U-Bahn Reading: Intersecting Book Spheres

In the past week I've unexpectedly wanted to write a great deal, after feeling like there was not a single sentence in me for days. It has been an inconvenience because I've written and therefore tended to go to sleep far later than ordinary. In every other respect, however, I feel rather smug about it. Also, in the U-Bahn and the S-Bahn I am managing to read books from front cover to back cover with astonishing speed, and also feel, frankly, smug about that.

Much of my fear of losing the motivation and help to explore fields of knowledge in detail, now that I am no longer studying, has been banished. Reading on my own — and letting the events and the pressure of work and news-reading, to some degree, illustrate or lend brilliancy to the reading — works. Also, the interdisciplinary mixture and meetings of fields at unexpected junctures that I enjoyed during the happiest years at university, when I had time and energy to take any course or visit any lecture my heart desired, exists again whenever I read multiple books.

As for what I am reading, Joseph Roth's reporting from the 1920s skirts the edges of the world of Federico García Lorca; Aristotle's Politics and Augustus's Res Gestae dig into the same uncertainties and questions that the governments under whom Roth and Lorca were forced to live, attempted to address in their own ways.

And in these books there is a hidden or revealed preoccupation with who is the 'Untermensch' in any relevant state, and if the state treats them well. Of course Augustus, for example, is not famed for a bleeding-heart philosophy about his meekest subjects. But what he doesn't say about vanquished peoples and about the underclass in Rome (proper and greater) speaks for itself too.

Voltaire jumps back and forth between old and modern history, philosophy, human geography, and also political and social observation, and in his way observes bits of the worlds of all the other books.

The astrophysics textbook, I'll admit, is largely sealed in its own world, although the significance of the advances in nuclear and other physics in the first half of the 20th century (and their political and social effects) rings through the text quietly but firmly. I am also reading a modern Greek educational novel that I already read in university and that I would not classify as much of a 'text.'

But even the books that are less robust or detailed are instructive because of the footnotes in the editions I've happened to come across. The Greek book is educational because it is written in Greek and I need to expand my knowledge for the sake of knowledge and because of my new Greek colleague!

***

Earlier today I've hopped briefly onto the piano and the violin — on the piano, a Scarlatti sonata and Spanish dances by Enrique Granados. On the violin I was cheeky and played bits and pieces of Bach's violin concerto in E major. It was, of course, above my abilities although the notes themselves are not so hard to hit. I also interpreted a G major scale that was not entirely in key. And there was a visit from godfather M***. I haven't set foot outside the apartment yet, but I intend to. It's Ascension Day, after all, and due to the federal holiday, no other duties prevent it.