Ramblings of a Disgruntled Cook

Having finished a dinner of deep-fried cod ("Kabeljau" in German), boiled potatoes, broccoli, and ice cream, I now have time to ramble pleasantly about my day. First, however, I would like to say that I detest deep-frying things. The spitting oil, the air permeated with grease, the uncertainty whether the fish is done or not, and the gradual change of the colour of the fat from a nice golden pine colour to a dark murky walnut one, are all things I could do without. But the ice cream considerably sweetened my mood, and since it was in creamsicle form it didn't create more dishes. Also, everyone else was quite content.

This morning I woke up a little before twelve. I tried to wake up J. based on a prior pact for the mutual improvement of our schedules, but he had gone to sleep very late the preceding night, so that didn't work. Then I went shopping. At around one o'clock I began to memorize the short poem "La Grenouille qui veut se faire aussi grosse que le Boeuf," one of Jean de la Fontaine's fables. The day before yesterday I memorized "La Cigale et la Fourmi" and yesterday I memorized the parts of "Le Corbeau et le Renard" that I didn't know yet.

Then I began to read Le Cid by Corneille -- only about the first page, then I explored the introduction, a chronology of Corneille's life, and photos of stage representations of the play. On gutenberg.org I recently found an old book for college students which had tips about learning on one's own, which included reading about the author of a work before you read the work itself. So yesterday I had already read up Corneille on Wikipedia. The 17th-century debate about Le Cid seems so absurd; could it really have been solely about the fact that Corneille didn't have all the events take place in the same day, in the same setting, and as part of the same central conflict? If men were really that slavishly devoted to the words of Aristotle, I wonder why Classicism didn't die out earlier. Anyway, the play sounds most interesting.

After that I did exercises with German reflexive verbs, trying to remember which ones take the accusative and which the dative. While I was engaged in this wholesome activity, Papa and T. left to go to a Physics lecture at the FU. So, basically alone (the others were gently napping), I read out loud a few pages from Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's Das Amulett, a historical novel set at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, that is sometimes humorous and sad at the same time. The young narrator has just taken fencing lessons from a shifty-eyed, cringing Bohemian man, whom he only tolerates because he wanted training before taking to the wars. Then a letter comes asking about a Bohemian man who committed murder out of jealousy. The uncle and guardian of the narrator shows the letter and confers with the narrator outside (both instinctively know that their Bohemian is the culprit); the Bohemian is sharpening his sword at the window of his room; the narrator holds the letter so that the red seal is visible from the window (this seems to be done with subconscious intent to warn the Bohemian); then, having decided on how to perform the arrest, the narrator and his uncle enter the house and climb the stairs with pistols cocked, only to find their ex-employee's room empty. The man has stolen the horse of the messenger and ridden off into the sunset.

At ten to four I looked at photos of Germany taken in between the World Wars; there are views of Dresden, for instance, which are now probably long vanished. What I really wanted was to find photos of the Moselle region, which is where I want to set part of my French Revolution story. The story, incidentally, is going well. In an old Merian issue I've already found a castle, Burg Braubach, that will be the blueprint for the residence of my aristocratic family, but I do want to know the region better. As for the name of my family, I'm wavering; "Eules" and "Aumarne" (both my inventions) are two options. But the head of the family will definitely be a Comte Henri X. There will be two daughters and one son, and the mother's father. The mother's eldest brother has died fighting the British, if this is chronologically reasonable, leaving his sole surviving parent embittered. The family will also have lodgings in a fashionable area of Paris, where at least the father will stay while he is the delegate to the Estates-General. Occasionally I have splendid ambitious ideas about the different characters I'll represent. I do want to include the predictable aristocratic snobs as well as a mob of commoners, but there are many other people I'd like to depict.

Most of all I want to present in my story a well-rounded world, where one can see the same events and places from many different perspectives. Here my biggest problem is failing to understand why anyone thinks of the French Revolution as glorious. But this afternoon the idea came to me that perhaps the real triumph of the revolution is the fact that people could come together and overthrow something in a few months that had the weight of centuries of tradition behind it. In concrete human terms, however, it still seems a senseless bloodbath. I can't stand the idealism where the life and well-being of the individual is seen as worthless, even where this idealism purports to be in favour of the "general good." In the Bible it is written (more or less) that God is "infinitely small as well as infinitely great"; this quotation represents to me the idea, in which I strongly believe, that every individual has worth as an individual, and not only as a part of a whole.

Besides, one can't consciously ensure the common good. Taking Communist Russia as an example: as much as officials might pretend that they were acting for the general good, it was clear that, through corruption and unnecessary brutality and so on, not only were they not acting for the general good, they were not acting for the good of any individual except themselves (and perhaps their family and friends). One cannot entrust a single person, individually or in a group, with the task of deciding what is for the good of both himself and everyone else. What is good for one person is not good for the other. For instance, the Russian people may all have had jobs, and mostly enough to eat, which made many of them contented. But, as I understand it, the minds and souls of many others were chronically repressed and starved, and with some people this is worse than any material deprivation. If one regards the human only as a labouring entity that must be fed, one is doing exactly what Marx was criticizing (even though it's true that most industrialists probably didn't care about the feeding part). Anyway . . .

To continue with my lessons, I was going to read about the French Revolution after my German. However, I sang Christmas songs instead, which made me cheerful, and played the piano. I tried the Presto movement of the G-major Haydn trio with a metronome; I should do that more often, because I'm terribly off. Then I played Schumann's Kinderszenen with the metronome; this went well, and I see that it is true that if one plays pieces properly but slowly, one is indeed already able to play them more quickly too. I finished my session with ragtime pieces by Scott Joplin and a rather bad rendition of Clair de lune by Débussy. Then I put on a CD of Christmas carols as sung by Dame Kiri te Kanawa, which we all know more or less by heart, down to the smallest flourish.

So, together with the cooking, that brings me up to date. I'll be more brief in my next post. (c: