Flawed Ecclesiastics and Other Tales

Today was truly a day of rest, as Sunday should be. I've rather wondered if God (at least hypothetically speaking) does mean that one should rest on the Sabbath day even if one hasn't worked on any other day. But that's just by the way.

It was sunny and tempting outside, but I stayed inside. I read two Western novels as well as A Sicilian Romance, and played much Beethoven and Bach and a little Chopin on the piano. The piano has gone splendidly yesterday and today. Without conscious effort I'm playing with considerable variety and feeling and fluency, and finding new ways of playing every piece. But this is probably not a sign of a lasting improvement; it is like a lovely enchantment in a tale of Hans Christian Andersen, an interlude which fades out like a dream, to vanish for ever without hope of being recaptured. In a few days the sonatas and waltzes and minuets will most likely revert to their usual clumsy state, and I will be forced to explore the lesser magic of scales and technical exercises again.

Anyway, the Sicilian Romance, which I'd already read before, was considerably amusing. It was written by Ann Radcliffe, and I'm sure that Jane Austen read it. The heroes are Ferdinand de Mazzini, his sisters Julia and Emilia, and his friend Count Hippolitus de Vereza (who is the beloved of Julia). The villains are the father, the Count de Mazzini; the stepmother, Maria de Mazzini née di Vellorno; and the Duke de Luovo, a suitor of Julia. Romantic conventions crowd the novel: picturesque and rugged scenery, unnatural characters (either angelically good or diabolically bad), banditti, caves, secret passageways, a castle, a shipwreck, a monastery, a deeply flawed ecclesiastic, a saintly nun, idealized peasant life, imprisonment in a dungeon, a wife locked away in a gloomy chamber, faithful retainers, a serenade, swordfights, and at least four deaths that turned out to be false alarms. And, in the grand finale, there is one suicide by stabbing, one murder by poison, the reunion of the Mazzini children with their long-lost mother, and the wedding of Julia and the Count de Vereza. A rattling good yarn, as it were.

At least I'm reading non-online books too. Yesterday evening I finished the Memoir of Jane Austen by her nephew, which was slightly maddening as far as its limited insight into her personality went, but pleasant on the whole. I'm also leafing through Tennyson's poems. I'm working my way up from the short bits like "The Kraken" and "Charge of the Light Brigade," and the longer sentimental narrative poems, and diving into In Memoriam, "The Voice and the Peak," and more of his comparatively drier poems. His short play "The Falcon" particularly interests me. I think the way he presents it is too saccharine and contrived, but the story itself (which is out of the Decameron) somehow really gripped me, and I intend to write something based on it. There is another poem, narrated by a woman who has come to live with her husband, who is a leper. I can't say I admire the poem's masochism. I did wonder, though, what I would do if I married and my husband had a fatal contagious disease (Ebola, for instance), and I was fairly sure I would stay with him too, unless we had children who still needed a parent. It would be more because I would despise myself eternally if I abandoned him than for any higher reason. Probably most people would do the same.

Anyway, the only other non-virtual reading I've done today was of the Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on beer, for the purposes of J.'s homework about monasteries. He had to write a letter from a monk to a secular, free-range friend. It was quite funny. He writes that the monastery's donkey got loose in the barley field and rampaged until Brother Theodosius, who is fond of beer, came onto the scene and unleashed a torrent of curse words. Brother Petrus felt faint and had to go to the infirmary. In the evening everyone was going to pray for the soul of Brother Theodosius.

A Third Afternoon of Lieder

This morning I woke up at quarter to twelve again, to an overcast day where the wind that had brewed up late last evening was still sweeping the tender new leaves of the trees outside. I cleaned up my clothes and papers and books a little, made my bed, spent time on the Internet, and on the whole enjoyed myself. Today the cooking was taken care of, so I had time to play out of the notebook of Anna Maria Magdalena Bach.

I did see Mama this time before I left for the third masterclass. Today the students were not so much in top form, and didn't respond as quickly to corrections as they had yesterday, let alone the day before that. I came only about a minute late today, and the usual opening singer was just beginning her song. Then came the powerful-voiced one, (appropriately named Ilsa, if I remember correctly) with a piece by Wagner (I think), about "Lebewohl." Under the influence of directions her singing became temporarily less aggressive; perhaps nervousness had also been a problem. The singer with the "belly voice" followed with the third (well, really the second) of Schubert's "Harfenlieder," this time about "eating bread with tears." Mr. Fischer-Dieskau asked him at one point not to sing as much with the throat but more from the stomach, and the suggestion worked wonders. After that, because the accompanist of the fourth singer had not arrived, Ilsa sang another song by Hugo Wolff, entitled "Er ist's," about the arrival of spring. Then it looked like the masterclass was over, when the long-awaited accompanist came speeding in just as people had begun to get up to leave. Then the singer who had not been there yesterday sang a piece by Schumann; as far as I could tell, the performance was not particularly controlled, because he and the accompanist were still rather excited, but at least there was a nice range of pitch and effect.

Now I am at home again, eating the bread of idleness -- without any tears, however. Soon I'll check up what's happening tomorrow. I may go to the concert that is to bring the masterclass series to a triumphant close, or I may go somewhere else. Anyway, I'm enjoying the sense of being busy and having something to go out to every day. And now Mama's friend G. is here for a visit, so I'd better go. (c:

Trivial Pursuits

After I had made lunch again (this time, turkey schnitzel, broccoli, a salad with oak leaf lettuce and eggs, cranberry sauce, and apple sauce) I went off to the second masterclass. I was late again -- about ten minutes -- and the singer on the stage was the dark-haired one again. The order was different, but the repertoire was similar: Hugo Wolff and Richard Strauss and Schubert. Quite honestly, the songs all sound more or less the same to me, except that I am occasionally vaguely aware of a Viennese touch in Strauss. The students were more confident this time around, I think; their voices were fuller and their diction considerably better, and the accompaniments were better synchronized with the singing. On the other hand, today the faintest note of irritation did creep into Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau's voice now and then, when a student persisted in certain errors that should have been easy to correct. The student whose singing I liked the most did not sing today (unless I came too late for it), but I also liked the voices of three others very much.

My other activities today included very, very slowly reading about France before the Revolution while simultaneously picking out songs on the ukulele. Perhaps the stimulation of the left(?) side of the brain does have a beneficial effect on learning after all, because I absorbed the information easily. And, while I was cooking, I listened to Gi. and Ge. discussing school, particularly the adverse effects of their difficulties with German on their tests, and the pendulum experiments they have been doing in Physics. J. complained about three tests that will, I think, take place tomorrow; Ge. comforted him by means of making absurd suggestions, for example that J. should quickly get a degree in medicine so that he can write doctors' notes to excuse himself. And then the others discussed certain animé series, for example "Death Note," which sounds most interesting, but whose premise they had pretty much picked apart by the end.

An Afternoon of Song

Today the big news was that Papa is now registered at the FU for, I think, his diploma! It was a relief to know it, and we celebrated with chocolate (and plenty of it), licorice allsorts and fruit gummies. It took a while until everyone came home, though. By the time I had finished preparing dinner (rotini with ground beef and a tomato sauce, with cherry tomatoes and bell pepper strips on the side) Mama had not come back yet.

At perhaps quarter to four I set off per U-Bahn to the Universität der Künste (UdK) building in the Fasanenstraße, close to the S- and U-Bahnhof Zoologischer Garten. At first I went in the wrong direction, but I suspected as much, and I soon received the right heading. It is a composite building, really, consisting of an old building (I'm guessing from the first years of the twentieth century) at the core, with two modern glass-and-steel-and-concrete additions to either side. I went first into the Konzertsaal part; completely empty, light brown, a sort of interior decorating wasteland, with one lone formally dressed woman sitting, bored stiff, in a ticket booth behind perforated plexiglass. She directed me to the 1B building. There I roamed about for at least ten minutes (it seemed longer), on three of the floors, in the vain search for the Theatersaal. The floor plan was intimate but complicated, because there were two small interior courtyards. At last I asked a lady in an office (I asked for the way to "das Theatersaal" instead of the correct "den Theatersaal," which was embarrassing, but at least instructive because she very tactfully corrected me) where the room was. So I went to the appropriate building annex, whose darkness and sixties-ish flair provided a decided contrast. A suited gentleman stood outside and answered my query as to whether I could still enter the Theatersaal rather grumpily.

Anyway, in the theatre, the masterclass (the first in a series of three) that I had come to see was well underway. A respectable crowd of well over fifty people had assembled in the audience, and on the black and rather harshly-lit stage there were a Steinway, an accompanist, a young dark-haired singer in black top and white skirt who was singing in nice full tones, and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who was half-sitting and half-standing to the right. Soon the next singer was up; he sang a "Harfenlied" by Schubert, with what I suppose one could call a"belly voice," and lots of vibrato as well as a somewhat unclear diction. Then came another singer who sang something from Richard Strauss, with "Daemmergrauen." He was easier on the vibrato and, I suppose, used his "head voice" more often, which was a nice change and also automatically made it easy to understand the words. After that came a fairly rotund student with copious curly golden hair, who had lots of energy but shot it off in every direction as she sang something about "Kammerfenster" and "Gespenster" by Hugo Wolff. And then came a small student who had a small voice at the beginning, but who had a larger voice by and by after the many corrections to her incomprehensible and not very well calibrated, but still nice performance. The final song came from a tall student who sang another song from Mahler(?), this time (I think) with the lines, "Lasst mich allein/ Dein eigen sein." The lines stuck in my head because he made a break after the "allein," and Mr. Fischer-Dieskau suggested that he do a crescendo on the "allein" to tie it into the "dein," because otherwise it would sound like "Let me alone!" instead of "Let me alone . . . be yours." On the whole, I liked his singing most of all.

Anyway, this was an unusually painless masterclass. There was no acerbic commentary, no trembling, and no cold silences punctuated with nervous laughter. The only jarring element was the whispered and rather critical commentary of two very irritating girls. I relieved my feelings by glaring at them, but they didn't notice. At any rate, the main points that Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau corrected were failures of tempo, failure to pronounce words properly (like singing "Liecht" instead of "Licht," or "Morgään" instead of "Morgen," and making "lebt" and "liebt" indistinguishable), an overly loud or overly fast accompaniment, and not suiting the singing to the words (like bellowing "schmachten" instead of singing it more quietly and lingeringly). It was hard to hear everything that was said, but at least the singing came across well.

Yesterday I went to another UdK event, this time a viola concert in the Bundesallee building, quite as enjoyable. It's pleasant that there is such an emphasis on singing or playing expressively here, because in Canada the emphasis mostly seems to be on the technique, which makes for more boring masterclasses that occasionally "make the soul hurt" because the musician is not engaging with the music at all (even the dynamics are programmed in to the playing rather than being a natural part of it). But I must confess that I only went to two university-level masterclasses (one for the violin, the other for the piano) in Canada. I won't write more about yesterday's concert except to say that the students played pieces by Karl Stamitz, J.S. Bach and Max Reger, and that I don't detest the viola as many people seem to do.

The Balm of Books

Today I was in a better frame of mind. I woke up fairly early, cleaned up the area around my bed a little, then wandered off to the Kleistpark with Sense and Sensibility in hand. As I walked down along the BVG building the lovely warm breeze carried the vague scent of blossoms. The splendid plane tree near the colonnades is beginning to bear leaves again, and this time it blended in with the colonnades in a less austere way. As for the trees in the large round lawn in the middle of the park, they were quite green. There were innumerable families out, in scattered groups that immediately reminded me of a painting. I found an unoccupied bench and managed to read quite well; but I'm probably still "stale" as far as Jane Austen goes, because I didn't get into the book. I haven't read any of her books from cover to cover for over a year, but once I knew Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion, for example, practically word for word. This time her severe characterization of Lady Middleton, for example, struck me unpleasantly. Maybe I should try rereading her other books, or waiting a few years.

When I came back home Mama and Papa had already set up a new base for a bookshelf in T.'s and my room, and Mama was filling the shelves with books. After she was done I rearranged the lower shelves, so that my favourite books will be at arm's reach for bedtime reading. I haven't read many non-virtual books for a while, but I intend to start again. Particularly children's books, when read properly, make me feel that the world is in order as very few other things can. It's nice to rearrange books, too, so that they have a new context. One of the charms of the books in our shelves is that I can look at most of them and immediately picture where they were in our old house. They weren't schematically arranged even then, and I'm not homesick for our old house, but the mental associations are still pleasant.

I feel a little ashamed about yesterday's post. First of all, it is rather whiny; secondly, I believe on mature reflection that its analysis is inaccurate. I like pity, or at least sympathy, but in this case I doubt that I deserve it, or at least I worry that it would be quite unmixed with any respect for my common sense. It's all in the perspective, I suppose; many people would probably like to be in a position where they are not working and where they still have many options open. If I were outside of myself, I would probably find it patently obvious what I should do, and tell myself to do instead of think. And I'd probably rather despise myself. As it is, I must impatiently wait for enlightenment, whether through the glacially slow process of reason or through happy circumstance. But by now I've done so much introspection that my mind must (metaphorically speaking) resemble the mirror-filled dressing room of Sir Walter Elliot in Persuasion; as Admiral Croft exclaimed, "Such a number of looking-glasses! oh Lord! there was no getting away from oneself!"

Thoughts at the Crossroads

Today is the third in a series of discouraged days. It has been very sunny and beautiful outside, and the trees along the street are unfolding more and more leaves with every day, and everyone is coming out of their houses and "making glad" the streets. But there is little corresponding jollity within me.

But nothing else is to be expected if I sit inside as much as I do -- though I did walk to the Zwölf-Apostel graveyard with J. yesterday -- and I'm still uncertain what to do next. It takes me a very long time to figure out what I want to do. Part of the reason for this is that my years in school were not calculated to help me develop my interests, talents, or personality. Of course I read many books and learned many things on my own, but I did it unintelligently, so that I didn't get nearly as much out of it as I could, and there was nearly nothing in my environment that lent any new dimension to what I was doing. For example in literature, no matter what I read -- Shakespeare or George Eliot or Dickens -- I had to understand it through imagination or through my own feelings rather than, for example, through knowing people who resembled their characters, or knowing about English history from school. This is why, for the worst weeks in Grade 11, I couldn't properly read books any more; I was not able to tie anything to the real world -- if that makes sense. George Eliot and Charlotte Bronte I could, however, almost always read, because their books are largely about isolation, repression by environment, etc. Anyway, in university and here in Berlin, the conditions were and are much more favourable. I am at the point now where I can "find myself," but this process is considerably hampered by the pressure I am under to choose a bachelor programme and career. It is a little humiliating but true to say that, at twenty-one, I am in most ways basically at the point where most people are (or seem to be) at fifteen or sixteen.

What I would love to do is to have a year or two where I can just work on the things that suit me best, in the way that works best for me. I have no intention of sitting around and doing nothing. But if I had a congenial piano teacher, if I were free to write and draw and read and play music as I like, if I could go to museums and art galleries and concerts without worrying about the cost, if my siblings would go and play soccer or badminton or whatever in parks with me, if I could read in many subjects, and perhaps have a small pleasant job, just for one year, I think it would finally compensate for the deficiencies of my school years and gently close that chapter of my life once and for all. To tell the truth, all of these things I could already have done, but I haven't yet cast off the self-doubt and habits of procrastination and restlessness that probably keep me from doing these things properly.

Anyway, that was all the complaining I wanted to do. Now I am, again, ready to admit that my problems are very small peas indeed.

Easter, Seven Years Ago . . .

Photo by Edithor, 2000 (est.)

Happy Easter!

This morning I woke up at around ten o'clock, roused in part by the tolling of church bells (they also tolled at half past eleven yesterday evening, I think, for no apparent reason). T. was already awake, watching episodes of Poirot on YouTube; so were Mama and Papa. I hid chocolate Easter eggs in the corner room (which we also refer to as the living room or, rarely, the library), mostly in the bookshelves. Then, slowly, everyone else woke up; J. entered the library while I was still at work, closely wrapped in his blanket-toga, then curled up with a crime novel (by Agatha Christie, I think). Mama prepared yeast dough into hot cross buns (minus the candied lemon peel and raisins and pudding cross on top and sugar glaze . . . (c: ) as well as a stately Easter wreath (this time with raisins).

At last we had the usual Easter breakfast. I thought it was more fun when we were little, when we were eager to wake up for Easter, and we (or I, at least) would scrupulously avoid looking at the decorated table until we were all awake and present. Once everyone was awake and assembled at the foot of the stairs in our old house, Mama would start to play our Messiah record as our cue to festively enter the kitchen to partake of the breakfast. Anyway, this year the breakfast consisted of croissants, the hot cross buns, hard-boiled eggs, chocolate eggs and minuscule candy eggs, Ovaltine or coffee, and jam or honey or Schinkenspeck or Lachsschinken ("salmon ham") to go with the buns. For once we had no chocolate Easter bunnies, but I might buy them belatedly, or perhaps no one really missed them that much.

Then T., Ge., and J. hunted for the Easter eggs in the corner room, a very quick affair, where they only overlooked three of the eggs. Afterwards I went on a short walk to the Kleistpark. There were few cars on the road, and it was unusually peaceful. In the Kleistpark itself there were small groups of people scattered about, mostly still in black winter clothing. The second colonnade in the park has been entirely renovated now; the scaffolding and plastic sheeting are gone. But the bushes that used to grow around the statue of Cupid(?) in front of them has gone, which I think is a pity, because the juniper and laurel bushes that grew there were so nice and Italian, in perfect keeping with the architectural style of the colonnades and of the Kammergericht. Also, but this probably happened a while ago, a thicket of juniper or hemlock trees had been hewn down. Perhaps they went in order to permit a clear view from the colonnades out onto the Kammergericht, but they were not directly in the way, and (to me, at least) it looks more like they were put out of the way for the passage of a tank. I don't particularly like the severity of gardening in the classical style anyway; having lived in a place where trees grow freely and densely and naturally to impressive heights, sheltering and shadowy, with an untamed junglish tangle of salalberry or moss and swordfern at their bases, I will of course not be so taken by gardens where large empty spaces predominate.

Anyway, there were many flowers out already; starry yellow forsythias, the fringed Oregon grape blossoms that I also saw in the graveyard, light blue squills (whose German name, "Blaustern," or "blue star," is somewhat nicer), voluminous and frilly deep yellow flowers on a bush, red tulips, purple and white Grecian windflowers with their beautiful soft purplish-green leaves, some very pale blue grape hyacinths that did not appeal to me at all, and white and pink blossoms of two members of the plum or cherry families. The hazel has sent out its leaves already, but most of the trees and bushes were still barren. Birds, including a pretty, plump pair of speckled, dark-brown ones, were foraging for food here and there.

Two Poems

I worked on a long post today, but the final version was lost when Netscape crashed. So here, instead, are two quatrains that I wrote just now.

Tony Blair

A master of the statesman's art
Of meaning very, very well
Whilst paving with his whole small heart
A most progressive road to hell.

*

Dick Cheney

The US's second-greatest resident,
He puts the "vice" back in "vice-president."
Quail or Iraqi, he's ready to kill,
And Congress is ready to pay off the bill.

The Last of Siberia

This afternoon I finished Tent Life in Siberia. This last segment saw the reunion of the original surveying expedition, who had been divided up and who had jointly found a route from the Amur River to the Bering Sea where the telegraph line could be put up. Labour and logs for the telegraph poles had been organized, and supplies gradually and belatedly arrived from America. Then, after two years, the news came, by newspaper and then by a proper message, that the second Atlantic cable had been laid, and that the first, unsuccessful cable had even been fished out and repaired in addition. The Western Union Telegraph Company lost something like $3,000,000 in the venture, and decided to stop the project. So the large wooden poles were left to freeze unused, the glass insulators were sold for teacups, and the Americans and Russians of the expedition left either by ship for America or by sleigh for St. Petersburg. The book ends quite abruptly, after a description of Irkutsk, which, as an outpost of civilization that had so many houses that numbers were needed to identify them, was the first and rather difficult station on the road back to the life to which Mr. Kennan had been used.

I liked the book. I'm not sure how truthful it is, but it is well-written (though in a somewhat unindividual style of the time, and though the author sometimes repeats sentences), detailed, and certainly interesting. Since the author is an American, he is not as condescending to the Kor(y)aks and other Siberian natives as one might expect, and he seems to have had a good understanding with them. At the same time, it doesn't take a crusading "p.c.-fascist" to detect a racist undercurrent, or at least a strong distinction between employer and employee. And there are incidents of cruelty to animals, though not mean-spirited ones.

Besides reading, I made my bed and washed two of the window frames and dusted the top of my Sekretär (which is a desk with a bookshelf or drawers on top of it), then played some piano. Though spring has never had this effect on me before, it has inspired me to spring cleaning this year, much like it inspired Mr. Mole in The Wind in the Willows. As for the music session, it included accompanying T. as she played Marcello and Telemann on her recorder.

Flightless Birds and Alisania

To continue my report about our Palm Sunday, Mama, in one of her rare baking sessions, made the birds out of yeast dough ("Palmmöskes") a few hours ago. I had just coincidentally discovered that the word "lady" comes from the Middle English for "loaf" and "knead." So, I was indignantly thinking, all that women are apparently here for is to knead bread. )c:< Anyway, Mama's specific dough had risen beautifully and looked like a sponge with all the air bubbles; it enlightened me as to the reason why nineteenth-century women talked about "setting the sponge" for bread. She briefly kneaded it, then cut it into equal pieces. Each of these she formed into the rough shape of a bird, with a beaked head, a tail, feet, and a demi-ovoid body. One piece of dough was very oddly shaped, so she made it into a pelican; another she made into a swan. I made a lot of wisecracks about the process, for example Mama's method of "strangling" the bird to make the head distinct from the body. J. joined us, too. Then Mama shaped the remainder of the dough into simple palm leaves. Then, when she had brushed the birds with milk and given them each a raisin eye, she placed the palm leaves where the wings would be, and its effect was very nice. The birds even came out of the oven perfectly baked, golden-brown, slightly toasted at the bottom, golden and moist on the inside.

When I was not in the kitchen, I was on the internet or roaming the halls of the house or cleaning up. There has long been a stately mound of clothing at the foot of my bed; I aired and folded some, put others in the laundry, and then laid everything away except for a heap of clothes that are not supposed to be machine-washed. I handwashed one cardigan, admiring how the rather bright orange became a beautifully subdued autumnal colour once it was thoroughly wet, kneading the thing and wondering whether I needed to use laundry detergent or something. As a result of my deliberations, and of my occasional tendency to overdo things, I took the bar of handwashing soap and passed it over the cloth. Then I hauled the sodden mass over to one of our clothes-drying racks, put one of our simple cloth rugs under it so that the wooden floor wouldn't become wet with the drippings, and hoped for the best. Anyway, I'm not doing any more handwashing until I see how the cardigan withstood it.

Then I thought of writing a story again, with the result that I took up a pen and one of my numerous notebooks, and wrote out information about the imaginary country which the protagonist of my scion-of-noble-family-living-in-Victoria story is supposed to come from. I've read quite enough stories with imaginary countries (Evallonia, Ruritania, etc.) that have pseudo-Slavic languages and people, and that always end in -nia; so I thought that I would never descend to that -- besides, I have no trouble keeping track of Russia's -stans and the Balkan states, so I can spot a pretend-state despite the -nia. But now I have become everything I most despise, for my protagonist is a proud (though expatriate) Alisanian. Alisania, population 65,920 according to a 2003 census, is a moderately wealthy ex-principality, speaking predominantly Russian, German, and Alisanian. It was once part of Prussia, but became part of the Soviet Union after World War II. For the purposes of my plot, which would be too complicated if the protagonist is still a contender for the throne, I have decided that the protagonist's grandfather will have been a Quisling (well-intentioned, but a Quisling nonetheless), and that therefore the royal family has fallen from grace forever.

Anyway, after a failed revolution in the 1980s (which would come a year or two before the one in Czechoslovakia), in which the protagonist's parents died, Alisania became automatically independent as the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Then it turned into a democracy; I must still determine whether it has a unicameral or bicameral legislature, which powers the president has, and how the power is shared between the legislative and executive branches (the Political Science 220 course that T. and I took is evidently bearing fruit). I will use the government systems of the other Baltic states to help me figure it out. The population as of the 2003 census was 45% atheist (a triumph of Soviet education), 23% Protestant, 9% agnostic, 8% Catholic, and 15% other. Perhaps it's ridiculous working and writing all of this background information out -- I suppose I'm the writing equivalent of a method actor -- but I like detail and accuracy.

As for the rest of the world, T. recently went to sleep; Gi., Ge., and J. are amusing themselves on the computer; and Mama, Papa and uncle W. are in the corner room smoking and talking. The day was sunny; trees are beginning to be flecked with green; the tulips in the middle of the street are already withering; birds chirp and sing freely in the courtyard so that one could imagine one is in the countryside; and the mood out on the street is appropriately springlike.

Palm Sunday, and More of Siberia

Today Mama woke me up at around 11:00 to partake of a communal breakfast, in honour of Palm Sunday. In Canada we sometimes marked this day by having small parades around the yard or around our grandfather's apartment with sharpened hazel branches (from the two trees behind our house) that had a bundle of boxwood twigs (also from our garden) tied around the tip and a bird baked out of yeast dough speared on top of it. Anyway, this year the feast is mostly culinary, from the breakfast to the coffee and cake (consisting of the birds) in the evening.

When Mama, T. and I went to church many years ago (we stopped going to church when we temporarily moved to Germany in April 1996), we learned the following song for this season:

Prepare the royal highway;
The King of kings is near!
Let ev'ry hill and valley
A level road appear!
Then greet the King of glory
Foretold in ancient story:
Hosanna to the Lord
For he fulfills God's word.

Anyway, when I reached the kitchen this morning, Papa, Mama, and T., had assembled, all reasonably awake. We had soft-boiled eggs; buns and baguette slices with Schinkenspeck (which resembles, I think, prosciutto), cheese, Nutella, and marmalade; and Mama and I each had raspberry-flavoured Götterspeise, the terribly fake but refreshing equivalent of Jell-o of the species that is sold ready-made in the grocery store refrigerators. With that we had tea and Carokaffee (coffee substitute). Anyway, I was still sleepy, and took a long while to respond to remarks or queries. Soon J. joined us, and summarized for us two tales from Strange Tales from the Strand before going to work on a kiwi that was so intransigent that a knife was needed to demolish it.

Yesterday I spent much of the day on the Internet. I kept on reading Tent Life in Siberia. The author travelled per horse and boats up into the central Kamchatkan mountain range during the brilliant autumn, then, as winter began, with sledges further and further into the snowy wasteland that is associated with Siberia until he reaches the Russian village of Gizhinga, then Anadyrsk. At most villages he changed his mode of transportation, and at the biggest ones he exchanged the guides and other native members of the expedition. Along the way he stayed in the dwellings of the native inhabitants, the Kamchadal (also known as Itelmen) and the Koryk (wandering and settled). There were yurts where one had to climb up at the side, then slide in on a pole through the smoke-hole, until one entered the dirty interior where the walls were black with smoke. Then there were large yurts that had no smoke-hole and were therefore awfully stuffy, with compartments of animal furs lining the outer wall; one had to enter them by crawling through a subterranean passage. There were houses that had fish bladders for windows, others that had blocks of ice for windows, and some that had no windows at all. And so on and so forth. Where there were no windows the usual lamp was a bowl of seal oil with moss floating in it for a wick.

Here is a typically humorous description of a miserable stay in an abandoned yurt whose wooden frame had been partially removed for firewood:

After a scanty supper of _selánka_, dried fish, hardtack, and tea, we stretched our tired bodies out in the shallowest puddles we could find, covered ourselves with blankets, overcoats, oilcloths, and bearskins, and succeeded, in spite of our wet clothes and wetter beds, in getting to sleep.

The wandering Koraks were essentially herders of reindeer. They used every part of the animal, just as the Plains Indians used every part of the buffalo. The bones were saturated with seal oil and used as fuel, the skin for clothing, the intestines stuffed with tallow and eaten, etc. Other groups also subsisted on fish and berries (blueberries and cranberries, for instance). It was altogether remarkable how ingeniously they survived despite temperatures of even around 68 degrees below zero Fahrenheit (-55.6 degrees Celsius).

But another people that had made its mark on the Siberian population was the Cossacks, who had been sent in the eighteenth century to conquer and colonize the easternmost regions of Russia, and who, after the warfare was ended, remained and often intermarried with the native inhabitants. Altogether the land had already been explored to a surprising degree. Petropavlovsk had been founded by Vitus Bering, and it was named (as I discovered on Wikipedia) after his ships St. Peter and St. Paul. De Lesseps, whose name sounds familiar but whom I can't really place, also seems to have been there, because he had compounded a vocabulary of at least one of the indigenous languages. And the tallest peak on Kamchatka, the volcano Klyuchevskaya-Sopka (Mr. Kennan calls it "Kluchefskoi"), was already climbed in 1788 by Daniel Gauss and two other "westerners."*

Anyway, I also watched certain films aimed at the younger female demographic on YouTube. There was one British period drama, a "Kostümschinken" that was humorously aware of the fact, of which I watched the last eight minutes or so. Where I started watching Hazard of the Heart, the heroine, clad in a white dress with an Empire waist, was running through a mansion pursued by Diana Rigg (clearly enjoying herself), who wore a bright red dress and ran with a rapier stretched out in front of her with evidently homicidal intentions. The heroine rushed into the library, where an elderly man lay deceased in the style of an aristocratic or monied victim in Poirot, bent forward with his head on his desk. I found this part a little off-putting. At any rate, the maiden then runs out through a secret door consisting of a bookshelf, to find herself in dimly-lit underground caverns. But the pursuer had heard her fastening the latch, and enters the caverns by another route. The villainess catches up with her, as does an unwanted suitor of the heroine, who seemed to have been hanging out in the caverns for no discernible reason. The latter despatches his confederate with a dagger in order to avoid being blackmailed ("It would have been ten thousand pounds this year, then ten thousand the year after that . . ." says the murderer** -- "No, twenty thousand," Diana Rigg unrepentantly replies with her dying breath). The heroine is in imminent danger of being dragged off, when a very neatly-clad and very British-looking gentleman, who is also evidently the beloved of the heroine, rushes up and engages the villain in a long rapier duel. At this point it is quite nice, really, that the heroine is genuinely distressed by the violence, no matter what the outcome. Either way, the villain eventually succumbs. And the hero and heroine live happily ever after.

N.B.: There are apparently three, not two, volcanoes visible from Petropavlovsk.
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klyuchevskaya_Sopka
** I'm paraphrasing here.

Camping on Kamchatka, and Other Tales

Today it was Gi.'s, Ge.'s, and J.'s last day of school before the Easter holidays, and when they came home they were in a correspondingly good mood. Gi. and Ge. had written a German exam, partly or wholly about Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf, which neither had read all the way through; but both were considerably optimistic, or at least cheerful.

Yesterday evening I finished Science in the Kitchen. It turns out that the author was a proponent of vegetarianism; she described meat as a coarse substance that is not necessary to nutrition but is saturated with nasty body wastes, and fish in particular as flesh teeming with parasites. Also, she finds cucumbers barely nutritious and barely digestible unless cooked. On the other hand, she seems inordinately fond of carbohydrates; I barely exaggerate when I say that there is some sort of boiled grain in every recipe. I was wondering about the temperance movement as I read. If one makes an enormous moral issue out of even one glass of wine ("beware the social glass!", as I read in another book), doesn't it make alcoholics defensive, making them more likely to become aggressive and drink more, and doesn't it discourage those who truly make an effort to stop but sometimes relapse? The present-day practice of treating alcoholism (real alcoholism, not just having a glass with meals) as an illness and not as a sin is, in my view, far more reasonable and helpful. Besides, when morality is no longer directed against actions that concretely cause harm, it only discredits all other morality, in my view.

It's funny, I think, how the wheel of public opinion turns. For example, drinking a glass of red wine per day, once denounced as the gateway to inferior regions, is now extolled for its supposed health benefits. Personally, I find the constant changes of views on nutrition highly irritating. First saturated fats are bad, then hydrogenated fats, then trans-fats. First the anti-oxidants in fruits are good, then they are bad if one consumes too much of them. Sports drinks are good, then they erode the teeth. Then there was the Atkins diet and the corresponding preference for meat over grains, followed by its furtive disappearance. And so on and so forth. I wish that everything written on the subject were supported by clear-cut scientific evidence, so that the public isn't like a herd of sheep ignominiously driven to and fro by the barking of the press. I like healthy debate, but I don't like when much of that debate consists of a pack of untruths.

Anyway, now I'm reading Tent Life in Siberia by George Kennan (not that George Kennan, but his explorer forebear). First published in 1870, it is the account of a surveying expedition sent out to Siberia in 1865 by the Russian-American Telegraph Company (for the Western Union Telegraph Company) to prepare for a possible trans-pacific undersea cable. The first trans-atlantic cable had just failed, and before the second trans-atlantic cable was laid there was a window of opportunity for the Western Union, of which it thus attempted to take advantage (unsuccessfully, as it turned out). The trans-pacific sea journey, which took nearly seven weeks, was anything but enjoyable. Mr. Kennan had expected the ocean to correspond to the poetic ideal, sublimely grand, whereas it inspired him only with intense sea-sickness. Then he landed in Petropavlovsk(-Kamchatsky), a village of some two or three hundred inhabitants, some of them xenoi from America and Germany. This village was also an important Russian fortress during the Crimean War. Its surroundings are not Siberian wasteland, as one would expect, but quite green and lovely. To Mr. Kennan, who arrived on shore desperate for land in any size, shape or form, it was nearly like Paradise.

I did an internet search on the Crimean War, which directed me to the Wikipedia article. One article led to the other, and I had an amusingly eclectic read about Florence Nightingale (whose Notes on Nursing I also read on Project Gutenberg), The Little Rascals, the Mexican-American War, the Texas Revolution, the Charge of the Light Brigade, Benjamin Jowett and other friends of Florence Nightingale, and even Petropavlovsk. The humble Russian village now is a city of over 100,000 inhabitants. There were even photos of it in the article about it, with Avacha Bay in the foreground, the buildings clustered on the shore, and the two neighbouring volcanoes in the background.

Here is a funny quatrain from the article on Benjamin Jowett, who was the Master of Balliol College at Oxford:

First come I. My name is Jowett.
There's no knowledge but I know it.
I am the Master of this College,
What I don't know isn't knowledge.

(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Jowett)

To end on a gluttonous note, for dinner we had a grand pot roast made by Papa with beef, potatoes, leeks, carrots, onions, white wine, etc.. We had baguettes on the side, and for dessert there was Quark -- by which I don't mean the tiny particle that composes the atom, but the food that resembles sour cream -- with cherries.

Piano and Cookery

Today was a lovely sunny day. I went outside twice, but for the utilitarian aim of grocery-shopping. For dinner we had lentil soup, cooked by Papa. It turned out spicy, because I had bought a bundle of what I knew to be either parsley or cilantro, and knowing that both herbs would work in the dish, I decided to let myself be surprised. Also, the soup was identical in green colour and flavour to the one that we used to have back in Canada, on Wednesdays when we visited our grandfather, so it was a nice Proustian experience. For dessert there were blue grapes from South Africa.

Between the shopping and the eating I played for hours on the piano. I took a look at Schubert's sonatas D. 558 (c minor) and D. 559 (A major), because (on YouTube, of course) I had come across a video of Alfred Brendel performing them in 1988. The last movement of the A major sonata was stuck in my head, because it is so nice and also because Papa often plays the beginning of it. Besides this piece of sightreading, I also played the parts of Chopin's waltzes that I usually don't play because I've already given up, tried out new ragtime pieces by Scott Joplin (I played "The Entertainer" about six years ago, and still can't manage the chords now), and sightread another Spanish dance by Enrique Granados. Then I played a few bars of the piano part of Schubert's Forellenquintet, because on YouTube I had also come across the documentary where that quintet is performed by Itzhak Perlman, Daniel Barenboim, Jacqueline du Pré, Zubin Mehta, and Pinchas Zukerman. Today the bits of Beethoven sonatas went unusually well (for once, I played all of Opus 31 No. 2 and 3 through, instead of giving up part-way through), as did Schumann 's Kinderszenen.

On the internet I still read many news articles, but now they're mostly restaurant reviews and other food articles. I take that as an indication that I am a terrible glutton, and that my mental horizon is in some respects narrowing. My lazy assessment of proper news articles is that the news is always the same. There are usually explosions of some sort in Iraq, more violence in Darfur, sabre-rattling toward or by Iran, something about Hilary Clinton or Barack Obama, political agreements or dissensions among the Palestinians, a case of the bird flu, a flood or a boat capsizing, another boatload of refugees off Australia or Italy or the Canary Islands, and a Bush scandal. It's not that I'd rather read lots of "good news," or that I don't think this news is important, but I have the feeling that a great deal of important news is being ignored just because the preceding topics are the ones that touch on the West's self-interest. Besides, in the case of Iraq, the news all appears to be filtered through the Iraq government or the US army, because the reporters cannot go out much, and it is hard to tell what is really going on.

As far as my online reading goes, I have finished with the novels of Mary Jane Holmes, continued with the historical novels of Mary Johnston (To Have and to Hold, set in early colonial Virginia, and Sir Mortimer, set in England and overseas in the time of Elizabeth I), and am now browsing merrily along the authors whose last names begin with K. This time I am reading more non-fiction, so I peeked into a grammar book, and am currently in the middle of Science in the Kitchen (which was published in 1893).

The cookbook has a reference to Louis Pasteur in it, which reminded me of a reference to Louis Pasteur in another book (fiction, though), where the unlucky scientist was mentioned as an evil being who injects poison into patients for his own gratification. It was funny to read in the cookbook -- which is also amusingly quaint as far as kitchen appurtenances and scientific terminology go -- how flour was adulterated by unprincipled sellers, with alum or lime or some other white powder (the prudent housewife would, for example, test for lime by dripping lemon juice on the flour and seeing if it fizzles). Also, I was introduced to the idea that mustard, pepper and other condiments are bad for you. They apparently inflame the lining of the intestinal organs, besides stimulating an unnatural appetite. And throughout the book the author interwove a strong temperance message, lamenting, for instance, that the lovely grape should be "perverted" by fermentation.

The Shadow of Coming Events

Today I am unfortunately not much the wiser from the good resolves that my blogging instilled in me yesterday. The only educational thing I have done, aside from reading sundry news articles, was reading a sixteen-page New Yorker article. The article, written by George Packer, was about Iraqi translators working for the US in Iraq, who are distrusted, marginalized and neglected by their employers and threatened with violence by their fellow countrymen. Altogether the article painted a bleak picture of the situation in Iraq in general, and a bleak picture in particular of the insular ignorance and callous indifference of the largely unqualified American officials who are or were in charge of it -- nothing new, really.

At the same time that I read that, I must confess that I was watching the latest episode of America's Next Top Model on YouTube. I'm not particularly sure why I find the show so interesting. But I must say that, unlike the Canadian and Australian versions, there is a serious love of fashion and of modelling palpable in the American original, even in its eighth season on television. And slowly I am becoming enlightened as to what modelling, at its best, is about. I think it is very much an art form, like music or painting or any other. Appearance -- clothing, hair, makeup, and above all the model's face and form -- is used to create a work of art that can be as rich in terms of aesthetics, mood, and meaning as any other. And the aesthetic is not simply beauty, or attractiveness. There are many photo shoots on the show that do go against my grain because the subject is primitive, or tasteless, or both. But in the American show, at least, it is made clear that character, individuality, imagination, and feeling at ease with one's self are really the most important characteristics of a model -- in short, that mere physical attractiveness is far from everything. On the whole, the personalities of the contestants are usually interesting and respect-inspiring, if not likeable or unusually intelligent. Even in an environment that is unfamiliar, stressful, and artificial, they always collectively manage to leave a strong personal imprint on the series.

Yesterday evening I began writing a short story entitled "The Convalescent," which was largely inspired by my lonely walks to the Rathaus Schöneberg, and, still more, by my recent fever. The first three paragraphs were decent, then the story derailed and at length I decided that it would be more productive if I slept on it. Today felt too soon to take a look at the story again; besides, I must still think up a plot. Unfortunately I usually think of stories in terms of character, "themes," and sometimes setting, while not having the foggiest idea what to do by way of plot. The main point of this story is really the way that the small problems and maladjustments in life provide a nagging undercurrent of discomfort and even sadness similar to a cold or other slight illness, and can bubble over into something still more worrisome. But I don't want to be preachy, and I am very fond of plots. Right now I'm mostly wondering what the troubles of my heroine should be. I've deprived her mother of her job (money worries is another topic) and made her father have a feud with his father-in-law (marred relationships is a third topic), but for some reason I still don't think that's enough. So I domiciled a family of filthy mice under the kitchen sink in her student apartment and gave her a stingy roommate. Now I have a bad conscience and I still don't think it's enough.

Anyway, perhaps I can write something cheerful soon. It's just that I still feel unlike myself, also because I haven't been out to a museum or concert or lecture or anything else (other than the grocery store and the bakery) in Berlin for weeks. Even a trip to my uncle and aunt in the countryside can't wake me up much. One of the nice things about being at the university was that my mind was generally active, and not only was my conscious pleasantly occupied but my subconscious* was also working away at the unresolved problems of my non-academic life. I don't think that a job, or constant pressure to go somewhere and do something, or anything else would be half as effective in keeping me awake as my pulling myself together and setting out a course of study for myself that would also require me to leave the apartment -- or, better yet, studying at a university again.

If I am put on a waiting list for the FU, which is most likely, I will indeed be forced to pull myself together. At least the coming year can't be nearly as difficult and dreary as the year after I graduated. There, for instance, I spent months gnawing away at a chapter of ancient Greek which, at university, I ended up skipping entirely in order to get to the more essential matter. I know few things harder than trying to gather and synthesize knowledge on one's own, without any practical context, without anyone to explain anything or provide a new perspective, and without anyone to set the learning pace. Besides, I think it is fair to say that studying on my own is more difficult for me than it would be for most people; I am neither patient, persevering, studious, clear-minded, nor particularly self-confident. One benefit of my gap-year pit was, however, that university seemed incredibly easy and rewarding by contrast. At any rate, I think I should put a plan in place for the year(s) where I have to wait to get into university again. During my fever one of the things that I realized was that I would probably take another university-less year very badly.

* I use the terms "conscious" and "subconscious" loosely, since I admittedly don't really know anything about psychoanalysis.

P.S.: Today Mama went to the Leipziger Buchmesse (Leipzig Book Fair). Perhaps she will write something about it somewhere . . . at any rate I can't report anything because I haven't heard her tell about it yet.

Where Am I Going?

Today will be, I think, one of my more complaining posts. Though I am quite as cheerful as ever, I am once again anxious about the future, and I am asking myself, as I so often do: where have I come from, where am I, and where am I going? The answer to the first question generally consists of going back over my school experience and analysing it, but at this point that whole part of my life seems more like a distant dream than like reality, so the accuracy of the process is highly suspect.

"Where I am" is the more pertinent issue. At present I'm not worried about getting a job or getting into university, because I have convinced myself not to properly think about that until May. What does worry me is that, as far as I can tell, I no longer have any ambition at all. By ambition I mean the desire to learn, and the desire to explore new places, and plans for what I want to do in university and as a career. Probably I am simply demoralized by the long months of winter. But I've been making plans for self-improvement most of my life, and now I don't seem to have any. I think it would be nice to learn another language, or explore German and French literature, or read up on the things in Berlin's museums and art galleries, etc., but I no longer feel compelled to do so. Admittedly I felt compelled to do this kind of thing in the past because I thought that I would vegetate or be an ignoramus if I didn't, which is not a particularly pleasant motivation. And perhaps I have reached a decent point; for example, as far as telling the truth, doing the dishes, cleaning things up in general, not being disagreeable, not eavesdropping, etc., go, I am now quite successful, especially because I have little or no provocation to do otherwise. Besides, speaking three languages fluently is quite respectable.

But, still, I'm sure I could use an awful lot of improvement. For example, now that I am living comfortably up to my own moral standards, I am in considerable danger of becoming intolerably self-complacent. And, as for my knowledge, even in English literature -- even in nineteenth-century English literature -- there are still enormous gaps. In the other fields that really interest me, like history, current events, art, medicine and biology in general, music, archaeology, and gardening, I could and should know far more. On top of this there are the fields of which I should know more and in which I am moderately interested, especially psychology, philosophy, and nearly everything else.

Anyway, now that I've written all of this out, I think I do feel like learning something. (c:

Character and Inspiration

Today it was sunny again, a really smiling day that tempted an unusual number of people out onto the sidewalks. When I went grocery-shopping with Gi. I also saw that the median of the street in front of our apartment was bright with striped red and yellow tulips; further up there are yellow crocuses. I also noticed for the first time that the branches of the oak (or relative thereof) that grows in front of our living room window are full of buds.

Perhaps it's the spring that gives me the feeling that I can write something again, but so far I have no idea for a short story, which I'd rather do. My French Revolution and scion-of-noble-family-living-in-Victoria books are something I'd rather postpone until ideas and information have gathered, but my subconscious and conscious are working away particularly at the latter. For the second book, I've decided to give the main character misanthropic leanings. Which reminds me that I've been thinking that it's safest to give my characters at least one glaring shortcoming each. It's an easy way to make them more interesting, and to keep me from describing them in a bland and idealized way. Since I want my writing to be realistic, I don't want to have any of my characters embody my ideals, though I do want to like them. One problem I have is that I really don't want to put anyone whom I know well into my stories, which cramps me especially because my circle of acquaintances is so small.

I've also found that, as with knowledge of all sorts, that the more I know people, the more I see that I don't truly know them. This is not to say that they deceive or disappoint, but rather, to the contrary, that people have so many more sides to them than one believes, and that they can, for example, show compassionate vulnerability when one least expects it. It's already incredible what different sides of the same personality can be shown in a situation depending on its details. Take a stressful journey, for example. The car breaks down and the driver must hike to the next gas station. The mood, the behaviour of the driver can be very different based on what day it is. On Monday the driver might be in a foul mood; on Tuesday stoic; on Wednesday struck by the humorous side of the situation; on Thursday impatient; on Friday overcome with tears of disappointment and exhaustion. Then many small factors in the environment might play a role. If the day is sunny, the behaviour of the driver might be different from what it might have been if it had been rainy. If another automobilist comes up to help, depending on the impression that automobilist makes, the behaviour will be different again. Small factors in the history of the day and week preceding also make a difference.

That's also why I really dislike it when people judge others based on an insignificant action. Human nature is too complex to be judged based on a small acquaintance. It's a sad fact that people can act in ways contrary to their nature for their whole lives, or nearly their whole lives, mostly because their environment or upbringing is adverse.

Anyway, I hope that a short story idea will come to me soon. I believe very much in inspiration, though I also believe in writing fairly regularly even without inspiration for practice and on the off-chance that something will come up after all. Perhaps the Scarlatti sonatas will spark something, or the opera I've been watching on YouTube (after many clips of Joan Sutherland, Marilyn Horne, Renée Fleming, Luciano Pavarotti, etc. I'm starting to see that opera has its good points despite terrible sentimental plots and frequently lousy acting after all). Today, by the way, I found an old black and white clip of Arturo Toscanini conducting the NBC orchestra in 1944; the performance of the overture of Verdi's Forza much impressed me.

In terms of the piano, I've been experiencing plenty of inspiration today and yesterday, the source of this inspiration probably being the fever. It feels disconcertingly devilish when I'm playing with 4/3 my usual agility and speed, and fingering snarls are dissolved as if by magic. Yesterday I had one of my "genius days," which only come about perhaps twice a year -- pieces by Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann and Schubert all went phenomenally well, though pieces by Mozart and Mendelssohn and the scherzo in Schubert's B flat major sonata didn't. But today I played "soullessly," so I broke off after a while. It's rather annoying that when I play very well it's a product of the subconscious and not the conscious, and that I have essentially no control over it. I think this lack of control is what gave me the "devilish" feeling. I suppose that if one is a genius one has this feeling often, and it's one reason I'm glad I'm not a genius.

I Become An Ailing Dickensian Orphan

Today is my second full day of a fever-cold combination that has thoroughly outdone my previous achievements in the category, as far as I can remember. While I feel full of energy most of the time, I sometimes feel very warm and perspiry or a little dizzy, my mind is working quickly (I can't say unusually quickly, because "quickly" doesn't describe its usual state anyway), my throat and head sometimes hurt, I cough and sneeze, and my temperature at one point reached 39.4 degrees Celsius. J., for once, made orphan jokes about me, and not vice versa.

But because of the energy, the nice sunny weather, my healthy appetite, the presence of every necessary comfort and remedy, the contrast to more painful physical and emotional ailments, and at least a week of excellent sleep beforehand, the illness is quite bearable. Also, the increased speed at which my neurons are firing mean that my memory, concentration, and ability to play the piano are all unquestionably in good shape, and I've been able to think matters over with greater distance and objectivity than usual. Sometimes, admittedly, the matters had best go unthought-of. I was thinking yesterday evening what would happen if I went blind; the day before yesterday I was worried that I might develop pneumonia. The things that perhaps more reasonably worry me is that I haven't clearly found out how serious the illness is (I think I'm exaggerating its importance), that my mind may be a little aberrant without my knowing it (for example, I've felt like crying and tried not to start because I feared that I wouldn't be able to stop), and that I am worried that people are angry at me (I would have tried to clear this up yesterday already, but I didn't feel clear-minded and strong enough to do it). I was with my uncle and aunt in the countryside until yesterday evening so I've felt rather disorientated too. Besides, I find losing my voice very unpleasant.

Anyway, it was nice today, though. I slept soundly, had a bath, lay down in the living room, played pieces by Mozart and Chopin and Schumann and Bach and Beethoven fairly slowly and quietly, read another chapter of Waverley, ate brunch with Papa, and talked a lot with T. and Ge. There are, it seems, many people in Ge.'s and Gi.'s classes who have colds. But in this family so far only J., Mama, and I have been stricken; Mama went to work anyway, and J. to school. The real event of the day was a work meeting to which Papa went, at a company that converts old computers and computer parts into new ones to be used for specific technical purposes.

Hopefully the next time I post, I will be cured! Then, instead of describing my symptoms for the benefit of a reluctant audience, I might write about Waverley. In the countryside I took a look at the Decameron too, and was much disappointed to find that it is perhaps 90% about women cheating on their husbands, which for some reason I find neither hilarious nor interesting except in a transient sensationalist way (I'm trying to put this as snobbily as possible). So I read too little of it to be able to discuss it. I did read the short tale of the woman who roused a king from his apathetic modus regendi by asking him to give her some of his power to bear the unbearable. Given the clearly violent nature of the regenerated king's rule, I don't know if the ending is meant to be good or not. Perhaps it is simply realistic.

The Adventures of a Night Owl

Today it was a special day in that I had stayed up the whole preceding night. Mostly I watched classical music videos on YouTube -- Gregor Piatigorsky, Artur Rubinstein, Jascha Heifetz, Martha Argerich, Evgeny Kissin, Vladimir Horowitz, Emil Gilels, etc. I alternately have bits of Beethoven's Sonata appassionata, Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 3 and a prelude, and one of Scarlatti's sonatas stuck in my head. There was a video in Japanese about the Polish pianist Mieczyslaw Horszowski, with whose interpretation of pieces from the Well-Tempered Clavier I really like, and whose interpretation of Mozart I like too. Then there was Horowitz's February 1, 1968 Carnegie Hall recital in full; I was struck again how beautifully he brings Scarlatti's sonatas to life. At the same time I read online novels and checked up on an online forum. Also, I began to take a look at photos of as many French castles as I could, hoping to find a closer prototype for my Revolution story. There is one tall, stately chateau with nearly a Scottish air standing splendidly erect on an outcropping in front of the stern, towering backdrop of the Alps. On its website there is a photo of the chateau library, which is essentially my ideal, and gave me the same teary-eyed feeling that some of the most touching music did.

By the time that everyone else unwillingly began to awaken (with the exception of T., who had shared my vigil) I was in very good spirits, though my eyes were somewhat tired and the mirror informed me that I was looking pale. I prepared porridge and eggs, and mentally planned to clean up the kitchen later on. But the awakening sleepers were woefully tired. As for Mama and J., they were and are in the throes of a bad cold. J. usually looks pale and wan, but today he has unquestionably outdone himself. He took Dickens-orphan jokes in good part as he reclined on the sofa. I read out the first chapter of A Tale of Two Cities and the first three and a half pages of Thucydides's Peloponnesian War to him while (or should I say whilst?) attempting a British accent, after which he looked quite cheerful. Then he had to go to school, having had only the first hour off.

I went shopping and amused myself on the internet again and played the piano while the others were at school. The piano went quite well, perhaps because the bad-playing-patch has just naturally faded away, or because I was in a receptive mood for music, or because my mind was too tired for uncertainty about notes. First of all I copied down and analyzed the first few measures of Claude Daquin's "Coucou." This means, for example, that I noted the key, saw how and where the sound of the cuckoo is imitated, and realized that I should probably make the second bar be a fainter echo of the first. Then I played Bach inventions and sinfonias, pieces from the Well-Tempered Clavier, Chopin mazurkas and bits of waltzes as well as polonaises and nocturnes, and bits of Mozart and Haydn sonatas, followed by pieces from my Grade 7 and 8 conservatory notebooks. Also, for the very first time I sight-read (slowly and painfully) all of Chopin's "Heroic" Polonaise, which I have determined to master, though I am still undecided whether it is merely a show-off piece or not.

Then I prepared dinner: chicken soup, rice, asparagus (from Spain, and very pale-looking with a purplish tinge that seemed to turn greenish during cooking), and apple sauce. The "Suppenhuhn," or "soup chicken," that I got, turned out to be a particularly meagre specimen. My battle with it when I tried to separate meat from bone and skin (the skin did separate beautifully, though) was, in my view, a fairly convincing argument for vegetarianism. Papa, who ended up doing the majority of the dissection work, said that the chicken was unusually rubbery. At least the broth tasted good, aswim as it was with leek and onion and carrot and chicken flavour. It had been a peculiar experience to shop before ten o'clock. New stock had apparently been recently delivered to the store, and it was a quintessential consumerist experience to see a wonderful array of products crowding the shelves of which I usually behold only a sad contingent after its ranks have already been much reduced.

Anyway, in the evening Mama and J. weren't much better. J. lay sleeping for a while on the sofa, colourful silk scarf around his throat, pillows behind him, and a blanket over him, with a water-soaked white washcloth on his forehead, with his head at an angle. For some reason I was reminded of one of Goya's paintings of the Spanish Civil War. He was and probably still is quite pale (as was or is Mama), the skin somewhat shiny, the mouth unusually dark, and the hollow around his eyes reddish. The effect was heightened by his very dark shirt. Based on my online novel reading, I might say that he looked like a consumptive, and I was much impressed by the ghastliness of his looks. I admit I made quite a few flippant remarks in the vein of my earlier orphan jokes, but J. doesn't really seem to mind it. And certainly I didn't (and couldn't reasonably) accuse him of hypochondria. Poor miserable little fellow.

The only other thing of note to me that occurred in the day was that someone from an environmental organization was going door to door. I've been worrying about doing my part for the environment, and the person was nice, so I agreed to shell out 100 Euro annually (the recommended donation being 2-3 Euros monthly) for the organization. It turns out from a speedy consultation of the website that the work of the organization is more in the lobbying/eco-friendly-social-gathering direction than much of the practical assistance I prefer, but it is certainly reputable and I haven't felt remorse yet.

Hail, Hardy, and Musical Introspection

To start yet again with the weather, today was a most interesting spring-like day. I woke up before nine, when it was cloudy. In the course of the morning -- which I spent reading about the Academy Awards and looking at the dresses, drying the dishes, doing beginners' Latin exercises (exciting stuff, about the domina receiving convivae at her villa), and leafing through the Feuilleton section of the Berliner Zeitung -- the sun intermittently appeared. I eventually went for a walk, blithely expecting the sun to emerge again from what I realized at the Rathaus (Schöneberg) to be a sky entirely blanketed with pearly grey. After turning a small round at the Rathaus, where isolated flower and clothing and bakery booths formed the remnants of the matinal market, I returned. Then a light sprinkling of rain began, intensifying into pelting precipitation, and rapidly reaching the stage of thick driving hail. I did not mind this at all, though the hail forced me to blink. By the time I had taken off my scarf and jacket back in the apartment, the hail was perhaps half a centimeter deep, and the green Hauptstraße median and the rooftops looked as if it had lightly snowed. But then the sun did come out again, and a universal dripping began -- quite lovely, in fact.

Throughout the rest of the day I was inclined to be cross, especially because I've been hanging around at home too much, but I didn't become openly disagreeable. I read articles in the New York Review of Books about the Hungarian Uprising in 1956 (which we learned about in History 12) ; Thomas Hardy; James Laughlin, the publisher; and Pedro Almódovar and Volver. Of Thomas Hardy's books, I've read The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and the Return of the Native. When I first read the first and third books they were a sort of revelation to me, because there was something (I don't know what) in Hardy's writing that I felt I had missed everywhere else without knowing that I had. At the same time I'm still uncomfortable with the moral turbulence of the books. On the whole I like The Mayor of Casterbridge the best, probably because I am callous as to what happened to the unfortunate mayor so long as his daughter didn't meet some tragic end. Also because Donald Farfrae and Elizabeth provide the matter-of-fact grounding that I like every book to have -- and that is, for instance, a trait that I find really appealing in Jane Eyre. By the way, I don't think that my opposition to the ending of Tess of the D'Urbervilles is solely based on the fact that it is unhappy; I think that it is melodramatic and unfair to the character of Tess, even in a desperate state.

I found the article on Thomas Hardy interesting and there was much information that was new to me. But parts of it verged on "too much information." Altogether the articles in the NYRB that deal with the private lives of well-known cultural figures interest me to a certain extent and repel me beyond that. One might say that I shouldn't read them then -- well, I do skip over parts or stop reading. I don't really care about the sex lives of great people, for instance. It may be my years of Victorian-era reading, but I think that there is much of the personality and the intellect that has nothing to do with sex, and that can be discussed interestingly, tastefully, and with respect for privacy. It similarly annoys me when character flaws of the dead and living are picked out with annihilating efficiency. Is it really fair that people who are famous are not only besieged with scrutiny while they live, but also subject to scrutiny and more often than not misinterpretation when they are dead? That said, the character criticisms of the Review are probably mostly just and sometimes amusing, but I think they could be more sparing.

For dinner Papa made delicious sweet and sour pork and chicken. The colours, appearance, flavours -- everything was harmonious. I made rice on the side; it turned out beautifully, though my method only consisted of boiling the salty water, dumping in the rice, stirring it twice, then leaving and forgetting it so that Papa had to take care of it. It contrasted agreeably with the irregularly done brown rice I made a few days ago, which much resembled gruel.

In the evening I played the piano, but not very well. My fingers are cold, and above all I'm not attuned to the music. I have been thinking a lot lately how well I can play, and my browsing of classical music clips on YouTube has greatly helped. In the end, I think, my understanding of the music and the originality with which I sometimes interpret it are unusually good, but my technique and lack of incisive intelligence as well as mental clarity present obstacles that I could only overcome if I really, truly wanted to pursue it. My pedalling is bad, trills and ornaments of every sort uneven, tone often muddy, fingers uneven and not strong or agile or quick, hands not able to reach more than an octave plus one, arpeggios particularly bad. I still tend to think of notes one at a time, rather than as sets of four, for example; my mind is not quite quick enough to play notes in quick succession above a certain low level. I haven't properly memorized a piece in years. I don't know anything about harmony or counterpoint, and little about the history of music, though I do know the "rudiments" of theory. And I don't have the patient, relaxed persistence that allows me to experiment with fingering, for example, as I should. Instead I rely on flashes of intuition and general mental development over time to correct my playing. All in all, when I play at the piano, it seems to me that the music emerges in spite of my hands, and not through their mediation.

Well, I'll see again tomorrow, but it seems to me that this is not an attempt at self-deprecation but an honest assessment as far as I can make it. Either way, I'm not in bad spirits, because I've read a nice online novel.

A Visit and a Story

It's a cloudy, rainy, sombre day. I only woke up at around two o'clock, though I had gone to sleep at around midnight, perhaps because I hadn't slept very well.

But when I did wake up, my aunt S. came for a visit, followed by uncle W. and my cousin A. Over cake and coffee, we talked about German television (the crime shows Tatort and Ein Fall für Zwei, people's-judge and Jerry-Springer-type shows, as well as the American-Idol-imitation Deutschland Sucht den Superstar), Japanese animé and culture in general, literature in school (Gi. and Ge. have to read Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf), shao lin, etc.

Now Papa and Mama, perhaps with help from Gi. or Ge., are setting up the metal storage boxes that we will use to hold art supplies, papers inherited from our grandfather, and other odds and ends left in our moving boxes.

In the meantime I am revolving a new story idea in my mind. The main character, based on one of the students at UBC who seemed quite unusual and interesting, is the scion of the royal family of an imaginary country. His parents were killed by radicals in the eighties, so he is being raised by his grandparents in a sort of "splendid isolation" in their large, rambling rural house. This house, to be precise, is located on the northern shore of Elk Lake (I have a specific one in mind; a light brown one surrounded by cottonwoods, perceptible in the distance from Brookleigh Rd.), in Victoria. His grandparents are very aristocratic in their tastes; they have the best food, listen to the best music, read the best books, and so on and so forth, trying in essence to live their lives as if they were still in Europe. So their grandchild's existence is completely out of touch with the surroundings, though he is intelligent, well-read, and he has many interests. He goes to a normal school (I need to figure out some reason why he wouldn't go to a private school, which I don't want to describe because I don't know what it's like), and, while respected by everyone, keeps mostly to himself. Then one or both of the grandparents die(s) during the main character's last year in school. And then he enters university, intending to study medicine. That's as far as I've gotten.

To be quite clear, I'm not killing off so many characters to add superficial excitement, and I certainly hope that I won't write about it callously. It is simply easier to write about the difficulties of life if they have a tangible cause; I think that many people only understand trouble if it comes in the shape of a bad relationship, death, poverty, or disease. I, on the other hand, agree with George Eliot's comment in the Mill on the Floss that the sorrows of childhood, even from trivial causes by adult standards, are as real and severe to a child as any other. Or, to quote Shakespeare, "The poor beetle that we tread upon / In corporeal suffering feels a pang as great / As when a giant dies." But in this case I think that outright tragedy -- though not in the simplified and etherealized form common in theatre -- is permissible.

Piano, Homework, Dinner and Virtuous Resolves

Today it was a quiet, busy, cloudy day. I got up in the afternoon, well rested and not at all uneasy of conscience. I played the piano, starting with Czerny exercises and continuing with scales and the fourth Preludium in the Well-Tempered Clavier, Vol. I. It wasn't a brilliant session by any means, and I was absentminded most of the time, but I enjoyed it. I went shopping for dinner later on; the dinner consisted of oven-grilled lamb, couscous, Greek salad, flatbread left over at Mama's work, olives, figs, and feta cheese baked over with paprika. Now I make the Greek salad without any onion, and I think it is no great loss.

I've been thinking as usual about pulling myself together and undertaking something. The day before yesterday I decided to try to have a short story published in the New Yorker. I want to write several short stories, decide which is the best, leave that one alone for a month and then proofread it again, and then submit it per e-mail. Since the magazine staff prefer to have only two short story submissions per year, I was planning to have one story written by May, and another written by September. I do also want to take a look at the published stories in the magazine from time to time, so that I know what they're looking for.

Another way of pulling myself together is to start learning things again. One of the things that was good in university is that I had to read a certain number of pages and absorb a certain amount of information regularly. I want to do this at home, too. I think that it is really the lack of mental occupation that brings out the slow-witted, self-absorbed, and whiny elements in me. At the same time I do want to go to lectures, concerts, museums, art exhibitions, etc. It is not so easy because I feel ill at ease spending money, whether it is logical to do so or not, and because, oddly enough, there is not always something going on that interests me. But it doesn't bother me so much any more if no one comes with me, though I would certainly prefer if someone did.

Anyway, in the evening J. and I did part of his Spanish homework. He had to look up websites of different large Spanish shopping centres where one can also buy products online, and answer questions about them. First of all, I thought that the assignment is advertising, which has no place in a school. Secondly, I thought the assignment is impractical. J. groaned much of the time. Stupid school. Soon uncle W. came to visit, and, procuring a handful of pistachios, J. decided to stop working, and retired from the field with a listless and weary expression. Such is life.

And now I shall return to my pious nineteenth-century novel, A Face Illumined (I am now reading Gutenberg books by authors whose last names start with R). Not the author's best, I would say.

Stirrings of Spring, and Schoolyard Psychology

Today it was bright and sunny, altogether spring-like. Before I went to sleep yesterday night I already heard the birds twittering outside. When I went to the St. Matthäus graveyard in the Großgörschenstraße yesterday, small but very pretty purple crocuses were growing all over, three daisies grew bravely from their flattened leaves, a cluster of white hellebores ("Christrosen") was in full bloom, the drooping branches of a low tree possibly belonging to the cherry family were beaded with pale pink buds, a row of Oregon grape bushes was crowded with fringy yellow blossoms, the birds were singing and a fly buzzing, and a tiny brown shrew was scampering to and fro around one of the graves.

I played the piano, went to the Staatsbibliothek at the Kulturforum and blogged about it, and read the beginning of the Principles of Chemistry (published 1970 but still helpful today (c: ). It was only today that I realized that isotopes, having different numbers of neutrons, must necessarily also have different atomic weights. In my defense, I never took Chemistry in school and my knowledge derives from my Science classes from grades 7 to 10 (we were introduced to the atom in Grade 8, if I remember correctly; Chemistry 11 is where I would have learned the sad truth that an atom does not truly look like a planet with electrons orbiting around it circularly like moons). In the afternoon W. came over, and we ate "Berliner" (jam-filled doughnuts sprinkled with sugar) and drank coffee as well as champagne in honour of Rosenmontag ("Rose Monday," which is a significant day for Catholics but I don't know why).

For the piano lessons, I've tried to develop a new routine. I'll begin with finger exercises, continue with a set of scales (D major and minor today), play a prelude and fugue from the Well-Tempered Clavier, then go on to practice my pieces as intelligently as I can. The day before yesterday I watched delightful lectures by Leonard Bernstein analysing Shostakovich's ninth (?) as well as Beethoven's pastoral symphony, and they gave me a whole new perspective (or more than one) on music. So today I looked at the first movement of Schubert's B major sonata with this approach in mind: I tried isolating different motifs, identifying the key of these motifs as well as the key's relation to the tonic key, and looking for transformations of the motifs. I'm not generally fond of theory, but this, in moderation, proved quite acceptable. Then I worked on technically difficult bits, such as the transition between chords without using the pedal.

But I am generally in a discouraged mood. My life still hasn't changed much from the way it's been for fifteen years -- it's still isolated and not very fruitful. I've been thinking about this isolatedness and the underlying problem, I believe, is this:

Even though I'm not in school any more, I still understand society the way I got to know it there, and it has really gotten in the way of getting to know people around my age -- or any people at all. The unspoken rule, especially for girls, was that an unpopular person should not speak to or in any way approach people higher in the social hierarchy unless he is spoken to first or unless it is absolutely necessary. It is an honour to associate with popular people, and a disgrace (leaving one open to teasing) or at best a necessary evil to associate with unpopular people. The exception to the rule of non-communication: an unpopular person may carefully ask popular people (indirectly, of course) to take him on at least as a second-class friend. If they are receptive, they might still ask him directly or indirectly to change his appearance or behaviour -- e.g. his clothing (as my friends did at my 13th birthday party), the type of music he listens to or the television shows he watches -- in order to have more in common with them. Usually the unpopular person changes these things of his own initiative. I was too inflexible to do this, and I don't think that a friendship on such terms is worth much anyway.

Sometimes I did want to be friends with popular people in school and university; some were really unusually nice, and some were not only nice but also intellectually my superiors. But I was too fearful of being obtrusive to even speak to them. Besides, in school (not in university) it would have been impractical to be friends with a popular classmate because I would have had to fit in with the friendship circle of that classmate. And, to be honest, out of the hundreds of students whom I've known and usually liked in school and university, only a handful really interested and impressed me.

Anyway, this analyzing has probably much reduced the workload for a future psychotherapist, and now I feel that I can move on to a delightful pious nineteenth-century novel. (c:

My Hundredth Post

To celebrate the occasion, I will make this an odds-and-ends post.

Music

Yesterday evening Papa, Mama and I watched (on television) Daniel Barenboim performing three Beethoven sonatas at the Staatsoper. He began with the Moonlight Sonata, though we only heard the second and third movements, the latter of which was faster than I had thought, but it worked except that there didn't seem to be much of a point to the movement. He continued with Sonata No. 19 (?), one of the pleasant short sonatas that I know well because Papa played it often when we were little. At the end, appropriately enough, he played Les Adieux (earlier today Papa tried it out too). I must say that I prefer Papa's way of playing Beethoven's sonatas; when his mood is right he plays them fairly slowly, so that the music has time to sink in, without any artificial attempts at effect, and in a very sympathetic and nice way. But Mama remarked this morning that she did find Mr. Barenboim's playing quite "empfindsam" (sensitive, I suppose it would be in English). Anyway, the camera angles for the concert were occasionally hilarious, zooming in on Mr. Barenboim's thumb or on his pinkie, or rotating from above so that Mama and I made jokes about feeling seasick.

Travel

In the New York Times there was a nice article about Oxford, where T. and I went nearly two years ago. I enjoyed the following anecdote:

One 20th-century student reputedly demanded a flagon of claret during his exams, having discovered an ancient rule in the University Statute Book entitling him to. The invigilator was able to annul the request because the student was improperly dressed: according to another statute, he should have been wearing a saber.

Politics

This evening Mama and I went to a lecture by an Israeli professor, Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, about binationalism. It turns out that the term binationalism is not synonymous with a two-state solution. Instead it is an older concept, in circulation before the modern Israeli state even existed, propounded first in the 1920s by a small circle of intellectuals within the group Brit Shalom. An opposite of the colonialist concept of planting a Jewish state in the middle of Palestinian territory, the idea was to find a common cultural and, if I understand correctly, even national identity with the Arabs. It also means a rejection of a "two-state solution" in which Israel and Palestine become wholly alienated neighbours, which simply cannot work out well. The professor brought up the dichotomies inherent in the present-day Israeli population, even the non-"Arab" portion, and Jews in the past: Western vs. Eastern, Ashkenazi vs. Sephardim, secular vs. religious. There is no reason why a middle ground should not be found. Gershom Scholem, for instance, seems to have identified the West with colonialism and oppression, and exhorted the Jews to stand with the East. And, just as Jewish does not inevitably mean Western, religion does not inevitably mean ultra-Zionist. So binationalism addresses not only the rift between Israeli and Palestinian but also the rift between Israelis of different origin. Binationalism would be very difficult to translate into political reality, but using it as a premise for discussion would, the professor argued, be helpful today, and such a discussion is certainly still relevant at a time where the unilateral-Jewish-state vision has brought about such an unendurable situation.

Weather

Rainy and cold. Cotton wool clouds in night sky.

Film

At the Konzerthaus at the Gendarmenmarkt there was evidently a Berlin Film Festival (Berlinale) event. A fenced in corridor, a tented photo shoot area, an umbrella-carrying crowd, shouting, camera flashes, and a red carpet leading all the way up the really high stairs of the Konzerthaus. I must confess that I have rather felt like "gawking at celebrities," as I like to put it -- the Sony Centre is just up the street. And I read lots of news articles today about the Grammy and Bafta Awards. A profound intellectual on an elevated plane of existence I am not.

Books

I've reached the "M" authors on gutenberg.org again. I was re-reading bits of Harold McGrath's books. Yesterday I did also read part of a review-essay by Thomas Macaulay about a historical book by Henry Hallam, which -- even a hundred and fifty-odd years after it was written -- made me want to read the book. I've never understood how the authors of certain Victorian history books that I've read could justify perpetrating so many implied lies and half-truths in their pursuit of a moral view of the past, so Mr. Hallam's apparent impartiality much appeals to me. It was also interesting thinking about the role of a historian.

Then I began reading the memoirs of a French aristocrat, who was born in 1772, married a M. de Lescure at the age of 18, when the Revolution began fled to Paris (of all places!) and was well received by the Princesse de Lamballe and stayed on until the Louvre was overrun and until clergymen and aristocrats were being murdered in the street, then went to the south of France where her husband fought and died in the Vendée. To me the woman seemed incredibly stupid despite her intelligence, with some inexplicable predilection for the most dangerous areas in France. To be fair, she stayed on in Paris out of loyalty to Their Majesties. Later, however, I kept on expecting her to emigrate, but she didn't! The strongest argument in her favour is, I think, the contrast between her as well as her husband and the aristocracy of Poitiers. As she describes it, the young Poitevin nobles were plotting a grand rebellion, but at the news of the king's failed flight to Varennes (if I remember correctly), though the Poitevin peasantry supported them, they stampeded out of the country like a flock of scared sheep.

Poem

Perhaps there is
some page of some book,
or some tablet in a mind,
where it is written
who fails
and
who succeeds.

The tiny steps
an author takes
-- the books he reads,
the poems he writes,
the way he revises line after line
(criticism heard and acted on) --
do these steps tend to some end
or are they simply progress on a road
that, neverending, leads nowhere?

What is it we are looking for?
-- To others, fame; to others, fortune.
What it is that I am searching
is some expression of the world
that is all mine, yet open to all,
and something good and something true
that will give my life some meaning,
that will give my life some end.

All that I can do at present
is ponder shadows of the future.
What will be real and what illusion?
When will the answer at last be given?

Reading, Riches, and Poverty

Today it was a delightful sunny day. Of course I stayed immured in our apartment like the lazy mole I unfortunately tend to be. But at least my mood was lifted, if my feet were not.

I've showered, made my bed, played Chopin mazurkas and waltzes, read The English Orphans by Mary Jane Holmes online, read newspaper articles online, and eaten. My hands are not perfectly healthy yet, but they're much better. Yesterday I read the introduction and first chapter of a book (my uncle's Christmas present) by Rick Gekoski entitled Eine Nacht mit Lolita. It's about the author's encounters with various books, and the history of the books' publication.

I also read two articles from the New York Review of Books, one being David Grossman's speech at a memorial service for Yitzhak Rabin, and the other being about Marie Antoinette and fashion. There was an interesting phrase in the latter article about the court being a place where affected sentimentality took the place of any real emotion; also, I found it illuminating to read that the Queen could not reach for a glass of water herself if she wanted one, and was forced to request someone else to give it to her. Of course neither idea is an innovation, but I hadn't thought of them as clearly before.

The general idea about Versailles and other courts is that it has little relation to the "realities of life." But certainly the life of a court lady or gentleman would not have been any more unnatural and un-human than the life of a pauper of the slums. If the "realities of life" means "the unpleasantness experienced by the lower classes," certainly the pauper would know more about those; but that is not, I think, all that reality is about. I often wonder what reality is. Most people seem to think of it as a set of shared experiences. But, after all, everything that happens is reality. Anyway, I think that if I actually read philosophy I would be able to spare everyone my tentative speculations! (c:

I'm still thinking about my French Revolution story. The d'Eules family is currently expecting an elderly aunt from Paris, who will hopefully turn out not to resemble Betsy Trotwood or Lady Catherine de Bourgh or any other pre-existing ladies of literature. But I've been thinking that I haven't been writing the book "in my own voice" so far, and I want to re-write it anyway.

As for other projects, I want to donate blood some time soon, and research more about applying to university (personally, I find the former less painful). I still have "existential angst," or whatever it is, off and on (though not as badly as just before I wrote my last post), and I've been seriously considering doing volunteer work for the very selfish aim of not feeling that my life is useless. I've been wondering, for instance, if there are any orphanages in Berlin. That may sound like I'm still stuck in Dickens and that I'm trying to emulate Little Dorrit or some other pious heroine, but the real reason I'm wondering about them is that I've read unsettling things about orphanages in Russia. The other thing is that I have no real idea what's going on in the poorest parts of the society in which I live, and I think I should. But it seems to be so difficult to really help. For example, is it really helping to serve food in soup kitchens to homeless people? Couldn't some of them do this themselves, and be paid for doing it? Still, maybe if I actually tried it out I would see the rationale for it, instead of which I am still entirely an armchair philanthropist, who doesn't even donate money to charities.