A Change of Pace in the U.S.

Earlier this evening I did what I'd done fifty times or more this past week: refreshing the main page of the New York Times hoping that the bar of electoral college seats for Joe Biden would pass the threshold of 270 required to win the U.S. presidential election.

Much to my surprise, enough votes had been counted in Pennsylvania (and soon thereafter in Nevada) to be able to declare that Biden and Kamala Harris had won.

Of course I was greatly amused to read that Trump had tweeted within the past hour or so that he had 'WON, BY A LOT!!'. This was an attitude I'd rarely seen since I stopped playing board games or sports with hyper-competitive children who invented their own rules as they went along. But for once I felt that playing golf was the most constructive thing he could have been doing at the time. In the meantime it was edifying to watch videos of streets with cheering, whistling and honking cars in New York City.

Due to my nerdy instincts I played Beethoven's variations on "God save the King" on the piano from start to finish for the first time, because the melody is the same as "My Country, 'Tis of Thee."  (These variations are definitely not his finest compositional achievement, by the way.)

There was tangible relief on the Tagesschau evening news here in Germany, both correspondents' smiling faces betraying them a bit and only the anchor keeping her composure. Justin Trudeau, Angela Merkel and Frank-Walter Steinmeier of course have all said they were looking forward to the Biden presidency, and I'd really love to have been a fly on the wall to hear what they said in private.

It is still peculiar to think back to all the US elections I remember. Bill Clinton's presidency was so full of animus at the time of the 2000 election because of the Lewinsky scandal that George W. Bush's election seemed inevitable. That intelligence, independent thinking and skill would be in such short supply in future, and that a president of greater moral turpitude would be greeted by the Bible-thumping establishment fifteen years later, was not clear to me. Then, of course, John Kerry's loss was pretty inevitable but a strong blow nonetheless, one I absorbed on a Canadian university campus with lots of other disappointed students and professors and (per email correspondence) family. Followed by the moral purity (in a way) of Barack Obama's decency, the experience of seeing him speak in person at the Siegessäule in Berlin after going through Secret Service security portals, and the televised sight of the Bushes lifting off from Washington D.C. in a helicopter and Cheney also sliding into the historical record. Then the shocking blow of Donald Trump's election when Hillary Clinton's election seemed almost inevitable.

This time I didn't feel like singing "Ding, dong, the witch is dead" as I did 'in honour' of G.W. Bush's leaving the White House. But I think that's also because there was better, stronger opposition to the absurdities of the Trump administration. I feel that once the person is gone, the bad policy will follow suit; and the good thing about a single presidential term is that the spirit of wrongdoing doesn't have time to settle in lastingly. So there was far more to 'kick out' after the Bush administration; and I still think it paved the way for the Trump administration to a great degree, e.g. because the manipulative role of the polemical rightwing media was embraced as part of the more 'respectable' political establishment.

Besides, the important point of this election was not the win or loss. It was about finding a president who is going to be actively better for all voters. Biden won't negligently kill thousands of his citizens per purposefully bad coronavirus policy. Biden won't shrug at paid contracts to kill his soldiers (in Afghanistan) and at a Washington Post columnist's death (Jamal Khashoggi's) and at the torture of an American citizen until he was brain-dead (Otto Warmbier) in North Korea.

What I really hope is that wise coronavirus policy in the US will also lead to a lessening of the pandemic's effects internationally. Of course this would be more on the economic than the medical front, since US citizens have been forbidden from flying to many countries anyway, and so I presume most contagion is not taking place across the US's borders.

Lastly, I suspect that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will be able to speak to the President of Japan without harassing him for a Nobel Peace Prize nomination.

Now I'm interested to see what President Biden will do in the first 100 days in office.

***

As for work, the workload is still high but the 'political' tension has decreased. My team has been given as much time as we need to take care of Black Friday work and do solid planning, and I feel that our autonomy is respected more.

But I need to have a person-to-person talk with a colleague in the extended management board, I think, to make sure that the board begins consulting more people before implementing plans.

Much as I appreciate how much colleagues often like and watch out for me, I'm not entirely sure sometimes why this same kindness isn't extended to other colleagues as well. And even if he's caught on to the fact that I have feelings, I'm not sure if he's caught on to the fact that e.g. the rest of my team has them too.

Anyway, a second conversation with the manager took a huge burden off my mind and has calmed me down considerably, as it has convinced me that my team is appreciated and safe.

I've also been asked to help give input for a mental health plan for the company. I intended to set aside time to filter through the material that the HR team has gathered, this weekend. But I am not a huge fan of advising people on how to deal with their mental health if 1. I'm a little hypocritical if I pretend I know the answers; and 2. I am not a qualified psychologist. I've gotten so much medically inadvisable advice over the years about how to lose weight, what healthy nutrition is (e.g. that a weight loss trick is surviving on soup made from bouillon powder ....), and so on and so forth, that amateur tinkering in anything medical horrifies me.

(Besides I am too conservative to approve of New Age methods, [Edit: or, rather, I'm not well-informed about them and perhaps I struggle with being reminded how much any form of spirituality is 'choose your own adventure' rather than easily verifiable] but these might really help others. Having read that meditation has been proven to help veteran soldiers deal with post-traumatic stress disorder has given me a healthy respect for it; but I really dislike any implication that one regimen can fix one's life or that this is even desirable. It might be trivial of me, but I don't really like that we are in a secular world where organized religion is seen as obsolete, but then replaced with other belief systems that in some ways have similar forms and aims. This feeling that we must live and think correctly or else we deserve the ills that fall upon us. What if we live correctly and we still have bad things happen to us? what if there is suffering that nobody deserves?

I like the idea that thinking carefully of the happiness of others and of one's own ethical standards is a good 'pathfinder' in life, but hopefully I do not believe that this is a way to guarantee my own happiness. And I don't think there is a bulletproof way to remain healthy (or that morality should be applied to one's own health), although one's chances can be improved. Seeing people whom I am fond of, losing their grasp on reality and dying as pale shadows of themselves, through no fault of their own, has convinced me of this.)

What I didn't mention is that there were structural causes of stress, one of which is unanticipated changes at the busiest time of year. But I did ask the manager if there would be any more changes before 2021. (Because I want to be mentally prepared.) And he kindly reeled off three developments that we could expect, the third of which was secret. Because one of the non-secret ones was sad and now everyone knows it anyway, and of the other two I couldn't remember which one was secret, I haven't blabbed.

A Jeremiad about the Workplace

I haven't felt much like writing lately. I have been so tremendously miserable at work, and so much of my time is spent on work, that it feels impossible to write anything that anyone would enjoy reading, or that I'd actually enjoy looking back on in two years.

To give a summary:

We have ~14 new clients to 'integrate' and 200+ clients for whom we need to maintain service. In addition, our manpower is low.

One person is leaving the team and another person's role is changing. We are having trouble hiring new people, because the applicants' technical abilities or motivation don't seem high, except in one case, or they don't appear to know what they're really applying for. I can't in all fairness hire people who will suffer and wilt away in the hellhole of my team's work.

We did find one applicant we were enthusiastic about, but I was told immediately after the interview that we were only supposed to hire one new person. I'd thought it had been agreed that we needed two people and I'd been so happy that we could say yes to more than one applicant. I wrote a detailed letter explaining the team's workload to the CEO and manager, and they promptly and kindly agreed to let us hire a second person.

Then we sent the hiring offer to the first applicant. As we were finalizing the salary details, I was told that a colleague (not the CEO or manager) had said that we should only hire this applicant on a freelance basis. Much of our team's work would soon be automated anyway. [Note: I have not been told which task would be automated, nor how the data quality would be kept at a high standard, nor how much time this would save. The team that might do the automation doesn't have available resources. ... And I was told by a fellow team leader just a week or two earlier that I was being paranoid for saying that my team would soon be downsized.] (Fortunately that person was persuaded to change their mind and the person will be hired for a better contract.)

I was so furious at this that, to be honest, I have put off contacting that person about an unrelated topic. I don't want to be nice to them until I've reached the stage of forgiveness where it would be genuine-nice instead of fake-nice.

In the meantime, my team is overworked. For the first time I've started asking the team to self-assess on a scale of 0 to 10 how anxious they are, and there are lots of 5s and 7s.

Today they were touchingly helping each other out with some of their tasks with the last vestiges of their own strength.

In addition to this, I've been appalled by the Mass Exodus in other parts of the company. My direct supervisor is leaving the company, one funny data scientist colleague has left the company this week (abruptly for me, but I think it was expected to those in her team), and a graphic designer who is one of the longest-serving colleagues is also departing.

Then I heard at second hand that the CEO thinks that our team works hard, but has sloppy data quality standards.

In addition to this, I was told that our team needs to be restructured, and that the planning needs to be done by January 1st. This is the peak season and colleagues will be on holiday in December.

***

The news that the team would be restructured came out abruptly on Thursday the 15th.

In the management level, the idea of taking the four teams that specialize in Front End, Quality Assurance, etc. and remixing them into multi-specialized/cross-functional teams had been floating around for months, it seems. It was suggested by another team leader who does work directly with my team, but not that much. Then a colleague in one of the current mono-specialized teams — who has also been hugely overworked — seized on the idea in a conversation with the CEO in the first week of October, and thought it would be the solution to all their team's Black Friday season problems. Another colleague who also leads a group agreed that it might be a good idea.

Two weeks ago, I talked with the colleague who first suggested the idea. I mentioned that people were leaving my team, and the colleague was worried that it would affect their plan to work my team into the new groups. I said drily 'Oh, great. That'll really help with the knowledge-sharing,' and was cautiously pessimistic and sarcastically upbeat, but figured that due to the great reworking of our company, our being split up was inevitable. The person felt it was an idea that might be put forward soon by management and talked over with the team.

But I almost burst into tears afterward. It was so odd that these plans were being discussed without consulting me or my teammates. Did people think I was too incompetent? too stupid? to have valid ideas to offer? Then I did write to the person saying that although I knew that was not his intention by any means, I felt really disrespected at not having been consulted. And I asked if it was fine to let my team know about it at once, so that the team would not feel as I was feeling. The person offered to speak to management to get permission for me to discuss it, which I thought was a very open and principled way of going about it.

For a day I heard nothing. Then I received an email on Friday evening from the CEO saying, à propos of nothing, that I should appoint people from my team to join new teams that would handle all incoming clients. And at that point I knew this would all go to hell.

I sent an email back — @ing everyone in the email chain to let them all know that a massive communication fail was happening because, yes, I was a little mad — saying that I couldn't give a good opinion unless I had a better idea what the teams would be composed of and what their aim would be.

The team leader who loved the idea explained that events had moved too quickly to consult me in time, and they apologized. They also laid out the composition of the teams, to make it a bit clearer what exactly would be happening: the idea was that there would be one person from my team in each new team, 4 people in total, 1 person from QA, 2 people from their team, etc.

This plan clearly showed to me that practical problems hadn't been thought of. We have 14 clients in the team's pipeline now, as I mentioned earlier. A few people in the team have explained that they can only focus on one client at a time and still do a painstaking, accurate job. Which means that if we cut down the number who work with new clients to 4 people, they could only address an average of 2 clients each. What about the 6 clients for whom we wouldn't have time? What if someone goes on holiday or can't work on a client for other reasons?

On Monday, the CEO talked with the team project manager and me to show the new structure he wanted. I had no idea what to say. I didn't know if any opposition would be felt to be disrespectful, and it didn't feel as if our opinion was needed because the plan was happening anyway.

But then I let the other team leaders have it (which was perhaps unfair, because I should have really vented on the CEO if I was that annoyed). I tried to explain how impractical it looked from my team's perspective, how much stress this was putting on me during Black Friday season, and that my team was already in a precarious position.

It had mixed results. The person who originated the idea felt that my worries about the practicability were justified, expressed sympathy, and hoped for the best without being very optimistic. A new Agile coach colleague who was in the call seemed to be wondering what kind of menagerie he'd newly been hired into. And the team leader who loved the restructuring thought that I was completely overblowing things and that I needed to be humored. They'd talked to their team right away, and didn't appear to believe me when I said that the CEO had told the team project manager and me that he wanted himself and the manager to be part of the communication to our teammates.

If one or two technical details need to be ironed out, it wouldn't be so bad if the team leaders who like this plan were really taking the problems seriously and helping. But their 'it'll all work out' attitude baffles me — leaving all of the labour of considering the details to us, who didn't suggest the reconstruction in the first place. It is firstly really unfair and secondly it will likely lead to catastrophe.

Of course I really like the other team leaders. I just don't know why this is happening. They're nice people who surely don't like to rule by diktat. And if they were thinking coolly, they would not want to disrupt the functioning of my team and put timelines in danger by discarding badly-needed resources in a haphazard new hierarchy.

It is so senseless for my team. The team project manager for my team has redistributed the workload to more painlessly and quickly meet the practical and emotional needs of teammates. This workflow is far better than what we had before, and I see how much effort the project manager puts into it maintaining it every day. If we need to take into account 4 new teams, then we will need to destroy this workflow and rebuild it.

Now the team project manager and I are now trying to design a new workflow before January. It is the peak season. The team project manager is also trying to retrain for other work. I am overworked from the regular workload already and also emotionally stressed. It is so unfair and so illogical it makes me want to thump my head against the wall.

Lastly, given our company's professed new adherence to Agile ideals, I do not understand why so many decisions are being taken without input (or 'buy-in') from most of the people directly affected. Even I find this far too undemocratic for my tastes. And I'm not sure why the team leader who is enthusiastic about the restructuring doesn't recognize that it's a bit cruel to make huge decisions on behalf of eleven other people whom they barely work with.

*

The next problem, after talking with management (I owe a life debt to our manager for talking me off the ledge, but still feel that I need to figure out better how to work with the CEO) and admittedly wrangling a bit with the team leaders, was to figure out how to let my team know what was going on. This stressed me out so much that, I woke up in the middle of the night before this Thursday and couldn't get back to sleep for a while.

In the end the team project manager and I anxiously went for this idea: On Thursday we asked the team to participate in an exercise to plot out all of the workflows we currently have. Then we'd inform them about the changes and work out the new team structure in the next meeting.

In practice, it did not work as we'd hoped. A few of the teammates had a hard time getting used to the tool we were using to chart the workflow, the meeting overran the time limit, a few teammates were cranky and one was just exhausted because they had felt ill that day anyway, and they were all in a hurry to get back to their work. At the end of it I tried to explain what was going on and what the purpose of the exercise really was. Silence. I felt really inept.

I still have no idea what the team thinks.

In a leadership training earlier this year, the HR manager who coached other team leaders and me said that when a large change takes place, it's really important to go through all of the stages of resistance and anger. If this is repressed, it will lead to years-long resentments and difficulties. So I think I will need to prod genuine reactions out of my team, only give my opinion when asked (then I think I have to give genuine reactions too, because they will know if I'm not being truthful and would be skeptical of any neutral, evasive thing I say anyway), and still let them know that eventually we'll need to get around to the implementation and that they need to have their say now because in a few months it'll be unprofessional.

*

Even outside of this — and the meetings regarding this change have swallowed up a lot of time — I've been working eleven-hour days for weeks...

My private life is worse, too. I could be doing things I love like cooking and baking and looking at art and learning new music. I could be practicing Greek and Spanish and other languages, making Christmas cards and shopping, tending plants and buying flowers, researching French history or reading new books. I could be writing emails or other messages to friends and relatives. The weather will be grey and cheerless soon enough, and I want to see the yellow trees.

My work problems are creeping into lots of private conversations; admittedly this is my fault.

My siblings and mother have also been comforting me for hours and hours, for weeks now. So has an ex-colleague, who very kindly reassured me that I was a good person who really did try to do right, and that I can't 'save' everyone.

In the meantime...

I feel too exhausted to ask more bluntly what's intended for me, although perhaps I should. But it appears likely that I'll be removed from a middle-management position before the end of next year. 

Likely until November 27th and beyond, I will be working 11 hour days. I will not be taking a holiday except if, for the third time this autumn, I feel so stressed that a half day is needed.

After that, perhaps I can expect a demotion. And I might see the dissolution of a team — either through further restructuring, or through people leaving due to overwork without the sense of unity and autonomy to make it better — where — for 4.5 years — I'd tried so hard to build up trust, humane management, and a feeling of true personal fulfillment in the workplace.

What I just wonder is, how does this serve the company; why do we need to stare common sense in the face but then ignore it; and what did I do to deserve this? Have I not represented my team well enough?  Is it bad if I mention that the team or I are stressed, because people will think I'm fragile and irrational and that the problems I mention lie in me and not in the workload or in poor decisions? Have I let the team down? In the end I know that I tried not to let them down, but it is so hard to know why this is happening and I feel so unhappy.

Rambles on a Hermit's Escapes to Berlin-Friedrichshain

Yesterday afternoon, T. and I cycled through a quiet Berlin-Mitte to Volkspark Friedrichshain to meet with a colleague. It was greyish weather, and light drops felt like the harbinger of a proper rainfall, but the weather forecast had insisted that at most 0.2 L of precipitation would fall per square metre for the next hour.

We reached the corner of the Volkspark where the plane trees and others embowered the pale brown stone and frothing white waters of the Märchenbrunnen, then pedalled along the sidewalk outside the park, then through the fence along the dirt paths into the park itself.

In the park there were throngs of pedestrians, joggers and cyclists that flirted with the boundaries of social distancing.

There were brooding lines of shadow underneath the old trees, dark red berries glowed from the underbrush; and in the flower gardens, a few roses in yellow or pink still flowered. The first touches of yellow and orange and even brown were tinging the foliage.

Then we reached the area where a sunken swimming pool has been reused for beach volleyball courts — the sands were deserted that day. The crown of a bouldering ring rises above it like the footprint of a modern megalith, and children were climbing all over it.

At the side of the park, the berry-dark brick of a church tower rose above the old, tired autumn green of the trees. It might have been a village church if it were not for the pale grey and white street lamp posts, bus stop, apartment house façades, cars, etc. between the tree trunks.

T. and I passed the time armchair-critiquing two parents, a twenty- or thirty-something gentleman in a black hoodie and a baseball cap and a lady in a rainbow woven poncho and blonde hair. They let a boy barely two or three years old ride a mechanical scooter in his size down an asphalt hill, and a girl who was two or three years older rode a bicycle. Other people were coming and going on the path, and it can be chaotic with cyclists, joggers, dogs, etc. It's true that the girl-cyclist was wearing a helmet and a puffer jacket and gloves, and the toddler-scooter driver was also padded, although I think he had no gloves. The parents stood at the top and bottom of the hill and didn't take their eyes off the children... But I think I've developed a pretty good radar for Playtime Ideas We Will Regret, as the eldest of five children; and this pinged the radar. Of course the children fell off their vehicles, nearly tripped over their machinery, and burst into tears at least twice, then cheered up again, while T. and I tut-tutted.

Then playtime was over. The father lifted his boy-toddler under his right arm like a sack of potatoes (or like a disgruntled gnome), as the infant screamed. The two adults retreated in defeat, the girl riding her bicycle more philosophically ahead of the others. As an armchair critic, I felt that this illustrated the virtue of parents who are willing to say no when it's in a good cause.

Working-class Berliners in their forties were sitting on a bench near ours and they were undoubtedly German. A thin man in a metal-studded jacket pedalled up on a bicycle with a wagon behind it, as a wolfish-looking black dog trotted alongside. We heard American-accented English from a few 20- or 30-somethings nearby. And a French-looking lady in an elegant red coat was throwing something to another dog who might have been a Jack Russell terrier and who galloped across the knotweed and grasses with the grace (but fortunately not the purpose) of a fox-hunter.

It began to rain more and more, until a large-dropping silvery torrent poured out of the clouds that looked like a shower in early spring; the park looked more English than ever and it was a little like being submerged into a storybook. A glimpse of blue sky kept beckoning, and lingering off to the side.

We took shelter underneath an oak tree — the ground was peppered with dark brown acorns, which have been noisily falling from other trees where we live still this past week — alongside the French-looking lady.

As the thickest rain subsided, the weather forecast on T.'s smartphone changed and suggested belatedly that the precipitation would amount to over 1 L per square metre...

Then we saw the colleague and began talking and walking through the park, past a white pillar with a greenish-black bronze bust that must have been from the Napoleonic era judging by the three-cornered hat, over slopes and down slopes and over the gravel. Finally we reached the restaurant.

It was crowded to an irresponsible-looking degree, but we waited patiently. The tables were smallish so that I felt like I was risking the health of the other two a bit by directly speaking across ours, but I was happy to remove my scarf... Sparrows were almost as plentiful as the people. There were larger ones that I _think_ were males, and littler, spryer ones that may have been females. They were not impertinent, I think. Aside from gathering on one tabletop as if it were a birdhouse full of fresh seeds, they skipped and pecked at the blotchy ground that the rain had wetted.

We ordered Kaiserschmarrn, fried chicken, and — because the kitchen had run out of their pumpkin crème brûlée — a salad. I thought the menu was hipster-Teutonic-Bavarian-Austrian, to which I have no objection.

My salad: baby red beet leaves, lamb's lettuce drenched in the vinaigrette, and purple carrot cut into long pale ribbons; deep orange, roasted pumpkin with a rich, salty flavour, wedges of plump fig, and golden-brown pine nuts. Maybe also arugula. It was nice, filling, seasonal, and definitely a dish I would not really want to go to the trouble of making myself.

I also peeked at what the others ate. T.'s fried chicken was presented almost as if it were molecular gastronomy. But it just had three little dabs of lemon mayonnaise spread along the rectangular serving dish, so I figured the kitchen hadn't gone too wild. And P.'s Kaiserschmarrn seemed to consist of halved cooked plums, the fluffy golden pancake itself, snow-clouds worth of powdered sugar, and a vanilla ice cream that looked like it might be the lighter (some might say, less indulgent) kind that tastes like it's made of quark or something similar. I had non-traditional ice cream of that sort when I went to München in 2008, and felt that it was a little like eating flavored scrapings of a freezer box; but that may just be because I'm a philistine.

It became really cold later on, and the terrace was more sparsely attended; the waiter still ran back and forth.

*

T. and I had a little adventure as we were cycling both to the park and back, as the chain jumped off the sprockets of my bicycle — well, Mama's bicycle — when I hit two bumps. (I guess it's another time one could misquote Oscar Wilde: To lose the chain once may be counted a misfortune, to lose it twice begins to look like carelessness.) It was useful to find out how to fix the problem and I felt like a skilled handyman for once.

When we arrived at home, I ate a few (as much as I could manage under the circumstances) leftovers from the Oktoberfest dinner that the brothers and Mama had been eating: two or more sausage varieties roasted in the oven, sauerkraut, red cabbage, mashed potatoes with carrot, malt beer and regular beer.

Then I baked vegan cookies, two different types; and rather regretted not making a cake, which seems like a grander and more elaborate gesture; for a cake-eating today.

***

Today I went on a bicycle tour to the office again. I felt silly keeping on my scarf as a mask inside the office; but as I'd felt a bit sniffly earlier in the day, did so anyway. In retrospect I probably felt sniffly because the corner room I was working in at home was extremely cold; before I left the coal stove had been turned on and I 'magically' felt much better. Another case of the triumph of hypochondria over common sense! I feel a little exhausted, but to be honest really welcome a break from just thinking about work all the time. Meeting with colleagues again and eating nice food and talking made me realize that there is more to life: serious things that are also enjoyable.

Far Afield Twice on the Bicycle

Earlier this week I felt sleepy, properly sleepy, which was great except that it was before 10 p.m., which felt too early in the day. It was a nice change from having the feeling that there is more, and more left to do, and not being able to rest as a result. But I've also been late to start working twice this week, which is awkward.

*

Most of this can probably be attributed not just to the workload being smaller, but also to T. hauling me out of the apartment to go on bicycle trips with her. First it was the Drachenberg, a mound that is respectably like a hill for Berlin's geography, where despite the cloudy day there was a vast view of windmills, a radio tower, the Fernsehturm and Potsdamer Platz and City Hall grouped together, the green dome of the Berliner Dom, then the buildings near the Technical University at Ernst-Reuter-Platz, etc. The wildflowers have mostly shriveled and turned brown, but green crept underneath near the roots of the grass, it was not too cold, and the foliage on the adjacent Teufelsberg was still thriving. The only thing that disgruntled me (because I am that petty) was that the silhouette of people against the crest of the hill was reminiscent of Caspar David Friedrich's paintings.

Then, in the middle of the week, we went through a settlement near Tempelhofer Feld and to the airfield itself. The acacia trees with their dark, deeply grooved trees (like twisted and split bread crust) looked like a Claude Lorrain painting, and the evening sunlight had a bronze colour that looked like aged varnish; the sky had washes of cloud in pastel colours that had the kitsch of nature; and the sun itself dissolved behind the trees in a glowing globe of dark orange.

T. bought a currywurst to eat near the basketball court, and I took one of her French fries. While we talked, the person at the stand kept yelling that halloumi was done, to the people gathered at the picnic tables.

Across from Tempelhofer Feld, on the way there and back, the rush-hour vehicular traffic took ages to stop flowing, and to leave enough of a gap so that we could cross the Columbiadamm.

But altogether it was still relaxing, and leaving the apartment (insofar as it is my place of work) appears to do wonders for my mood.

Hoarfrost, Early and Figurative

On Saturday and on Sunday morning I was in a rather fabulous mood, which turned into what I used to consider an 'emo' mood.

It has kept up, although during the middle of the day I felt briefly cheerful, and so this evening I listened to the aria "Lascia chi's pianga" by Georg Friedrich Handel. Montserrat Caballé fudges a few of the transitions between notes, or so I think, but for the clarity and brilliance of her tones I like her performance [YouTube] a lot. The less said about the piano accompaniment from a compositional point of view, the better; there has to be a more original and striking arrangement.

In a similar vein, I looked up the lyrics in Wikipedia and found that they're tedious in the more popular version. An earlier version, however, by Cardinal Benedetto Pamphili, sounded pretty good to me:

Lascia la spina, cogli la rosa;
tu vai cercando il tuo dolor.
Canuta brina per mano ascosa,
giungerà quando nol crede il cuor.

In roughly translated English: 'Leave the thorn and cull the rose; you seek out your pain. Hoarfrost through a hidden hand will come when the heart least expects it.'

Lascia ch'io pianga [Wikipedia]

Anyway, I need to 'wind down' and go to sleep. To sound narcissistic, in the age of video calls at the workplace, amongst all the other, more important symptoms of stress, one can't help but notice if one's facial skin is in bad condition from lack of sleep.

The Second Coming (of Black Friday)

This morning, or this afternoon, I looked out the window and saw a green-leaf tree that was beginning to have clusters of golden leaves on its branches, and realized that I haven't been outside in maybe two weeks and that's why I didn't notice it before.

The past week has been stressful at work, but far more stressful for other colleagues than for me. I was just vaguely thinking of William Butler Yeats's verses:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world

In the peaceful and happy microcosm of our company, it hasn't become too bad. But there are a few personnel changes, comings and goings, difficult decisions, and strikings out of people to avoid stress. Also, there is a lot of work that seems to have been suspended in the first ominous lull of the worldwide coronavirus quarantines, then restarted and accelerated as businesses try to catch up in the Christmas season to compensate for their previous economic losses and inactivity.

Of course there is also the maelstrom abroad of the US election, where the ineptitude and lack of character of the president do determine the tone of international politics; the ongoing suffering from the virus; the troubles in Belarus and the refugee camps of Greece and elsewhere; the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the shifting face of the US Supreme Court and its interpretation of the American constitution; ...

What I've been doing lately on my microcosmic plane of existence is waking up at 10 a.m. or later (or, as was the case today, earlier), then working until 1 p.m. — the company lunchtime — and taking 10 minutes to an hour to find food. But often I am still finishing my breakfast oats at lunch, because once or twice I've been so stressed that I've lost my appetite or other times I'm too busy to eat.

Then I resume working with full concentration until around 7:15 p.m., and other times still have so much to do then that I don't lose concentration then either. And as the evening news comes on for Berlin at 7:30 p.m. and Germany nationwide at 8 p.m., I listen in while doing more work, sometimes taking a break to eat or chat.

After that I watch Miss Fisher's Mysteries or an early Agatha Christie's Poirot episode or another Agatha Christie adaptation (Death on the Nile with Sir Peter Ustinov) or Dr. House out of the corner of my eye while doing more work. But on Monday I interrupted my work almost totally to watch the Emmys television awards.

Then, generally after 9 p.m., I pack up my laptop. I might exercise with YouTube videos. Then I might watch cooking or book reviews, and read news and opinions in Twitter, the Guardian and Facebook. Then I read ebooks to wind down.

Lately I've been able to sleep soon after I go to bed, although this might be after 2 a.m. But last night I did have trouble going to sleep again.

A few of my colleagues, however, are also working half or full days on Saturdays.

*

That said, I always go into what I call a 'Marxist-Leninist' phase at this time of year. The way I see it 50 retailers, all in tooth-and-claw competition to survive alongside each other and the Death-Star-like Amazon, sell the same cheap or expensive, thoughtless and aesthetically shoddy items.

These items mean millions of acres of logged forest that makes way for fields, mass agriculture, indentured servitude or regular low wages, slaughtered animals whose skin is used for leather, oil wells and tar sands. The way they are manufactured means the death of small agriculture, the death of traditional fabrication techniques and design and artwork (homemade or professional) that existed for centuries before the Industrial Age and certainly before the age of the assembly line, and also the death of the very expensive and refined craftsmanship that likely kept at a peak in the 17th through 20th centuries.

The consumers who buy the products are rarely going to cherish and keep them, and then they end up in heaps on the sidewalks like I've often seen in Berlin, or thrown in the landfill. Or the items are dumped directly in landfills by the retailers if they are still unsold at the end of the season, to keep up profit margins by artificially keeping the items rare.

Black Friday season is like an annual punch in the face. I have an income, health insurance, wonderful colleagues, and the consciousness of my employer's ultimate aim of reducing this consumer frenzy a little, which makes it better.

But the thought occurs again and again, why don't I finally do something to 'square the circle' and bring forth something good? And this year, rather masochistically: doesn't it make sense that I suffer emotionally and physically a little if I am in this sometimes good, often horrible industry?

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

An Interlude in an Italian Restaurant

Yesterday evening Te. and I cycled to eastern Berlin where our office is. The trees are still very green, but lacings of linden leaf-petals are curling along the edges of the sidewalks, and elsewhere I've seen chestnuts and acorns scattered along the chestnuts. As it was Friday, the customary madness had set in, and we were amongst scores of hipsters who had gathered to sit in front of restaurants, throng at the waterfronts, ride bicycles along the infernal car gridlock of Skalitzer Straße (where a red ambulance, a fire ladder truck, and a white-and-blue police van managed to squeeze past the compact cars and BVG public transit bus), walk hand-in-hand in parks, drink and socialize. We rattled along under the mildly grubby, postered and graffiti'd classical-style plaster façades and sett stones of Friedrichshain, bypassed the Rigaer Straße regions, and found the Italian restaurant.

We were meeting a former colleague, our manager, for the first time in person since he left the company. I sat down at the golden, lacquered table underneath the awning and ignored the red-tasseled menu for the present to look at the tree with splashes of gold (like sunlight), the beige-yellow house façade, the red-and-black-brick church that was very 19th century and oddly rural for this city district, and the dipping long tail of a magpie that swooped in silhouette beyond it. The sky was blue and the clouds wispy and few, the temperature milder than it has often been lately. To. came striding up very soon after, and Te. came back out to the table, and we had a lovely meal and conversation.

I was wound up tensely as a jack-in-a-box after what have frankly been awful-and-partly-wonderful-but-as-mentioned-also-awful weeks at work.

But by the time my pizza with its thin pieces of eggplant, crinkly champignon mushroom, wine-flavored artichoke, and grainy parmesan had been dissected and eaten, and we had talked about tons of topics — babies, bicycle lanes that had popped up during the coronavirus era, soccer, Israeli elections, Netflix, .... — I began to feel relaxed and happy again. He also talked of his partner and his family, we talked about our brothers and mother too. It was nice to glimpse the larger circle of people whom he cares for, and to know that some things are turning out very well, as we wish for him.

I naïvely said that I hadn't seen many signs of the economic depression that had been predicted as a consequence of the coronavirus. He set me straight by pointing out that people he knew had lost their jobs, and that sectors of the population would have trouble finding their first job or regaining a last job before retirement. It was a reminder that I and my colleagues are exceptionally lucky to be employed and paid well.

To a degree, I still think that I have a small right to be unhappy with how things are going, at present, in the company for which I work. But there are of course so many bright spots in it as well. I hope that finding safe ways to meet with colleagues and others again will cheer me up. My social distancing was less rigid for a while. But then I realized that even if I do not catch the coronavirus or become ill from it, being quarantined and forcing everyone I've recently spent more than 15 minutes with to suspend their lives likewise, is the type of risk that one needs to think about properly. So that's why I've felt a little tense, too.

Spanish Literature and Semi-Quarantine

 After the boiling fury of the summer sun, we have been wafted with a few strong prevailing winds into an early autumn. A glacial humidity lies in the air, the evening light has turned from a fiery glow into a golden touch on the still-green leaves of a distant cottonwood, and the crescent moon in the sky tonight had a pensive air.

This summer has been one of thunderstorms that were forecast but failed to appear, often just (at most) being a low rumble or two that was practically swallowed in the frequent masses of pale grey cloud, and a decent quantity of rain. Yesterday, large silvery drops of rain.

***

I have taken advantage of the raininess to read a lot of books. My eyes were definitely bigger than my stomach, and one of my reading projects hit a stumbling block when I tried to find one book from a Spanish author about Spain, and yet failed to find just one that satisfied me. With Don Quijote de la Mancha, I am still stuck in the prefaces and acknowledgements; the story I read by Juan Marsé and the abridged Juan Ramón Ramirez failed to really grip me; a crime novel by Dolores Redondo was more lurid than what I'd usually read and in my view rather a TV crime episode in book form than anything more real and engaging. But in my perplexity I finally decided to ask a colleague from Barcelona, whom I don't know very well, if he had any books he'd recommend. He was, surprisingly and reassuringly, delighted, and based on what I said my tastes were, sent me this list: 

CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

Mortal y rosa, by Francisco Umbral
Berta Isla, by Javier Marías
La sobra del viento, by Carlos Ruis Zafón

CLASSICS

Benito Pérez Galdós - Fortunata y Jacinta
Vicente Blasco Ibáñez - Cañas y barro
Camilo José Cela - La colmena
Carmen Laforet - Nada
...apart from El Quijote, of course

***

It has come at an excellent time.

On Friday I got a minor 'coronavirus scare.' Someone I met this past week mentioned then that they had been advised by a doctor to have themselves tested for the virus. I was too busy working for the news to sink in, but the moment Feierabend arrived, I had much too think about.

It was all indefinite, but I decided that in all prudence I had to distance myself from my mother and brothers. Just shutting myself up in my room seemed grim and overreacting, so I'm afraid I've gone for a lighter, 2-metre distancing and frequent ventilation arrangement. (As well as excusing myself from sports I'd planned to do with colleagues today. And repressing a sudden urge to go grocery-shopping, which became far more tempting once it became forbidden fruit.)

As a result, a comedy routine has been staged in our household. I yelp in shock if I accidentally find myself close to someone, but generally manage to avoid this by listening for voices and craning my neck to look through doorways.

I keep the window open to let in the inhospitable warm balminess of the day and the nipping chill of night, in defiance of normal rules of common sense, just so that my room is well-ventilated. And I touch light switches, sink handles and doors with my elbow.

A general choreography of movement and placement has taken place during breakfasts and lunches. I eat dinner on a 'naughty step' in the corner of the kitchen, unfortunately too far away to pinch someone or jab someone with the elbow if they deserve retribution for a cheeky remark. And my mother, Ge. or J. put a cup or a plate at the end of the table, and then like an unsociable cat reluctantly approaching its tin of cat food, I come forward when they have backed away, to pick it up.

Anyway, it is hilarious, and of course the person whom I was in contact with has far more to complain of than I.

But I am especially grateful to my colleague now, because I have a new pile of Spanish books to take my mind off things.

— In addition to audiobooks, I have also turned to my old friend, the piano. Today I immersed myself in Schubert, Chopin, Tchaikovsky and Brahms again, excerpts of Rachmaninoff and Granados in between; yesterday I think it was Beethoven sonatas.

Because Gi. played Chopin regularly for a while, the clothbound pale-brick edition of his mazurkas and polonaises was gone from the music room. Now it's back, and I love the mazurkas so much. (The polonaises are, of course, not bad either.)

On an Excursion with Colleagues

It was raining and thundering today as T. and I began cycling to Friedrichshain for our company's latest team event. We were split into teams of five, and sent off into the neighbourhood to walk around and take photos of ourselves, and photos of buildings that we were asked to guess based on hints.

I was put in a group with members of the team that handles the cooperation with our clients and of the Front End team, a new colleague from the Back End team, and the leader of the team that gathers statistics to report to our clients; and I think our rapport was relaxed and happy.

We saw the Stasi Museum where the East German secret police used to keep their archives, and it was eerie, quiet and empty. We visited the teeming centre of Frankfurter Tor with its two towers designed in the late 1950s in imitation of the domes at Gendarmenmarkt and its tram lines and its heavy traffic streaming from the city centre and Alexanderplatz. And in between we passed the printmaker and florist and local fashion designer shops, Spätis, cafés, and cobble streets, homemade cloth banners that had graffitied slogans against 'Nazis' and a 'fascist USA' in the leftist zone around Rigaer Straße, posters that railed against rent raises and the high cost of living, a Dalmatian dog and maybe a dachshund? and other dogs, two white and blue police vans, the pockmarked brick façade of a 19th-century? street church, and the hollyhocks and other flowers of high summer.

After the other teams won the competition, we met colleagues in front of a Späti or went home. T. and I cycled home together. On the way to the office, T. and I had seen a protest march crossing the bridge at Warschauer Straße with a police escort, declaring events planning(?) as an essential service that should be protected financially despite social distancing measures. The way back was not as eventful, but it was nice to talk with each other.

When my team travelled by train from Samariterstraße to the station near the Stasi Museum, it was the first time I had taken the U-Bahn since the middle of March. I think that some people are militating against the mask policy or are forgetful. The Berlin transportation authority is running an automated loudspeaker message that persons caught without a mask must pay a 50 Euro fine, as per the anti-coronavirus policy. Anyway, the trains weren't too full. It didn't feel too strange to take it again, either.

***

But in general, I feel like the Lady of Shalott. While I was working in the office between June 2016 and March 2020, I metaphorically went for a nice walk around the neighbourhood, spoke with the townspeople, felt perfectly normal (although a little quirky as always), and was no longer the Lady of Shalott. But now — not knowing how or when it happened — I am in the tower room again, seeing the world merely through a mirror. And it is not entirely nice, although in having my mother and brothers around, there is still a lot of entertaining and comforting interaction. But today was a break in the enclosed life.

The Hate U Give: Police Brutality in and Outside of Fiction

I'll never give up.
I'll never be quiet.
I promise.

When Angie Thomas, a freshly graduated college student who wrote the earliest form of the story as part of Creative Writing coursework, published her young adult book The Hate U Give in 2015, her novel reminded me of the death of Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

(Brown was an eighteen-year-old. Apparently he had a tug-of-war with a police officer on opposite sides of the police car window. Then Brown, shot in the hand during the altercation, ran down the street, away from the car. He was shot at least six times and died on the spot — according to a Wikipedia article, forensic evidence suggested that he was charging back toward the police officer. A grand jury and the US Department of Justice investigated; both declined to prosecute the officer in the end. While he and others are mentioned in the book, The Hate U Give is most directly inspired, however, by events in 2009 when police killed another American: Oscar Grant.)

George Floyd (October 14, 1973 – May 25, 2020)
Student athlete, security guard, father.
via Wikimedia Commons
Further reading in Wikipedia here

Angie Thomas's story is told from the perspective of a teenager, Starr, whose friend Khalil is shot dead by a police officer. The police officer stops the car the two young people were driving in. Then he mistakes a hairbrush that Khalil wanted to pick up for a gun, and — hyper sensitized by racial stereotyping to presume crime where there is none — overreacts and fires his gun.

     They leave Khalil's body in the street like it's an exhibit. Police cars and ambulances flash all along Carnation Street. People stand off to the side, trying to see what happened.
[...]
   The paramedics can't do shit for Khalil, so they put me in the back of an ambulance like I need help. The bright lights spotlight me, and people crane their necks to get a peek.
    I don't feel special. I feel sick.

Then, when Khalil's death is no longer ignored, because of social media gossip, his story has become the property of the public and the press. His reputation is maligned. It also becomes clear that no prosecution of the police officer will happen, if it is left to the shooter's own department. But after a while the state attorney steps in to begin a prosecution, and 16-year-old Starr faces the burden of being the principal witness.

And the protests (and riots, partly undertaken by white people who aren't residents of the neighbourhood) are already underway. Alongside them, too, there are the first attempts to repair both an already figuratively broken system and a newly, literally broken neighbourhood.

***

In Search of Lost Time: (Pre-)Revolutionary France

After watching a video on techniques for motivating one's self to do what one would like to do in life, taking precise steps, I decided that what I want to do is to make advances toward writing my long-expected French Revolution story. It will be just for myself; I don't want to publicize a distorted or inaccurate version of history, and instead respect the truth. It might also be a way of working through the coronavirus crisis in parallel: following another topsy-turvy development in history.

The approach I am still taking is the one I took to university essays during the last two years, which is to keep researching and researching, and note-taking and note-taking, until something crystallizes. Plot, characters, setting — all of this must be inspired in the course of gathering subject matter.

Besides I want to write a historical setting with a well-rounded overview of what is going on, more than any one person could have in reality — a heightened reality, as it were. Even though I am living in the present, for instance, there are wheels within wheels of what is happening that I am not privy to. In the context of this story, I could do the 18th century French equivalent of flying into the Chancellor's office and listening to her conversations with German state ministers or with foreign leaders about policy.

Conversely, a French statesman in 1789 likely had little idea of the life of a farmer in one of the remote provinces, so a novelist would need to mend that gap. I think it would still be difficult to have the insight into the Third Estate nowadays, because the historical record is not full of 18th-century French farmers' diaries. I have often thought that it might be easier to approach that reality by reading memoirs and reporting written by people who live in countries with a huge gap between rich and poor in the modern day. At least I presume that social mobility is easier now than then, in most countries, so these records would be easier to find for the present day.

But perhaps I am trying to impose logic and integral order that did not exist in pre- and Revolutionary France: maybe the people of France were no connected dots, instead overlapping spheres of individual feeling and action.

The experience of attempting to research, and reflections about 'leadership' because of my experience in the company I work for (it is incredibly hard even to 'lead' ten people, and as such I have no idea how one would lead a country of millions), have made me determined not to write of the aristocracy. It is not a milieu I have germane life experience about.

The material for my research has also changed. Researching the archives of the French National Library, as I did over the past 3 years, was interesting. But it was also stultifying, insofar as there were mostly high-level, official documents or speeches. They did not give a detailed idea of the situation on the ground.

Therefore the approach I have taken this month is to find little French museums that describe their exhibits on their websites. (Although this has left me with the guilty feeling that I need to support local museums more; many websites are now out of service or minimalist. And of course all of the websites that do exist have messages affirming that the museums are shut due to the coronavirus.) This has been surprisingly rewarding; even a throwaway sentence in the caption for a painting or a document offers little insights that are widely illuminating.

I have also set up new spreadsheets. In one spreadsheet, I am tracking social-historical context that would have informed a French and particularly Breton person's worldview in the 1780s and 90s: dishes, local factories, clothing, military organization, etc. In another, the biographies of French people in the 18th century, arranged by last name and labelled by estate (aristocracy, clergy, populace), field of work, etc. In another, a year-by-year, month-by-month chronology of what happened in France and overseas from around 1760 to 1790.

Besides I have calendars for each year from 1789 through to 1793, and I add events to them along with the URLs where I found the information.

Along the way I am learning about American history during the War of Independence, and World War I through a museum that concentrates on French-American relations. I am also becoming aware that it is impossible to write of 18th century French trade and wealth without broaching the subject of slavery, since it was evidently still going strong and there seem to be fine initiatives investigating this being conducted by French museums today. Looking at 18th-century sketches of plantations, for example, with the fields and the workers' huts, is kind of revolting now; but it was apparently a 'normal' part of business back then.

The research is rewarding, as mentioned; but it is exhausting whenever my curiosity fizzles on a subject, and I mechanically keep recording information to keep up the system.

Yesterday, by way of relaxation, I gave myself a treat by watching a documentary about Marie Antoinette on the website of the Franco-German cultural television channel Arte. It was not comprehensive — Stefan Zweig's biography goes far deeper, for example — but it was helpful to visualize her haunts at the Petit Trianon and it supplied much food for thought. For example, I think it was arguing that Marie Antoinette had sympathetic and sane impulses (like a desire for privacy and simplicity) in what was, from a modern perspective, an insane social environment; but she was not careful or reflective in how she carried them out.

In the Dusk of Spring/Summer Social Distancing?

Theoretically I wanted to go back to work in the office next week. But after receiving many requests for a catered office lunch next week, which implied that many of us would be doing so, the head of the company's human resources 'pulled the emergency brake.' She told us that Berlin's anti-coronavirus measures had still not been suspended, and that only half of each team should be showing up to work, at most.

So I am spending at least another week in the home office. I feel sure that being amongst the colleagues again would have been marvellous. Also, getting out of the house every week day would have been good. But I feel guiltily pleased too.

I will not need to commute yet. And I will be able to spend more time around my brothers and mother, eat all my meals in comfort, tidy things during the lunch break and after work instead of feeling too exhausted to do anything, play the piano or ukulele or violin whenever I feel like it, wear my most comfortable socks and my training pants and my worn-out clothing that I don't want to throw out yet because it feels wasteful, hum songs at my laptop, take relaxing baths and light a candle and knit if I like, exercise freely, and spend more time exploring the home library.

Not that I have huge amounts of time for this either. But the extra hour per day adds up over time; and I find eventually that I have a big smile on my face, because I've had peace to do something that has been more or less impossible for the busy past four years, except around Christmas.

Long Notes about 20th Century Literature and 21st Century Prejudice

Today, after inhabiting a long black hoodie and a green corduroy skirt I've worn since I was thirteen years old for a few days on end, and spending the last two days immersed in an audiobook of Pride and Prejudice and Other Flavors, I took a lovely shower and went outside!

After realizing that my anxiety lately has been having ill effects on my work, I've been reading and experimenting a little. While breathing deeply and regularly for three minutes works, I've also had success with other 'slow' activities, like the piano.

But I also have been dosing myself with audiobooks that have an accessible writing style and a guaranteed happy ending. I can immerse myself in these for hours and tune out all duties and responsibilities, and think or feel my way into a more relaxed rhythm. These are maybe the best way I've found to calm down.

As far as this Pride and Prejudice retelling (from the year 2019) goes, which is set in California and has as its main characters the neurosurgeon daughter of an Indian-American royal dynasty and a cook who grew up in London, it has 'sweep,' which I like.

But I do think that the rapport between the main characters falls short of the romantic, so that pairing them up is as awkward as if a child were smushing the faces of its dolls together. And the political career of the heroine's brother felt more interesting than many other threads of the story. While there is a great deal of discussion about what one does not enjoy in politicians, idealized portraits of politicians are quite rare. (Except in disaster films and thrillers where the fictional US President bravely faces the worldwide tornadoes, interplanetary asteroids, or the freezing of half the hemisphere.)

And with this author I am always interested in how she 'dresses up reality'; there is soap opera panache in her plots and characterization.

Her characterization and details are not entirely surefooted, but she has clearly done volumes of research.

What I also like is that, unlike the dramatic malfeasance of a Hollywood film — although in Sonali Dev's book the malfeasance is dramatic, it is also nice (for lack of a better word) to encounter a truly villainous character who word-poisons people, in a book where this character ends up not getting his or her way. I've mentioned before how brilliant I think that Jane Austen's character of Mrs. Norris is, and that I think we need more villains like her.

Aside from audiobooks, I have been trying to 'tempt' myself to pick up paper books by reading the first paragraphs of books on the bookshelf. Right now a lot of these happen to be 20th century classics, some of those from our Aunt Nora or possibly from her mother, and some of those books from my father and aunt.

The first book I picked up is Tender is the Night, and I think — but didn't get far enough into it to know for sure — that this is a book where people are too amoral for them to be villainous in any fictionally-satisfying way. If they 'word-poison' people, that's just a fact of life.

(As a semi-hermit, I can say with a slightly lower risk of hypocrisy, that where people talk far more than they think, read, or self-reflect — and have few grains of philosophy or religious ethics to nourish them — I think there's a tendency to feel that the duty to be moral lies in being willing to criticize misdeeds in others. Because there may be no mention of the Bible about it, it may be felt not to be sententious or preachy; but I think in a way it's just the same thing that many self-identified Christians were doing when it was more fashionable to be Christian: someone always wants to be the gatekeeper of society's mores, in a way that's the most convenient for one's self. Needless to say, I believe this interpretation of ethics is neither philosophically nor ethically valuable. And it makes it far easier to assume the worst of each other, because then we feel that we are 'off the hook' and don't need to behave well ourselves. I think that this semi-amorality exists far more than undiluted amorality.)

That said, Tender is the Night was written in a lovely style, so I had qualms about putting it down.

Then I moved on to Ernest Hemingway, after having favourable recollections of The Old Man and the Sea (in Opapa's collection, I think) and another work.

But I found the first page of Death in the Afternoon nasty. I read a page of The Sun Also Rises next — and saw a 'joke' about Jewish noses. I decided that I should not force myself to read anti-Semitic tripe for leisure; if I ever wanted to research the early 20th century or something like that, maybe then, but I will postpone the evil day. So Ernest Hemingway was out.

Then I read a few articles about D.H. Lawrence in a college student's critical edition. I imagine that Lawrence in the syllabus was a more popular tool to épater les bourgeois in the 1970s than it is now; at any rate, unlike my parents' generation because it looks as if one of my father's housemates and my aunt had to read him for class, I never encountered him on a university syllabus except for one or two of his poems.

While his books are famously 'not safe for work,' I read about him mostly in the context of Bertrand Russell's autobiography. That reading was ~17 years ago. But what I recall from Russell's characterization — I think they were forced into an uneasy alliance because both were not in favour of the war, for different reasons, and they were at times the only people who would still talk to each other — is that he was an amoral fish who was not nice toward women, not warm in any of his relationships, and indifferent to national loyalty or national welfare in equal measure. Perhaps this is unfair.

Anyway, I was interested that in the British periodical Athenaeum and elsewhere, Lawrence's contemporaries generally found him ingenious, but unsound in his psychological theories and far too fond of explicit scenes. Their criticism grew even fiercer during World War I because his wife was a German woman. (I think that anyone who knows anything about D.H. Lawrence will already know this, but I wanted to repeat it anyway.) Lawrence roamed around the world after a while and may have had greater unaccountability elsewhere.

A year or so ago, I watched a Lucy Worsley television show about love in British literature, and I liked the way she contextualized Lady Chatterley's Lover. I guess this is still Lawrence's most important work? I've read critiques of several films that have appeared over the years, and there must have been articles on the anniversary of Lawrence's libel trial.

That said, I am never too fond of stories where individual people (even fictional people) are seen as avatars of an idea or of a thing one desires for one's self. And it has seemed to me like this novel does tend to 'fetishize' (for lack of another word) upstairs-downstairs relationships. So just like the rest of D.H. Lawrence's works outside of one or two poems, I think I will leave Lady Chatterley's Lover unread.

In the end I landed with Letters From an English Judge to an English Gentlewoman. Even before reading it on the internet, I was pretty sure that these letters were not genuine, but in fact written by the 'English Gentlewoman' herself. They're written maybe a decade or two before Indian independence, so in the 1930s, and they are extremely well-meaning — about social hierarchy in Anglo-India and about the perfidy of racism. They also mention a lot of local details of the houses etc.

***

But lastly, I said that I had gone outside.

So the details: my mother went per bicycle to a nearby park, my brother and I jogged part of the way and walked the rest. The horse chestnuts have been in flower and are now shedding dry debris on the paths, the purple lilacs fragrant, and iris spears rising from the flower beds like Myrmidons. Pink and white rhododendrons were either clad in their flower frock already, or on the way there; and the graceful columbines, with their blossoms like cupolas, are out in pink and purple. The May lilies are ringing their bells in the dips beneath trees. Late daffodils, grape hyacinths, hyacinths in white and pale blue and pink, and even a spindly species of snowdrops, are still flowering. And blood-red tulip flower petals were languishing on their stalks in Roman decadence.

While strips of white and red banded plastic hang from playgrounds here and there, these are now open to the public again; and ping pong tables, tennis tables, teeter totters, etc., resounded once more with the clamour of vox populi. What I enjoyed less — seeing the closed playgrounds caused me to ache a little every time I saw it, so I was really happy to see that the need for that had lessened — was the three or more medical masks that had been abandoned on the sidewalks.

This synopsis doesn't even capture a fraction of what we saw. But suffice it to say that it was summery — despite the clouds that drifted overhead; there is a welcome front of rainy weather that has been reviving the barren terrain of Berlin and Brandenburg, and reducing the forest fire danger, for the past few days.

An Unremarkable Day in Virusy Times

Today I had no scheduled work meetings, aside from the 15-minute meetings that take place anyway. As my mother witnessed, I literally did a 'happy dance' when I looked at my calendar yesterday evening and saw that.

(After missing an important meeting two years ago, I asked one of the managers for advice. He said that he checks his calendar last thing in the evening, to see which meetings are scheduled the next day. His advice has been so helpful that I've kept following it.)

But many surprise tasks and questions came up. So even without the meetings, I was quite absorbed and absent-minded, and had to take pains to make sure that I kept up with developments in my team and others.

For lunch I put on a pot of potatoes to boil, and later stirred together yoghurt with chopped onion, salt, and cracked black peppercorns — although the melted butter that I had with part of the potatoes was even nicer.

Then Ge. came home and went grocery-shopping with his red mask, obeying the anti-coronavirus measures that have been ordered by Berlin's city government since yesterday.

Now we have a greater variety of food to eat again; I've been culpably reluctant to drag myself around to the grocery store, and had begun to 'scrape the bottom of the barrel' when deciding what to make.

Ge. also fried an omelette for us, and he and Mama and I took turns boiling water to make a kind of grain coffee throughout the day.

Also, I broke off work earlier, at 6:15 p.m. — the day began before 9 a.m., so it was fair. Then I exercised and read in a paper book until the Berlin city evening news began, when I dashed back to the living room and listened to the TV news. At the same time I finished up the last daily tasks for work.

After hours, I've been listening to an audiobook and doing language exercises on Duolingo after neglecting it for months. Right now I'm focused on Swedish and Turkish.

Under-Sense and Over-Sensibility

It's late at night and I'll hopefully go to sleep soon.

The week has been like a merry-go-round of continuing activity. Aside from a heavier schedule of work, I overdid the exercise and underdid the eating so that the analogy is even more apt in that I've been spit, also physically, exhausted and half-nauseated into the weekend.

Today a few colleagues and I also concluded what were hopefully the last phases of a debate about principles and company-wide interests at work. My conscience hadn't left me alone until I rushed into a fray that I'd rather have avoided.

And mentally I am still spinning in circles like a caffeinated squirrel. It is also a bit depressing to realize — in the middle of writing answers to questions at work — that I've written error-filled and irrelevant stuff; maybe I really do need to build in more pauses.

But that's the glum view of things.

Then in the evening I read up on the U.S. President's views on the possibilities of the internal use of disinfectants in fighting viruses, which were not reassuring. Even if he later claimed — a claim that appeared in no wise supported by the video footage that I watched with my own lying eyes and lying ears — that it was 'sarcasm.'

Then I found that Twitter threw me into another 'anxiety spiral'. So although I am curious how other Republicans are reacting to his pearls of wisdom, it didn't appear wise to check it.

I've been catching up on YouTube subscription videos that had gathered unwatched for the past three months, on classic literature and home cooking and baking. Besides I have written two emails this evening, neither of which were in English so there was more head-scratching than usual.

The wind is wuthering, I think — the Brontës might disagree that this wind sound is what they heard — and rattling the windowpanes every now and then. It's a restless sound and a restless feeling, after the sun-soaked idyll of the past days. But let's hope that it's a wind like the one in the Dick van Dyke and Julie Andrews film version of Mary Poppins, and if we must interpret it subjectively and unscientifically as a sign, it may be a sign that a change is coming, but a good one.

A colleague is reading Sense and Sensibility, and perhaps it is time to immerse myself in something soothing and subtly critical like that too. The Marianne Dashwood within me is likely too strong and I must swing over nearer the spirit of Elinor.

The Lamb of March and Lion of April

Today has been mixed.

To begin with the harder stuff, the Berlin evening news had a segment about the postponement of burials and funeral services due to the coronavirus crisis. They showed film of a recent interment and the sight brought back recollections of my father's funeral.

I've been meaning since 2017 to go to the graveyard where the funeral took place and to begin to think of it as just another graveyard again. But I need to have someone who did not know Papa, to go with me to help me keep up a stoic façade. I feel I can remember every detail — what I wore, how many people were in the bus, the trees, each flower that we cast into the hole for the urn — of the day of Papa's funeral. It is too fresh.

Maybe in 2019, I almost had a mini-panic attack when my colleagues and I were on a weekend walk and we passed a graveyard that looked like it. I told myself to breathe, in and out; and reminded myself that we were in a different part of the city; and I don't think any colleague saw that anything was wrong.

So I find it hardly bearable to think how much worse burying a loved one is, under the present conditions (the number of attendees limited to ten, not being able to hug people, having ceremonies postponed indefinitely due to virus-related understaffing), for other families.

Then the newscast mentioned that a neurologist and 30-year partner of our former mayor, Klaus Wowereit, had just died at 54 from the effects of a Covid-19 infection. And then, of course, the death by suicide of the finance minister of one of Germany's states, due in part to the pressure of trying to figure out how to rescue the state's economy.

Fortunately there were also cheerful parts of the newscast, and the weather.

But there were good experiences today, too. It hailed a little, white pearls that could almost have been shaken from the blossoming trees; the breeze stirred the budded twigs and whirled the hail; and little snowflakes streamed through the sky and one of them — like the song from The Sound of Music — stayed on my nose.

In the afternoon, Ge. and I jogged to a park. I never feel like I can run or jog for longer periods without a long warm-up first, but today it worked. He is a nice person to jog with; despite his longer legs he went at a gentler pace for me. He also demonstrates the 'social distancing' well, planning where we run so that we wouldn't come too close to others, and slowing down his pace nearly to a standstill when we had to accommodate walkers.

In the park there were the plane trees, whose wintry trunks seemed to say that they had seen war and peace for over a century, and yet they were there still. I felt tempted once or twice to pat them. And we heard a woodpecker in the distance.

But the loveliest part was a bridge, which was renovated perhaps last year and now gleams very brightly. A dense dark grey cloud banded overheard, behind the tan-brown clock tower of the Schöneberg City Hall. Sunlight poured out from behind us. The tasseled twigs of a willow were ochre almost turning into pale spring green in front.

And everywhere, running and walking and cycling and pushing children's strollers through the deeply green lawns, with dark-blue-veined chionodoxa hidden in the margins, there were people who were numerously but safely turning to Nature for cheer and help, at a time of benign but sustained imprisonment.

A Stroll in the Park and Little Ghosts

In more cheerful news, after only going out once each the past Thursday mornings to go grocery-shopping in the organic food store across the street — it is almost empty at that time, with four staff distributed over it and maybe up to three shoppers in the whole store, so the hypochondriac in me could hardly have been happier —, I finally went outside for a frivolous, selfish, healthy walk this morning.

It was quiet and there was an early morning feel although it was past 9 a.m., the birds were cheeping and whirring, the number of pedestrians was low and the vehicular traffic is much sparser this week compared to the beginning of last week. In preference to pressing pedestrian crossing buttons, I have to confess that now I sometimes just amble across the street because there are no moving cars nearby. A police car rolled along the street and I wondered if they were checking for social distancing guideline adherence.

(In the past two weeks, I also saw police cars patrolling to make sure that the restaurants observed the then-6 p.m. curfew. Now, of course, it's forbidden to sit down in an eating establishment; one must order to-go, and the chairs are stacked inverted on the tables. There is a daily update about social distancing infractions on the Berlin city government's website and in the Berlin evening news, which mentioned 40 infractions yesterday.)

On March 17th, the last time I'd been on a proper walk, it had been a surprise to me that cinemas etc. were closed and dark without any signage whatsoever, except one piece of paper in a poster vitrine that promised 'Wir sind bald wieder für Sie da.' They were shut down too quickly and it was too unclear when they could reopen. But now shops are prepared.

And on the elaborately carved 19th-century door of a residential apartment building, I saw a sign that promised help and offered phone numbers to anyone who wished someone else to go shopping on their behalf. This kind of initiative is often being taken for Berliners with preexisting medical conditions.

Then, after 'checking in' on familiar shops on my block to see which ones were open and which weren't, I decided to enjoy my freedom and try to regain a feeling of normality by going to one of my favourite walking destinations. And soon I reached Viktoriapark in Kreuzberg and walked briskly up to the pinnacle in the centre.

Of course the city panorama reminded me dimly of Wordsworth's view of London:

This City now doth, like a garment, wear

The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,

Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie

Open unto the fields, and to the sky;

All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.*

Synagogues, churches, mosques; industrial brick buildings from the Wilhelminian epoch and building cranes and the Sony Centre at Potsdamer Platz; the TV Tower; tree-lined streets and the renovated façades of Kreuzberg apartment buildings along the streets named after places and generals of the Napoleonic Wars. All of these were half-immersed in a blue-grey morning haze.

Red and white tape was hung across the children's play areas. And since yesterday or the day before, it's been forbidden to sit down on the grass, and sitting on benches is only recommended for short periods.

I was one of three people who had surmounted the veined pale stone steps to the enclosure surrounding the pinnacle. Around the pinnacle itself, there was an even more silent host of beer bottles from the bacchanalian nighttime revels of neighbourhood ne'er-do-wells, standing dispersed around the steps.

And at the foot of this enclosure, a man in his forties or fifties had his little portable wheeled suitcase ('Hackenporsche' in German; I'm bad at thinking of the English-language equivalent) with him as he pottered around the waterfall, beyond the wooden fence.

But what I loved were the signs of spring. Green leaves appearing more fully formed, like salmon 'alevins' becoming recognizable fry, narcissus — always yellow and perfect large stars, fragrant hyacinths in white that had blossomed so far that they had toppled and were beginning to wither at the edges of their petals, annual golden cowslips or primroses, and violets in white that were (I thought) more funereal-looking. Little ghosts at the foot of a large tree.

After I was warmed up, I jogged for a minute or two on the way home, feeling healthy and strong and hopeful again.

* "Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802" [Wikipedia]

Reading a Shakespeare Sonnet on Waves and Eternity Beyond

Shakespeare's sonnets formed part of my 'emo' teenager phase, maybe not so much the sprightlier 'darling buds of May' sonnets but the ones about aging and dying.

Now the sonnets are coming to mind again, given the heightened death rates that are reported as a consequence of the coronavirus, and the grim pictures of military trucks carrying corpses in northern Italy.

It is probably still a little 'emo' to feel that the verses are apt when I'm just reading depressing news about deaths, like millions of other people have since script was first invented, not staring at the Reaper eye-to-eye.

But I guess it's fair to take comfort where one can find it.

Please forgive the crude undergraduate analysis, in advance.

***

Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end;
Each changing place with that which goes before,
In sequent toil all forwards do contend.
Nativity, once in the main of light,
Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crown'd,
Crooked eclipses 'gainst his glory fight,
And Time that gave doth now his gift confound.
Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth
And delves the parallels in beauty's brow,
Feeds on the rarities of nature's truth,
And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow:

And yet to times in hope, my verse shall stand.
Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand.

***

I like the first lines because they express very well, I think, the feeling of the benign and friendly passing of time when one is not in the middle of a personal storm.

As a teenager I spent hours walking beside the ocean and hearing the lapping of the waves, which do of course have a rhythm like the second hand of a clock. Then at rare moments, seeing the waves crashing high onto the concrete breakwaters with an arctically cold wind whistling behind.

And I like the abstracted ideas that the waves are heading somewhere; that there is an 'aim'; and that they are engaged with each other as if they were colleagues or comrades.

These are comforting thoughts.

But I don't think Shakespeare delves deeply enough — cheeky though it is for me to write this — when he portrays the worst spectre of old age as losing the beauty of youth.

I should think that being more vulnerable to mental and physical illness, losing the ability or permission to carry on one's life's work, or seeing loved ones die before their time, is worse.

And age is not always cruel. I am far happier now than I was when I was a teenager, although admittedly it's too early to tell if the worm will turn. Also, looking at others: for example I think that a lifetime of tough experiences can make characters especially loving and beloved as they become older.

Age has become a large topic with the coronavirus, although perhaps gradually less so as it becomes clear that even twenty-year-olds who are otherwise healthy may become critically ill. And I'd have to reiterate that greater statistical likelihood of death should by no means devalue the worth of a human being. Perhaps I'm biased by knowing wonderful people who were well over sixty: there are many people who, at a hundred years of age, have far more left to contribute to the world than I do.

Anyway, the last two lines of the sonnet I find a bit obnoxious — even though I like the feeling that underlies them of being determined not to forget the dead —, because writers (or first-person narrators?) rarely manage to bestow immortality as much as they think they do. Taking, again, a religious standpoint; and borrowing a few metaphors from Antony and Cleopatra; I would say that the good that men do lives after them, in an abstracter form, and gradually the bad is interred with their bones. No need for human intervention.

___
Text of the sonnet taken from Shakespeare's Sonnets, ed. William J. Rolfe (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1883), at Wikisource.

Mini-Quarantines and Mini-Ethics

It's the end of the second week of staying at home in order not to spread the coronavirus. I've been managing to sleep longer.

From a logical perspective I know that this crisis is small peas in even recent history. Also, the things that worry and disorientate me the most are signs that proper action is being taken; not of problems per se.

But because of the technological demands of switching to the home office, tasks have piled up at work and I have been putting in work on Saturdays the past two weeks.

Rather having more time to read or do housework or do other things, I have been working as much as ever, and it is definitely weird to do it at home.

It is only now, because a few urgent work tasks were tackled and I have reemerged from the first state of archetypal fight-or-flight reaction, I am beginning to realize how not all right I have been, emotionally. I think that admitting the problem is good; admittedly I'm not quite sure how to proceed from here.

Having familiar routines interrupted still seems to be traumatizing for me; and I still don't know how to handle the reversal of stimuli — the pull of the sunshine and the green spring versus the rational need to stay indoors, the wish to comfort-eat versus the shortfalls in the grocery store stocks, etc.

That said, a billion other people or more on Earth are in the same boat; I just don't want to generalize on everyone else's behalf.

Because of my anxiety I haven't been able to properly think out the broader ramifications, especially the philosophical or (in my case) specifically religious ones. From what I heard in the news yesterday, the Pope called the coronavirus crisis a punishment from God for sins like ignoring the poor and the needs of the earth. I did not find this especially inspiring.

My armchair analysis is different:

To my (hopefully not too Leibnizian) eyes: like all things, the coronavirus brings with it good and evil. This good and evil are unequally scattered now, but will in the due course of time be balanced out and resolved for the good.

Much of this will wash over us without our being able to influence much; but a portion of its effect is up to us to determine. And yet, although I am trying to become a marginally better person through this interesting experience, I have felt cornered, panicked and not nice or noble at all.

That said, I think that many secular or theological analyses are likely to be better than mine!

A Snapshot in the Age of Coronavirus

It feels as if events are happening too quickly to process them.

A week ago I'd have thought it was absurd to stay home from work, even as I washed my hands when necessary until the skin was cracked and bleeding, and tried to figure out how skin lotion could be applied antiseptically.

Now I'm working from home after weeks of debating with colleagues about the office's policy against remote work. I can't emphasize enough how bizarre this feels.

The roads below the room where I'm working are maybe a third more empty than usual — Sunday morning levels of traffic except at rush hour. With each pedestrian and cyclist whom I see I always wonder, are they really being prudent? Car music sounds louder, bird song easier to hear, the air I think a little lighter and less particle-filled, and brawling voices on the sidewalk permeate the windows more easily as do the buses and the ambulance sirens.

Going out to the grocery store does not appeal, normal though it may seem at every other time.

Firstly, I'd need to think out how to do it while keeping at a proper distance from others.

Secondly, I'm worried about seeing a William Hogarth-like picture of cupidity and greed in a city I'd felt happy in and proud of until Monday.

On Monday evening I went into the familiar chain store underneath my office. The leafy vegetables were largely vanished (lots of tomatoes remained), table sugar and flour gone, baked goods bins decimated. In the aisle that holds hygiene products, half of the shelves were bare and had paper signs taped to them that announced that supplies had temporarily run out.

At the cash register, the atmosphere was anxiety mixed with boisterousness.

Everyone was in a hurry, or in a state of giddy frivolity that made me angry, e.g. planning to buy lots of beer to drink with pals. The cashier was calm enough on the outside. But the way she was hyperaware of the indeed perturbing, loud roaring of a man near the drugstore on the other side of the street, revealed that her nerves, too, were on edge.

Later on, once I'd left the store, I almost cried because I felt that the crisis-management-by-consumption was so degrading and now began to find it sad. Then I walked home for two hours to avoid public transit.

It's strict and yet a little weak-spirited of me, but I don't want to see those grocery scenes again.

Anyway, the best consolation I've found — aside from fluffy and harmless distractions I find, and jokes — is the levelheadedness of people I know personally and of many people whom I don't, and especially the companionship of the people I like best. (Although Papa is missing.)

What I'm still trying to figure out is my duty to others, aside from staying home and not becoming a carrier of the virus. Maybe I'll also be able to sleep properly again. Lately I've been anxious enough to wake up even before 7 a.m.

February, Flowers, and Easy Programming

Three weeks ago, one of my superiors at work kindly helped me sign up for an SQL (structured query language) at Coursera, an online university. Since then, I've been watching videos, practicing new techniques, and reading supplementary articles and even skimming a few academic papers; and it's both absorbing and rewarding although I doubt I could have gotten much out of it if it weren't so pertinent to the workplace.

Fortunately I already knew a lot of SQL that my sister had inculcated into me, by precept or by example, over the past 3.5 years. The methods of reorganizing tables of information by using a cross/Cartesian join, self join, outer join, or right join are confusing me, however. And when the readings refer to SQL in relationship to the programming languages R and Python, the explanations are wasted on me entirely.

It has confirmed my opinion that university — lovely as it is for others — is not for me except as an appendage to my working life. If I am not really enjoying the courses and absorbing information easily, and if the effort expended into it has no immediate, real-life application for me, I simply don't have a sense of purpose.

But despite my reservations about academia, it's incredible how much easier it is to learn something in a work or university setting when I'm used to the heavy friction and resistance of trying to learn things on my own.

Anyway, the course leads to my staying 15-60+ minutes longer at work per day than I otherwise would. So I have had less sleep than customary, and arrived quite late to work twice or so this week, and my slight tendency to anaemia has struck again.

Other things are going on too: Last weekend I threw a party for two work teams. It turned into such a wonderful evening — thanks to the guests, and the snug setting of the Corner Room and the kitchen, and admittedly also the way that it accidentally turned into a chance to play the piano and pick up the violin again (although this sounds selfish, and probably is) — that I felt amply rewarded for the effort.

The week before that I had a cold, which I had to respect (so to speak) because it made me a bit wobbly — I took half a day off work to sleep in and regain strength — but which was otherwise the mildest and most agreeable cold I've ever had.

As for spring, the florists are full of pussy willows, prunus branches, primroses, cowslips, grape hyacinths, hyacinth bulbs, narcissus (generally the small-flowered ones that come in tight clumps), tulip bunches, and pansies. I bought a few native English species for the party, and it was so nice to have an excuse to put a yellow primrose, willow and cherry branches, a pot of ivy, and a fern around the apartment.

Returning outdoors, I spotted a snowdrop blossom a long time ago, in December. Now there is a yellow crocus — only in the bud, and a little collapsed — near work. Long catkins are streaming from the Turkish filberts and from other shrubs and trees in the hazelnut genre.

The rose bushes seem to be spending the winter remarkably well. A few weak rose flowers in roadside plantings remind me of Beauty and the Beast, because they persist in such an inhospitable season and place:

Il neigeait horriblement ; le vent était si grand, qu’il le jeta deux fois en bas de son cheval, et, la nuit étant venue, il pensa qu’il mourrait de faim ou de froid, ou qu’il serait mangé des loups, qu’il entendait hurler autour de lui. Tout d’un coup, en regardant au bout d’une longue allée d’arbres, il vit une grande lumière, mais qui paraissait bien éloignée. Il marcha de ce côté-là, et vit que cette lumière sortait d’un grand palais qui était tout illuminé.
[...]
Il regarda par la fenêtre et ne vit plus de neige ; mais des berceaux de fleurs qui enchantaient la vue. [...] Le bon homme, après avoir pris son chocolat, sortit pour aller chercher son cheval, et, comme il passait sous un berceau de roses, il se souvint que la Belle lui en avait demandé, et cueillit une branche où il y en avait plusieurs.

(It snowed horribly; the wind was so strong that it threw him under his horse twice, and when night had come, he thought that he would die from hunger or from cold, or that he would be eaten by the wolves whom he heard howling around him. All at once, looking at the end of a long alley of trees, he saw a great light, but it seemed very far away. He walked to that side, and saw that this light was coming from a big palace that was all illumined. He looked out of the window and did not see snow any more, but flowers that enchanted his sight. The good man, after having taken his chocolate, went out to search for his horse; and as he passed underneath a cradle of roses, he remembered that Belle had asked him for some, and he picked a branch where there were several others.)*

Anyway, other rose species are just speckled with intensely red rose hips and have not flowered in months. But in all species, strong dark green leaf shoots with streaks of red are now thrusting from the twigs.

And a few potted plants, like geraniums, survive nested in balconies and in receptacles on the sidewalks. The forsythia on my windowsill, however, is losing the remnant of its desiccated leaves. At least the pith of its twigs is green, and promising leaflets have emerged from the tips of two twigs.

The city birds are as resilient as the late roses. A week or so ago I saw a pigeon retrieve things from the dusky ballast stones of the U-Bahn bed and fly up into the whitewashed Art Deco roof beams at U-Bahn station Bülowstraße, repeatedly. Because something that looked like a dead leaf fluttered down again from the beam, and because of the pattern of flights, I surmised that the pigeon was not eating but that it was preparing a nest.

The days are growing longer, the temperatures are nippy but it could be worse, plump buds are gathering in heavier and heavier accumulations on the tree and bush branches not just of plant species that I know. Altogether, the feeling that I've had since last autumn that this winter would not leave me 'seasonally depressed' has turned out to be justified thus far.

* French text taken from "La Belle et la Bête" (1806 edition) by Jeanne Marie Leprince de Beaumont,
at Wikisource.

A Walk along the Wuhle

This morning I woke up in time to have a nice early breakfast with my mother and two youngest brothers. Plain Schrippen (buns) and croissants and a bread pretzel stick and so on, with marmalade, and coffee.

Three of us set forth before noon to Berlin-Mitte to browse the English and humanities books in Dussmann, as well as the music scores in the basement. I bought Bruch's violin concert in g minor, but — as I suspected — the piano reduction of the orchestral part is not piano-solo-friendly at first glance; and I don't recognize the violin part yet although I was convinced that it would sound familiar. In terms of English-speaking books, I saw that Michelle Obama's autobiography does not seem to be out in paperback yet; and in the foreign language book section I picked up Gösta Berlings saga hoping that at some point I'd finally begin reading Swedish.

Standing in the bus that was replacing the S-Bahn line whose tracks are under repair over the weekend, I broke off the return trip home when Ge. pointed out to me that I would be quite late to a walk with colleagues if I didn't go straight there. So I disembarked at Potsdamer Platz, jogged awkwardly from the large intersection to the U-Bahn entrance that was under construction and closed and then ran along the track of setts that marks the former location of the Berlin Wall across the lawn to the elevator which was amazingly quick to arrive, and just missed my train. The next train came in 4 minutes so it was no tragedy.

At Alexanderplatz, I waited up on the S3 platform as S7 and S9 train after train arrived and left, all touching on some of the same stations as the S3 line. I became too nervous and took a 'wrong' train for part of the route, to Ostkreuz. There I saw at last that the S3 train had a sparser schedule than the S7 and S9, but that there was no construction or anything that would block it from arriving. In the end, I disembarked at S-Bahnhof Köpenick with merely the expected 4 minutes' tardiness.

The S-Bahn journey itself was newly explored ground for me, after Ostkreuz was past. At Betriebsbahnhof Rummelsburg, for example, there was a magnificent industrial landscape with lines of rail tracks as far as the eye could see that partly exuded real pride in labour and technology. It was a mixture of epochs. A building that could not have been much older than thirty years was steaming in greater billows than ever in the winter cold. But there was also a haunting former brick roundhouse that suffers desuetude and has lost its windows likely to vandalism, that looked a bit older and more Prussian and obviously not so elegant. A pale brick water tower that must be a remnant of the age of the steam engine was less disruptive to the overall impression I have in retrospect, that the scene was a friendlier kind of Futurist scene, all 1920s curves and contours.

I liked that the residential area to the east has shed the monotonous DDR gloom. Instead you have the feeling — or I have the feeling — that pre-WWI Berlin has revived. You can imagine that working or middle-class people might afford their own home with its own acre, or you can see parents and children taking the train in chattering masses to leave town for a day's or weekend's getaway along stations that have purposely been brightened and decorated to attract them. The birch forest along the tracks felt natural and unregimented: its ground sank and rose again, old branches and trunks rotted fruitfully to prepare the way for more vegetation, it breathed and thrived in its thin-soiled way.

But if Wuhlheide was Brandenburg in feeling remote from the urban grind; and if a few of the buildings along the way also hinted at insouciance; Köpenick was Berlin again: shopping centres and densely plotted apartment buildings — but maybe less high than what you'd see in my neighbourhood — and traffic.