News from the Berliner Sauna

In the U-Bahn I am reading only the Dilemmas of Lenin for a while. This is due to the temperatures because when I travel to work in the mornings it has already been 27°C lately. And then it rises to 30° or 31° during the day, and settles down to a dissatisfying 20° at night. The past two nights I have woken up between 2 and 3 because of the heat and awkward mosquito bites at the ankles. These are not conditions in which I feel fit enough to read the philosophy of Aristotle or the physics of Schwarzschild. In the case of Aristotle, I admit that this avoidance seems weak-spirited since he worked out all of this philosophy in the heat of Greece without complaining (as far as I know), which is surely more demanding than reading it.

Although this type of summer heat has been one of the preconditions for many a rebellion and revolt in the course of human history, I am reading the book without feeling any burning desire to start a communistic revolution myself.

This week has been strange in general. On Monday morning I had an errand in the embassy. I went there before at the beginning of the year and wasn't let in, so I am quite anxious now whenever I go there that I will be barred again for reasons I don't understand.

On that evening I was going home, but then I wasn't able to switch to the second U-Bahn line that I always take. At least 3 transit personnel were standing at attention at a barrier of tape at the foot of the stairs to the platform. I was part of the bewildered crowd milling around at the foot. Eventually one of them barked at us that the train wasn't coming and that we should use the Straßenbahn or other transport methods. Later I read that someone had been hit by a train; I am not sure about this, but it made sense to me that the train employee who practically yelled at us was under the stress of trauma. There were ambulances with personnel as well as police scattered around outside the entrance above ground, although I wasn't sure whether the police were there for other reasons. i.e. It was a tourist hotspot and it made sense to have police there to prevent handbag thefts and drug sales.

So I decided to walk home, for an hour and a half. Eventually I did feel like weeping a little because it was tiring after a day of work and the tension of going to the embassy (although that went well). But, still, I had a weird, lonely tour of Berlin Mitte. And I passed the embassy again...

On Tuesday, it was Mama's birthday, so uncle M., T. and I went home by the S-Bahn and then when we got home, he and uncle B. both chatted with Mama. (I was in the room at first, then retired shyly to my room, also feeling disgruntled because of the heat.)

For Wednesday, a colleague planned to have a beach volleyball game at 8 p.m. near our place of work. I agreed to go, but went home after the end of work and before the volleyball. But while I was going home, the train I was in stopped at a station and didn't pull away again. I guessed that there was a mechanical problem with the doors, which presumably weren't registering properly whether anyone was still entering the train or not. Whatever the problem may have been, for safety's sake all of us passengers had to leave the train. I was already running late to the volleyball game. So, rather than wait for this train to be fixed or for the next train to arrive, I walked to the next station and caught another connection home. Then I took about ten minutes to change, pack a snack to eat, and go out again. In the end I was around half an hour late.

The sport itself was enjoyable. It was also more rigorous exercise than it seemed, stomping around in the sand, because a few of my muscles decided to hurt after half a day or so had passed. And there's a bruise on my right arm that I consider a minor badge of achievement. The main problem was that mosquitoes were biting me. These bites have come back to haunt me and they're the same ones I complained about at the beginning of this post. The other quibble I had was that I was shocked that a few of the male players had their shirts off, which I thought was more than I ever expected to see of my colleagues and perhaps a trifle exhibitionist, although in an innocent sense. Sometimes I surprise myself with my intense Puritan instincts.

Anyway, although at work I had a plentiful store of ice cream, I feel that this weather is bound to make everything seem like a fata morgana, wavering and blurred in the heat. And it has been weird to me to be away from home during part of the past two weekends, rather than 'recharging' silently in my room and perhaps going on smaller expeditions either to shop for things or to swim or walk or play with the siblings.

A Ramble Relating to American Presidents and Lenin

Lately there has been a mixture between early autumn and summer. The leaves are still green, fall seems far off, and there is a lovely multitude of apricots, red and white and black currants, gooseberries, watermelons, and other summer fruit in the shops. But there have also been many cloudy days and rainy days, so that the summer only seems half-developed.

Yesterday evening I watched the hour-long lecture that ex-President Obama held in South Africa for the 100th anniversary of Nelson Mandela's birth. It is always strange to step from the hurly-burly of the Trump administration to Obama's (more) inward-looking worldview aimed at being thoughtful, informed or at least curious, and dignified. I suppose that one man is a mature human being, with some feeling of responsibility, while the other is a gigantic, badly-raised child.

While I don't think that all of Obama's insights are trenchant or critical enough, there was food for thought in the speech. It was also strange to see what he says and how he thinks if he doesn't need to suit his ideas and words to an American audience. Even his style changed — he used his speech in part to entertain the audience and not just as a platform to persuade his listeners or to reel off his statements. Instead of the conformity to what seems like mainstream thought, there was originality there, some half-formed thoughts that were the beginnings of ideas and not just summaries of ideas that were shaped to be acceptable. And, of course, although I have never been as awed by his speeches as many others have, I felt the same thing that I did when I heard him in person in Berlin in 2008: he does make his speeches seem as if they went by too quickly.

Of course the speech was startlingly different from the press conference that the current American President held with the Russian President in Helsinki. It reminded me of the verse that Maria Edgeworth quotes in her romance Patronage:

Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne'er within him burn'd,
As home his footsteps he hath turn'd,
From wandering on a foreign strand!
If such there breathe, go, mark him well;
For him no Minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust, from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonor'd, and unsung.

(From Sir Walter Scott's "Lay of the Last Minstrel," here.)

The morning after I watched Obama's speech, I read more of Tariq Ali's book The Dilemmas of Lenin. It was a funny juxtaposition. Both discuss the role of young people in improving society, and about the deep ills of economic inequality. Of course they come to different conclusions. While I admire the Lenin book for its intelligence and being properly steeped in the time it discusses, I think it smooths over a lot of rough edges. Ali presents rather awful people (not Lenin himself, only) as nature's gentlemen, who possess a few trifling quirks which one should politely ignore, while there is something intrinsically degenerate and rotten about the cruelties of the aristocracy. If I had been alive at the Russian leader's time, a little person observing the colossus, I think I'd learn more about Lenin if I were one of the people who were squashed under his boot than if I were one of the fellow wayfarers perched on his hat brim.

To return to the present, Machiavellian maneouvering in politics and diplomacy I find less distasteful than the gross sleaze that is presently fashionable. Misogyny that terrorizes and exploits women, psychologically pathological contempt of gay citizens, reactionary nationalistic fantasies, religion that has few noble or fine aspects, a brainless and heartless refusal to agree that refugees, asylum-seekers and migrants are men and brothers (or women and sisters, if you will), shabby treatment of the innocent and the criminal alike in jails and prisons by people who are greater criminals, anti-Semitism (which I'd naively thought was extinct in its most direct forms), toplofty criticisms of Islam by people who should really examine their own ideological flaws first, and lies that rely on the laziness and brainwashing of the propagandized rather than the skill of the propagandizers. To be fair, one cannot impute this all to one country. Large populations of these political diseases exist internationally, regardless of whether the bacterial strain sports the name of Farage, Orban, Duterte, Putin, what's-his-name of the AfD, or Trump. I know that political correctness and the intolerance of virtue-signalling liberals are supposed to be the great evils of this time — but perhaps one can stop inspecting this mote of self-righteousness in the eye of the other and begin examining the beam of sociopolitical despotism in one's own eye.