Saint-Éxupéry: Men and Earth

In the U-Bahn and S-Bahn I have been reading more of Antoine de Saint-Éxupéry's Terre des hommes.

I guess the first part of it depicts him as a young man, attempting his first proper pilot's job as a carrier of airmail from Toulouse to Senegal, in awe of the pilots who flew before him. A second part explains something of the airmail routes in the Andes. Part of this is the story of a pilot, Henri Guillaumet, whose airplane is trapped in the Andes. Despite the deadly frost, the inimical terrain and lacking food, he walks for days and manages to make his way to his family and his fellow pilots, although he had to be hospitalized. A third part is about Mohammed Ben Lhaoussin: a man who, after being captured and then enslaved in the Sahara desert, is freed and flown back to his native Morocco by Saint-Éxupéry and his French compatriots. (I found the depiction of slavery and its emotional/mental effects rather disquieting.)

Perhaps I am misremembering bits — if so, I'm sorry.

Later, Saint-Éxupéry narrates a hairsbreadth brush with death that he faced alongside the mechanic André Prévot in the 1930s. They crash in their plane in the eastern Sahara, vaguely between Libya and the Red Sea. In the crash, the water reservoirs are damaged and the liquid spills into the sand. The two men nearly die of thirst. They walk hundreds of kilometers trying to reach the sea, an oasis, or anything, but along the way fata morganas mislead them much as Saint-Éxupéry was misled by stars that he thought might be lighthouses in an earlier story.

Terre des hommes, and this tale in particular, is written so well that I felt sympathetically thirsty as the tale progressed. The grimness was veiled, too, in elegant prose-poetry and an impressive philosophical — not quite detachment, but at least analysis. But despite the muting elements, the adventure was so gripping that I kept thinking of the tale again during the working day. In general, Terre des hommes is one of the books where I figuratively hop up and down with admiring enthusiasm, although it's silly to think of that when the topic is so grim.

***

Recently I have thought about generating beautiful things from a personal hell or the darkness of the grave. Is it possible to beautify the world by reappropriating elements of bad experiences?°

A bush or a fruit tree or another plant takes food from the rotten plant matter in the worm-eaten soil, or from lifeless-looking bulbs. It works this food into petals that appear, beautifully, to the rest of the world. (Apologies for the time-worn metaphor.) But I don't know if it's this easy for humans.

I thought of this because of the saint's legend of St. Dorothea of Caesarea:

Dorothea of Caesarea suffered during the persecution of Diocletian, 6 February, 311, at Caesarea in Cappadocia. She was brought before the prefect Sapricius, tried, tortured, and sentenced to death. On her way to the place of execution the pagan lawyer Theophilus said to her in mockery: "Bride of Christ, send me some fruits from your bridegroom's garden." Before she was executed, she sent him, by a six-year-old boy, her headdress which was found to be filled with a heavenly fragrance of roses and fruits. Theophilus at once confessed himself a Christian, was put on the rack, and suffered death.
[Wikipedia]

[I am not quite sure whether this fragrance of roses and fruits is a saint's way of saying 'I told you so,' or if Dorothea's gesture was intended to be more high-mindedly generous. Generally, it's likely best if generous deeds don't end in people being 'put on the rack' and 'suffering death.']

[° It turns out that Saint-Éxupéry was writing about a similar line of thought just where I'd left off reading, so these ruminations are even less half-original than I'd imagined...]

*

Returning to Terre des hommes, I think that Saint-Éxupéry must have worked over his experience for years. I have crises over writing about simple grocery shopping trips; it's mind-boggling to think of the work he put into his descriptions of thirst, abandonment, and triumphant return to the comforts of human society.

Spring Cleaning: Quotations Written Down in 2018

I am clearing my desk, a little, and à la Marie Kondo, I am looking to see if my old bank statements 'spark joy.'

In the trains to and from work, I sometimes scribble down quotations. I'll share a few of last year's scribblings below, because they were amongst the papers on my desk.

***

Brave New World
Aldous Huxley
p. 12

Great is the truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects, by lowering what Mr Churchill calls an 'iron curtain' between the masses and such facts or arguments as the local political bosses regard as undesirable, totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have done by the most eloquent denunciations, the most compelling of logical rebuttals.

*

Andromaque
Racine
p. 39 (Bordas, 1979)
Act. I sc. i
Verses 121-122

Il peut, Seigneur, il peut, dans ce désordre extrême,
Épouser ce qu'il hait et punir ce qu'il aime.

(Rough translation: He may, Sire, he may, in this extreme disorder, espouse that which he hates and punish that which he loves.)

*

Trumpian Fallacy:

Politik
Aristoteles, transl. Franz F. Schwarz
Stuttgart: Reclaim, 1989

p. 219

Doch man ist gewöhnt, die Verfassungen, die sich mehr zur Demokratie neigen, Politien zu nennen, aber die, die mehr zur Oligarchie neigen, Aristokratie, weil den Wohlhabenderen eher Bildung und edle Geburt folgen. Dazu aber scheinen die Wohlhabenden das schon zu besitzen, weswegen die Rechtsbrecher Unrecht tun. Daher bezeichnet man diese als ehrenwerte und anerkannte Leute.

(Rough translation: Yet one is used to call those constitutions, which incline toward democracy, polities; but those, which incline toward oligarchy, aristocracy; since education and noble birth are likelier to follow the wealthy. Moreover the wealthy seem to possess that already, for the sake of which lawbreakers do unjust things. Therefore one defines these as venerable and respected people.)

p. 220

Bei den meisten beinahe scheinen nämlich die Wohlhabenden den Platz der ehrenwerten Leuten einzunehmen.

(Rough translation: Almost for the majority of people, the wealthy seem to occupy the place of the venerable.)

*

p. 456 (Footnotes)

Der hl. Thomas sagt zu Anfang von De ente et essentia: "parvus error in principio magnus est in fine."

(Rough translation: St. Thomas says at the beginning of De ente et essentia: 'a small error in the beginning is large in the end.')

Stars and Bars Before the Weekend

We've had a glimpse of March in February, and the world was positively bathed in sunlight this morning, so that I saw hundreds of details during the morning train ride that I had never seen before. It has been delightfully warm — happily, not so warm that I was fearing that global warming would kill humanity forthwith.

I have made progress in The Structure and Evolution of the Stars. Martin F. Schwarzschild is winding down and concluding his findings, rather than assailing my brain with further mathematical formulae.

In the evening, after work, I went to a 'Späti' — the Berlin answer to North America's 7-11, except that the Berlin shops are independent and seen now as endangered jewels of our neighbourhoods ('Kieze') — with colleagues. We were saying farewell to a departing colleague. I bought, to be honest, two bars of chocolate, while the others were drinking beers; and have to admit I felt tremendously uncool.

Because it is winter and the benches outside the Späti are not capacious, we walked on to a bar after almost everyone had two or three beers.

It has rude sketches hanging as decor which I hadn't noticed before, which a woman colleague pointed out to me this evening. But the bar has been pleasant whenever I've been there: dark-blue couches and stools, tea lights in glass holders and flowers (e.g. a golden daffodil, very Wordsworth) in a glass jug on the tables, red-speckled lighting, and antiquated architectural 'bones' like the peri-19th-century doorways and passages, with a semi-Gothic atmosphere.

I was in an awkward mood: my nose was congested, I was too quiet to be heard often, and I felt selfish because I had my back to half of the colleagues. But the colleagues made kindly and sincere efforts to 'include' me, also at the Späti earlier. And I hope I was able to say goodbye to the colleague in this way, to his satisfaction.

I took leave early, and I walked two train stations further, which took half an hour, before taking the train and reaching home. Especially on the bridge at Ostkreuz station I saw the Orion constellation, more stars, the moon, and trails of airplanes; rectilinear patches of building window lights, red lights along the train tracks, headlamps and taillights of cars, dipped paler beams of street lamps, sparkling Christmas lights, watery reflections of the building lights on Rummelsbucht, and the white flares of bicycle lights heading toward me in a covered construction passage. Not that I noticed all the terrestrial nights today with precision; I had catalogued them yesterday or the day before.

The starry night suggested Terre des hommes to me. It is hard for me to read because of its enigmatic language and its recherché vocabulary. But as I have an airplane mechanic brother it takes on an immediate interest. I'd read an anecdote at the beginning: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and a navigator (?) are lost over the sea at night, during a postal delivery flight in the 1920s or so. They cannot see the coast or the water, which lie in deep fog, and keep steering for stars that they think are Earth lights. The airplane is running out of fuel, drop by drop.

I liked reading about planets in the Encyclopaedia Britannica at eight years of age, but I'd lost that enthusiasm over the years, although I considered taking Astronomy as my science elective course at UBC. This enthusiasm is coming back to me. I think there's something pure and lovely about outer space; and I find its workings more reasonable and less fantastical to read about, than the workings of terrestrial chemistry, physics or biology.

Along the way I also bought organic groceries. At home, later, I made sautéed spinach with onions, cut up beetroot to eat raw, divided up a bar of milk chocolate, and also put black beluga lentils to boil. Needless to say, I am not always this socio-ecologically conscientious or nutritionally punctilious.

After all this, I reached home after 9:30. One of my uncles had invited me to a family meeting nearby. But I felt it was too late to cross the road and see if the relatives, including two of my uncles, were still awake, present, and chatting with each other. Mama had been studying intensively at home, so I couldn't gauge by her presence or absence whether the party was ongoing, and wouldn't have had her morally bracing proximity to mitigate my timidity.

Stars and Pastures in February

Fortunately I'm on the mend from the cold. This evening, because it was a Friday and I was thinking of walk-running tomorrow, I didn't walk to the next train station. Instead, I stepped right into the one near the office and tried to read The Structure and Evolution of the Stars again, still hoping to finish it soon. Right now it is about white dwarf stars, in which the hydrogen has mostly been burned up except for a radioactive shell, which remains (if I've understood correctly) around a helium core in which the warmth is evenly distributed. But I did not focus well; I felt groggy and the work day was repeating itself in my mind.

In the morning, Berlin was bright and sunlit. So I neglected the book and I looked out the glass doors to absorb the landscape outside the S-Bahn. Apparently I am not too grown up to love a real-life Richard Scarry book, with a hundred human machines and habitations and activities, when it appears in front of me.

***

I think that trying to find new hopes and ideas, as we head into spring, is going well. There are verses of Milton's that I like to pair together and that seem to breathe this spirit:

"They, looking back, all the eastern side beheld
Of Paradise, so late their happy seat,
Waved over by that flaming brand, the gate
With dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms:
Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon;
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide;
They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way."

from Paradise Lost (quoted in Goodreads)

as well as

And now the Sun had stretch'd out all the hills,
And now was dropt into the Western bay;
At last he rose, and twitch'd his Mantle blew:
To morrow to fresh Woods, and Pastures new.

from "Lycidas" (quoted in Bartleby)

I wish — just a little bit, because perhaps there are compensations — that in my life I'll reach the point again where winter does not sink so harshly into my mind just because of the weather.

Germs, Sunshine, and Literary Travel to Russia

On Friday I felt quite 'woozy' at work, and even lay down on the sofa in the lounge. Then I had a sore throat for two days over the weekend, and presumed more or less that this would be the end of it. But the past two days I've had barely any voice. I think part of this is due to little sleep — the last time I had this much trouble feeling sleepy was in around 2012, so I've been spending a great deal of time reading and listening to audiobooks. Which, of course, has certain compensations, i.e. feeling rather smug about how much contemporary non-fiction I'm reading. I've also finished listening to The Hate U Give, a young adult book about life in the suburban southern US, and found it tremendous, and today I began listening to On the Come Up by the same author.

Yesterday afternoon I decided that it would not be kind to risk spreading the germs by exposing my colleagues to them for eight hours. So I attended work only during the first half of the day, and in the early afternoon set off in direct sunlight to go for a walk and take the train home two stations further. I wasn't fragile as a result of the cold, I told myself, although it did take about 20 minutes' walking time for me to begin feeling good with the exercise and the fresh air. There was so much to see: construction workers, the river, brick buildings, concrete buildings, cyclists and joggers, trains and trucks, birds and railway maintenance workers, and trees and old houses half-hidden amongst them.

I feel chipper anyway, even if my voice is horrendous whenever I manage to growl out an intelligible word. A host of co-workers and family have brought me hot drinks and cough candies, expressed boatloads of sympathy, deluged me with friendly advice, avoided (whenever they could) asking me anything that would force me to speak, and altogether been terribly kind. As many people are sick lately, I'm surprised they can spare the energy!

In the train, I've begun reading Die Russland-Expedition, the account of Alexander von Humboldt's travels to Russia in the early 19th century. It includes letters by Humboldt that paint almost everything in cheerful colours, while a person who accompanies him contradicts this sanguinity by painting grim scenes of acres of mud, slushy rivers, ice, collapsed boats, and so on and so forth. They haven't even travelled past modern-day Latvia yet.