Spring Cleaning: Quotations Written Down in 2018

I am clearing my desk, a little, and à la Marie Kondo, I am looking to see if my old bank statements 'spark joy.'

In the trains to and from work, I sometimes scribble down quotations. I'll share a few of last year's scribblings below, because they were amongst the papers on my desk.

***

Brave New World
Aldous Huxley
p. 12

Great is the truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects, by lowering what Mr Churchill calls an 'iron curtain' between the masses and such facts or arguments as the local political bosses regard as undesirable, totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have done by the most eloquent denunciations, the most compelling of logical rebuttals.

*

Andromaque
Racine
p. 39 (Bordas, 1979)
Act. I sc. i
Verses 121-122

Il peut, Seigneur, il peut, dans ce désordre extrême,
Épouser ce qu'il hait et punir ce qu'il aime.

(Rough translation: He may, Sire, he may, in this extreme disorder, espouse that which he hates and punish that which he loves.)

*

Trumpian Fallacy:

Politik
Aristoteles, transl. Franz F. Schwarz
Stuttgart: Reclaim, 1989

p. 219

Doch man ist gewöhnt, die Verfassungen, die sich mehr zur Demokratie neigen, Politien zu nennen, aber die, die mehr zur Oligarchie neigen, Aristokratie, weil den Wohlhabenderen eher Bildung und edle Geburt folgen. Dazu aber scheinen die Wohlhabenden das schon zu besitzen, weswegen die Rechtsbrecher Unrecht tun. Daher bezeichnet man diese als ehrenwerte und anerkannte Leute.

(Rough translation: Yet one is used to call those constitutions, which incline toward democracy, polities; but those, which incline toward oligarchy, aristocracy; since education and noble birth are likelier to follow the wealthy. Moreover the wealthy seem to possess that already, for the sake of which lawbreakers do unjust things. Therefore one defines these as venerable and respected people.)

p. 220

Bei den meisten beinahe scheinen nämlich die Wohlhabenden den Platz der ehrenwerten Leuten einzunehmen.

(Rough translation: Almost for the majority of people, the wealthy seem to occupy the place of the venerable.)

*

p. 456 (Footnotes)

Der hl. Thomas sagt zu Anfang von De ente et essentia: "parvus error in principio magnus est in fine."

(Rough translation: St. Thomas says at the beginning of De ente et essentia: 'a small error in the beginning is large in the end.')

Stars and Bars Before the Weekend

We've had a glimpse of March in February, and the world was positively bathed in sunlight this morning, so that I saw hundreds of details during the morning train ride that I had never seen before. It has been delightfully warm — happily, not so warm that I was fearing that global warming would kill humanity forthwith.

I have made progress in The Structure and Evolution of the Stars. Martin F. Schwarzschild is winding down and concluding his findings, rather than assailing my brain with further mathematical formulae.

In the evening, after work, I went to a 'Späti' — the Berlin answer to North America's 7-11, except that the Berlin shops are independent and seen now as endangered jewels of our neighbourhoods ('Kieze') — with colleagues. We were saying farewell to a departing colleague. I bought, to be honest, two bars of chocolate, while the others were drinking beers; and have to admit I felt tremendously uncool.

Because it is winter and the benches outside the Späti are not capacious, we walked on to a bar after almost everyone had two or three beers.

It has rude sketches hanging as decor which I hadn't noticed before, which a woman colleague pointed out to me this evening. But the bar has been pleasant whenever I've been there: dark-blue couches and stools, tea lights in glass holders and flowers (e.g. a golden daffodil, very Wordsworth) in a glass jug on the tables, red-speckled lighting, and antiquated architectural 'bones' like the peri-19th-century doorways and passages, with a semi-Gothic atmosphere.

I was in an awkward mood: my nose was congested, I was too quiet to be heard often, and I felt selfish because I had my back to half of the colleagues. But the colleagues made kindly and sincere efforts to 'include' me, also at the Späti earlier. And I hope I was able to say goodbye to the colleague in this way, to his satisfaction.

I took leave early, and I walked two train stations further, which took half an hour, before taking the train and reaching home. Especially on the bridge at Ostkreuz station I saw the Orion constellation, more stars, the moon, and trails of airplanes; rectilinear patches of building window lights, red lights along the train tracks, headlamps and taillights of cars, dipped paler beams of street lamps, sparkling Christmas lights, watery reflections of the building lights on Rummelsbucht, and the white flares of bicycle lights heading toward me in a covered construction passage. Not that I noticed all the terrestrial nights today with precision; I had catalogued them yesterday or the day before.

The starry night suggested Terre des hommes to me. It is hard for me to read because of its enigmatic language and its recherché vocabulary. But as I have an airplane mechanic brother it takes on an immediate interest. I'd read an anecdote at the beginning: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and a navigator (?) are lost over the sea at night, during a postal delivery flight in the 1920s or so. They cannot see the coast or the water, which lie in deep fog, and keep steering for stars that they think are Earth lights. The airplane is running out of fuel, drop by drop.

I liked reading about planets in the Encyclopaedia Britannica at eight years of age, but I'd lost that enthusiasm over the years, although I considered taking Astronomy as my science elective course at UBC. This enthusiasm is coming back to me. I think there's something pure and lovely about outer space; and I find its workings more reasonable and less fantastical to read about, than the workings of terrestrial chemistry, physics or biology.

Along the way I also bought organic groceries. At home, later, I made sautéed spinach with onions, cut up beetroot to eat raw, divided up a bar of milk chocolate, and also put black beluga lentils to boil. Needless to say, I am not always this socio-ecologically conscientious or nutritionally punctilious.

After all this, I reached home after 9:30. One of my uncles had invited me to a family meeting nearby. But I felt it was too late to cross the road and see if the relatives, including two of my uncles, were still awake, present, and chatting with each other. Mama had been studying intensively at home, so I couldn't gauge by her presence or absence whether the party was ongoing, and wouldn't have had her morally bracing proximity to mitigate my timidity.

Stars and Pastures in February

Fortunately I'm on the mend from the cold. This evening, because it was a Friday and I was thinking of walk-running tomorrow, I didn't walk to the next train station. Instead, I stepped right into the one near the office and tried to read The Structure and Evolution of the Stars again, still hoping to finish it soon. Right now it is about white dwarf stars, in which the hydrogen has mostly been burned up except for a radioactive shell, which remains (if I've understood correctly) around a helium core in which the warmth is evenly distributed. But I did not focus well; I felt groggy and the work day was repeating itself in my mind.

In the morning, Berlin was bright and sunlit. So I neglected the book and I looked out the glass doors to absorb the landscape outside the S-Bahn. Apparently I am not too grown up to love a real-life Richard Scarry book, with a hundred human machines and habitations and activities, when it appears in front of me.

***

I think that trying to find new hopes and ideas, as we head into spring, is going well. There are verses of Milton's that I like to pair together and that seem to breathe this spirit:

"They, looking back, all the eastern side beheld
Of Paradise, so late their happy seat,
Waved over by that flaming brand, the gate
With dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms:
Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon;
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide;
They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way."

from Paradise Lost (quoted in Goodreads)

as well as

And now the Sun had stretch'd out all the hills,
And now was dropt into the Western bay;
At last he rose, and twitch'd his Mantle blew:
To morrow to fresh Woods, and Pastures new.

from "Lycidas" (quoted in Bartleby)

I wish — just a little bit, because perhaps there are compensations — that in my life I'll reach the point again where winter does not sink so harshly into my mind just because of the weather.

Germs, Sunshine, and Literary Travel to Russia

On Friday I felt quite 'woozy' at work, and even lay down on the sofa in the lounge. Then I had a sore throat for two days over the weekend, and presumed more or less that this would be the end of it. But the past two days I've had barely any voice. I think part of this is due to little sleep — the last time I had this much trouble feeling sleepy was in around 2012, so I've been spending a great deal of time reading and listening to audiobooks. Which, of course, has certain compensations, i.e. feeling rather smug about how much contemporary non-fiction I'm reading. I've also finished listening to The Hate U Give, a young adult book about life in the suburban southern US, and found it tremendous, and today I began listening to On the Come Up by the same author.

Yesterday afternoon I decided that it would not be kind to risk spreading the germs by exposing my colleagues to them for eight hours. So I attended work only during the first half of the day, and in the early afternoon set off in direct sunlight to go for a walk and take the train home two stations further. I wasn't fragile as a result of the cold, I told myself, although it did take about 20 minutes' walking time for me to begin feeling good with the exercise and the fresh air. There was so much to see: construction workers, the river, brick buildings, concrete buildings, cyclists and joggers, trains and trucks, birds and railway maintenance workers, and trees and old houses half-hidden amongst them.

I feel chipper anyway, even if my voice is horrendous whenever I manage to growl out an intelligible word. A host of co-workers and family have brought me hot drinks and cough candies, expressed boatloads of sympathy, deluged me with friendly advice, avoided (whenever they could) asking me anything that would force me to speak, and altogether been terribly kind. As many people are sick lately, I'm surprised they can spare the energy!

In the train, I've begun reading Die Russland-Expedition, the account of Alexander von Humboldt's travels to Russia in the early 19th century. It includes letters by Humboldt that paint almost everything in cheerful colours, while a person who accompanies him contradicts this sanguinity by painting grim scenes of acres of mud, slushy rivers, ice, collapsed boats, and so on and so forth. They haven't even travelled past modern-day Latvia yet.

Ramblings on a January Weekend

It is becoming clear that I do not handle Berlin winters well. Technically I should have gone running again yesterday — my heel feels as fit as a fiddle again after the long rest since the 29th of December — but I suspect that my running clothing is not warm enough and honestly the frigid rainy weather was not inviting.

I've been going on walks and to the weekly ballet class, instead. On the walks I've seen that heroic joggers have been striding along the Frankfurter Allee with snow flying in their faces, wearing regular hoodies and leggings to keep warm — no professional gear. But if I were to emulate them, I'd just end up with more disturbing feelings that a strip along my heel has been overextended, more hobbling, more going down train station stairs step by step holding onto the railing, etc., more worrying dramatically if I would ever dance ballet or run more than a kilometre again, and more biting pains at my ankle even when I have been sitting down and exerting nothing. In other words, I'd just end up replicating the emotional experiences (note: that is an overdramatization) for the first week or so of this month.

It's true that I was asked today how my life is going and I was able to say that it's going happily and to feel that this was not a lie — in the moment it certainly felt right. But, aside from feeling like the gloom of winter is permeating my bones and bringing with it the unhappiness I've learned to dread since I was a teenager, I've also reached a nadir of confidence at work.

I am finding it harder to get out of bed in the mornings; and I no longer find work the most interesting and most productive part of my day. Listening to the three feminist audiobooks that I 'reviewed' for the books blog, for example, was far more engrossing, or even staring out the train at frozen Berlin rivers and 'seeing short stories' in the trains and train stations.

That said, I think I am just going one from one phase to another, and need to give up some of the hopes and aims of the old phase to find new hopes and new aims. — Like spring!

Re. hopes and aims: I've been reading more Structure and Evolution of the Stars, which I actually appear to be finishing quickly now that I've weaned myself cold turkey off fiction on the U-Bahn and S-Bahn. I am concentrating on non-fiction because I don't want to tote this textbook and Aristotle's Politics around for another two years. (My intended project of becoming less ignorant about the natural sciences and mathematics should begin to diversify away from this one book, too.) Then I am reading books and listening to audiobooks for the sake of writing more 'book reviews.' But I do want to read up on MySQL and GitHub work, as well, so that I can be far better positioned to help along my team in the kind of professional development that one of the managers would really like us to do.

Unrelated to work, I also want to start supporting more charities, and need to decide how to go about this most wisely. It's purely selfish; feeling useless is the worst feeling.

Then, the piano: Right now I desperately want a new project — playing short pieces as I've been doing is not the right process to help me improve much, and I do still want to 'sink my teeth' into Beethoven's sonatas again, but I should go shopping for new scores again too. I haven't played Tchaikovsky's or Rachmaninov's piano concertos properly, for example; I've been yearning to play these for a decade at least and I've heard them reasonably often. That said, I think that Tchaikovsky is not the composer I play best; it seems too comfortable to play him without intellectual rigour, and I think that I am so short of this rigour that I need to be forced into applying it a bit. I am also a little worried about sitting down at the piano because it requires becoming absorbed in my feelings, at least the way I approach it, and there are feelings one just doesn't want to fall into.

A propos of that, in the Berlin evening news today, a Holocaust survivor replied to a television reporter's question about how she 'felt.' She said, paraphrased, 'I deal with facts; and my feelings aren't necessarily anything that the whole world needs to know about.' Afterward, I realized that it is perhaps what I worry about with this blog — that I describe too many insecurities and worries that people with other mindsets would find self-indulgent. Ignoring for a moment the fact that any parallel of her harsher experiences with my own is impossible, and that she is speaking as a half-public figure of the general public, I think that hers is a worthwhile point of view, and a hundred percent understandable in her circumstances. But I cannot 'connect' with other people and cannot begin to fix things that are bothering me without being open. Also, stoical silence was far easier before I began working at my present job, because then I was absolutely convinced that nobody cared about my feelings, or that if they did care, it would have been a huge burden to them instead of just something that everyone deals with some time or another.

Much of the drama of my life seems to happen after the real interactions — the real annoyances or grievances that everyone speaks of freely. It happens in my brain. So that's why I rarely complain about pleasingly concrete things. I can't complain of what a person did at once, because I don't want to be judgmental or to assign the blame without finding out why he or she did it, why I reacted as I did, and if it was right to react that way. It is less the interaction itself that is painful; it is the thought process afterward, if I don't find a good reason why the other person did something, or if I presume that I was in the wrong somehow. That is one reason why I think that being mean to people is almost unforgivable: it usually drips a poison into the system instead of making a quick and easily healed wound, and one can't guess how much damage it will do.

I also miss Papa because he discouraged, I think, going through life imagining yourself to be the innocent sufferer of the terrible perfidy of everyone else's behaviour (for example, of schoolmates). At some point, one probably needs to accept responsibility for something, too. At the same time, if I told him about a way someone had hurt my feelings or wronged me, he would trust me to be in the right so fully most of the time, that it made me want to be extra-fair to the 'villain,' so that his indignation was not awoken on false pretences.

But I wrote to a colleague about a work-related gripe (that was not about anything he'd done) last week, and his reply helped me to realize again that there are different kinds of openness and honesty, some that I should practice more than others... He replied that venting feelings can be done by pounding the keyboard (for instance!) or by talking to the people involved, instead of mentioning feelings to third parties. That was painful, because it made me worry that I have become passive-aggressive to the point of devious, and that, all questions of principle aside, I'd really annoyed him. Also, it's been a longish while since I've been so worried that I've been doing something genuinely terrible, so I was rusty at the self-examination, and brooded most of yesterday rather exaggerating how perfidious I'd been. But the more I think about it, the more his suggestion makes sense as something to think about whenever I have grievances in future. He has done me an immense favour!

A Very Long Overview of the New Year's Concert

[Apologies for any factual errors or exaggerations]

A few minutes before the Vienna Philharmonic's New Year's Concert began broadcasting on television, the doorbell rang, M. came to visit, and I woke up. We ate doughnuts, or Berliner as Mama would insist I call them, and drank rose hip tea as well as coffee, M. had brought his lovely homemade cookies as well, and I had a little of the leftover punch with mandarin oranges and peaches from last night.

This year the Vienna Philharmonic's guest conductor was Christian Thielemann. I associated him slightly with German right-wing nationalism, and Mama associated him heavily with Wagner. At any rate he is not Austrian and indeed regularly conducts the Sächsische Staatskapelle Dresden. So (after I played a silly game I've often indulged in since we moved to Germany, of sorting people I briefly see on television into CDU, SPD, Linke, FDP, Grüne or CSU politician personality types, with him, and decided on SPD) we began listening with trepidation.

But there was no galloping nationalism, no heavy Wagnerianism or portentous Beethovenianism in the music he produced — and I felt that with him he was not merely there to let the orchestra express themselves, but was purposely steering the concert and music — whereas some of the repetitious Viennese flourishes that are often emphasized in the Strauss family's music fell by the wayside. To be honest, I welcomed this as a temporary change.

Thielemann clearly wanted to try a mildly different approach, and I didn't feel I was hearing a twice-told tale. The music lacked some of its energy and sparkle, as M. also remarked, but it had gemütlichkeit and I thought Thielemann was adept at making the music tell a tale or describe scenes. I didn't need the hovering camera shots of Austrian pastoral scenery that overlaid some of the music in the televised version to be transported somewhere else.

This year is the 150th anniversary of the Vienna Opera House's opening. So in the intermission, we were transported from the golden rectangular hall of the Wiener Kunstverein hall, with its blingy chandeliers and coffered frescoes, to a stone-walled-and-bronze-roofed birdcage with a grand central staircase, pale sculpture and gilt decorations, other frescoes, and other chandeliers. There was so much opulence that my inner Marxist emerged fully fledged. The Marxist wondered, firstly, where the money for the building came from (banking? exploitation of the peasantry? colonial labour?); and, secondly, whether the original builders could have ordered fewer decorations and redirected more expenditures to food and shelter for the poorer classes.

But the cameras did not only roam in the lobby and amongst the opera-goers. It was nice to peek 'behind the scenes' of the Opera House, even if backstage it was unconvincingly tidy. I think that the traditional aspects of stage work were also played up a little; for example, I don't know how often the crew at the Opera House still use rope made of natural fibers, but they showed one coil of it that happened to have survived, anyway.

Also, when we had left the trolleys and pulleys and washing clotheslines of the towering opera sets briefly behind us, there was an interlude in the room where the ballet troupe was 'practicing' its pairs dancing. Their cute summery garb — the women dancers often wearing what I'd call 'sleeveless crop tops' at work that made me rack my brains trying to figure out how they stayed on — did not look like something dancers would normally practice in. And in the middle of winter the sight of that many bare limbs suggests painful cramps, muscle strains, and breakages, unless the dancers have had a good warm-up; but I'm sure it was filmed earlier in the year.

Anyway, at some point in the intermission, I figured that it might be more interesting to be pushing around backdrops and nailing down canvas onto wooden frames than to be one of the singers on the stage, or to be a musician like the ones trying not to look enervated when the camera crew blocked the exit from the greenroom where they were just practicing.

Chamber music groups taken from the ranks of the Vienna Philharmonic also performed arrangements of opera music by Mozart and Strauss and others, during the intermission. They were scattered inside and outside buildings, yet blessed with the same acoustics whether they were contending with the breeze and traffic noise on a roof overlooking a busy Vienna street, or perched at ease in a serene, lofty hall adorned with white marble sculptures. A quartet of cellos played at the head of the staircase — having watched a lot of Agatha Christie adaptations, I expected one of the four cellists to meet a vertiginous (and not very accidental) death at any moment. A pianist and other musicians were gathered in a room like one of the committee meeting rooms in the British Parliament, surrounded by a choir as if by ranks of courthouse visitors. Sometimes I much preferred the idea of the orchestral originals; but I warmed to the way the Rosenkavalier waltz was adapted for a smaller group of instruments.

Two interludes during the intermission made my hair stand on end.

The first interlude was a 'rehearsal' of an "Uhren-Duett" from Johann Strauss's operetta Die Fledermaus. An Anne-Sophie-Mutter-esque soprano sat on a round seat in old-rose plush, dressed in a pale tulle tiered skirt and a black top skin-tight at her bosom. (Her chest is such a significant part of the narrative that I imagine that, in a fairer world, it might have received third billing.) A Roberto-Benigni-esque tenor fiddled around with his fob watch. Then he expressed the most polite annoyance when the soprano filched it and dropped it into her bosom. From a practical standpoint I worried that unless the soprano had an all-encompassing bra, the watch might slip further, wriggling down her skin like an ice cube. Sacrifices must be made for art, however, and either she is an excellent actress or no mishap occurred. Needless to say, my inner gender studies theorist just pretended I didn't see this. Although I felt that there was such an absence of genuine lasciviousness or elementary romantic attraction in the scene* that despite the noxious concept it wasn't as sleazy as it could have been.

The second horror: a soprano and tenor's duetting from the Magic Flute, as Philharmonic musicians with poker faces that would be the despair of Las Vegas stood around them and pretended that all of this was sane. The soprano (Pamina) wore an A-line dress, as plumy and golden as Big Bird from Sesame Street with feathers dribbling off her chest and tufted in her hair, and her demeanour like an irritating version of Zoë Wanamaker. The tenor (Papageno) wore a matching Sesame-Street-yellow suit. In a worse vagary of artistic judgment, both of them wore rope nooses around their necks. Of course the first associations that came to mind ran the gamut from keel-hauling and suicides to lynchings. In fact these ropes were part of a life-saving apparatus that later lifted them into the air above the stage (as the Philharmonic musicians, imperturbable as ever, remained in position); but it takes a battle-hardened soul to find the nooses less than weird.

Of course there were ballet interludes. My inner amateur womyn's studies theorist emerged again: I found the gender politics — the froofy tulle skirts in which the tiny-waisted women were clad as inexorably as if it were the 1950s and Coco Chanel had never designed a pantsuit, and the tendency to treat each man-woman pairing as a romantic pairing — reductive and behind the times. Only a man-man pas de deux, although it had no kissy elements in the least and therefore did not disturb the heteronormative bias, warmed my cold theorist's heart.

The first round of costumes was not bad, I thought. Just a spotted, bustier-style dress paired with affrighting black-speckled white tights underneath unsettled me a bit. But the second round, in which the dancers wore primary colours à la Fisher Price, and the women's tunics ended high above the knees, as if the costumer believed that a glimpse of butt-cheek aesthetically uplifts any balletic effort, was weird. I'd never have thought of dressing ballet dancers in blazers that must restrict their arm movements or of risking their necks by suggesting that they dance on cobblestones, either. Hip-hop dance was woven into the choreography, so that whenever this happened it was neither good hip-hop dancing nor good ballet, but just a middling mixture. The artistic concept of flailing around long limbs and awkwardly seizing the hand and feet of one's partner was a little outré as well. The choreography didn't lack naturalistic moments, like the pas de quatre legs to which we were treated: two dancers sat in niches, hidden from the screen except for their feet and shins, and wiggled their limbs. But at times the choreography felt counterintuitive with regard to how the human body moves, how people gesture when they interact, and to how ballet dancers should use their finely trained muscles to produce something fluid and beautiful.

[Also, there are only so many times that a dancer can rest hands thoughtfully on the balcony of an old Austrian palace, gazing at a view that is never shown (so that we never see how many cars and Edekas there are); can appear in a doorway and stop in amazement at the sight of a fellow ballet corps dancer whom they've known for years; and can rest their hands on a window sill and peer at another colleague beneath them, without running the risk of looking a trifle unoriginal. But this is hardly the choreographer's fault; it is, rather, a hazard of working with the Vienna New Year's Concert format.]

Anyway, although I do dance beginner's ballet, I felt that it has given me no greater insight into the dancing whatsoever, except to make me worry more about dancers injuring themselves. So the previous paragraphs are not at all the result of professional observation.

Returning to the music, there were no 'gimmick' instruments this year, as far as I noticed. That said, the orchestra — not all the musicians; some were tactfully silent — sang 'La-la-la-la' during the 'Egyptian' piece by one of the Strausses. (I could picture Edward Said in the afterlife, whipping out his pen and drafting a new chapter of Orientalism, but it wasn't bad from a musical perspective.) I enjoyed the zither last year, because it required being quiet and attentive and appreciating an instrument that usually only comes into its own full power and glory in the framework of folk music. And, of course, because the music itself was lovely. But I think a year without gimmicks is nice, too.

Lastly, the video footage of castles, ruined or intact, on the banks of the Danube, was a nice accompaniment to the "The Blue Danube." I found the Radetzky March more easy to endure than usual, too.

Prosit Neujahr!


* I googled it, and it looks as if the tenor sings:

Dieser Anstand, so manierlich,
diese Taille fein und zierlich,
und ein Füsschen, das mit Küsschen
glühend man bedecken sollt',
wenn sie's nur erlauben wollt'.

Based on the romantic chemistry, I wouldn't have been surprised if he'd sung: 'Excuse me, Madam. I believe you have left your wrap on the staircase, and I almost tripped on it. Please guard your belongings more carefully next time.'

Christmas Eve, in Retrospect

Yesterday I went to work for the morning of Christmas Eve. It was a quiet group of 8 colleagues that I joined, one of them my sister and two of them from the same team, so that was nice. I stayed 20 minutes late because I went out shopping in between — the grocery stores around the office closed by the time I would have gone home otherwise.

When I arrived home, Mama had begun plucking the parsley for our Christmas Eve dinner: radicchio and green lettuce salad with parsley and a vinaigrette à la Toto, green broad beans with olive oil and aceto balsamic and salt and pepper (I find this irresistible), lamb cutlets flavoured with butter and sage and garlic and broiled in the oven, couscous and Turkish flatbread, a bowl each of yoghurt and tzatziki, and our Wedgwood platter of antipasti: humous, artichoke dip, dolmates, sun-dried tomatoes, a tabbouleh of couscous and red pepper (/tomato?) paste and parsley, and three other dips of red pepper or tomato paste heated by varying intensities of spice. We also had a bottle of Spanish red wine and, on my insistence, Turkish delight.

It was not, in other words, too unlike what we've eaten every Christmas Eve for the past 15 years or so, and as delicious as ever.

***

I am not relaxed and indeed tense this year, because Christmas, New Year's and work are not cleanly separated. But at any rate I went for a run-and-walk in the half-deserted streets an hour or so after yesterday's dinner, after wasting time on the internet and never managing to achieve peak idleness. This week and (theoretically) the past one I have been running 50 seconds and walking 20 seconds, and yesterday I had to run for half an hour.

It was funny how buildings that are often shut were open, and places that are often open were closed. It reminded me of the paradox: make low the places that are high, and high the places that are low, from somewhere in the Bible. (In the German hymn "Mit Ernst, o Menschenkinder" it is written rather harshly as: "Bereitet doch fein tüchtig den Weg dem großen Gast; / macht seine Steige richtig, lasst alles, was er hasst; / macht alle Bahnen recht, die Tal lasst sein erhöhet, / macht niedrig, was hoch stehet, was krumm ist, gleich und schlicht." I don't think that crookedness is intrinsically bad, and do think God shouldn't hate; but the phrase 'macht niedrig, was hoch stehet' was what I was thinking of.)

Light shone from the Baroque church (at the kernel of an old town where the Seven Years' War led to death and destruction, and which is encircled now not by fields, trees or townhouses with Dutch façades, but by peaceful yet not very beautiful post-war apartment buildings); and from the police station in its 19th- or early 20th-century villa.

The post office, charity secondhand shop, clothing retailer, rope and pulley, pharmacy and other stores were dark and forlorn. Except a florist that sold flocks of tulips, despite the specks of snow and the frosty air. Turkish or other families gathered in the handful of cafés, restaurants and kebab stands, run by Muslim or agnostic neighbours, that were not closed for the evening.

The buses roamed alongside the sidewalks and gathered up a few lost souls at the stops; stray couples walked along together; and when I went past the barricades and earth heaps at a construction site, I thought that a mouse scuttled past.

Christmas and Lux Aeterna

It was quiet today (i.e. Friday); the U-Bahn and S-Bahn refreshingly ran as planned, it did not rain (much), and it was not especially cold. At work we went ahead and tried to remain concentrated, as we exchanged the last presents before Christmas and the office was emptier because colleagues had already gone on holiday.

I was so tired at the end of the day that I almost fell asleep, standing in the U-Bahn. Theoretically I was reading more of Aristotle's Politics, i.e. about the easy transition between, or affinity of, an aristocracy and a monarchy. I could admire the hollowness of my own Christmas goodwill, too: when a seller of the street newspaper came by I donated nothing, and when I saw a woman standing at the street corner at the U-Bahn entrance asking for spare change, the same thing happened. Nor have I donated lately to any organizations that provide food, medical assistance, and shelter.

At home I revived again, did a crossword with Mama, helped demolish a gingerbread house, read news, ate a reheated piece of Georgian khatchapuri, chattered about work, and played the piano. ("In the Hall of the Mountain King" by Grieg, the arrangement of "La Vie en rose," and Granados's Spanish Dance No. 5.)

Despite the proximity to Christmas, I feel that there are cards, letters, and even a present or two that I should prepare. Whether or not I will manage to prepare over 50 handmade holiday/New Year's cards with unique motifs by January 6th remains to be seen. I don't know if I have enough material and I certainly need more cardstock.

At least we already have a tree in the Corner Room: small and endearing, if not likely to hold much of our enormous Christmas tree decoration archive.

(In the morning I dreamt about my father — I am thinking of him often. I have a photo of him on my desk in the office, and felt a little worried when, after putting the photo back into a notebook for safekeeping, I felt almost like crying when I'd forgotten and saw a few hours later that it wasn't on the desk as expected. Anyway, almost always in my dreams Papa is quiet and sad or says nothing at all; but in this one he was happy, looked at me with a smile and said, 'I have been here all along.' Then I woke up, comforted by that, my stomach still pleasantly full (to be honest) from visiting a restaurant the day before, warm and snuggly, and fully aware that I needed to get dressed and ready for the work day ahead. So life is still quite good. But lately I've been far more worried about my ability to steer ahead in moral quandaries without him as a guide. Of course Papa often had an unexpected, principled perception of a situation, or a way of reminding one to be true to one's self, that is difficult to replicate. And sometimes I do feel a chilling sense of loneliness that, to be fair, has long pre-dated his death.)

An Early Christmas Dinner on the Canal

Since Black Friday came and went, my team has had so much time to do our regular work that it's challenging to adjust to the comfort and lack of pressure. In fact, I think I'm falling back to an old tendency to brood about things once my mind has little other food for thought to chew on.

The cold temperatures of the early Berlin winter have given way to cool rainy days. It's a relief to have some rain because November seemed dry; even before then I've only felt uncomfortable twice or so walking outside without proper rain-gear. The relative drought is likely not good for all the plant and animal life in Berlin and in the countryside surrounding it.

Today my colleagues and I went to our annual Christmas dinner. This time it was held on a freshwater barge on the Spree River, and it started in a dock at the Treptower Park in former Eastern Berlin. It was dark when we arrived.

City lights were glimmering across the water and (if I remember correctly) sparkling in the trees where fairy lights were hung, and stark brown tree branches scoured the sky Wuthering-Heights-esquely against the mottled backdrop of the general light pollution. Large white clouds with apertures and fissures between rushed across the sky. Aside from the docks; a stationary restaurant boat with turquoise keel, beer label flag, mainmast that appeared to contain a ventilation system, two booms that folded down from the masts, and a Christmas tree in the rigging at the bow; and our own boat; there was a tall building that looked vaguely 19th-century-esque remaining from that industrial era of Berlin. Black waves with glassy bright reflections swapped at the concrete shore, carrying schools of fallen tree leaves on their bosom.

We entered the boat down a firm gangway, to find a red-carpeted space with glass windows, pinky-beige curtains, cylindrical lights between the windows, plants and other bric-a-brac, and a round mirror with a white life ring around it at the wall. A white door that swung both ways led to the washrooms and to the deck. Chairs were draped in pale satin-like cloth, and the tables were decked with red napkins, two sets of cutlery (a fork and knife to either side, and a tinier fork and spoon for dessert at the top) per person, and an evergreen branch decoration with a red reindeer tea light as well as pinecones in the centre.

We were handed a bread basket per table, which included a bowl with a dip that looked like a mushy, pale olive green baba ghanoush (I didn't try it). Also, we ordered our drinks: Merlot, white wine, hot chocolate spiked with Baileys, sparkling water, etc. A bottle of Moet et Chandon would have cost 120 €, and none of us were cheeky enough to order it.

I went out on deck, and saw more of the Mitte district especially, and was rather unsettled by the unequal distribution of money for chic buildings, etc. through the city. There was the funnel nose of the Bode Museum, there the tower corners of the Reichsgebäude where the EU and German flags fluttered from the stonework as a maelstrom of little humans spiralled down the walkway in the glass dome, there the Fernsehturm. The Holzmarkt, the Jannowitzbrücke; Zalando building, Ver.di workers' union building and Kanzleramt: dramatic stages that were all lined along the riverbanks.

It was breezy, rain droplets sprinkled, and I wasn't warmly dressed. Yet I was happy to be out on water again — whether it's insalubrious freshwater in a European metropolis or the sea off Canada appears to make little difference. And it was nice to talk to the colleagues.

(And, to finish describing the menu: we ate either a meat 'entrée' of goose drumstick with dumplings and a slice of orange and green cabbage; or a vegetarian course of mixed rotini and tagliatelle with sundried tomatoes, arugula, eggplant, olives, and a balsamic vinaigrette reduction. For dessert, we had a scoop of vanilla ice cream on plum compôte, a half-moon of persimmon for the garnish, and whipped cream.)

It was after 8 p.m. when we had returned to the dock. We disembarked in (I think) a happy frame of mind, split into different groups heading back to the S-Bahn stations Plänterwald or Treptow according to our destinations, and perhaps more conviviality was to be had in a group I didn't join.

Misery in November

Today was a strenuous day, where I did intense work and also had to analyze how and where things went wrong, answered questions as usual (which was mostly enjoyable), and compiled reports on our progress on various tasks until 6:30 or so, which wasn't terribly late. I ate lunch and talked with the colleagues in my team, and even read a little news during the lunch hour; and because I ate only for 20 minutes also drafted an appeal letter related to an Amnesty International 'urgent action.' The hard, environmentally unfriendly and humanly exploitative work of preparing for the frenzy of Black Friday has made me so uneasy that I feel the need to do something in between just to rebalance my senses of proportion and of worthy aims, and to connect to a real and humane need.

In the evening I realized that a task I thought was done was not done. After standing at the window in the kitchen to gather myself and think how to tackle the task independently, I decided that I was rational and strong enough to ask for advice from the older-brother-ish colleague. In the end, the discussion will be postponed to tomorrow.

That said, I felt guilty in retrospect because of a remark I'd made earlier today to 'my' team: we were speaking of the weather, and I said (more or less) that doing work for the task-that-was-not-done-after-all client more or less replaces the necessity of seeking warmer climates amid these winter days, because being in hell is warm enough. It was perhaps more truthful than professional. And perhaps I was tempting fate.

At 6:55 p.m. I went outside in the dark to do the 30 minutes of walking and running for this week. Now I am at intervals of 30 seconds of running followed by 30 seconds of walking. It was snowing, and at first my spirits lifted, but then I realized that the snow was melting in my hair and that I was cold; also, I had relatively low energy. Like drinking alcohol liberally, I suppose, endurance sports (if one can dignify my beginner's training by that name) are more terrible and painful if one's spirits are already drained or made aggressive by negative thoughts. Toward the end my run, the knee that I bruised falling on the sidewalk on Mehringdamm hurt, but so little and it could have been so much worse that I pitied myself just half-heartedly. There were many other joggers out, so I wasn't alone.

It has been bad for my morale to think that no matter how hard I work before Black Friday, what I have to anticipate after that is a forensic inspection of my team. It is suspected of being inefficient by the management. The inspection is being postponed until afterward because everyone is so busy. It feels like one harrowing ordeal will be followed by another. While I always feel insecure about whether I'm doing things precisely and enough, in this case I'm not certain the inspection is deserved or if it's based on misunderstandings. I don't like to defend myself, especially because I don't want to force people to take my word when the facts speak for themselves, and because I don't want to justify myself if it might mean throwing doubt on other colleagues' descriptions of the situation; and I don't want to waste brain power on that drama when I could be making sure that the workload is done instead.

Anyway, as I told myself during the run, there are things in life that you can comfortably know that you can do; you just need to realize that at the same time you shouldn't expect them to be easy and be surprised if they aren't.

Before I left, the only other two colleagues in the office left together and wished me goodbye, but I had the distinct impression they were displeased about something, which is awkward because they were the managers. Then I went out into the cold, too. The U-Bahn had a Betriebsstörung, I left the warmth to walk to the nearby S-Bahn station, the S-Bahn came promptly, I missed the connecting train by 20 seconds or fewer, and therefore walked the last ten to fifteen minutes home rather than wait 9 minutes in the frosty temperatures. It was not my day. I have to admit that I am also cranky and angry in general. But I did make progress in the Sartre.

Also, Ge. had cooked cream of wheat pudding for dinner, Mama and I watched (in my case) excerpts of Miss Fisher's Mysteries, and an ex-colleague wrote me a beautiful email that I just discovered this evening. And I'm really glad to be at home, but trembling in my boots at the thought of tomorrow. I also need to make sure that everyone in the team has plenty to do, because today there was speak of being at a loss, and I definitely get in trouble if people are at a loss for things to do even if we are supposedly buried under work. The problem is just that there are tasks that are so intricate that sometimes I don't even know if it's 'my' team that should be working on fixing them.

Sartre and Communist Party Plots in Fiction

After finishing Madame de Staël's De l'Allemagne extracts from the Larousse volume, I've begun reading Les Mains Sales by Jean-Paul Sartre. I'd never heard of it before.

The premise of Sartre's play is intensely interesting: The client king of Illyria (~Yugoslavia) bypasses his weakening Nazi hegemons to reach across political lines to the establishment liberal democrats and even to the communists. The communists partly wish to ally themselves against the Nazis with the other political parties, as the king requests, but other communists resort to assassination to prevent the alliance from forming.

A young communist party member who has grown tired of his prosaic work as a writer for the party's newsletter, and wants to emulate the violent activists amongst his comrades, becomes the instrument of this faction. He is the protagonist of the play.

While the plot, as described, has far-reaching historical and political implications, the scene starts small in the utilitarian lodgings of Olga, a devoted female communist party member, with various conversations about ways and means. As Sartre was a member of the French Resistance movement, I wonder how much the conversations and plottings of his fictional characters reflect the methods and discussions of his experience.

Sartre published this play in 1948, I think, about imaginary events in the previous five years. His exploration of contemporaneity is not made vague or distorted through excess subjectivity, and his matter-of-fact lack of reinterpretation or emotional overlay in his depiction of wartime political agitation is something that I think most filmmakers, etc., began to lose in the 1950s as one began to kitschify, retouch, or moralize more.

And the 'tableaux' are scripted with perfect tension — Agatha Christie might feel envy. The words (each, at times, seems to let fall a new insight or a new turn of the plot) have even greater weight because of his basically worded yet impeccably aimed French. The film is ripe for a film adaptation; I could imagine one in the vein of Witness for the Prosecution. I think Sartre's conscious exploitation of suspense verges on the sensationalistic, but the play is not a chore to read.

I haven't greatly enjoyed Olga's character. She is superficially tough. But whether Olga is an 'idealized' figure who sets forth Sartre's wishes or whether she represents an observation of gender roles in that milieu and at that time, either way this idea that a woman is a handy party-political tool is depressing.

The main gripe I have is that 'disappearing into the 1940s' in imagination before and after work, is a weird feeling and not a nice thing. To be both preachy and prim, the murder and mayhem should not be enjoyable because the playwright repeatedly raises and gratifies curiosity about these intrigues that take place as part of an especially gruesome moment in history. In Sartre's time, people would have lived this world firsthand, but through the buffers of the intervening decades I think it is too easy for the reader to feel detached, as if these things didn't happen to people like you and me. Sartre's fictional Illyrian communists also make use of death squads, however, and in the year of Jamal Khashoggi's murder this is as immediately nauseating and grim as ever.

Lastly, I suppose it is a commentary on the twists and turns of history that the only other time I've read a play or any work set in Illyria, it was a Shakespeare play (Twelfth Night?). And, riddled with poverty and the Armada and other strife though Shakespeare's era was, his Illyria was infinitely more cheerful and innocent.

Pumpkin Cookies and a Pas de Chat

This morning I went to work as usual, and for lunch we had an Asian-style dish of pudgy udon noodles with chicken or beef (I can't remember which), perhaps ginger, and certainly miso, with a few curls of spring onion on top. That said, I don't think I know what miso even tastes like. There was also a salad with spinach and beet greens in it, and I really like the colour and the earthy flavour of beet greens. They also remind me of the time (a really long time ago) when one of my grandfathers grew beets in the garden. They looked like overgrown radishes and they had a real, fresh, lively, comforting flavour, and you could also taste a hint of the dust that they were caked in before they were washed and cooked.

Anyway, in the evening I went to the ballet class. Thanks in part to the rush hour train traffic, I arrived over 15 minutes late. The preliminary floor exercises had ended, and so I began with the barré. We practiced tendus, pas de cheval, ronds de jambe, and glissades; then went over to the floor exercises that were less about turnout directly and rather for strengthening the abdominal muscles and the muscles along the insides of the legs; and finally performed the usual sets of four pliés followed by four jumps. Today was one of those rare but appalling days where I jumped like a potato sack, and did not suggest springiness and grace in the least. We also ended the class by trouping across the floor diagonally, two at a time, in a sort of Noah's Ark of pas de chat, and it would require time and consideration to determine where I disgraced myself less.

Either way, I'm afraid that I consider that my inflexibility and un-ballerina-like stature give me a carte blanche. I try not to bring my teacher to tears with how horrible everything looks, and to achieve technically what I am capable of doing. But in return, I happily suppose that nobody demands that I become a new Margot Fonteyn.

Then I went grocery-shopping, almost weepy with gratitude at having the leisure to do this given the schedule of the past weeks. And I bought frozen berries with quark; eggs and bacon and other ingredients for a quiche lorraine; as well as dark chocolate to chop up and add to vegan pumpkin-and-oat cookies that I am thinking of trying to bake for a colleague.

In the U-Bahn I read more of the Politics and De la littérature. Altogether I felt that this day was an islet of peace and sanity in the ocean of Black Friday.

Then, of course, tomorrow (or the day after, due to the time zone differences and the length of time it takes to count ballots) we will know what happened in the midterm elections in the USA...

Aristotle and a Few Sonatas

This weekend I did overtime work again, so I have to squeeze as much weekend into one day as possible. The weather is not particularly holiday weather. It is as if a watercolour grey is soaking the sky, and the absence of light that manages to get through the clouds has made it gloomy even at quarter to 4 in the afternoon. In contrast the tree leaves are very bright and steeped with colour, but there aren't too many of them left.

Because I have been playing a lot of shorter pieces on the piano in the past few months — Spanish Dances by Enrique Granados, Hungarian Dances and waltzes by Brahms, the theme from the Third Man arranged for piano, children's pieces by Tchaikovsky, an arrangement of "La Vie en rose," ragtime pieces by Scott Joplin, Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King," etc. — I decided last weekend to begin playing longer pieces again.

Beethoven's later sonatas are less approachable, as I've said before, than his earlier ones. I think it is easier to plumb the young and confident Beethoven who had in some respects a popular conventionality; it is harder for me to figure out what he was thinking of when he composed his later music, which feels more abstract and personal or introverted. At times his later music still has elements of the 'classical' style. But it is classical through the lens of romanticism, or nostalgically classical: so I feel that to really understand it, one needs to scrape beneath the surface and capture the ambiguity in one's interpretation.

Today I tried passages of his 'Halloween Sonata' (i.e. his last sonata; I might be the only person who thinks of it as Halloweenish, but I think it has aspects of the magisterial and gothic Bach organ toccata about it) as well as the Sonata appassionata and the Waldstein Sonata. The last time these I looked at these sonatas regularly must have been around 2008 to 2010. I think I was finally able to hit on a reasonable, original approach today, aside from stumbling over the notes; whereas it quite annoyed me a decade ago that I could only manage bad imitations of excellent performances I had heard on YouTube. When I was a turbulent teenager I found Beethoven's early music quite soothing as it reflected what I felt, and his twilight music might become a friend and companion now.

I've slowly reached the point where I think I need to go 'underground' with my current dissatisfactions in life. It would be too boring and annoying to keep filling people's ears with them; and generally a good way to avoid that is to 'talk' with composers and instruments, instead of with family and friends, and to transmute those thoughts into harmless art.

The other thing is that I have a strong sense that I just need to keep going, and things will become better, and I'll be annoyed in future if I give up now.

Tackling the intellectual culture of Beethoven's sonatas reminded me of reading Aristotle in the U-Bahn lately. Their breadth and gnomic style are, at least, traits that the composer and the philosopher both have, and I suppose that Beethoven's art partook of the political. In Aristotle's Politics he is of course trying to cover a vast subject: political organizations and history in the Greek city-states. He might get a few things wrong. Despite his systematic method, other people might arrive at radically different interpretations from his own; there is more than one truth. It is clear that he is writing as one of many theoreticians that he knew, and not expecting anyone to accept his version as the only version. In that respect I think that 18th-century and other interpreters did him a great disservice in taking his Poetics as dogma rather than suggestion. Not to over-interpret, but this is one reason why I adore what I know of Greek culture much more than what I know of Roman culture: Greek culture often acknowledges that one might be wrong about things, and that even the gods don't always know what they're doing.

In the Politics, in my view, Aristotle even begins to contradict his own words after the first three books or so: I find that he undermines the orthodoxies he has set up about the aristocracy's superiority to the rabble in the first book, by being a passionate advocate of the relative wisdom of the people and a passionate critic of oligarchs' and tyrants' abuses in the later books. Also, the more he tries to define what a polity is, or an aristocracy, etc., the less I am sure what his definition really is, and if he has actually kept the same definition that he used earlier in his work or has changed his mind about it. It makes me feel stupid because I cannot remember his exact thoughts for comparison.

As for Madame de Staël's De la littérature, I have to admit that in weak moments I did agree with her argument that Aristotle's work is partly more a synthesis of accumulated wisdom than a development of own ideas.

"Ce qu'il écrit en littérature, en physique, en métaphysique, est l'analyse des idées de son temps. Historien du progrès des connaissances à cette époque, il les rédige, il les place dans l'ordre dans lequel il les conçoit. C'est un homme admirable pour son siècle; mais c'est vouloir forcer les hommes à marcher en arrière, que de chercher dans l'antiquité toutes les vérités philosophiques; [...]" (pp. 75-6, Paris: Charpentier, 1860, via Google Books)

=~ 'His writing on literature, on physics, on metaphysics, is the analysis of the ideas of his time. A historian of the progress in the various types of knowledge at that time, he edits them; he places them in the order in which he conceives them. He is an admirable man for his century. But searching in antiquity for all the truths of philosophy, is wanting to force men to regress.'

One weak moment occurred when I was reading these pearls of wisdom:

"Es müssen entweder alle über alles, das genau unterschieden ist, urteilen, wobei sie entweder durch Wahl oder durch das Los eingesetzt sind, oder alle über alles, einerseits durch das Los, andererseits durch Wahl; oder daß eben im Hinblick auf einige identische Fälle die einen durch das Los eingesetzt sind, die anderen aber gewählt. [... Und] entweder sind die Richter über alles wiederum aus einigen bestellt durch Wahl, oder einige Gerichte sind über dieselben Angelegenheiten aus durch das Los oder einerseits durch das Los, andererseits durch Wahl, oder einige Gerichte sind über dieselben Angelegenheiten aus durch das Los Bestimmten oder aus Gewählten eingesetzt."* (p. 243, Book IV, Stuttgart: Reclam, 1989)

I felt like dashing my brains out on the walls of the U-Bahn train to end the torment, after trying to understand all the grammatical and logical twistings and turnings, in that terrible and intellectually unfruitful paragraph.

(* In English: "[...] they must either appoint from all by vote, or from all by lot, or from some by vote, or from some by lot, or partly in one way and partly in the other—I mean partly by vote and partly by lot [... F]or here again the judges for all cases may be drawn by vote from a certain class, or for all cases by lot from a certain class, or some courts may be appointed by lot and others by vote, or some courts may be composed of judges chosen by lot and by vote for the same cases."

[Aristotle in 23 Volumes, Vol. 21, translated by H. Rackham. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1944. via Perseus.tufts.edu]
Rackham's English translation is much more lucid than the German one from Reclam, if one fills in the places where I've put ellipses; so here is a disclaimer: I'm doing his text a disservice.)

A Late-October Run and Walk

Yesterday I spent time playing the piano, reading news on the internet, eating breakfast with Mama and the siblings, and filling out crosswords with Mama, but I have to admit that through most of it I was still feeling self-pity related to work.

That said, in the early afternoon, heavy grey clouds were hanging in the sky, and it looked like it would rain, but I saw that the chance of precipitation was only 15%. So I borrowed a pair of shorts and a wristwatch from Ge., ate a banana for fuel, put on my running shoes and a t-shirt, and did the run/walk that was on my training schedule. I've been trying to reach a point where I can run for 5 km without walking or stopping in between, and this past week was my third. The point of the whole exercise was at first to take part in a charity race. Now I just want to train the discipline to learn to do something long and arduous in a sensible way that makes it not uncomfortable — perhaps this will help me write novels in future — and just to explore the technique of running a little. Moving through unfamiliar and familiar streets in a not-too-fast way and looking at the scenery has also been a side benefit.

I went 7 km from our house, past Brandenburger Tor and along the Street of the 17th of June, around the traffic circle at the Siegessäule, and to the nexus of the Technical University at Ernst-Reuter-Platz.   A cold autumn wind blew down the broad streets; lot of trees are losing their leaves, and it was fascinating to see the smaller trees lining the parking lanes at the Street of the 17th of June, which were mostly barren except for a sprinkling of pale leaves (like stars in the night sky) in the branches that were closest to the warm street lamps. The fallen leaves were rustling on the pavements, of course, and at times crushed or ground to a fine, pale powder. Also scattered over the sidewalks were tourists, and other joggers, who often wore neon yellow or pink outfits with long sleeves, and whose leggings were also warmer-looking than what I had on.

A man in a trench coat stood in front of the Soviet memorial, figuring out how he wanted to take a photograph with what looked like an analog camera, rather like an escapee from a John Le Carré novel. A brightly painted carriage powered by foot pedaling rolled along the margin of the Street of the 17th of June, full of young people in their late teens or early twenties, singing in a language I didn't know. Whether it was Russian or not, it somehow reminded me of droshkies in tsarist Moscow, especially against the bleak, almost wintry background of the twiggy trees and the lanterns. 

Altogether I felt so fine when I reached the 6.4 km mark that I'd originally intended to reach that I decided to go what I thought was another 200 m. What I didn't know at the time is that I was actually going another 600 m. But then I did get into the U-Bahn and ride home, instead of walking all the way back. When I'd eaten a banana-and-strawberry fruit bar before the train arrived, I slowly began to feel so mellow and happy that it became clear that, instead of exhausting me counterproductively and worsening the stresses of the week, this outing was more or less the best thing I could have done.

Turning A Page in the U-Bahn Reading

Earlier in the week I finally finished reading the last pages of Andromaque, as well as the endnotes, and then — reading more of Aristotle's Politics in between, where he tries to define the oligarchy and the polity — began reading a collection of extracts from Madame de Staël's De la littérature and De l'Allemagne that Larousse published in a purple paperback edition in 1935.

My grandmother must have picked it up in Canada, because her name is recorded on the first page in her writing, and there is a price stamp '$0.50' on the same page.

Biased as I am, perhaps, by the editor's notes — Mme. de Staël's sweeping assertions in De la littérature about ancient Greek playwrights and philosophers (e.g. 'the Roman philosophers were better') make me cringe.

Perhaps they make me cringe all the more because they hold up a mirror: I too have made plenty of "sweeping assertions" about many subjects throughout my life!

A Few Pages From Racine and Molière

In a way there's little to add to the previous post. It feels like my life has taken four focuses lately: working, reading in the train, sleeping, and training to run without having time or leisure to eat and sleep properly. I still haven't written to an ex-colleague in the US who left the company a month ago. It's not a hard life I'm leading now, compared to those of others, but it does not make much sense.

I think there are strong moral arguments in favour of doing the extra work on Saturdays, sometimes, in the microcosm of my work group. But I think this extra work in itself has no special idealism or reason that ennobles it.

***

In the S and U-Bahn I've been reading Andromaque by Racine and L'École des femmes by Molière. Previously I had read Le Cid by Corneille. It turns out that, as is often the case with the two French tragedians, I am a fierce partisan of one and a fierce critic of the other. I can't stand Le Cid and Corneille's stodgy verse, the kitschy metaphors, and the 'logic' of his 'reasonable' and 'noble' characters. It is the one play I'd read where I felt let down — as the tension shifted from excited tension into bored tension as to when this work was going to end — that no other characters died by the end.

Not only I have a bone to pick with Corneille — so did some of his contemporaries. I found this passage in L'École des femmes funny — Molière's antagonism with the Corneille brothers seemed fiercer than any antagonism between them and Racine:

Je sais un paysan qu’on appelait Gros-Pierre
Qui, n’ayant pour tout bien qu’un seul quartier de terre,
Y fit tout à l’entour faire un fossé bourbeux,
Et de Monsieur de l’Isle² en prit le nom pompeux.

=~ 'I know a farmer named Gros-Pierre who — although he owned nothing except one field — ordered that a marshy ditch be dug all around it, and took the pompous title Lord of the Isle.'

2. Allusion précieuse au frère du grand Corneille, Thomas, qui avait pris le nom de Corneille de l'Isle. Les frères Corneille furent vexés de l'allusion.

=~ 'Allusion, in the "precious" style, to Thomas — brother of the great Corneille — who had taken the name of Corneille of the Isle. The brothers Corneille were vexed by the allusion.'
Footnote: (ed. G. Sablayrolles, Paris: Larousse, 1959)

*

As for Racine: Before I read the introduction, I couldn't tell who Andromache was because I confused her with Andromeda and Antigone. I was hoping for Antigone because I find that legend touching. But, of course, Andromache is Hector's widow, and the Greeks captured her in the fall of Troy.

In Racine's version, Pyrrhus (')loves(') Andromache. She resists him, since she still loves Hector as much as ever. That is my interpretation, at least. The play's notes in the edition that I am reading mention that others have read Andromaque and believe that she does love Pyrrhus, and that duty causes her to resist her yearnings. Anyway, the way that I interpret it, even if she did decide that she wants to leave her marriage with Hector in the past, which to be honest I think no self-respecting ancient Greek playwright would have permitted because it doesn't suit their idea of women as being sentient property rather than human beings with their own right to determine things, she does not wish to marry Pyrrhus. It is even more repellent because Pyrrhus killed her father-in-law Priam and her sister-in-law Polyxena.

(The Pyrrhus-hounding-Andromache aspect of the plot reminded me of L'École des femmes, although of course this play is a comedy. Arnolphe is Molière's character; he has tried to force marriage on a woman whom, in a dependent situation, he has deprived of interaction with and knowledge of the outside world, and who loves another man. He is hopping mad that she refuses to love him or agree to belong to him. Faced with that opposition, he discards his dignity with disgraceful protestations and demonstrations. I found the play very uncomfortable to read as a young woman, because it feels partly true. But, of course, since this is Molière, we do feel sorry for Arnolphe despite his malfeasance.)

In Racine's portrayal, Hermione herself — who is Greek and hates Andromache for being her rival — denounces Pyrrhus for murdering elderly and female 'non-combatants' at the end of the Trojan War. He replies that he is remorseful, but that this slaughter was done to avenge Hermione's mother, and that in fact he could be nagging Hermione about the deaths except that he's able to get over such petty impulses.

Also, in an earlier passage, he tells his True (Unrequited) Love that the feelings of most the people she knew and loved when they were killed are a mere bagatelle, compared to the feelings he feels pining after her:

Hé quoi? Votre courroux n’a-t’il pas eu son cours ?
Peut-on haïr sans cesse ? Et punit-on toujours ?
J’ai fait des malheureux, sans doute, et la Phrygie
Cent fois de votre sang a vu ma main rougie.
Mais que vos yeux sur moi se sont bien exercés !
Qu’ils m’ont vendu bien cher les pleurs qu’ils ont versés !
De combien de remords m’ont-ils rendu la proie ?
Je souffre tous les maux que j'ai fait devant Troie.
Vaincu, chargé de fers, de regrets consumé,
Brûlé de plus de feux que je n’en allumé,
Tant de soins, tant de pleurs, tant d’ardeurs inquiètes…
Helas ! fus-je jamais si cruel que vous l’êtes ?
Mais enfin, tour à tour, c’est assez nous punir.
Nos Ennemis communs devraient nous réunir.

Source: Wikisource
Spelling modified to comply with modern norms.

Needless to say, I do not find his character much of a charmer. I think this effusion of hyperbole also reflects a trait that literary critics and that Racine himself have acknowledged — that Racine's 'Greek' characters are anachronistically well-versed in high-flown sentimental absurdities of 17th-century French courtly literature.

Racine's characters are aware of their flaws of thinking, of course. So their missteps are less enragingly stupid. But, in the midst of plotting murder and involuntary marriage, blackmail and infanticide, etc., I do think the heroes and heroines might have taken this spirit of self-criticism far further.

Specifically, perhaps Pyrrhus might have sympathized with Andromache's grief. Perhaps he, Hermione or Orestes might have accepted the idea that their 'love' would have been more credible if they had tried to make their Beloved happier, instead of making their Beloved a hundred times more miserable/dead. I think that Orestes comes off best — the Erinyes are hounding him, so he is less responsible for what he does, and he even manages to balk at murder.

In Andromaque, fiddly shadings of moral sentiment are the least of the characters' worries, in the face of greater quandaries. But I do think that in a less dramatic situation, the characters would also feel that it is unflattering if a man or woman is inspired to show the worst sides of his (or her) character 'on one's behalf.' In the peaceful and kinder realm of literary 18th-century domestic England, I suppose that it's neatly expressed in the first marriage proposal scene in Pride and Prejudice, where Elizabeth Bennet is irritated and offended that Mr. Darcy portrays marriage to her as a necessary but degrading step that he would never have planned for himself.

"I might as well inquire [...] why with so evident a design of offending and insulting me, you chose to tell me that you liked me against your will, against your reason, and even against your character? Was not this some excuse for incivility, if I was uncivil?"

Source: Pemberley.com

Of course — when I suggest that people in love could be nice and thoughtful and that people in a tragic play could kill each other less, perhaps I am grossly ignoring the essence of love and of theatrical tragedy. Perhaps I am being as absurd as Caroline Bingley is in the scene where she and her brother disagree over his hosting a ball:

"I should like balls infinitely better [...] if they were carried on in a different manner; but there is something insufferably tedious in the usual process of such a meeting. It would surely be much more rational if conversation instead of dancing made the order of the day."

"Much more rational, my dear Caroline, I dare say, but it would not be near so much like a ball."

[Source: Pemberley.com]

Nevertheless, I'll perpetrate more absurdity: I think that the plot of Andromaque would have been far more pleasant if Andromache had had the opportunities of a modern-day Hollywood action film. She could have doctored the wine of Pyrrhus's guards to temporarily send them to sleep, or trained in martial arts, or asked for the aid of a noble mercenary-for-hire. Then whisked her son out of the room where he was being held, shipped him to an island-state where no one knew about the Trojan War (or at least had no strong feelings about it), and raised him to be a kindly philosopher who did not care about avenging his ancestors.

A Long Lament About the Effects of Overconsumption

Lately I've been distressed for a few reasons, but I think an underlying one is really a lack of proper rest. The trip to Canada was lovely in many ways. But aspects of it were harder than I expected, e.g. going to places where Papa used to take us when we were children; and also meeting with friends and relatives whom we last met ten or more years ago sometimes made me feel that in some ways I'd become sterner, older and harder. Well, the 'older' part is obvious and not necessarily bad. For the first two days or so after the trip I was in a bit of a fog, like a variant of Robert Burns's 'My heart's in the highlands' — in spirit I was taking walks along the seashore and gazing up at Douglas firs and surrounded in the rainy mist of autumn on Vancouver Island, which made me feel happier and more relaxed but also remote. So I had trouble readjusting my mindset to work.

The heavy workload ahead of America Thanksgiving is intermittently bearable now. But it is still more than we can do. This time I don't have much reason to blame the project managers. They have tried to accommodate the team I am in after I raised my protest — indeed have been awkwardly tip-toeing around me for a while, and one of them has (for reasons best known to herself) been making a beeline for a colleague who is roughly as stressed as I am — and understand that the work is too much. They are under pressure themselves and cannot change the influx of clients, which as the manager has said is a good problem to have. The other teams are also all suffering now; I have to make sure that I am not demanding special treatment.

We have been asked to come in if we wish on Saturdays for overtime work (paid double) to help tackle the work. I feel that this is not right for me. First of all, whether accurately or not, I feel rather fragile, and I have to respect my boundaries. As the Black Friday season piles on additional pressure, and five days per week of Black Friday pressure are already too much for me, I don't need six. For the past month or two, whereas at one point I could leave at 6:30 p.m. often with an easy conscience, I have done about 9 to 13 hours of overtime per week whenever I was not in Canada. I count on Saturdays and Sundays to 'decompress' so that I can return to work on Mondays with renewed spirits and a sharper brain. Now I need them especially. I don't care to earn extra money for stunts like Saturday work. I have the income I need to cover the basics, and want any pay raises to be allotted if I develop more skill at my work generally.

But being a team leader, of course, requires pitching in alongside the colleagues in the team and being a decent example. So I agreed to come in every second Saturday. Also, I had the feeling that saying that I couldn't handle coming in because it was too exhausting — which I more or less did — was seen by the manager as an indulgence of weakness rather than as a statement of fact. So I felt that my pride was challenged to show that I wasn't completely fragile.

So I came in this past Saturday. The way I felt during and after bore out my reservations, and not because I went into it so skeptically that it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Working on a Saturday for 3 hours on a whim as I described in the last blog post is, indeed, nothing like working on a Saturday for 8 hours out of obligation. I was also worried because of bad news I'd had unrelated to work. At any rate I was grumpy, sad or giddily cheerful by turns, had wobbly legs at times when I stood up from my desk, and cried more than once. (Hidden from the view of others, and silently.)

One of the managers had also come in for noblesse-oblige-y reasons, alongside more than a handful of colleagues including Gi., and they didn't look like they were overflowing with happiness either.

Besides I feel less sure of properly listening and responding to colleagues, or handling anything that requires intelligence, because I'm too saturated to think straight.

Aside from objections on grounds like health and poorer job performance, I am also opposed to this from a moralizing and religious perspective. Thanksgiving — if one abstracts it from the historical context of invading the Americas — is about being thankful for immaterial goods and material necessities, not about exploiting human labour and the environment in a reckless orgy of spending (and returning). The Christmas season is also not just about 25% sales. And I want to be able to telephone people if I want to, see my family, dance ballet, and look at trees and grass and flowers in daylight instead of crawling home after dark.

Anyway, today was a day off because of the Day of German Reunification, and next Saturday is a day off. Also, I should not let one aspect of work make me miserable; and I should take things more easily, also because people do generously worry about me and don't enjoy witnessing self-destruction.

A Self-Indulgent Rant After A Week of Overtime

Last Saturday I went to work for the first time on the weekend, sitting in the empty office tapping on the computer and eating snacks at regular intervals and even doing the traditional exercise routine at 11:30 a.m. by myself. It was only for three hours.

Generally I am a great believer in the separation of weekday from weekend, which is fortunately possible at my job (in theory!), and which I think helps keep one's mind keener and fresher, and one's feelings happier. So I was worried that this sacrifice of a Saturday morning would take a psychological toll.

Fortunately it did not — what I did not know, though, is what a small hell the week would become. Surely coming in to work on Saturday would be enough? — it was not.

On Monday I went to my ballet class exactly when the working day officially ended, so that I would arrive on time. (I was on time, but not early enough to get changed into my ballet clothes before the class had already begun.) Then I came back after 1.5 hours of it, and worked for more than half an hour, alone in the office except for the cleaning crew. Surely that would be enough? it was not.

On Tuesday I worked until after 9 p.m., so 11 hours. Surely that would be enough? it was not.

On Wednesday I worked until ~6:35 p.m.

Then I went off to play volleyball with the colleagues. I arrived at the park 15 minutes late because I needed to finish things up, and because I insist on walking there, I had just done about 20 minutes of very brisk walking... None of the colleagues were there, perhaps because they had been invited out for drinks to mark the departure of another colleague.

So I went back to work for roughly half an hour.

Then I decided to go to the bar to help say goodbye to the colleague. I took the S-Bahn one station, and since it was already after dark, ended up in the weirdest suburban wasteland I have ever walked in. There was the hulking train station that was half-empty at night with fewer passengers and that glowed in a limited perimeter; streets with few buildings on them and just cars passing through the void; concrete overpasses and traffic cones; forsaken yards full of shrubbery, sand, and metal fencing that people had partly opened; the sound of loud music; and altogether the kind of ambience that would grace any thriller. In daylight I'm sure it looks less worrisome.

Anyway, I had an idea where the bar was, but was perambulating about in a manner which, if I'd been watching it in the aforementioned thriller, I would have probably considered extremely stupid.

The bar was at the edge of the Spree, but a pedestrian path passed between it and the water. It had a gatehouse-like entrance, battle-scarred wooden trimmings, a signboard in front, and boisterous 'youths' inside. The menu, as far as I could read it in the dim light, listed non-alcoholic drinks too ... I set foot inside and was ready to look for colleagues. But a man, who had an 'I've seen it all' air and a Jean-Claude van Damme appearance, was sitting on a stool, and he put out his arm to block me. He politely announced that there was a 6-8 Euro entrance charge. So I forked over the money, feeling that it was far past my bed time and wondering — as he stamped the bar logo on my hand — if this meant I was 'clubbing' for the first time. I vaguely wondered what this building and its purpose were during the East German days.

Inside, a band was rendering 'Our House' in a cave-like stage to one side, bathed in yellow light. People thronged the benches, at picnic tables and I think standing tables nearer the stage, and tucked seats in higher niches in the walls that were part of the theme of the pirate's hideaway. I thought they were mostly in their twenties, and felt at least three years too old for the crowd — like I should have experimented with it earlier in life.

My colleagues were no longer there.

I arrived at home quite late.

On Thursday I worked until 11 p.m., at least thirteen hours. Surely that would be enough? it was not. As I was finishing up, I also discovered that I had to do twice as much work as I'd expected.

But Friday was horrible. I had come in before 9 a.m., I think, delayed slightly because of a late train, so an hour early. Because of sleep deprivation and stress I felt light headed and floaty, but I kept trying to be sensible and considerate. Surely that would be enough? it was not.

By 6 p.m. I had had enough. I think next week I need to take less of a 'quietly sacrificing all my spare time' approach and instead read the riot act to the project managers as reasonably as I can. I think that this will benefit the company, whereas working away in overtime without fixing the underlying problem is well-meant but ineffective.

Life Ambitions

Every now and then I think of what I want from life. Often it ends up in princely-looking lists of languages I want to be familiar with, books I want to read, and so and so forth.

But at present I suppose that I can list vague aims. I want to have friendships and other relationships in which there is a give-and-take, where both people support and make the other happier, without contracting emotional debts or falling prey to great insecurities. And I also want to know a lot of people who are wise and funny and don't take themselves too seriously, generous-hearted and curious about the world, and clever. At work I want to do my work well and knowledgeably, and become more relaxed and far more helpful as a 'team leader.' (The manager has said that the main aim of a leader is to want the people in his or her team to succeed, and to help them to do better. Which is very sage, but I'm finding it hard to translate it into practice.) I want to become more well-rounded in sports and films and many other subjects, so that I don't cut off sources of enjoyment and interest, and so that I can talk well with others about things they are passionate about.

And, at home, I want to write and play music and draw childish pictures, and daydream about books that I read on the U-Bahn, and investigate political and social problems in newspapers and on the internet in general, and perhaps also add to the comfort of my family.

Notes of a Disgruntled City Commuter in August

On Tuesday it was over 35°C, and it was mildly thrilling to work in those temperatures and feel stoic and brave. (Although I still became angry when I felt that the windows and blinds weren't being used to their full effect to keep out the sunlight and let in the breeze.)

But since then, a not so thrilling new routine has been born:

At night I wake up once to three times because of the heat.

As for work... today the temperatures were better. But yesterday, on a semi-conscious level, I kept up a constant internal monologue of 'warmwarmwarmwarmwarm.' Eating ice cream feels less effective than it did a week ago, because it is a small speck of relief in a world full of warmth. I rarely leave the orbit of my desk fan. (Generously given by a human resources colleague.) Of course I am quite pampered with these resources against the heat. But the ability to feel the proper amount of gratitude is dwindling and I choose to blame the weather.

One disadvantage of the temperatures climbing back down from 35° is that, on Tuesday, even all the fruit flies and regular flies seemed to have gone into hiding. I was staggered and amazed, but sadly that state of affairs has not lasted.

In the evenings I travel per train. I have begun to take notes and care about window architecture in the U-Bahn. For example, I caught a boxy, compartmented train this evening. I have finally realized that this type of train does not have windows that can be tilted open on both sides, only on one side. Also, at the beginning of the wagon there is a pair of closed windows. So I step farther back into the wagon, behind the open windows. And yet this evening the cold air of the train tunnels only rushed past the windows without coming in. Also, that cold air didn't seem to help much from the outside, either, because the metal sides of the train are warm to the touch. Then, when the train stopped at a station, a few tendrils of cold cellar air seeped in through the open doors, at which point it merely served to present a depressing contrast.

In short: I have a commute where sweat pours all over my face and down my neck. I have accidentally gotten droplets of perspiration on my bookmark, the book I am reading, and on my t-shirt. And I don't really know how disreputable the other commuters think that this is...

That said, this summer has been nowhere near as bad as the summer of 2006, so far.

News from the Berliner Sauna

In the U-Bahn I am reading only the Dilemmas of Lenin for a while. This is due to the temperatures because when I travel to work in the mornings it has already been 27°C lately. And then it rises to 30° or 31° during the day, and settles down to a dissatisfying 20° at night. The past two nights I have woken up between 2 and 3 because of the heat and awkward mosquito bites at the ankles. These are not conditions in which I feel fit enough to read the philosophy of Aristotle or the physics of Schwarzschild. In the case of Aristotle, I admit that this avoidance seems weak-spirited since he worked out all of this philosophy in the heat of Greece without complaining (as far as I know), which is surely more demanding than reading it.

Although this type of summer heat has been one of the preconditions for many a rebellion and revolt in the course of human history, I am reading the book without feeling any burning desire to start a communistic revolution myself.

This week has been strange in general. On Monday morning I had an errand in the embassy. I went there before at the beginning of the year and wasn't let in, so I am quite anxious now whenever I go there that I will be barred again for reasons I don't understand.

On that evening I was going home, but then I wasn't able to switch to the second U-Bahn line that I always take. At least 3 transit personnel were standing at attention at a barrier of tape at the foot of the stairs to the platform. I was part of the bewildered crowd milling around at the foot. Eventually one of them barked at us that the train wasn't coming and that we should use the Straßenbahn or other transport methods. Later I read that someone had been hit by a train; I am not sure about this, but it made sense to me that the train employee who practically yelled at us was under the stress of trauma. There were ambulances with personnel as well as police scattered around outside the entrance above ground, although I wasn't sure whether the police were there for other reasons. i.e. It was a tourist hotspot and it made sense to have police there to prevent handbag thefts and drug sales.

So I decided to walk home, for an hour and a half. Eventually I did feel like weeping a little because it was tiring after a day of work and the tension of going to the embassy (although that went well). But, still, I had a weird, lonely tour of Berlin Mitte. And I passed the embassy again...

On Tuesday, it was Mama's birthday, so uncle M., T. and I went home by the S-Bahn and then when we got home, he and uncle B. both chatted with Mama. (I was in the room at first, then retired shyly to my room, also feeling disgruntled because of the heat.)

For Wednesday, a colleague planned to have a beach volleyball game at 8 p.m. near our place of work. I agreed to go, but went home after the end of work and before the volleyball. But while I was going home, the train I was in stopped at a station and didn't pull away again. I guessed that there was a mechanical problem with the doors, which presumably weren't registering properly whether anyone was still entering the train or not. Whatever the problem may have been, for safety's sake all of us passengers had to leave the train. I was already running late to the volleyball game. So, rather than wait for this train to be fixed or for the next train to arrive, I walked to the next station and caught another connection home. Then I took about ten minutes to change, pack a snack to eat, and go out again. In the end I was around half an hour late.

The sport itself was enjoyable. It was also more rigorous exercise than it seemed, stomping around in the sand, because a few of my muscles decided to hurt after half a day or so had passed. And there's a bruise on my right arm that I consider a minor badge of achievement. The main problem was that mosquitoes were biting me. These bites have come back to haunt me and they're the same ones I complained about at the beginning of this post. The other quibble I had was that I was shocked that a few of the male players had their shirts off, which I thought was more than I ever expected to see of my colleagues and perhaps a trifle exhibitionist, although in an innocent sense. Sometimes I surprise myself with my intense Puritan instincts.

Anyway, although at work I had a plentiful store of ice cream, I feel that this weather is bound to make everything seem like a fata morgana, wavering and blurred in the heat. And it has been weird to me to be away from home during part of the past two weekends, rather than 'recharging' silently in my room and perhaps going on smaller expeditions either to shop for things or to swim or walk or play with the siblings.

A Ramble Relating to American Presidents and Lenin

Lately there has been a mixture between early autumn and summer. The leaves are still green, fall seems far off, and there is a lovely multitude of apricots, red and white and black currants, gooseberries, watermelons, and other summer fruit in the shops. But there have also been many cloudy days and rainy days, so that the summer only seems half-developed.

Yesterday evening I watched the hour-long lecture that ex-President Obama held in South Africa for the 100th anniversary of Nelson Mandela's birth. It is always strange to step from the hurly-burly of the Trump administration to Obama's (more) inward-looking worldview aimed at being thoughtful, informed or at least curious, and dignified. I suppose that one man is a mature human being, with some feeling of responsibility, while the other is a gigantic, badly-raised child.

While I don't think that all of Obama's insights are trenchant or critical enough, there was food for thought in the speech. It was also strange to see what he says and how he thinks if he doesn't need to suit his ideas and words to an American audience. Even his style changed — he used his speech in part to entertain the audience and not just as a platform to persuade his listeners or to reel off his statements. Instead of the conformity to what seems like mainstream thought, there was originality there, some half-formed thoughts that were the beginnings of ideas and not just summaries of ideas that were shaped to be acceptable. And, of course, although I have never been as awed by his speeches as many others have, I felt the same thing that I did when I heard him in person in Berlin in 2008: he does make his speeches seem as if they went by too quickly.

Of course the speech was startlingly different from the press conference that the current American President held with the Russian President in Helsinki. It reminded me of the verse that Maria Edgeworth quotes in her romance Patronage:

Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne'er within him burn'd,
As home his footsteps he hath turn'd,
From wandering on a foreign strand!
If such there breathe, go, mark him well;
For him no Minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust, from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonor'd, and unsung.

(From Sir Walter Scott's "Lay of the Last Minstrel," here.)

The morning after I watched Obama's speech, I read more of Tariq Ali's book The Dilemmas of Lenin. It was a funny juxtaposition. Both discuss the role of young people in improving society, and about the deep ills of economic inequality. Of course they come to different conclusions. While I admire the Lenin book for its intelligence and being properly steeped in the time it discusses, I think it smooths over a lot of rough edges. Ali presents rather awful people (not Lenin himself, only) as nature's gentlemen, who possess a few trifling quirks which one should politely ignore, while there is something intrinsically degenerate and rotten about the cruelties of the aristocracy. If I had been alive at the Russian leader's time, a little person observing the colossus, I think I'd learn more about Lenin if I were one of the people who were squashed under his boot than if I were one of the fellow wayfarers perched on his hat brim.

To return to the present, Machiavellian maneouvering in politics and diplomacy I find less distasteful than the gross sleaze that is presently fashionable. Misogyny that terrorizes and exploits women, psychologically pathological contempt of gay citizens, reactionary nationalistic fantasies, religion that has few noble or fine aspects, a brainless and heartless refusal to agree that refugees, asylum-seekers and migrants are men and brothers (or women and sisters, if you will), shabby treatment of the innocent and the criminal alike in jails and prisons by people who are greater criminals, anti-Semitism (which I'd naively thought was extinct in its most direct forms), toplofty criticisms of Islam by people who should really examine their own ideological flaws first, and lies that rely on the laziness and brainwashing of the propagandized rather than the skill of the propagandizers. To be fair, one cannot impute this all to one country. Large populations of these political diseases exist internationally, regardless of whether the bacterial strain sports the name of Farage, Orban, Duterte, Putin, what's-his-name of the AfD, or Trump. I know that political correctness and the intolerance of virtue-signalling liberals are supposed to be the great evils of this time — but perhaps one can stop inspecting this mote of self-righteousness in the eye of the other and begin examining the beam of sociopolitical despotism in one's own eye.