

Wonder Woman was putatively the work of an outsider, a woman director. But Thor: Ragnarok was in fact more of an outsider's perspective, I thought. Later I realized why, perhaps; it's because the director is a New Zealander and also felt less bound or pressurized to match or criticize other American output. There was a chummy feeling to the interactions between some of the actors, probably because they had worked on the other films in the series together, which wasn't displeasing. The Australians Chris Hemsworth as Thor and Cate Blanchett as Hela, Hemsworth's brother in a brief scene, the director himself disguised as a computer-generated rock monster, were a relaxed Antipodean grouping. But Thor and Loki (Tom Hiddleston) seemed to have an unforced camaraderie that also lent appeal to the world in the film, and Mark Ruffalo was also touchingly genuine in his dishevelled, self-deprecating way.

While Hemsworth and Hiddleston played their roles with enthusiasm, as did Tessa Thompson as a Valkyrie who had turned into a spaceship's captain far away from her native Asgard, I felt (as others have said) that Cate Blanchett's role was one-dimensional, and so was Idris Elba's. His contribution was to look sapient and lead around the hapless folk of Asgard in a cloak, with walking stick in hand.

I found 'problematic' aspects, too. In Thor's world, electrocution was a comedic element in spite of its detrimental physical effects in real life. The Valkyrie's alcoholism was a harmless voluntary quirk that, while it anesthetized her feelings and banked her ambition, did no harm to her fitness, her mental health or her social interactions. The demands of superhero films on the actors were also worrying me yet again; in Wonder Woman, too, the filmmakers had eradicated any kind of physical imperfection, and I don't think it's healthy.

Amongst other aspects, I'd freely endure films in a blurrier screen resolution if it means that Hollywood can indulge its collective wrinkles. I also see no need to build masses of muscle fibre or exercise and diet off one's lipid elements before an actor or actress is allowed to appear in the public eye.

Cate Blanchett appeared to think of her role as a pastiche of fashion models, glamour models, etc., in the way that she moved and walked, although perhaps that was also edited in after her own acting. I felt that it ended up being mocking and demeaning; and that it plays into the belief that women who are sexualized in their careers freely manipulate men; but I am perhaps imagining it. (It also worried me because I think that a few established Hollywood actresses are reacting to the sexual harassment reports lately in a very uncongenial way, either because they believe that everyone must suffer as they did earlier in their careers, or because they don't want to acknowledge that even people who haven't necessarily harmed them personally shouldn't be given the power that they presently wield.) Much as I admire her as an actress, I don't know if I approve of everything.

Also (on a different topic) I did find the seamless, deindividualized computer-generated world uncanny. Aside from a few strikingly realistic ideas, like the early scene that takes into account the awkward physics of suspended objects on a chain, there was not much practical and real.

Yet I left the theatre with the happy impression that this was a thought-free film, edited with an efficiency that made a Gesamtkunstwerk, and that it was partly fun to film. The computer or set designers planned out the worlds in the film with real love (as well as, in Asgard, hints of Lord of the Rings) and I liked the dystopia, a kind of 1980s-90s wonderland that was not pretty but was at least evocative.

Curling Up At Home

Winter is breaking in like the first waves of a tempest over a berm, and it is cold enough in the mornings for frost to form. The trees have lost most of their leaves, but because of the rainy and temperate autumn there are a few happy exceptions amongst the oaks and the linden trees. A day or two ago there was a deep fog in the street, which was picturesque in its turn-of-the-century London Thames-side way, but also seemed to help the icy air to permeate into the apartment. We're firing the coal stoves at the two poles of our apartment again — although my room feels like a third, North pole because I refuse to heat it...

The workload has been pretty light the past two days, and it feels as if we had prepared well for Black Friday after all. This afternoon I left early because I felt sickly. But although I still have a bit of a headache and other unalarming symptoms, imbibing 40-proof liqueur, sleeping for two hours, and then knitting a wool scarf in the corner room while watching the city and national evening news with Mama was enough to feel better. So they were as piffling as I expected. I only regret having missed the birthday celebrations of a colleague, which took place after work.

Lunch was a yellowy-orange-coloured curry — bell peppers, orange pumpkin, what tasted like buckets of coconut milk, and tender chicken pieces in the meat-eater's serving — and, interestingly in accompaniment, gnocchi. As my uncle studied Italian, he informed us how to say the latter — there was apparently a debate about it at the lunch table in the largest room. 'Apparently,' because I wasn't present at this debate, having retired to eat lunch in the room where I work, because I don't want to 'hog' room at the communal tables. Afterward I ate a tootsie pop, which a colleague brought over from the States as a remnant of a Halloween candy trove, for dessert. This profusion of detail is not wildly interesting, probably; but if Pepys could describe his dinners, so can I.

At home I made porridge for dinner: oats, chia seeds, a red winter apple, milk, powdered sugar, cinnamon sugar, and caramelized crunchy granola. It was tasty and the acme of comfort food, if not terribly virtuous.

Anyway, I hope tomorrow I can return to the fray, symptom-free. By the way, I am still reading the physics book about stars, and the book about Middle Eastern governments in Turkey, Iran and Egypt in the 'modern era,' and am rereading Candide. It's not a terribly escapist book, because you can read versions of its sensational scenes in the newspapers almost every day, and sadly they're not imaginary and disquietingly they're not taking place almost 300 years ago. At least the annotations are nice to read and don't heap up new tales of horror...

An Essay on Relationships, or Vexatious Rambling

I've been brooding a great deal about love and relationships, and as is usually the case this takes a very moralistic aspect.

One of the great surprises to me when I was no longer a teenager is that admiration, flirting or in my opinion many relationships are not so much a free gift to the other person, as something that one desires for one's self in a particular setting.

Even younger, I already felt that I didn't approve of opportunistic friendship. In other words, a friendship that is not based on real kinship of interests or opinion or character, but rather is built on a an ad hoc frame where one ignores one's external conflicts or internal criticisms as much as one can. The compensation for this pretense being that one can have companionship whenever one wants it, and also prove one's social merit.

But I failed to realize for a while that romantic relationships can also be a great deal like that. (Or all relationships.)

As a teenager I tried to analyze and steer clear of the problems that I saw with adult relationships. I became afraid of entering a relationship where one partner moulds the other partner to fit their conception and warps their character until it becomes unrecognizable. I don't want to make people amoral and greedy through knowing me; and I don't want to lose sight of the best features of my personality either, like a John Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility. Another fear was that of making life miserable for someone by bickering with them 24/7.

Nor do I want to 'use' people as personal props or therapy. If I feel lonely or insecure, these are things I must resolve for myself. While I can imagine nothing nicer than having people around me whom I can care for, and to feel that I improve their existence, I don't want to be exploited, either.

Besides, I think that trust and loyalty are admirable things, most of all if the person who inspires them has earned them. I can't imagine why you would want to be close with someone whom, a few years later, you might despise or hate, or don't really give a darn about.

The Tale of the Mysterious Parcel

I was sitting at my desk at work when yet another of a procession of delivery men filed into our office with a cardboard parcel. The human resources colleague accepted it and dropped off the parcel into the largest room in our office, then wrote a note to all of us informing us that there was no name on the parcel.

Having read newspapers and short stories of a criminal bent in the course of my lifetime, and having watched a considerable quantity of hours of television, this inflamed my imagination.

In short order I observed that my colleagues were as fascinated.

We have a principal rival within the electronic commerce field, and a coworker theorized that the parcel was a Trojan horse for corporate espionage. Many of us wondered non-seriously whether it was what was once called an 'infernal machine,' and a colleague from the Middle East noted rather drily that in his native country one would have sent someone in to defuse the package by this time.  But one of the colleagues opened the package (I sort of wished he wouldn't, in case it was actually dangerous).

This opening took place in a different room. Our prying eyes could be of no use to us. The curiosity did not die down.

Our Australian colleague (who seemed to be, as they say, 'seized of the matter') laconically noted that none of us had exploded, so we should be pleased with the outcome.

Then a colleague who is working in an annex two floors up in our building, hopped into the conversation. She hurriedly wrote that if it was incense, it was for her. Hilarity ensued and I wasn't certain if she meant it as a statement of fact, or as a comedic anticlimax.

There was little or no discussion of the subject during lunch (as far as I could tell), although our long and satisfyingly thorough discussions mostly take place then. I presumed all questions from relevant parties — instead of insatiable snoops like me — had been answered.

Apparently not. After lunch the colleague of the incense asked what the package had been. The colleague who opened it answered, 'It should probably remain a secret package.'

Of course I believe as a morally upright individual that the post should remain secret except as the rightful recipient wishes it to be revealed. But I admit that I am still all agog to hear about what was within the secret package.

(And I contributed to the conversation by mentioning the lurid Sherlock Holmes "Adventure of the Cardboard Box.")

My Two New Boots

In the past week I've felt disgruntled as work has piled up and up, and special and important requests have flocked in from colleagues at an unprecedented rate. Because of our clients in the USA and because of the internationalization of Cyber Monday, we are beginning to feel the first simmering bubbles in the pressure cooker of Black Friday. (If this is an unknown 'holiday,' I'll explain that the Friday before Thanksgiving in the United States is popular as a day on which to buy things cheaply in seasonal sales, which means that an enormous volume of goods is sold. It is conveniently close to Christmas, so I gather that people will also buy their Christmas presents then. I have no idea why it is called Black Friday. Lately a 'Cyber Monday' has been added onto this weekend of unbridled consumption, for consumers who prefer to buy online instead of taking the trouble to travel to a brick-and-mortar store. A 'Giving Tuesday,' less relevant to my company, has entered the queue of shopping days too; consumers are encouraged to donate to charity.)

***
Today I waited for and bolted down lunch within 6 minutes: a lightning-quick time in my personal opinion. Then I excused myself for the sake of a shopping trip. I managed within 30 minutes to go to the bank, travel three blocks to Karstadt, locate the correct floor for shoes, find a pair of ankle boots in what should be the right size, pay for these boots, and travel back to work again. It was needlessly suspenseful because I hadn't tried on the shoes. In the evening I did, and they fit.

My previous shoes are black leather flat shoes that Mama bought for me in Europe in 2003. My old shoes at that time were broken and it was painful to walk in them. I did so for eight excruciating hours in the city we were travelling in. (It was Florence, which is almost apt, although I'm not silly enough to think that I really emulated Savonarola's torments when he was burned at the stake.) The next day Mama took me into a shoemaker's shop and bought these shoes. It's too much information, but we were very short on money, so it's generous that she did.

A relative told me at least three years ago that I shouldn't wear them any more; the tongue was admittedly ripping away from the rest of the shoe leather. Bah, humbug, I replied internally, still feeling deeply indebted to the footwear that had saved my sanity a decade earlier.

At work I have noticed that the shoes are squeaky. They practically echo whenever I walk in them.

And recently I felt that my feet were becoming wet when I walked to work. My feet became grubby. I was sitting at my desk at work today and noticed that my feet were still whiffy, and still wet and chilled, even though the streets had dried. Furthermore, I could feel a wintry draft seeping through the (s/h)oles. I sprayed lavender air freshener into one shoe, but I prefer to honestly neutralize the source of odours.

So I outlined the 'dangerously Victorian state of affairs' to the coworkers who would notice my absence, and went shopping as mentioned above. Tactfully, during my explanation I left out the rich detail about stink that I have described here.

***
A moral: It is obvious yet again that I will let some things escalate to a ludicrous extent before taking the trouble to do something about them. But I am proud that the events of this tale fell short of pneumonia.

18th Century Feasting

The feast is behind me, and in the end I believe it was questionable as a source of knowledge about the 18th century, but a roaring triumph as an enjoyable oddity.

The menu:

Breads

Oaten 'Schulbrot' and Kastenbrötchen, from the bakery

French Bread, homemade

Wiggs Seed Cakes, homemade, sugary and with caraway seeds

Dutch/Lower Rhenish honey cake

served with Butter and Apricot marmalade

Drinks

Switchel

(drink of water, honey, powdered ginger and apple cider vinegar)

Sparkling mineral water

Apple juice

Rhenish white wine

Pale beer

Hefeweizen beer

Tea

Coffee

Accompaniment

Toasted American pecan nuts

Grapes, red and green

Purple plums

Apples

Apple chips

Dried apple rings, store-bought and homemade

Clementine

Walnuts, in the shell

Main Course

Roast Chicken with Bread Stuffing and marjoram, thyme and rosemary sauce

Rice, steamed

Lettuce and Spinach Salad with vinaigrette

Baked pumpkin, Rondini and Hokkaido

Cornbread, homemade

Dessert

Pfeffernüsse

Spekulatius

Nürnberger Lebkuchen

Dominosteine

(German Christmas delicacies)

The wiggs seed cakes and the cornbread were too dry, although the former tasted delicious in my opinion, so I will have to introspect about what went wrong. I did notice that the homemade yeasty 'barm' foamed up nicely, probably indicating an active yeast culture, after all my doughs had been made; this partly explains the seed cakes, perhaps. I had read a warning that 'cornmeal' in American Revolution times was a wetter product than the store-bought polenta we have now. At least Mama, kindly, remarked that 'the colour looked good'! By the end of the day, in any case, I was so happily replete that I felt great reluctance to speak of food any more.

The Apple Dumpling, etc.

Yesterday (or, as I'll still call it, today) I woke up when the sky had brightened to the point that I thought was not too grim to awaken to, which was still not superlatively cheerful since it was cloudy and rainy and true autumn weather.

In the U-Bahn — this morning, I think, although the memories of different U-Bahn trips melt together — I read more about the Structure and Evolution of the Stars, which is becoming easier to read again and is addressing radioactive processes. There were laconic paragraphs about the phase of a star in which hydrogen transforms into helium and then one by one into the heavier elements, as neutrinos and gamma rays flit out, which were fascinating. This is, of course, the reason why Earth is populated with carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and so many other elements.

I arrived early enough and researched what work to assign to colleagues. But the workload was mildly overwhelming and in the afternoon I had also scheduled a meeting, and altogether I was inwardly grumpy. In the afternoon I announced that I would be cooking historical food, from Revolutionary-era America and Britain, on Saturday, and instead of one or two polite comments there was a deluge of interest. I felt guilty for distracting my colleagues... But I have the feeling that Saturday will turn out to be an entertaining and worthwhile day.

In the train on the way back home, I finished reading the introductory essay of a Voltaire novel, since I've finished Montesquieu and am now returning to another Enlightenment thinker. It turns out that I may have to read a few entries in the Encyclopedias of his time, because the articles seem much more relevant to public debates than Wikipedia articles of the present day, and Diderot's Encyclopedia has information about daily life in the early 18th century, too. Finally, I went to the organic food store near home and bought pears.

After hewing the lid off of a pumpkin and after pushing in chopped, salted pear spiced with cinnamon where the seeds used to be, I baked that in the oven until it was softened. And I also roasted the seeds with salt and olive oil.

Lastly, I put a camping recipe for an 'apple pudding' to use. I set a pot of water to boil, made a paste with flour and water, cut the core out of a halved red apple, then when the water was boiling, J. helped me by soaking a kitchen towel in the boiling water, lifting it out again, spreading flour over the inside of the towel, and folding the red apple covered with the sticky paste into the cotton cloth. Then I tied it into a bundle with a 'little room to grow.' Then he dropped it into the boiling water with our tongs. This recipe is taken from the YouTube channel Townsends, which I've been watching regularly from the earliest episodes to the newest ever since I read a New Yorker article about it.

Townsends itself is a harbour of tranquillity; the apple dumpling was more chaotic, however. J. and I were both doubled over with giggles as we lifted the pudding out of the cloth at the end of an hour. It was a glutinous spectacle that had a medicinal smell and a bland beige colour, and its texture was like an alien birth or brains; it was bathed in a thin gruel of flour mixed with water, and of course cradled in the wet cloth. With sugar and cinnamon it tasted nicer, but I wouldn't recommend making the dumpling with the expectation of an extremely wonderful flavour. (But I imagine that the medicinal smell and taste came from the cloth that we used; and I should have tied the cloth a little more tightly so that we could have a spheric dumpling instead of a flattened ovoid; and then it might have been more pulchritudinous and appealing in every sense.)

Aside from that, I tried to plan how to construct the 18th-century meal on Saturday, and I lined up the recipes and ingredients for a shopping list already.

In between all of that, I read news on Twitter and the Guardian and Jezebel as usual, and tried one ballet stretching video, since Monday's ballet class didn't take place.

Westward to Brandenburg and the Revolution

It has been a quiet Sunday. The blue sky shone through the gaps in the apartment buildings, tree leaves were bright in dark summer green and saffron-yellow and even brown, and sunlight poured over almost everything. Walking along cobblestones or setts, acorns can tumble with your steps, and tiny pot lids of acorn husk are lodged here and there. Mama and I took the train to the southwestern periphery of Berlin to visit my uncle and we sat out in the garden with the other guests, amongst the pines and cotoneaster and grass and rosebushes, with its suggestion of the seaside with the rustling breeze. One or two mosquitoes drank from us while we drank more politely from cups of coffee or water, ate rolls with apricot marmalade or cheese, spread butter on Lower Rhenish honey cake with candied sugar as well as lemon and orange peel, and had apple cake fresh from the oven. A crow croaked in the canopies and magpies, apparently, gathered nearby; and a wedge of migrating birds pulled by.

At home I spent my time on the computer and watched videos about day-to-day life in colonial America of the 18th and early 19th centuries. It feels relevant to the French Revolution research that I am tugging away at, alongside the database job I do, and it overlaps a little with the letters by Montesquieu that I read in the U-Bahn.  (Which in turn overlap with the modern history of Middle Eastern progressive rulers, movements and proponents that I am also reading the U-Bahn in a pathetic attempt not to let my interrupted studies go to waste.) I had despaired of this ever happening, but I am beginning to understand the French revolutionaries' point of view better and better. Amongst other things I'm beginning to imagine that the influential aristocrats were like the worst magnates in the United States, and that the Church was like the retrograde leadership of modern-day 'Christian' movements that prefer to regulate the morals of others according to long irrelevant and disproven misconceptions, and that magnates and churchmen had the same effect on government policy and public discourse; and at once I feel a lot of sympathy. Also, Montesquieu seems to be reeling off a string of commonplaces in his writings when he describes by what principles one should govern, what freedom of and from religion should be, etc. But back then they were not as evident as they are now, I think. Even now they are not so evident; and the relevance to present-day political discourse is so immediate that it is difficult, I think, to be bored or to fail to be engrossed by most of the subjects that he brings up. I still think that admiring Rome for anything is a huge mistake and that its republics were probably a crock; but since Montesquieu doesn't go in depth into Roman history in them, that doesn't bother me so much in his Letters.

Montesquieu on Religion and Riches

Today I travelled in the wrong direction for two stops, in the U-Bahn after work. Although I was reading the less raconteur-like work of Martin Schwarzschild at the time, I switched over to the Persian Letters later and was absorbed in those too.

The second letter I read reminded me of a foreign head of state who, of late, is not so much rattling a saber as thumping a Neanderthal-like stick, in syncopation with North Korea's leader:

Je trouve, Ibben, la Providence admirable dans la manière dont elle a distribué les richesses : si elle ne les avait accordées qu’aux gens de bien, on ne les aurait pas assez distinguées de la vertu, et on n’en aurait plus senti tout le néant. Mais, quand on examine qui sont les gens qui en sont les plus chargés, à force de mépriser les riches, on vient enfin à mépriser les richesses.

('I find it admirable how Providence has distributed its riches: if they had been accorded only to worthy people, one would not have distinguished them enough from virtue, and one would no longer have felt all of their nothingness. But when one examines who are the people who are most loaded with them — by disdaining the rich, one comes at last to disdain wealth.' — roughly translated from letter XCIX, Lettres persanes by Montesquieu [Wikisource])

I also really enjoyed the letter that preceded it. It was a light but sweeping satire on the leading intellectuals (or rather, perhaps, specifically scientists and philosophers) of the day, and their deistic worldview:

laissés à eux-mêmes, privés des saintes merveilles, ils suivent dans le silence les traces de la raison humaine.

Tu ne saurais croire jusqu’où ce guide les a conduits. Ils ont débrouillé le chaos et ont expliqué, par une mécanique simple, l’ordre de l’architecture divine. L’auteur de la nature a donné du mouvement à la matière : il n’en a pas fallu davantage pour produire cette prodigieuse variété d’effets que nous voyons dans l’univers.

Que les législateurs ordinaires nous proposent des lois pour régler les sociétés des hommes ; des lois aussi sujettes au changement que l’esprit de ceux qui les proposent, et des peuples qui les observent : ceux-ci ne nous parlent que des lois générales, immuables, éternelles, qui s’observent sans aucune exception, avec un ordre, une régularité et une promptitude infinie, dans l’immensité des espaces.

Et que crois-tu, homme divin, que soient ces lois ? Tu t’imagines peut-être qu’entrant dans le conseil de l’Eternel, tu vas être étonné par la sublimité des mystères ; tu renonces par avance à comprendre, tu ne te proposes que d’admirer.

Mais tu changeras bientôt de pensée : elles n’éblouissent point par un faux respect ; leur simplicité les a fait longtemps méconnaître, et ce n’est qu’après bien des réflexions qu’on en a vu toute la fécondité et toute l’étendue.

La première est que tout corps tend à décrire une ligne droite, à moins qu’il ne rencontre quelque obstacle qui l’en détourne ; et la seconde, qui n’en est qu’une suite, c’est que tout corps qui tourne autour d’un centre tend à s’en éloigner, parce que, plus il en est loin, plus la ligne qu’il décrit approche de la ligne droite.

Voilà, sublime dervis, la clef de la nature ; voilà des principes féconds, dont on tire des conséquences à perte de vue.

Translated in the 19th century by John Davidson:

left to themselves, and deprived of these sacred miracles, they follow silently the footprints of human reason.

You would not believe how far this guide has led them. They have cleared up chaos, and have explained, by a simple mechanism, the order of divine architecture. The creator of nature gave motion to matter: nothing more was required to produce the prodigious variety of effects in the universe.

Ordinary law-givers offer us laws to regulate society--laws, subject to change like the minds of those who make them, and of the people who obey them: those talk only of general, immutable, and eternal laws, which, without exception, are obeyed with order, regularity, and absolute exactness in the immensity of space.

And what think you, most holy man, these laws may be? You imagine, perhaps, that entering into the counsels of the Eternal, you are about to be astonished by sublime mysteries: you give up in advance all idea of understanding, and propose only to admire.

But you will soon change your opinion: they do not dazzle us by a pretended profundity: their simplicity has made them long misunderstood; and it is only after much reflection, that people have seen how fruitful they are, and how far they reach.

The first is, that every body tends to describe a straight line, unless it meets with some obstacle which diverts its course; and the second, which is but a consequence of the first, is, that every body which moves round a centre, tends to fly from it; because the further off it is, the nearer the course it describes approaches a straight line.

Here, sublime dervish, you have the key of nature: here are the fruitful principles, from which consequences are drawn which pass beyond our ken.

"Persian Letters/Letter 98" Montesquieu, transl. by John Davidson [via Wikisource]

Zeitgeist and Zeit-Ungeist

Yesterday I read a handful of Guardian articles on the internet, when I was surprised to see an article from the Berlin correspondent that mentioned that a neo-Nazi demonstration was taking place here, today, and that a counter-protest was planned. He wrote that generally counter-protestors had outnumbered the protestors at similar events, but — and this made me worried — that the right-wingers had managed to gather increasingly large crowds.

It struck me because I'd felt uncertain after reading about the Ku Klux Klan and other groups marching in Virginia recently. Was it better no longer to ignore extreme views under the impression they are representative of so few and so little likely to have concrete effects; were the concrete effects in Charlottesville but especially the ambivalence of Donald Trump a sign that ideas like ultranationalism, racism and anti-Semitism are in fact far more widespread than I imagine? Also, am I completely blind to racism that exists here — housing and employment discrimination, street harassment, etc. — because I'm never the target of it?

I thought as a teenager that every person who has 'white privilege' is racist; now I think it's silly. While it is unpleasant to feel that I am certainly not 'colour-blind' and that in the case of strangers my ideas do run along racially problematized lines, I doubt anyone would care about my mental preconceptions, etc., as long as it just makes me embarrassed. It has nothing to do with the actually important, enormous scale of de facto economic, social and political segregation that I've seen glimpses of in — for example — New York.

Either way, the idea of counter-protesting appealed to me. It was not to say that I hate neo-Nazis or to strut around feeling virtuous about clearing a shamingly low threshold of reason and good feeling. The point is rather that I (representing not myself but many others) care enough about the safety and happiness of present-day targets of Nazism — rather than inhumane and horrible ideas of race and nationality — to take the trouble to appear in person and express the alternative point of view.

As J. and I got to Spandau, the thought of a neo-Nazi protest and hatred of foreigners perturbed me as a risk for other Berliners. Seeing pedestrians and fellow subway travellers who were probably from Turkey, from French- and English-speaking African countries, from Vietnam or elsewhere in southeastern Asia, and other places, I wondered how safe they were. What do their children experience in schools or in public, and are their parents afraid for them? etc. Some of the neo-Nazis at this protest were travelling from other countries where their xenophobia might have fewer immediate targets, but what do neo-Nazis in Berlin do to racial minorities?

We reached the U-Bahn station Rathaus Spandau, where the huge city hall and tower were already rearing behind the entrance. To the left there was a long glass façade in the terminal, on the first floor above ground level, revealed the regional train platforms. On one or more of them, I gathered, the right-wing protestors were arriving. As for the subway, it was hard at first to leave the station because there was such a sea of people in our protest: several thousand, I imagine.

We saw red flags for the SPD party, red flags for the Linke; red flags for labour unions like IG Metall; green flags for the Green Party; and a sail-like triangle for the Pirate Party. Not that everyone need trumpet how Nazi they ain't, but I thought it was a pity and a loss of opportunity that no representatives of the CDU seemed to be present. Two posters for the MLPD, which I assumed to be the German Marxist Leninist Party. Enormous rainbow flags. A handmade white poster with black lettering prodding Neo-Nazis to 'Mach wie Rudolf Hässlich,' in other words to make like Rudolf Hess and in other words kill themselves; and another poster outright encouraging them to kill themselves. Another sign, 'Ob kuschlig oder militant, das Wichtige ist der Widerstand' ('Whether cuddly or militant, the important thing is the resistance').

After a delay, we began marching. Spandau is, I'd say, so far out at the northwestern periphery of Berlin as to be almost in the Brandenburg countryside. People stepped out onto their 20th-century or quaintly older balconies, propped themselves up in the windows, or stood on the sidewalks, watching screenlessly or capturing the scene with their smartphones. Their faces were often beaming, and I liked the weekend-strolling atmosphere of the protest, and the feeling that we were redeeming the reputation and honour of the neighbourhood on the residents' behalf. It was only the very elderly who were stranded at their bus stations who made me feel regret. But I felt a little tearful once, at the thought that so many years after my grandparents' awful experiences in the 1930s and 40s people were continuing to pretend that there was something to be nostalgic about.

Schlachtensee

Early this afternoon three of us set out to the southwestern corner of Berlin to swim in the Schlachtensee.

Massive grey clouds were gathered overhead, but also blue apertures, and beams of sunlight; we were worried it might rain, and instead it was only cooler than ordinary; and once we went into the water, the dragonflies swooped as eagerly as ever, iridescent blue beetles thronged on a beleaguered spray of beech twigs, insect corpses and a feather and a dead reed were lulled to sleep on the water's surface, and the green and silvery leaves of the trees half-buried in the banks could not have looked happier or more summery.

Twinkletoes at Thirty-One Years of Age

Yesterday T. and I went to our first ballet lesson, at a much riper age than customary, by at least two and a half decades. She had graceful black canvas ballet slippers affixed in front by criss-crossed elastic bands, and I had beige leather slippers with an elastic drawstring around the edge; I wore grey legging-like yoga pants and a long-sleeved shirt, and she had black leggings and a pale grey t-shirt. Both of us had our hair neatly tied back. Despite our pleasure with our new clothes, it was strange for me to walk into the studio room, with the sea of mirrors surrounding it entirely, and no way of escaping one's own presence there.

We were at the studio, in Kreuzberg (or Berlin's hipster Mecca) early. Closer to 8 p.m. a mother and a child (steeped in ballet) arrived and already warmed up quite professionally in the studio room. Then, as the class had begun, we were joined by two more women about our own age or older, one of whom had done dance already while the other also proclaimed herself a novice. We entered by a small office in front, with changing rooms to the right, washrooms further in to the right, and in front of us the studio room with the vast mirrors, a piano with a computer and other paraphernalia on top of it but a puzzling cushion with the British flag all over it beneath it, a mobile barré, and a well-loved lacquered wooden chairs lined up at the far mirrors. The neighbouring house façades, visible through the classic windows, were also atmospheric.

We were enthusiastically greeted by the instructor, who was a replacement and also usually teaches children. She started us at the barré. We lined up, left hand in front of us reposing on the bar, and began a series of pliés to the accompaniment of music. We repeated these facing in the other direction. I was careful not to do anything that I couldn't do with reasonably safety and with sound technique. For example, my pliés — since grim experience in front of the narrow hall mirror in the home studio had taught me that after sinking into a plié at a certain point, I end up imperceptibly sticking out my bottom in an ungraceful fashion — were the merest bendings of the knees. I can't turn out my toes much without fudging a lot, and endangering the wellbeing of my knees, so I didn't cheat. After that came dégagements, perhaps glissés too, followed by grands battements. The instructor declared herself reasonably pleased by these. After that things went downhill.

We left the barré. We did series of steps, and we also rehearsed the Five Positions. Looking at myself in the mirror, I did see glimpses of grace and uprightness of bearing. But I had been trying to make the 'ballet' painless to watch, after all, and to relax so that the movements could be more natural and fluid. The 'three step run' was a graceless; and yet the jumps in first, second, and third position were less bad. It was too absorbing to notice how good we were generally. But at some point here the instructor — having long ago left off the remarks of 'I think we have achieved that' — said that 'the important thing is to have fun.'

Then, after an hour, we went home again. (Determined to practice.)

Bookmarks: Martin Schwarzschild and Montesquieu

At present I keep reading the same sentences again and again in Schwarzschild's The Structure and Evolution of the Stars, and the Reynolds constants, adiabatic temperature gradients and convective fluxes are all a bit beyond me. So today I read more in a newly published book about western progressivism in the Middle East throughout history, and have had a strange déjà vu experience in the latest chapter because I am quite sure that the story of Rifaa Bey and fellow Egyptian students traveling in early 19th century Paris under the aegis of strict guardians is familiar from another source.

In the evening I read Montesquieu's Lettres persanes. It is likely due to the circumstances of life at present rather than the intrinsic quality of the book, but the Lettres haven't delighted me nearly as much as Voltaire's stories and Cyrano de Bergerac and Jan Morris's Writer's World did before. So far. But I almost travelled past the U-Bahn stop because it was so absorbing, and I liked Montesquieu's retold fable of the troglodytes.

First the troglodytes were mean and selfish, and each cared only for his own welfare. But then good troglodytes formed their own community, and are almost as amusingly extreme in their altruism as the former troglodytes were amusingly extreme in their venality.

From Montesquieu:

Je ne saurois assez te parler de la vertu des Troglodytes. Un d'eux disoit un jour: Mon père doit demain labourer son champ; je me lèverai deux heures avant lui, et quand il ira à son champ, il le trouvera tout labouré.

On vint dire à un autre que des voleurs avoient enlevé son troupeau: J'en suis bien fâché, dit-il; car il y avoit une génisse toute blanche que je voulois offrir aux dieux.

On entendoit dire à un autre: Il faut que j'aille au temple remercier les dieux; car mon frère, que mon père aime tant et que je chéris si fort, a recouvré la santé.

Ou bien: Il y a un champ qui touche celui de mon père, et ceux qui le cultivent sont tous les jours exposés aux ardeurs du soleil; il faut que j'aille y planter deux arbres, afin que ces pauvres gens puissent aller quelquefois se reposer sous leur ombre.

Un jour que plusieurs Troglodytes étoient assemblés, un vieillard parla d'un jeune homme qu'il soupçonnoit d'avoir commis une mauvaise action, et lui en fit des reproches. Nous ne croyons pas qu'il ait commis ce crime, dirent les jeunes Troglodytes; mais, s'il l'a fait, puisse-t-il mourir le dernier de sa famille!

On vint dire à un Troglodyte que des étrangers avoient pillé sa maison et avoient tout emporté. S'ils n'étoient pas injustes, répondit-il, je souhaiterois que les dieux leur en donnassent un plus long usage qu'à moi.

Shopping and the Thundershower

On an impulse I announced last week to my colleagues that I would be playing badminton at 2 p.m. on Tempelhofer Feld, and that they were free to play too. As far as I could tell a thrill of bemusement and interest ran through the company, since my sociability is lamentably scarce. The weather was one central concern, and one colleague also doubted if he would come if one of our rare 'team events' — this time held in a beer garden at the Hasenheide park — on Friday would lead him to sleep in too long.

Yesterday I realized that at home there is only one badminton shuttlecock that the siblings and I have been using, which is threadbare at the nose and intact but grubby in the feathers Although there are tattered remains of other birdies that might still manage to fly in a traditional arcing motion.

I decided to go to a shop in Mitte instead of the Schlossstraße. There it turned out that SportScheck, where I wanted to procure aerodynamically reliable badminton birdies, was in the elegant grey and glass hulk that is the Mall of Berlin. It towers near Potsdamer Platz, hoping to catch the tourists who have just taken selfies in front of the fragment of the Berlin Wall or walked from the Brandenburg Gate, and the Canadian embassy.

After entering the chasm between the 'West' and 'East' side of the mall, I consulted the closest signs with the shop brands plastered on them that I could find to see what side was relevant for me. The brands were also elegantly labelled inside the correct side of the mall once I found it, and I spotted the shop on the first floor above ground level.

It's difficult to retell properly, but once a few years ago my brother Ge.'s cell phone alarm kept ringing jauntily, because it was time for him to go to an early shift at his apprenticeship. It was in Ge.'s and J.'s room, and J. looked like he was asleep. But then he said in a small, exhausted voice, 'I'm in hell.' Being in a shopping mall impressed me similarly. I was less than glamorously dressed and coiffed, and feeling warm because of the weather and the walk from the Kulturforum station. (I got out of the bus early.) Working in a consumerism-related company also makes me sensitive about rampant capitalism, since there is plenty of time and occasion to Think Deep Thoughts about it; and at present I'm in a very money-saving frame of mind.

The Goodbye

I haven't wanted to write anything on this blog until after the memorial service for my father happened, which it did yesterday, just to have privacy.

It's said that grieving is a strange process, so I've felt justified in being cheerful and normal one moment, and accepting that I am going to be extremely gloomy the next. Right now I'm in one of the glum stretches, so I don't want to write too much.

I hope I can also see and find the fine qualities in people who are not Papa or the rest of my family, because I had the subjective and probably snobby habit of measuring people against him and not thinking that they quite reached the mark. He believed, I think, that it's pointless to feel restricted to the idealization and pursuit of an abstract goodness, like a distant figure of God; one must seek it in the one place one may ever see it: in one's fellow man.

Extroversion has also been forced on me a bit, which has its disadvantages because I find it exhausting, but it has made me feel less lonely.

Books: Misogynist Nitwits, Yemeni Deserts and Red Giants

In the U-Bahn I've been reading Le Rouge et le noir by Stendhal. Normally I love the introductions to the French classics from our bookshelves at home, because to neophytes like me their atmospheric pictures of the biographical and cultural environment of the literature are extremely useful. But I really groaned internally while reading the introduction for Le Rouge et le noir. It is by Henri Martineau and was I felt not amoral as much as directly nasty.

I didn't like his characterization of the roles of women in Stendhal's or in his protagonist's lives. Both important love interests of Stendhal's protagonist seem to have ruined their lives, which was quite praiseworthy apparently to Martineau, because it was convenient for Julien Sorel. (Well, I mean, he dies at the end of the book; but let's say 'convenient in the short term.') If women really existed merely as tools for men's advancement, maybe I'd be as rapturous as Martineau, but as it is I find myself not especially ecstatic. I felt that he was describing women as the material trappings of social status, and as enemies to men if they withhold their favours. The idea that they might have as deep grievances as men, that their rights to development and happiness as individuals are as real as that of the masculine labourer, never seems to have crossed Martineau's mind.

I wasn't certain, either, that the protagonist — who in Martineau's rendering seemed like he'd sell out his grandmother without thinking twice for ambition's sake, and was far too absorbed by ingratiating himself with the upper class to care about (the plight of) anyone in his own class — was a hero of the proletariat classes as Martineau alleges. The enemy of one's enemy may at times be a friend; but I hesitate to attribute Sorel's intrigues or even violence — merely because they are intrigues and violence — to any profound and voluntary preoccupation with the plight of the urban or rural poor.

On a more trivial note, Martineau also admires Rousseau and La Nouvelle Héloïse. I gave up on reading that book in short order, as expected, because the characters were so insufferable. (What's-his-face, the love interest, was a dire little emotionally blackmailing worm, in fact the epitome of the ethically invertebrate Frenchman that I thought existed only in the fevered imagination of an overpatriotic 19th-century Briton.) I expected to find it immoral, and instead found it sappy, disingenuous and, in a sense, stupid.

By contrast, a German translation of Ibn Battuta's 14th-century travelogue about Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Yemen — so far, has been pleasant. I don't care much about the extremely longwinded names of countless sheikhs and which saint's tomb is in which city, however, and was a bit amused at the detailed descriptions of betel leaves, coconuts, and other things that are extremely familiar nowadays.

I have also enjoyed reading The Structure and Evolution of the Stars, with its Hertzsprung-Russell diagrams and calculations of luminosity and temperature; because, surprisingly enough, it instills meditation and peace of mind.

April Flowers on a Good Friday in Berlin

For Good Friday I went on a long walk to Berlin Mitte. Although sunshine was pouring through the buildings and the newly leafy trees, dark grey clouds were piling toward the north and although a swift wind was whisking them away again I didn't feel that I was timing the walk particularly cleverly. But in case of a downpour, I decided, I could always take the bus back home again.

During the walk I thought a great deal about the shops along the way, wondering how much business they had. There were also two nightclubs, and exaggerated though it was there was a smell of burning rubber that I thought was roughly reminiscent of brimstone. And there were a few businesses and organizations that cater to newcomers to Berlin, and that made me reflective about the hopes and dreams that people might have; and whether they got assistance or whether the places that were supposed to help were exploitative instead, either because they were not well run or because they were fraudulent.

Less gloomily, I was likewise fascinated by the plants. The trees and grass and other shrubs all have a dreamy green about them, as if they were fresh from a tube of oil paint and were lingeringly slumberous from their winter rest. There are red tulips in a velvety rich colour that are popular in ad hoc street side plantings, and glow from behind the minuscule palings and the spears of early grass. In fact, the grass and especially the tree leaves glow in every light and at every time of day, from the draining grey of dawn to the dark of night. The lines of buildings, while still grayish and wintry depending on their building material, are clear against them; and a few days ago there was also something nice about a freshly blossoming tree in front of the church at Südstern station, which to be unoriginal did look bridal and almost as if it were going to its dryad wedding and its groom was waiting at the steps.

There were also ghost-like creamy tulips with spear-tipped petals congregating in a bed of ivy leaves, red deadnettle underneath trees and purple heal-all in a lawn, merry striped red or golden or orange ones at the roadsides, squat dandelions, and dark baby blue chionodoxa that looked as if their days were numbered as they bore fewer yet intense flowers. I loved the fresh, damp green of the juvenile linden leaves and the glittering litter of minuscule petals that have been scattered over the ground like gold coins in the Grimm fairy tale — although I can't tell if they come from linden trees or some other species — for the past week or so. And daffodils, unfailingly bright. The Reichpietschufer canal was dark, fall leaves still floating in it; but the chestnuts and other trees at its side looked even leafier than many other trees, and even if the water itself was empty I thought it seemed to be expecting the barges and other traffic of summer, imminently.

Tulips, and More U-Bahn Reading

I have spent this week so far diving deep into my work and not breaking the thread of my concentration until the evening. It was extremely enjoyable. It is quiet at work because a few co-workers are on holiday, and although I certainly miss them, it does seem to have created a more efficient and, one might say, library-like or cloistered atmosphere.

The presence of direct sunlight on buildings in the courtyard is novel but pleasing, although the twitter of the birds I didn't notice today as we had our windows closed again; so spring is enhancing the atmosphere. Noise-wise, it was after seven o'clock where two colleagues came in with a ladder, an electric drill and other paraphernalia, in order to reattach a curtain that had collapsed onto the gas heating range beneath the far windows. But one of our neighbours has also been roaring away with an electricity- or gas-fuelled appliance in an unseen corner of the courtyard, at the height of day.

On my walks around the office, I've barely noticed any of the plant life that has emerged elsewhere in Berlin. On Saturday I spotted a disconsolate, shabby snowdrop, but also promising buds of royal purple crocuses, dark primroses nestled in the newly gardened soil at the street side, and a sprinkle of buds and curling rose leaves on the bushes. Daffodils, tulips, and hyacinths, as well as tall spiry pussy willow branches, are bulging from the shelves of florists on the sidewalks near the office, however.

In the U-Bahn I've added books to my bag, which I suppose are best discussed when I get around to reading them. In the meantime I read more of the Feminine Mystique, with great absorption, and liked Betty Friedan's descriptions of 19th century feminism as well as her investigations of the image of women in Freudian psychology. It might sound a bit naïf, but I 'discovered' a watered-down, half-informed version of Freud's thought as a teenager, and it was quite as startling and interesting as it may have been when he originated it. Although with the passage of time I do think it's like a religion: it can help people who sincerely find it useful, and for everybody else it's a bit confining. After reading Betty Friedan I did feel better about having found 1. him personally, and 2.psychoanalysis generally patronizing, too. I've had my doubts for a while, and it's reassuring to know that maybe the reason for it is not just my own insolence, or ignorance, or both.

The Feminine Mystique and the Fifties

Stride Toward Freedom was a 'page turner,' and I easily finished it. But I decided that Chrétien de Troyes and Henri Troyat were heavy going, or at least not cheerful enough for my purpose. So both of those books are in the shelf again. Instead I am reading the prefatory notes — given my feelings about the philosopher (a poseur and a bore), I expect these notes to be more agreeable than the novel itself — to La Nouvelle Héloïse, Vol. I.

Besides Rousseau, I am launched on a heady look into the early days of Second Wave feminism, in the first years of the 1960s, through Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique. I somewhat wish that the relations between men and women as men, as women and as persons, were analyzed in another frame than that of ladies' magazine articles; Betty Friedan seems to have ransacked these with great dedication in order to amass sociological data. Secondly, much as she protests, I think class barriers are not overleapt in the way she handles feminism in her book. Also, in setting up women as victims with a generous sweepingness, I think she ignores the lived reality in households where people honestly didn't care to strictly observe gender roles, and cases where intellectual laziness rather than conscious oppression seems to me to be the main culprit.

It may be the reflection of my introverted character, however, that I deny the necessity of a few of her problems and of her solutions. If I think that a practice or a fashionable approach to human relationships is nonsense, I mostly don't do it. It makes me fit in less; but then I have control over what I do and think. It prevents the situation where many people do a thing that, as it turns out, none of them really liked or found helpful. Translated into the world in the Feminine Mystique: If women don't want to wear make-up, they shouldn't; if they don't need a boyfriend, they shouldn't have to pretend that they do; if they have 'masculine' interests rather than 'feminine' ones, or both, they shouldn't feel ashamed to indulge them. Also, anyone who encourages a young woman to leave college to marry unless this is a mature and spontaneous decision, should be roundly scolded and then ignored.

[Needless to say, a passive-resistance approach to societal developments stood me in good stead in school: one fashion after another passed me by, and with each one I had more interests in common with everybody else, which did wonders for my social life. I recommend this approach for practicality and its gregarious dividends.]

Irony aside — What I find undoubtedly convincing is Friedan's portrait of a changing American society after World War II. Women who had been in the labour force while men were scarce, have been returned home to make way for the men again. (It was also a British phenomenon. While I was researching the 1950s, I watched the beginning of a film with Sarah Churchill — related to that Churchill — where a newspaperwoman relinquishes her job for the journalist who has returned from the wars, in a seaside town/village in Britain.)

I wonder if the experiences of being forced apart for many years during World War II — men abroad or at a distance within the United States, women staying behind — gave rise to a feeling that more 'togetherness' within families was a deeply needed change. What Friedan does is to fear that breastfeeding, mothers raising their own children and staying at home to do so, etc., will create problems for their 'over-tended' children — as well as breeding the deleterious effect on the mothers.

Last spring I did an experiment where I 'lived in the 1950s' [minus the colonialism, the Klan, the Cold War, etc.] for a week. I remember it quite fondly now, because doing housework kept me fairly fit*, making a point of visiting grocery shops and the Turkish street market nearby made me interact more with people, going to libraries made me explore public places I'd rarely visited before, the food was ample and good, I missed the internet less than expected, practicing the piano and listening to records was barely a departure from my usual routine, the radio was less boring than I remembered, mending socks rather than throwing them out and replacing them was ethically sound, watching television was as fun as ever, and all sorts of interesting books were written, scientific facts explored, and ideas thought during or before the 50s. (Thomas Mann's Mario und der Zauberer was an ordeal, but anyway . . .) Besides, in October or November I did an experiment, scheduled around my working hours, based on daily life in Britain in the 1940s — mostly, really, on rationing — and that was appalling. The 1950s came off very well by contrast.

But, in spite of the housework, I did 'live in the 1950s' ambivalently as far as gender was concerned. I hardly know whether women were always expected to have time to play the piano and inform themselves, and were always free from competing claims on their time like child care.

It's a bit fatuous for me to insert myself into the question like this, though. Life in a few essential ways was not the same in the 1950s as it is now, and I can't properly claim any experience or knowledge of it.

I had more Thoughts, of course, but for now I want to close off this blog post!

*As well as making my feet sore and desiccating my hands.

From Chalcedon to Colvin

Martin Luther King, Jr. From the March on Washington, 1963.
Government photo: public domain.
Colorized photography (2016).
Wikimedia Commons.

NOW my reading on the U-Bahn — which, as it strikes me now, is taking up a strangely large part of recent blog posts — has turned from Voltaire to Henri Troyat and Martin Luther King, Jr. To begin with the second book:

In 1958 King published Stride Toward Freedom, where he describes himself leaving university and deciding where to become a minister, and why, and how he changes the Alabamian church where he and Coretta Scott King decided to begin his ministerial life at the birth of the civil rights movement.

A peculiar phenomenon is that things progress, regress and stay the same in an inconsistent way, all at once. It isn't just the decade that matters, but also the generation. Martin Luther King, Jr. mentions young African Americans rebelling against racist society at a time where African American adults who were educated and well-off sometimes did not want to do anything to risk their jobs or status in society. Years ago the Guardian ran an article ("She would not be moved," Gary Younge) about Claudette Colvin, who remained sitting in the 'wrong' seat of a bus when she was fifteen years old, before Rosa Parks did the same. He mentions her, too. Of course, the right of African American children to attend schools that white children attended had also been recognized in the Supreme Court 5 years before the book was published; girls had walked to school past crowds of rabid adults. Emmett Till was killed around that time. But the bus boycotts, the Greensboro lunch sit-ins, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the Supreme Court's recognition of the right to mixed-race marriage had not happened yet; and churches were bombed later, Medgar Evers assassinated later, and voting rights proponents who were registering African American voters were murdered into the 1960s.

Martin Luther King, Jr.'s writing at that time is self-conscious, I think. Part of it is I think a carefulness not to say anything jarring that can undermine one's public standing or one's 'message.' Whether I think this carefulness should be necessary is another question. But to be wildly optimistic maybe it has more to do with being a political figure in the public eye, than with being the potential target of racists who are eager to find excuses to criticize any African Americans in the public eye.

Ta-Nehisi Coates's article "My President Was Black"* about President Obama for the Atlantic, published in January before the inauguration of Donald Trump, is relevant to that issue, too. I think it's called 'respectability politics,' and the Nation of Islam was a strange example of it in a broader sense; in order to be equal to white men, you had to be rigidly well conducted and attired in suits at all times or in general act like a respectable 1950s paterfamilias. (In the end I think the Atlantic article reflects its writer more than it does the subject, because I think he wants to understand himself through President Obama. Besides, I don't remember if there was anything specifically about feeling the need to be exceptionally self-censoring in the article, except perhaps on Michelle Obama's part, because of the fear that arose in white quarters in 2008 that she was 'too angry.' But I found it absorbing to read anyway.)

* You will probably have to un-block the advertising to read it.

***

Next: Henri Troyat's Les Désordres secrets (1974). I find the level of precision in his language to be far behind Molière and Voltaire; it's not that he tried to compete with them at all, it's only that I read them recently so that I see a contrast. I think he has also read too much Tolstoy; an author is far more endurable when he is the Narcissus and not the Echo. But I feel a bit mean in saying this, because his own family escaped the 20th century Russian revolution, and clearly Russian literature, history and society were a highly personal matter to him.

Troyat's tale, a fragment of the Muscovite series, begins during the retreat of Napoléon's French army from Moscow, felt through the eyes of an aristocrat(?). Hailing from Gaul, he had been raised in a noble Russian family, so he feels goodwill toward both sides. Part of the aristocrat's cortège, as he is a French soldier retreating from Moscow, is an actress who has become his mistress. Like her theatrical colleagues, Paulette finds the company's programme far more absorbing than the actions and plans of the Russian or French armies or their leaders, or the risk of attack by Russian pursuers. There is a lack of relevance of her thespian concerns to his emotional rift between upbringing and adulthood, etc.

Of course I don't admire the idea of men taking women as companions whom they don't see as mental equals and whom they cannot speak with frankly and fully about important matters. But at least it's funny if one remembers Jane Austen's passage characterizing the phenomenon:

The advantages of natural folly in a beautiful girl have been already set forth by the capital pen of a sister author; and to her treatment of the subject I will only add, in justice to men, that though to the larger and more trifling part of the sex, imbecility in females is a great enhancement of their personal charms, there is a portion of them too reasonable and too well informed themselves to desire anything more in woman than ignorance. But Catherine did not know her own advantages [...]

I also guess (so far) that Troyat-the-narrator is a more advanced, nicer dinosaur than many others.

***

To Disquiet On The Western Front

The Munich Security Conference creeps me out every year; I find it anachronistic and vaguely threatening, and also mainly an opportunity self-righteously to offer arms and military technology to governments that 1. are marginally more morally corrupt and far less trustworthy than ours, 2. should be spending that money on worthier causes. As a resident of Germany I feel accordingly embarrassed.

But this speech from John McCain — he appears, I will say, far more in his element there than in the dispiriting environment of American punditry — brings a whisper of fresh life into perhaps an old-fashioned idea that through a restrained, diplomatically enhanced militarism we can mitigate wars rather than proliferate wars.

A Discursion on Zaire and Simplicity

Lately I've pestered my parents and siblings with the theory that the 'worldview' that we have with regard to the Middle East is inherited from the time of the Crusades. Firstly, the idea that we have a right to invade it at any time in order to 'set things straight.' (Regardless of the repeated historical proof that this invariably goes wrong.) Secondly, the idea of Muslims as a threatening armed force. Thirdly, I now realize, the idea that there is a competition of morality — or a one-upmanship of religions, in the case of the US, and that our secular ethics/religion are better than their morality.

With much fresher incursions of armed Muslim armies into Europe — and by 'fresher' I mean the Battle of Vienna in 1683 —, the rhetoric of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the hijackings of planes, and warfare along religious or ethnic boundaries in Britain's Commonwealth like the Siege of Khartoum in 1884-5 or the Indian Rebellion of 1857, there are of course far more recent events that prop up the set pieces for a stage of enmity. As Islam postdates Jesus Christ and the other events in the Bible by at least 500 to 600 years, the Bible itself clearly has nothing in particular to say about this religion. Admittedly, to be pragmatic, as a competitor to various Christian churches I am sure it has rarely been held in good odour even by modern religious authorities.

At any rate, the grounds for mentioning these Wikipedia'd findings are that I have been reading extracts from an early play by Voltaire: Zaïre. I suspect that it is almost entirely obsolete; but after running across it in an English novel from the dawn of the 19th century, I was very happy to find it in our bookshelves, and I am in fact re-reading it. As I reread it, its resemblance to a cross (pun unintended) between Othello and Lessing's Nathan der Weise grows.

Its heroine is enslaved under a Turkish sultan. She is a Christian who survived a fictional massacre in Jerusalem during the Crusades, when she was a baby, to be raised amongst Muslims in the harem. Many years later, she and the sultan Orosmane have fallen in love and are about to be married, permitting her to attain the rank of Queen. But, unfortunately, her duty as a Christian-born child enters galumphing into the plot like an elephant — an elephas ex machina if you will — trampling beneath it the vestiges of her innocent happiness. (Although I wonder whether Voltaire wasn't setting her up for a fall from hubris anyway.) No sooner have she and her long-lost father been reunited — he being an aged Christian prince and warrior who ruled Jerusalem until the massacre, whom the sultan had imprisoned due to the political threat he represented — than her father and brother are shocked at and insulted by her profession of the Muslim faith. That's as far as I've read.

The melodrama of the play — I am tempted to call it a soap opera — is (purposely) gripping and amusing. But the understanding of religious faith that Voltaire describes makes me wince — as if religion can be reduced to the physical act of baptism, as well as a willingness to designate one's self Christian and to vituperate any other religion. He casts the dogmatic nature of the Church on these kinds of points in an unflattering light, I think; in his second preface, he also mentions the unamiable habit of denying actors a burial in a Christian graveyard unless they recant their profession.

It is hard for me to reconcile the picture of early Islamic history that I received in university with the events of the play, by the way, although Voltaire (per the footnotes) did read up on the history of that period and place, and I don't doubt that he did it well.

Back to the religious aspects, as well as political: I do think that it's easy to read the play and to interpret into it criticism of more recent French politics. The King Louis of France in the drama is named as a saintly figure, but from a humanitarian perspective I wonder why. If we nonetheless do accept his virtues as given, there is at least an unflattering implicit contrast between the King Louis of the 12th century, the prolific warrior, and the King Louis of the 17th18th century, the prolific skirt-chaser. (Who did also half-empty the French coffers of state to support optimistic foreign ventures like the American War of Independence Seven Years' War, but I don't remember Voltaire making any reflections on that in Zaïre itself [N.B.: which would make sense since the Seven Years' War took place two decades after the play was written; please excuse my egregious error]; and, to be fair, he was also notable for nice things like patronage of the arts.)

[Reinforcing the contemporary political dimension, I do wonder whether Voltaire had already been locked up in the Bastille when he wrote Zaïre, because then it would raise the question whether he was reflecting on his own imprisonment as he detailed the imprisonment of the Christian crusaders. (I still haven't bothered to look that up, unfortunately.)

The prisoners of war are, by the way, I think a poignant element of the surviving legends of the Crusades — Richard the Lionheart, for example, in Ivanhoe, even if he was actually kept in prison by Christian kings rather nearer home than Jerusalem. The murders and general carnage of the imaginary massacre in Voltaire's play are also fiercely alive, but he does have a long tradition in classical tragedies to draw upon even in absence of personal experience.]

Anyway, mentioning the play beside Othello and Nathan der Weise is unfair. I think that both of the other plays are far better. Zaïre was speedily written and, especially once it caught on, more of a 'crowd pleaser.' (It was written in order to satisfy the need for romantic plots in his feminine fandom.) A dashing Orosmane and an endearing, ingénue-like Zaïre were cast to bring his roles to life in France as well as in Britain, writes the French scholar in the introductory notes for the edition I'm reading. After the play had overcome a rough start, the 18th-century audience that flocked to its presentations in France and in Britain was frequently in tears.

A passage in Maria Edgeworth's romance Patronage describes a private theatrical: an unsympathetic, social climbing character plays Zaïre; the amateur actress is hedged about not by the latticed windows and armed guards of the harem, but rather by envious and critical ranks of young ladies who are her social competitors. The higher-minded protagonists of the book hold a conversation about the play's purposeful simplicity. (In general it's also strange to read things from Voltaire's less sexist phase, also in Patronage, for example this epigraph on Cupid: "Qui que tu sois voici ton maître. Il l'est, le fut—ou le doit être."*) But it has the same effect on the audience as the better professional performances.

(The fact that this play would feel so fresh and immediate to characters in a novel that was written in the first two decades of the 19th century, reminds me that the scholarly introduction in the edition that I'm reading also posits that Voltaire's use of the theme of the Crusades in fact anticipates elements of the Romantic period — seventy years in advance of Wordsworth's and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads. Combined with this ideal of 'simplicity' of style, I think he is quite right.)

Voltaire wrote two prefaces to Zaïre. In the later preface, added after his play had reached the British stage, he dissects the way Aaron Hill translated Zaïre into English. I think that, like modesty, 'simplicity' is a virtue that is dangerous to describe in one's self; it is contradictory. So I did smirk when he took up the discussion about his own play's 'simplicity,' and enclosed a brief list of the most 'simple' verses in it. As he used high-flown language and circular phrases to fit the dramatic quality and the verse lengths of his play — for example, nobody in his drama ever travels to/from plain France, but always hails to or from the rives de la France — his threshold for simplicity is not terribly high. I was also amused when he took issue with Aaron Hill's stage directions. One of the 'simple' highlights of Zaïre's dialogue comes as the sultan repudiates his beloved, and she begins to weep. 'Zaïre, you weep!' he observes in the French original, fairly and simply enough. In the English, she flings herself to the floor, and weeps there, and then he exclaims the same thing. That's ridiculous, declares Voltaire. Her flinging of self is far stranger than her crying, so if that horrendous stage direction must needs be kept in the play, at least it would make more sense for her beloved to exclaim, 'Zaïre, you are rolling on the ground!'

*It's apparently taken from his poetic works. Here it is on Bartleby.
The passage in Maria Edgeworth's Patronage is available here on Project Gutenberg.

A Farewell to Decency?

In the past, I've often wished that I kept a sober record of the zeitgeist at particular political stages in time, so that it's easier to separate out what happened when and why we felt what and when what changed.

Despite the needless complexity of that last sentence, I think I'll begin straightforwardly enough with President Obama's final week, ending in President Trump's inauguration. I was blissfully uninformed the entire week, busy with work and also basking in the crepuscular glow of the last days of what felt like if not a golden era, at least a fair silver or brazen one. Then, during the Friday company meeting, an American colleague informed us with what I thought was lurid cheer that the inauguration was taking place; another, who had taken pains to vote against a certain presidential candidate, had watched part of it but couldn't — if I remember correctly — endure her new president's speech. It sounds almost hyperbolical to say so, but it is touching how dignified and deep the grief and sense of responsibility of some of my American colleagues are about the state of politics in their country — not party politics, but real feeling. That weekend there was much dismay amongst the lefties whom I follow on Twitter about the barely conciliatory spirit of the new president's inaugural address, and specifically also dismay about the adoption of the slogan 'America First,' which had been used to justify exclusionist policies during the Nazi era.

I didn't think it was fair to want a head of government to fail. After thinking that he was a terrible person in terms of his treatment of his fellow human beings, whether family or no relations to him at all — I also thought that this that was no guarantee that he would be a bad president. But I had no enthusiasm for his impending regime, and felt that it was best not to immerse myself in ungratifying details.

But after thinking about it on Friday evening, on Saturday morning I went to the Women's March on Washington sister demonstration at the Brandenburger Tor in solidarity with American protestors. For one thing I wanted to help prove that even though President Trump himself was endorsed for the presidency by a majority of the Electoral College, not everyone endorses his style of sexist behaviour or his opinions. But while the others — I felt quite shy — shouted slogans like 'Show me a feminist! — I am a feminist!', I was also happy with messages at the protest that were about broader social justice and rights issues like, 'No hate; no fear; immigrants are welcome here," which were as significant for Germany as they can be to the United States. Human Rights Watch was also there.

There were roughly 500 people there, I read on the news — over 2,000 people officially attended it per the Facebook page — and while there were also French accents and doubtless German people there (like me, I suppose), many protestors were by their accents American; and after all the Democrats Abroad organized the event. There were lights on in two or three rooms in the American Embassy but otherwise no evidence that anyone was 'at home,' a pair of police officers in dark blue standing at the bollards in what was otherwise pretty much a dead zone, and few tourists photographing the protest or the Brandenburger Tor, and then the din of music from a stage at the other side of the Tor that was probably set up for the demonstration against 'big agriculture' in Germany that also took place that day. The tractor cavalcade that was organized for that demonstration incidentally also made me a bit later than I already was to the protest.

It is hard to exaggerate how happy I felt as I came home and gradually read about the enormous protests in London and in the United States as they happened, and that they were all pretty much as free from rancour and as festive as the one I had joined. The inertia and self-doubt and repression of disagreement that I felt had to be overcome during the Iraq War and the Bush years were entirely absent. I felt that any reasonably decent person across the mainstream political spectrum would feel that aspects of the Trump presidency needed protesting against.

In the next week, after the early attempts of Congress to dismantle the Affordable Care Act that tried to make health care available to most Americans, etc. it was the most painful to read about the ban on refugees and partial ban on immigrants that were signed on Friday. I happened to be reading news on Twitter as the Customs and Border Patrol began to apply it. I was on the verge of tears when it became clear what the effects were. I remember feeling unhappy at borders when I was a child, when the customs officials were being apparently disagreeable and pedantic about the tiniest things, when we were tired and bored and tense, and being afraid of being separated from one home or the other. The idea of leaving Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, the Sudan, Somalia, or Yemen, and feeling the same thing in an acuter way, was awful. Then the taxi driver's union in New York City released its statement mentioning that policies like this lead to violent attacks on their employees. Then I did feel a sense of hopelessness.

But I've resolved during this presidency to read in detail about issues and also read more longer-form news, like the PBS News Hour clips on YouTube. As a result, I also kept track of official reactions to the Ban — even Republican senators sent out weak announcements at least nitpicking the Muslim Ban, and the Democratic establishment and experienced public officials as well as groups like the ACLU have expressed such effective opposition. I think, in fact, that some Republicans should receive more credit than they have been getting. But what cheered me the most were the anti-Trump administration protests in Britain; and — because I am childish — the public's online petition to refuse President Trump the formalities of a state visit to the UK because he was 'too misogynistic and vulgar,' which would 'embarrass the Queen.'

Brexit is (I think) a terrible event, too — an example of the movements that led to the right-wing meeting in Koblenz on the weekend of the Women's March, and bound to bring harm especially to politically and economically vulnerable people. Thanks perhaps to these anti-Trump administration protests, the apparent resurgence of the protesting ethos in Britain (which was changed, I felt, into impotent shock after the result of the referendum) was also bearing fruit in the House of Commons, in the debate on whether to begin using Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty to leave the EU.

I watched a few parliamentarians speak on Thursday. While 'remainer' legislators who were representing 'remainer' constituencies attempted to justify their 'yes' vote using their idea of democracy — i.e. voting along the lines of a slender majority — this argument failed to fill me with thrilling conviction. But then, after reading Polly Toynbee's praise on the Guardian's website, I watched the former Justice Minister Ken Clarke's speech. I thought his speech had a depth of emotional interest, reflected political experience, and wealth of parliamentarian tradition, together with his old-fashioned though jovial statesmanliness of air, that 'blew my socks off.' And that praise is although I had no particular or high opinion of him beforehand.

So I alternate between feelings of optimism and bearing an influence, and of despair and a complete lack of hope.

But the quandary of where to help still puzzles me. I want to throw more money at things, but at present I have to budget it.