A Minor Exodus from the Embassy, and Violin

In preparation for travelling to Canada this year (or afterward, as the case may be) I went to the embassy this morning to submit applications for the 'proof of citizenship' that we'll need before we can even apply for a passport. But after trying to clear matters up with the guard at the door, he said that I needed a Canadian passport or an appointment, or I wasn't getting in. (My brothers and sister had no problems getting in without them.)

It was disappointing especially since it was a large sacrifice of time, anxiety and effort in the morning before another intense day at work. Due to an accident, the team I work in had to sort through over ten thousand pictures in three days, and also sometimes research them further on the internet, in addition to the usual workload. It caused considerable pressure and I didn't enjoy it.

So I have felt insecure and perturbed all day...

That said, the colleagues cheered me up a bit, and at lunch I was able to practice more violin. While I do have a little time to practice before work, I tend to not want to practice too early so as not to disturb the neighbours. Beginner's violin being particularly risky, I think. So I asked a human resources colleague if she knew where I might be able to practice, and there's a small conference room that, when it's not otherwise in use, I can take. The point of the whole thing is that I want to try playing in an amateur orchestra in less than a month's time, and until then I feel the need to make rapid progress in acquiring a few rudiments. Contrary to my insouciant approach to the formal requirements of piano performance, I want to make this work, because not being able to count beats well or produce a proper tone would be an infernal mess in an ensemble. Which admittedly hasn't inspired me to similar efforts when playing piano trios and the like... mostly because the piano score helpfully shows everyone else's part of the music, too, so that I almost always know where to chip in my part.

In the evening I listened to Bruch's violin concerto, with Yehudi Menuhin, and otherwise tried to forget that this morning ever happened!

Matthew Arnold, Sweetness and Light

Today I picked up the essay collection Culture and Anarchy again, and the time seems ripe for my rant.

Arnold's writing raises doubts about how often he set foot outside his study door to behold the plight of the unwashed British masses in person. His criticism of America is daringly trans-Atlantic. But the last time I read the book I was glad I never published any criticism on those points. Because Matthew Arnold's contemporaries, as he mentions himself, already dissected those points eloquently in the 1800s; and I am late to the party.

As a reasonable person I feel that what Arnold writes is more sensible and well-considered than it seems, but it's sometimes hard to see the evidence.

But this evening I reached an especially badly-thought-through part that — I think — justifies me in abandoning any attempt to make my reactions more reasonable, at present.

It also made me remember these three quotations:

1.

"Good sense is, of all things among men, the most equally distributed; for every one thinks himself so abundantly provided with it, that those even who are the most difficult to satisfy in everything else, do not usually desire a larger measure of this quality than they already possess."

(René Descartes, Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason, and Seeking Truth in the Sciences - his Discours de la méthode [1637] in translation, at Project Gutenberg)

2. 

"Then," observed Elizabeth, "you must comprehend a great deal in your idea of an accomplished women."

"Yes; I do comprehend a great deal in it."

"Oh! certainly," cried his faithful assistant, "no one can be really esteemed accomplished, who does not greatly surpass what is usually met with. A woman must have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages, to deserve the word; and besides all this, she must possess a certain something in her air and manner of walking, the tone of her voice, her address and expressions, or the word will be but half deserved."

"All this she must possess," added Darcy, "and to all this she must yet add something more substantial, in the improvement of her mind by extensive reading."

"I am no longer surprised at your knowing only six accomplished women. I rather wonder now at your knowing any."

(Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice [1813], at Pemberley.org)

3. Bertrand Russell, on the Confession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar:

"the reader finds with surprise that the voice of nature, when it begins to speak, is uttering a hotch-pot of arguments derived from Aristotle, St Augustine, Descartes, and so on."

(History of Western Philosophy, 1945)

I find it very curious that Matthew Arnold's idea of 'sweetness and light' is the idea that everyone should 'democratically' think exactly as he does, as the one higher truth.

On the Threshold of February

I frankly dread the months from January to March every year, ever since I became a teenager. But one advantage of working with many others is the feeling that all of us are in the birdcage of darkness and cold and seasonal illnesses together, and longing for springtime to open the door latch. It's worse, of course, to colleagues who come from friendly climates than it can be for me. It still is nightfall before 5 p.m., the mornings are still half-lit, and it is only in the past week where I noticed the song of one or two birds and the yellow-green catkins in hazel bushes. Otherwise the only green at the street side is the funereal ivy and half-dead grass and evergreen trees, although even needle trees can be a disappointment like the leafless larch I passed this afternoon. Courtesy of my aunt, I've seen the latest cover cartoon of the New Yorker, which is an annotated calendar of the dismal days of January, and it is quite accurate.

In the morning I woke up between 9 and 10 a.m., I believe, and felt that I had slept enough, rest being important to me to help recover from the work week. Then I made a 'healthy' brunch of couscous: couscous made in salted water without butter or oil, onions and yellow bell peppers and sticks of zucchini fried with paprika and dried basil and black pepper, vegetable bouillon, and two poached eggs. Much to my surprise, since the healthy food that I improvise is generally a thing not even its cook can love, two of my brothers liked it and ate the rest.

Then the siblings and I travelled to the Bergmannstraße to get our prerequisites in order for a planned trip to Canada. I think I'm becoming parochial and unused even to other quarters of Berlin, because I had a powerful 'I'm in hell' feeling again. The area around the Bergmannstraße is gentrified, to seize the first word that might come to mind, and I think that creatives and intelligentsia flock to it. But its fashion boutiques, craft stores, children's toy stores, cafés, expensive import shops, music shops, etc., also pander to almost every First World Problem you can think of. As I was beginning to insist — tediously — to my family, pure beef is not good enough on this street. It needs to be grass-fed beef prepared by a world-travelled chef who sears it on a specially crafted Italian gridiron and flavours it with green peppercorns that are only grown (organically, like the cattle) on a single field in Nepal, and a black-aproned, experienced waiter presents it fashionably on an elegantly rustic black slate.

***

In the late afternoon, my brother and sister and I went to the birthday party of a colleague, which I much enjoyed; and I read a little more of the introduction to Aristotle's Politics on the way there; we walked all the way home; then Mama and some of us filled out newspaper crossword puzzles at home; Ge. heated a pot of hot chocolate; and now I'm wasting time on the internet.

A Helping Hand From A Colleague

I've been feeling great self-pity due to work. Despite coming in a little more than half an hour early, I stayed an hour and a half late at work again today, and bemoaned the loss of exercise, fresh air, ballet classes and free time that I've felt obliged to give up these past two weeks because there is genuinely too much to do. That said, a colleague told me today that I always seemed so calm in stressful situations and how do I do it? (To be fair, she has been in another continent for the past months, and unable to glimpse my antics with her own eyes.) Undeserved as it is, this compliment cheered me up and made me determined to live up to it in future. Especially at home, where I've been a misery-guts and have regaled Mama and the siblings with long laments and the sight of an equally long face!

An Overstuffed Book Bag

Last week I went to the German-Polish bookstore during the lunch hour at work, and picked up We Were Eight Years in Power by Ta-Nehisi Coates. I've been reading his Twitter feed and, more enterprisingly, a few of his Atlantic articles for a while. The book began with a brief retrospective on the Restoration era directly after the Civil War, where for a few halcyon years African Americans enjoyed the political franchise not only as voters but also as congressmen. Then it moved to a personal perspective on the author's life in 2007, when nobody would hire him and he was officially unemployed.

Because of my own 'funemployment,' I didn't want to linger on these passages much. It is still a sore subject. For example I find that a lot of knowledge I gathered then is useful now, and that I am happier being employed but haven't blossomed into virtue I didn't already have. So: maybe I should have been less harsh on myself, instead of thinking that when I am not working I am the worst, laziest, and least competent person in existence. — For many unhappy years, as I wrote about in this blog back then and would rather not dig up again.

On a happier note, I think I have more than enough books to read on the U-Bahn now. To recapitulate: Structure and Evolution of the Stars is an ongoing struggle, and I have Aristotle's Politics where I am reading the introduction at present, Augustus' record of his achievements in Res Gestae Divi Augusti,  Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy, and then this.

I have been burning to write about Culture and Anarchy. But I feel badly informed about the Victorian-era religious and political environment; and, secondly, feel too grumpy through no fault of Matthew Arnold (since he is not a contemporary figure, much less a work-related Client From Hell), to do him justice. So... maybe some other time?

Battling with the Quill and Self

I woke up closer to noon this morning, but at least I put the rest of the day to good use. I vacuumed two rooms and dusted one, washed two panes of the windows in my room, and scrubbed the bathtub; washed a load of delicate laundry and managed to shrink a sweatshirt that was already too small for me; and then went shopping and brought home a lot of ingredients for the '18th century' meal I want to make tomorrow. Late in the evening I made hot chocolate by heating, but not scalding, milk and then melting a chocolate bar into it. On the one hand, I was too lazy to whip it into the really nice froth that was I believe really one of the points that made hot chocolate so attractive three hundred years ago. On the other, it was still tasty.

My resolution for the New Year was to finally write a long story that I might want to have published. But today, aside from realizing that I will likely find my ideas running out by the end of the first chapter, I was also worried that maybe I've become a lousy writer for lack of practice and that I am by no means ready to write at greater length.

Besides it is lovely to put no pressure on one's self to write anything that anyone will ever see. It takes away the urge to consider one's own writing great even if it's frankly horrible, out of sheer stubbornness and a wish to save face about something one put a lot of time into. My ego seems more healthy and bulletproof without it. There is no sense of competition in a dog-eat-dog market. And if I can't produce anything nice at present, nobody cares. And if I disapprove of a book or a poem or something, I can say so without worrying too much about succumbing to sour grapes.

But I think as I did as a teenager or even a child: it's frustrating to be somewhat good at something and yet to have no respectable plan how to improve in it. One thing that has helped with growing older is that there is more material, subject matter and abstract knowledge and personal experience, to rely on as fuel for a story. But the mental discipline to round out the knowledge and think it thoroughly through in a short period of time (instead of riding the same train of thought off and on for months or years, and finally reaching a breakthrough because of a coincidence) is lacking.

Perhaps it's a disadvantage of breaking off twice at university, to fear that I dabble in a lot but don't pull much through, and I feel a bit like I'm telling tall tales when I list all of the eclectic subjects I tried studying ever-so-briefly. Fortunately, at work, I've been able to feel that I do have a good work ethic once an evident need for it arises. A thing that Papa told me that helped me as a teenager, dragging myself through half-finished homework that I never found very helpful to the greater world and ending up feeling that I was a lazy bum who could never achieve anything, was that he thought I would be good for 'mission-critical' work. If there's anything that really, absolutely needs doing, I can do it. I need to find a worthy purpose for writing. But I think the danger is to believe that an egotistical manifestation of my self is God's gift to the greater world. So perhaps I just need to wait until I find the story, and honestly acknowledge that, whose purpose is just that it is important to me individually. In which case, pursuant to my past practices, I don't need to push myself to put anything out in public.

Lastly, I think that stories should ripen fully before they are plucked, so even if good ideas come, I will have to wait a long time before I'm happy with the way they've been worked out.

Ramblings About Winter Floristry And Classic(al) Politics

It has been cold and dry enough lately to freeze a rock, figuratively speaking. But I keep in mind that it will be spring in a couple of months, despite the darkish mornings; and fix my eyes on the figurative afterglow of Christmas (like the last yellow trace in the sky after the sun has set) as well as the life and bustle in the streets around the workplace. In the florists' shops there are zinnias and amaryllises in pots and laid in caskets, evergreen bushes with specious dustings of 'snow' furnished by a spray bottle, Christmas roses, white and almost purple cyclamen, azalea shrubs that had white markings on pale pink flowers. The pink, good-luck piggy planters with green micro-clovers? have vanished since New Year's Eve. But, although the hyacinths that were sold beside them haven't shot up far from their bulbs yet, I saw yellow narcissi growing flowers in the U-Bahn shop this evening.

In the U-Bahn train I read again today, and instead of Matthew Arnold I read parts of the introductions to the Res Gestae Divi Augusti by the Emperor Augustus (who, because of his census, was relevant to the Christmas season, at least) and Aristotle's Politics. The Poetics, which I tried to read in the U-Bahn during my 20s, inoculated me against Aristotle for years. But both of these books are of a piece with my continuing French Revolution research. I want to know what political thinkers in the late 18th century read, and how the Roman models and Greek thought on political aims and functions were in contrast to the Ancient Régime.

In the Candide edition that I'd been reading before, the notes argue that, unlike the Revolutionaries, Voltaire (perhaps because as well as a philosophe he was also the not-so-suffering 'millionaire of Ferney,' who did not need great revolts in the socioeconomic order) did not appear to even entertain the idea that the solution to human suffering lies in nobler, more effective forms of government. He believed instead, it appears, that brutality and inequality are the inevitable characteristics of human nature. ("Croyez-vous, dit Martin, que les éperviers aient toujours mangé des pigeons quand ils en ont trouvé? Oui, sans doute, dit Candide. Eh bien! dit Martin, si les éperviers ont toujours eu le même caractère, pourquoi voulez-vous que les hommes aient changé le leur?" (Chapter 21 in Candide, Wikisource)*) Candide's idyll in Peru is a pipe dream that he does not expect to see in reality. I thought this was funny because as an inhabitant of modern Germany I certainly, and perhaps too uncritically, believe that there will be progress, thanks to rationality and good will but certainly rationality, through the government.

But the Res Gestae argues the antithesis, perhaps. The foreword describes in detail how the Romans defined the rights, privileges and power limits of their statesmen. They claimed to ensure that the people's will was represented, and that no one had more power than his due. It is as if the Romans felt that everything could be regulated and bettered with the right governance. But I suppose that the separation of powers was a 'shell game'; people pretended a great deal that everyone had equal chances, but in fact underneath the equal positions, votes, etc., the rules were rigged in favour of the one who ran the game (i.e., to a degree, the Emperor).

It's true I was not fond of Augustus personally after learning about him in the first year of university, and after reading Suetonius's biography, although I've forgotten about the important details why. But I picked up the Res Gestae under the impression that they were Julius Caesar's, put them in my bag for work, and that was that. Anyway, the foreword praises Augustus's straightforward writing style, so that's one thing to expect happily.

Which reminds me of Ron Chernow's far more modern biography of Ulysses S. Grant. Barack Obama recommended it in his year-end summary of his favourite music and books of 2017. So I read a few pages of a preview today.

(I thought of ordering the book in print, but it's over 1,000 pages and not deliverable through the service that the bookshop near work uses. Instead I ordered Fire and Fury in person earlier today.)

I had read a paragraph or two of Grant's memoirs once, and at least didn't remember them unfondly. But Chernow emphasizes that he had a remarkably direct writing style. And that is what the former General and American president had in common** with the Roman Emperor.

Besides, I liked the quotation that Grant — who did not want to vaunt himself and was not loquacious as a rule — 'knew how to be silent in several languages.' It reminded me of my father.

* "Do you believe," said Martin, "that hawks have always been accustomed to eat pigeons when they came in their way?"

"Doubtless," said Candide.

"Well then," replied Martin, "if hawks have always had the same nature, why should you pretend that mankind change theirs?"
(Candide in translation, Tobias Smollett. Wikisource)
** As well as two eyes, two legs, etc.

With Great, or Small, Power

Last week I read the endnotes of a Larousse edition of Candide that T.'s and my former French teacher sent from Canada. They were by Jean Goldzink and I enjoyed them. The observations were less of-their-time and jargon-filled than in introductions I'd read for other French literary classics of Voltaire's time; rounded; and written in an old-fashioned vocabulary. Because I like 19th century and Edwardian literature so much, I am fond of meandering sentences and a far-roaming vocabulary. But I suspect — based on listening to British parliamentary debates, for example — that a refined and elite speaker uses a word-set understandable to everyone, which expresses ideas with structured force and economy. And his writing is a good example.

Work was a deluge from Tuesday until Thursday, but by Friday I decided that I had the right to work at a not-so-killing pace. Although I still wanted to bang my head against the wall now and then. The fact sank in yet again that with my new title came new responsibilities, but surprisingly not just the management responsibilities that I mentioned in the last post. Receiving a double workload due to requests from other parts of the company, which has grown in size since I began working there in May 2016, hammered in that point. As a result I began to concentrate far more on organization last week, filtering old messages in my email account, and creating spreadsheets for current tasks and a list of tasks to do — or to delegate to others to do — in future. This list was less than encouraging as it grew longer and longer within the space of a day, and by the time I'd reached 40+ tasks I felt exhausted by the thought. That said, there are others in the company who handle a far higher volume of requests. So in theory it's feasible to handle them all.

So reading Candide literary criticism and, now, Matthew Arnold's essay collection Culture and Anarchy (which it is fun to disagree with almost all the time) for ten minutes or so in the mornings and evenings, although that is not unchallenging in some ways, was a pleasant distraction from the fray.