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.