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.