At work, M.'s birthday present of a notebook is handy, and so is the quill pen and extra ink bottle that the British Colleague gave me. Whenever I remember, perhaps once a day, I scribble down a poem about whichever thoughts are passing through my mind: the sky, the kentia palm and the peace lily and other plants on or near me, late hours at work, friendship, etc. I don't worry much about metre or rhyme, but these structures are such an engrained habit that they occasionally appear in the verses.
Reading Konstantinos Kavafis's poems has been a spur. His poems are (as far as I can tell) brief scraps of thought, study and imagination written during breaks from a daily schedule, telling in lucid language of things that are borrowed from the universal experience, or telling anybody something about things and images one broods about in private. I believe, however, that I love my day-job far more than Kavafis liked his. Also, it should be admitted that the comparison does not hold true for many other reasons, e.g. most obviously, the gulf of quality that separates my scribblings from his works.
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I've been reading more of Aristotle's Politics in the U-Bahn and S-Bahn. Also, the biography of Marie Curie by her younger daughter, in an English-language translation of the original French. (This biography is the successor to The Structure and Evolution of the Stars, i.e. the representative of the scientific realm in my book bag.)
I have many thoughts about these two books that I'll perhaps mention in the books blog.
But I've also finished listening to Toni Morrison's audiobook reading of Beloved and I'm still trying to finish Naomi Wolf's Beauty Myth.
Perhaps then I can finally move on to reading Morrison's anthology Mouth Full of Blood (British title), other feminist books, James Baldwin and other authors.
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The trees mostly look as austere as they did in December. But I've seen white blossoms on a shrub perhaps in the plum family, and crocus leaves in the wild, and tiny green leaves on trees. The florists' shops are bursting with daffodils, anemones, tulips, hyacinths, pansies, etc., and the plants at work have begun to look sprightly and a beautiful living green because of the increased sunshine. In the southeastern tip of Berlin where colleagues and I had a walk on Sunday, there were genuine, purple crocus flowers, wrinkled little chionodoxa in the hedges and hollows of the church grounds, and olive-green leaflets forming on the branch ends of lilac bushes across the cobblestones in front of a private home. Swans were swimming on the lake and one was flapping, very unwieldy-looking, through the breezy air. I think I've seen periwinkles crawling along fences nearer our apartment, too.
The songbirds are chirping everywhere; the wind is bringing warmth, hail, clouds, gaps in the clouds, and rain. And it is invigorating to see that the sky remains bright for ever longer hours until, as Shakespeare put it, "thou seest the twilight of such day / As after sunset fadeth in the west [...]".
We are keeping the coal stove burning, but I hope that its term will soon expire for the year.
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Last week the company I work for had a Team Event, which was a guided tour of a reconstructed air raid shelter from World War II in northern Berlin, and secondly a trip to the Georgian restaurant that I adored when we visited it the Christmas before last.
The tour led me to reread part of one of my grandmothers' memoirs. I last read it at the age of 16 or so and remembered that she mentions an aerial bombing that levelled her parents' Berlin home in 1942. It's probably the least bad thing that happened during World War II because nobody was hurt or killed, at least.
In general, while reading these memoirs, I was glad that I have not lived at any point in the early 20th century. I detest the rigid social hierarchy that she describes, and have rarely appreciated my own social, educational, professional and fiscal mediocrity more. I am afraid she'd hardly have intended this, so I should probably ask her pardon. But after all, as Tennyson put it,
Kind hearts are more than coronets,
And simple faith than Norman blood.
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