Westward to Brandenburg and the Revolution

It has been a quiet Sunday. The blue sky shone through the gaps in the apartment buildings, tree leaves were bright in dark summer green and saffron-yellow and even brown, and sunlight poured over almost everything. Walking along cobblestones or setts, acorns can tumble with your steps, and tiny pot lids of acorn husk are lodged here and there. Mama and I took the train to the southwestern periphery of Berlin to visit my uncle and we sat out in the garden with the other guests, amongst the pines and cotoneaster and grass and rosebushes, with its suggestion of the seaside with the rustling breeze. One or two mosquitoes drank from us while we drank more politely from cups of coffee or water, ate rolls with apricot marmalade or cheese, spread butter on Lower Rhenish honey cake with candied sugar as well as lemon and orange peel, and had apple cake fresh from the oven. A crow croaked in the canopies and magpies, apparently, gathered nearby; and a wedge of migrating birds pulled by.

At home I spent my time on the computer and watched videos about day-to-day life in colonial America of the 18th and early 19th centuries. It feels relevant to the French Revolution research that I am tugging away at, alongside the database job I do, and it overlaps a little with the letters by Montesquieu that I read in the U-Bahn.  (Which in turn overlap with the modern history of Middle Eastern progressive rulers, movements and proponents that I am also reading the U-Bahn in a pathetic attempt not to let my interrupted studies go to waste.) I had despaired of this ever happening, but I am beginning to understand the French revolutionaries' point of view better and better. Amongst other things I'm beginning to imagine that the influential aristocrats were like the worst magnates in the United States, and that the Church was like the retrograde leadership of modern-day 'Christian' movements that prefer to regulate the morals of others according to long irrelevant and disproven misconceptions, and that magnates and churchmen had the same effect on government policy and public discourse; and at once I feel a lot of sympathy. Also, Montesquieu seems to be reeling off a string of commonplaces in his writings when he describes by what principles one should govern, what freedom of and from religion should be, etc. But back then they were not as evident as they are now, I think. Even now they are not so evident; and the relevance to present-day political discourse is so immediate that it is difficult, I think, to be bored or to fail to be engrossed by most of the subjects that he brings up. I still think that admiring Rome for anything is a huge mistake and that its republics were probably a crock; but since Montesquieu doesn't go in depth into Roman history in them, that doesn't bother me so much in his Letters.

Montesquieu on Religion and Riches

Today I travelled in the wrong direction for two stops, in the U-Bahn after work. Although I was reading the less raconteur-like work of Martin Schwarzschild at the time, I switched over to the Persian Letters later and was absorbed in those too.

The second letter I read reminded me of a foreign head of state who, of late, is not so much rattling a saber as thumping a Neanderthal-like stick, in syncopation with North Korea's leader:

Je trouve, Ibben, la Providence admirable dans la manière dont elle a distribué les richesses : si elle ne les avait accordées qu’aux gens de bien, on ne les aurait pas assez distinguées de la vertu, et on n’en aurait plus senti tout le néant. Mais, quand on examine qui sont les gens qui en sont les plus chargés, à force de mépriser les riches, on vient enfin à mépriser les richesses.

('I find it admirable how Providence has distributed its riches: if they had been accorded only to worthy people, one would not have distinguished them enough from virtue, and one would no longer have felt all of their nothingness. But when one examines who are the people who are most loaded with them — by disdaining the rich, one comes at last to disdain wealth.' — roughly translated from letter XCIX, Lettres persanes by Montesquieu [Wikisource])

I also really enjoyed the letter that preceded it. It was a light but sweeping satire on the leading intellectuals (or rather, perhaps, specifically scientists and philosophers) of the day, and their deistic worldview:

laissés à eux-mêmes, privés des saintes merveilles, ils suivent dans le silence les traces de la raison humaine.

Tu ne saurais croire jusqu’où ce guide les a conduits. Ils ont débrouillé le chaos et ont expliqué, par une mécanique simple, l’ordre de l’architecture divine. L’auteur de la nature a donné du mouvement à la matière : il n’en a pas fallu davantage pour produire cette prodigieuse variété d’effets que nous voyons dans l’univers.

Que les législateurs ordinaires nous proposent des lois pour régler les sociétés des hommes ; des lois aussi sujettes au changement que l’esprit de ceux qui les proposent, et des peuples qui les observent : ceux-ci ne nous parlent que des lois générales, immuables, éternelles, qui s’observent sans aucune exception, avec un ordre, une régularité et une promptitude infinie, dans l’immensité des espaces.

Et que crois-tu, homme divin, que soient ces lois ? Tu t’imagines peut-être qu’entrant dans le conseil de l’Eternel, tu vas être étonné par la sublimité des mystères ; tu renonces par avance à comprendre, tu ne te proposes que d’admirer.

Mais tu changeras bientôt de pensée : elles n’éblouissent point par un faux respect ; leur simplicité les a fait longtemps méconnaître, et ce n’est qu’après bien des réflexions qu’on en a vu toute la fécondité et toute l’étendue.

La première est que tout corps tend à décrire une ligne droite, à moins qu’il ne rencontre quelque obstacle qui l’en détourne ; et la seconde, qui n’en est qu’une suite, c’est que tout corps qui tourne autour d’un centre tend à s’en éloigner, parce que, plus il en est loin, plus la ligne qu’il décrit approche de la ligne droite.

Voilà, sublime dervis, la clef de la nature ; voilà des principes féconds, dont on tire des conséquences à perte de vue.

Translated in the 19th century by John Davidson:

left to themselves, and deprived of these sacred miracles, they follow silently the footprints of human reason.

You would not believe how far this guide has led them. They have cleared up chaos, and have explained, by a simple mechanism, the order of divine architecture. The creator of nature gave motion to matter: nothing more was required to produce the prodigious variety of effects in the universe.

Ordinary law-givers offer us laws to regulate society--laws, subject to change like the minds of those who make them, and of the people who obey them: those talk only of general, immutable, and eternal laws, which, without exception, are obeyed with order, regularity, and absolute exactness in the immensity of space.

And what think you, most holy man, these laws may be? You imagine, perhaps, that entering into the counsels of the Eternal, you are about to be astonished by sublime mysteries: you give up in advance all idea of understanding, and propose only to admire.

But you will soon change your opinion: they do not dazzle us by a pretended profundity: their simplicity has made them long misunderstood; and it is only after much reflection, that people have seen how fruitful they are, and how far they reach.

The first is, that every body tends to describe a straight line, unless it meets with some obstacle which diverts its course; and the second, which is but a consequence of the first, is, that every body which moves round a centre, tends to fly from it; because the further off it is, the nearer the course it describes approaches a straight line.

Here, sublime dervish, you have the key of nature: here are the fruitful principles, from which consequences are drawn which pass beyond our ken.

"Persian Letters/Letter 98" Montesquieu, transl. by John Davidson [via Wikisource]

Zeitgeist and Zeit-Ungeist

Yesterday I read a handful of Guardian articles on the internet, when I was surprised to see an article from the Berlin correspondent that mentioned that a neo-Nazi demonstration was taking place here, today, and that a counter-protest was planned. He wrote that generally counter-protestors had outnumbered the protestors at similar events, but — and this made me worried — that the right-wingers had managed to gather increasingly large crowds.

It struck me because I'd felt uncertain after reading about the Ku Klux Klan and other groups marching in Virginia recently. Was it better no longer to ignore extreme views under the impression they are representative of so few and so little likely to have concrete effects; were the concrete effects in Charlottesville but especially the ambivalence of Donald Trump a sign that ideas like ultranationalism, racism and anti-Semitism are in fact far more widespread than I imagine? Also, am I completely blind to racism that exists here — housing and employment discrimination, street harassment, etc. — because I'm never the target of it?

I thought as a teenager that every person who has 'white privilege' is racist; now I think it's silly. While it is unpleasant to feel that I am certainly not 'colour-blind' and that in the case of strangers my ideas do run along racially problematized lines, I doubt anyone would care about my mental preconceptions, etc., as long as it just makes me embarrassed. It has nothing to do with the actually important, enormous scale of de facto economic, social and political segregation that I've seen glimpses of in — for example — New York.

Either way, the idea of counter-protesting appealed to me. It was not to say that I hate neo-Nazis or to strut around feeling virtuous about clearing a shamingly low threshold of reason and good feeling. The point is rather that I (representing not myself but many others) care enough about the safety and happiness of present-day targets of Nazism — rather than inhumane and horrible ideas of race and nationality — to take the trouble to appear in person and express the alternative point of view.

As J. and I got to Spandau, the thought of a neo-Nazi protest and hatred of foreigners perturbed me as a risk for other Berliners. Seeing pedestrians and fellow subway travellers who were probably from Turkey, from French- and English-speaking African countries, from Vietnam or elsewhere in southeastern Asia, and other places, I wondered how safe they were. What do their children experience in schools or in public, and are their parents afraid for them? etc. Some of the neo-Nazis at this protest were travelling from other countries where their xenophobia might have fewer immediate targets, but what do neo-Nazis in Berlin do to racial minorities?

We reached the U-Bahn station Rathaus Spandau, where the huge city hall and tower were already rearing behind the entrance. To the left there was a long glass façade in the terminal, on the first floor above ground level, revealed the regional train platforms. On one or more of them, I gathered, the right-wing protestors were arriving. As for the subway, it was hard at first to leave the station because there was such a sea of people in our protest: several thousand, I imagine.

We saw red flags for the SPD party, red flags for the Linke; red flags for labour unions like IG Metall; green flags for the Green Party; and a sail-like triangle for the Pirate Party. Not that everyone need trumpet how Nazi they ain't, but I thought it was a pity and a loss of opportunity that no representatives of the CDU seemed to be present. Two posters for the MLPD, which I assumed to be the German Marxist Leninist Party. Enormous rainbow flags. A handmade white poster with black lettering prodding Neo-Nazis to 'Mach wie Rudolf Hässlich,' in other words to make like Rudolf Hess and in other words kill themselves; and another poster outright encouraging them to kill themselves. Another sign, 'Ob kuschlig oder militant, das Wichtige ist der Widerstand' ('Whether cuddly or militant, the important thing is the resistance').

After a delay, we began marching. Spandau is, I'd say, so far out at the northwestern periphery of Berlin as to be almost in the Brandenburg countryside. People stepped out onto their 20th-century or quaintly older balconies, propped themselves up in the windows, or stood on the sidewalks, watching screenlessly or capturing the scene with their smartphones. Their faces were often beaming, and I liked the weekend-strolling atmosphere of the protest, and the feeling that we were redeeming the reputation and honour of the neighbourhood on the residents' behalf. It was only the very elderly who were stranded at their bus stations who made me feel regret. But I felt a little tearful once, at the thought that so many years after my grandparents' awful experiences in the 1930s and 40s people were continuing to pretend that there was something to be nostalgic about.

Schlachtensee

Early this afternoon three of us set out to the southwestern corner of Berlin to swim in the Schlachtensee.

Massive grey clouds were gathered overhead, but also blue apertures, and beams of sunlight; we were worried it might rain, and instead it was only cooler than ordinary; and once we went into the water, the dragonflies swooped as eagerly as ever, iridescent blue beetles thronged on a beleaguered spray of beech twigs, insect corpses and a feather and a dead reed were lulled to sleep on the water's surface, and the green and silvery leaves of the trees half-buried in the banks could not have looked happier or more summery.

Twinkletoes at Thirty-One Years of Age

Yesterday T. and I went to our first ballet lesson, at a much riper age than customary, by at least two and a half decades. She had graceful black canvas ballet slippers affixed in front by criss-crossed elastic bands, and I had beige leather slippers with an elastic drawstring around the edge; I wore grey legging-like yoga pants and a long-sleeved shirt, and she had black leggings and a pale grey t-shirt. Both of us had our hair neatly tied back. Despite our pleasure with our new clothes, it was strange for me to walk into the studio room, with the sea of mirrors surrounding it entirely, and no way of escaping one's own presence there.

We were at the studio, in Kreuzberg (or Berlin's hipster Mecca) early. Closer to 8 p.m. a mother and a child (steeped in ballet) arrived and already warmed up quite professionally in the studio room. Then, as the class had begun, we were joined by two more women about our own age or older, one of whom had done dance already while the other also proclaimed herself a novice. We entered by a small office in front, with changing rooms to the right, washrooms further in to the right, and in front of us the studio room with the vast mirrors, a piano with a computer and other paraphernalia on top of it but a puzzling cushion with the British flag all over it beneath it, a mobile barré, and a well-loved lacquered wooden chairs lined up at the far mirrors. The neighbouring house façades, visible through the classic windows, were also atmospheric.

We were enthusiastically greeted by the instructor, who was a replacement and also usually teaches children. She started us at the barré. We lined up, left hand in front of us reposing on the bar, and began a series of pliés to the accompaniment of music. We repeated these facing in the other direction. I was careful not to do anything that I couldn't do with reasonably safety and with sound technique. For example, my pliés — since grim experience in front of the narrow hall mirror in the home studio had taught me that after sinking into a plié at a certain point, I end up imperceptibly sticking out my bottom in an ungraceful fashion — were the merest bendings of the knees. I can't turn out my toes much without fudging a lot, and endangering the wellbeing of my knees, so I didn't cheat. After that came dégagements, perhaps glissés too, followed by grands battements. The instructor declared herself reasonably pleased by these. After that things went downhill.

We left the barré. We did series of steps, and we also rehearsed the Five Positions. Looking at myself in the mirror, I did see glimpses of grace and uprightness of bearing. But I had been trying to make the 'ballet' painless to watch, after all, and to relax so that the movements could be more natural and fluid. The 'three step run' was a graceless; and yet the jumps in first, second, and third position were less bad. It was too absorbing to notice how good we were generally. But at some point here the instructor — having long ago left off the remarks of 'I think we have achieved that' — said that 'the important thing is to have fun.'

Then, after an hour, we went home again. (Determined to practice.)

Bookmarks: Martin Schwarzschild and Montesquieu

At present I keep reading the same sentences again and again in Schwarzschild's The Structure and Evolution of the Stars, and the Reynolds constants, adiabatic temperature gradients and convective fluxes are all a bit beyond me. So today I read more in a newly published book about western progressivism in the Middle East throughout history, and have had a strange déjà vu experience in the latest chapter because I am quite sure that the story of Rifaa Bey and fellow Egyptian students traveling in early 19th century Paris under the aegis of strict guardians is familiar from another source.

In the evening I read Montesquieu's Lettres persanes. It is likely due to the circumstances of life at present rather than the intrinsic quality of the book, but the Lettres haven't delighted me nearly as much as Voltaire's stories and Cyrano de Bergerac and Jan Morris's Writer's World did before. So far. But I almost travelled past the U-Bahn stop because it was so absorbing, and I liked Montesquieu's retold fable of the troglodytes.

First the troglodytes were mean and selfish, and each cared only for his own welfare. But then good troglodytes formed their own community, and are almost as amusingly extreme in their altruism as the former troglodytes were amusingly extreme in their venality.

From Montesquieu:

Je ne saurois assez te parler de la vertu des Troglodytes. Un d'eux disoit un jour: Mon père doit demain labourer son champ; je me lèverai deux heures avant lui, et quand il ira à son champ, il le trouvera tout labouré.

On vint dire à un autre que des voleurs avoient enlevé son troupeau: J'en suis bien fâché, dit-il; car il y avoit une génisse toute blanche que je voulois offrir aux dieux.

On entendoit dire à un autre: Il faut que j'aille au temple remercier les dieux; car mon frère, que mon père aime tant et que je chéris si fort, a recouvré la santé.

Ou bien: Il y a un champ qui touche celui de mon père, et ceux qui le cultivent sont tous les jours exposés aux ardeurs du soleil; il faut que j'aille y planter deux arbres, afin que ces pauvres gens puissent aller quelquefois se reposer sous leur ombre.

Un jour que plusieurs Troglodytes étoient assemblés, un vieillard parla d'un jeune homme qu'il soupçonnoit d'avoir commis une mauvaise action, et lui en fit des reproches. Nous ne croyons pas qu'il ait commis ce crime, dirent les jeunes Troglodytes; mais, s'il l'a fait, puisse-t-il mourir le dernier de sa famille!

On vint dire à un Troglodyte que des étrangers avoient pillé sa maison et avoient tout emporté. S'ils n'étoient pas injustes, répondit-il, je souhaiterois que les dieux leur en donnassent un plus long usage qu'à moi.

Shopping and the Thundershower

On an impulse I announced last week to my colleagues that I would be playing badminton at 2 p.m. on Tempelhofer Feld, and that they were free to play too. As far as I could tell a thrill of bemusement and interest ran through the company, since my sociability is lamentably scarce. The weather was one central concern, and one colleague also doubted if he would come if one of our rare 'team events' — this time held in a beer garden at the Hasenheide park — on Friday would lead him to sleep in too long.

Yesterday I realized that at home there is only one badminton shuttlecock that the siblings and I have been using, which is threadbare at the nose and intact but grubby in the feathers Although there are tattered remains of other birdies that might still manage to fly in a traditional arcing motion.

I decided to go to a shop in Mitte instead of the Schlossstraße. There it turned out that SportScheck, where I wanted to procure aerodynamically reliable badminton birdies, was in the elegant grey and glass hulk that is the Mall of Berlin. It towers near Potsdamer Platz, hoping to catch the tourists who have just taken selfies in front of the fragment of the Berlin Wall or walked from the Brandenburg Gate, and the Canadian embassy.

After entering the chasm between the 'West' and 'East' side of the mall, I consulted the closest signs with the shop brands plastered on them that I could find to see what side was relevant for me. The brands were also elegantly labelled inside the correct side of the mall once I found it, and I spotted the shop on the first floor above ground level.

It's difficult to retell properly, but once a few years ago my brother Ge.'s cell phone alarm kept ringing jauntily, because it was time for him to go to an early shift at his apprenticeship. It was in Ge.'s and J.'s room, and J. looked like he was asleep. But then he said in a small, exhausted voice, 'I'm in hell.' Being in a shopping mall impressed me similarly. I was less than glamorously dressed and coiffed, and feeling warm because of the weather and the walk from the Kulturforum station. (I got out of the bus early.) Working in a consumerism-related company also makes me sensitive about rampant capitalism, since there is plenty of time and occasion to Think Deep Thoughts about it; and at present I'm in a very money-saving frame of mind.

The Goodbye

I haven't wanted to write anything on this blog until after the memorial service for my father happened, which it did yesterday, just to have privacy.

It's said that grieving is a strange process, so I've felt justified in being cheerful and normal one moment, and accepting that I am going to be extremely gloomy the next. Right now I'm in one of the glum stretches, so I don't want to write too much.

I hope I can also see and find the fine qualities in people who are not Papa or the rest of my family, because I had the subjective and probably snobby habit of measuring people against him and not thinking that they quite reached the mark. He believed, I think, that it's pointless to feel restricted to the idealization and pursuit of an abstract goodness, like a distant figure of God; one must seek it in the one place one may ever see it: in one's fellow man.

Extroversion has also been forced on me a bit, which has its disadvantages because I find it exhausting, but it has made me feel less lonely.

Books: Misogynist Nitwits, Yemeni Deserts and Red Giants

In the U-Bahn I've been reading Le Rouge et le noir by Stendhal. Normally I love the introductions to the French classics from our bookshelves at home, because to neophytes like me their atmospheric pictures of the biographical and cultural environment of the literature are extremely useful. But I really groaned internally while reading the introduction for Le Rouge et le noir. It is by Henri Martineau and was I felt not amoral as much as directly nasty.

I didn't like his characterization of the roles of women in Stendhal's or in his protagonist's lives. Both important love interests of Stendhal's protagonist seem to have ruined their lives, which was quite praiseworthy apparently to Martineau, because it was convenient for Julien Sorel. (Well, I mean, he dies at the end of the book; but let's say 'convenient in the short term.') If women really existed merely as tools for men's advancement, maybe I'd be as rapturous as Martineau, but as it is I find myself not especially ecstatic. I felt that he was describing women as the material trappings of social status, and as enemies to men if they withhold their favours. The idea that they might have as deep grievances as men, that their rights to development and happiness as individuals are as real as that of the masculine labourer, never seems to have crossed Martineau's mind.

I wasn't certain, either, that the protagonist — who in Martineau's rendering seemed like he'd sell out his grandmother without thinking twice for ambition's sake, and was far too absorbed by ingratiating himself with the upper class to care about (the plight of) anyone in his own class — was a hero of the proletariat classes as Martineau alleges. The enemy of one's enemy may at times be a friend; but I hesitate to attribute Sorel's intrigues or even violence — merely because they are intrigues and violence — to any profound and voluntary preoccupation with the plight of the urban or rural poor.

On a more trivial note, Martineau also admires Rousseau and La Nouvelle Héloïse. I gave up on reading that book in short order, as expected, because the characters were so insufferable. (What's-his-face, the love interest, was a dire little emotionally blackmailing worm, in fact the epitome of the ethically invertebrate Frenchman that I thought existed only in the fevered imagination of an overpatriotic 19th-century Briton.) I expected to find it immoral, and instead found it sappy, disingenuous and, in a sense, stupid.

By contrast, a German translation of Ibn Battuta's 14th-century travelogue about Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Yemen — so far, has been pleasant. I don't care much about the extremely longwinded names of countless sheikhs and which saint's tomb is in which city, however, and was a bit amused at the detailed descriptions of betel leaves, coconuts, and other things that are extremely familiar nowadays.

I have also enjoyed reading The Structure and Evolution of the Stars, with its Hertzsprung-Russell diagrams and calculations of luminosity and temperature; because, surprisingly enough, it instills meditation and peace of mind.

April Flowers on a Good Friday in Berlin

For Good Friday I went on a long walk to Berlin Mitte. Although sunshine was pouring through the buildings and the newly leafy trees, dark grey clouds were piling toward the north and although a swift wind was whisking them away again I didn't feel that I was timing the walk particularly cleverly. But in case of a downpour, I decided, I could always take the bus back home again.

During the walk I thought a great deal about the shops along the way, wondering how much business they had. There were also two nightclubs, and exaggerated though it was there was a smell of burning rubber that I thought was roughly reminiscent of brimstone. And there were a few businesses and organizations that cater to newcomers to Berlin, and that made me reflective about the hopes and dreams that people might have; and whether they got assistance or whether the places that were supposed to help were exploitative instead, either because they were not well run or because they were fraudulent.

Less gloomily, I was likewise fascinated by the plants. The trees and grass and other shrubs all have a dreamy green about them, as if they were fresh from a tube of oil paint and were lingeringly slumberous from their winter rest. There are red tulips in a velvety rich colour that are popular in ad hoc street side plantings, and glow from behind the minuscule palings and the spears of early grass. In fact, the grass and especially the tree leaves glow in every light and at every time of day, from the draining grey of dawn to the dark of night. The lines of buildings, while still grayish and wintry depending on their building material, are clear against them; and a few days ago there was also something nice about a freshly blossoming tree in front of the church at Südstern station, which to be unoriginal did look bridal and almost as if it were going to its dryad wedding and its groom was waiting at the steps.

There were also ghost-like creamy tulips with spear-tipped petals congregating in a bed of ivy leaves, red deadnettle underneath trees and purple heal-all in a lawn, merry striped red or golden or orange ones at the roadsides, squat dandelions, and dark baby blue chionodoxa that looked as if their days were numbered as they bore fewer yet intense flowers. I loved the fresh, damp green of the juvenile linden leaves and the glittering litter of minuscule petals that have been scattered over the ground like gold coins in the Grimm fairy tale — although I can't tell if they come from linden trees or some other species — for the past week or so. And daffodils, unfailingly bright. The Reichpietschufer canal was dark, fall leaves still floating in it; but the chestnuts and other trees at its side looked even leafier than many other trees, and even if the water itself was empty I thought it seemed to be expecting the barges and other traffic of summer, imminently.

Tulips, and More U-Bahn Reading

I have spent this week so far diving deep into my work and not breaking the thread of my concentration until the evening. It was extremely enjoyable. It is quiet at work because a few co-workers are on holiday, and although I certainly miss them, it does seem to have created a more efficient and, one might say, library-like or cloistered atmosphere.

The presence of direct sunlight on buildings in the courtyard is novel but pleasing, although the twitter of the birds I didn't notice today as we had our windows closed again; so spring is enhancing the atmosphere. Noise-wise, it was after seven o'clock where two colleagues came in with a ladder, an electric drill and other paraphernalia, in order to reattach a curtain that had collapsed onto the gas heating range beneath the far windows. But one of our neighbours has also been roaring away with an electricity- or gas-fuelled appliance in an unseen corner of the courtyard, at the height of day.

On my walks around the office, I've barely noticed any of the plant life that has emerged elsewhere in Berlin. On Saturday I spotted a disconsolate, shabby snowdrop, but also promising buds of royal purple crocuses, dark primroses nestled in the newly gardened soil at the street side, and a sprinkle of buds and curling rose leaves on the bushes. Daffodils, tulips, and hyacinths, as well as tall spiry pussy willow branches, are bulging from the shelves of florists on the sidewalks near the office, however.

In the U-Bahn I've added books to my bag, which I suppose are best discussed when I get around to reading them. In the meantime I read more of the Feminine Mystique, with great absorption, and liked Betty Friedan's descriptions of 19th century feminism as well as her investigations of the image of women in Freudian psychology. It might sound a bit naïf, but I 'discovered' a watered-down, half-informed version of Freud's thought as a teenager, and it was quite as startling and interesting as it may have been when he originated it. Although with the passage of time I do think it's like a religion: it can help people who sincerely find it useful, and for everybody else it's a bit confining. After reading Betty Friedan I did feel better about having found 1. him personally, and 2.psychoanalysis generally patronizing, too. I've had my doubts for a while, and it's reassuring to know that maybe the reason for it is not just my own insolence, or ignorance, or both.

The Feminine Mystique and the Fifties

Stride Toward Freedom was a 'page turner,' and I easily finished it. But I decided that Chrétien de Troyes and Henri Troyat were heavy going, or at least not cheerful enough for my purpose. So both of those books are in the shelf again. Instead I am reading the prefatory notes — given my feelings about the philosopher (a poseur and a bore), I expect these notes to be more agreeable than the novel itself — to La Nouvelle Héloïse, Vol. I.

Besides Rousseau, I am launched on a heady look into the early days of Second Wave feminism, in the first years of the 1960s, through Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique. I somewhat wish that the relations between men and women as men, as women and as persons, were analyzed in another frame than that of ladies' magazine articles; Betty Friedan seems to have ransacked these with great dedication in order to amass sociological data. Secondly, much as she protests, I think class barriers are not overleapt in the way she handles feminism in her book. Also, in setting up women as victims with a generous sweepingness, I think she ignores the lived reality in households where people honestly didn't care to strictly observe gender roles, and cases where intellectual laziness rather than conscious oppression seems to me to be the main culprit.

It may be the reflection of my introverted character, however, that I deny the necessity of a few of her problems and of her solutions. If I think that a practice or a fashionable approach to human relationships is nonsense, I mostly don't do it. It makes me fit in less; but then I have control over what I do and think. It prevents the situation where many people do a thing that, as it turns out, none of them really liked or found helpful. Translated into the world in the Feminine Mystique: If women don't want to wear make-up, they shouldn't; if they don't need a boyfriend, they shouldn't have to pretend that they do; if they have 'masculine' interests rather than 'feminine' ones, or both, they shouldn't feel ashamed to indulge them. Also, anyone who encourages a young woman to leave college to marry unless this is a mature and spontaneous decision, should be roundly scolded and then ignored.

[Needless to say, a passive-resistance approach to societal developments stood me in good stead in school: one fashion after another passed me by, and with each one I had more interests in common with everybody else, which did wonders for my social life. I recommend this approach for practicality and its gregarious dividends.]

Irony aside — What I find undoubtedly convincing is Friedan's portrait of a changing American society after World War II. Women who had been in the labour force while men were scarce, have been returned home to make way for the men again. (It was also a British phenomenon. While I was researching the 1950s, I watched the beginning of a film with Sarah Churchill — related to that Churchill — where a newspaperwoman relinquishes her job for the journalist who has returned from the wars, in a seaside town/village in Britain.)

I wonder if the experiences of being forced apart for many years during World War II — men abroad or at a distance within the United States, women staying behind — gave rise to a feeling that more 'togetherness' within families was a deeply needed change. What Friedan does is to fear that breastfeeding, mothers raising their own children and staying at home to do so, etc., will create problems for their 'over-tended' children — as well as breeding the deleterious effect on the mothers.

Last spring I did an experiment where I 'lived in the 1950s' [minus the colonialism, the Klan, the Cold War, etc.] for a week. I remember it quite fondly now, because doing housework kept me fairly fit*, making a point of visiting grocery shops and the Turkish street market nearby made me interact more with people, going to libraries made me explore public places I'd rarely visited before, the food was ample and good, I missed the internet less than expected, practicing the piano and listening to records was barely a departure from my usual routine, the radio was less boring than I remembered, mending socks rather than throwing them out and replacing them was ethically sound, watching television was as fun as ever, and all sorts of interesting books were written, scientific facts explored, and ideas thought during or before the 50s. (Thomas Mann's Mario und der Zauberer was an ordeal, but anyway . . .) Besides, in October or November I did an experiment, scheduled around my working hours, based on daily life in Britain in the 1940s — mostly, really, on rationing — and that was appalling. The 1950s came off very well by contrast.

But, in spite of the housework, I did 'live in the 1950s' ambivalently as far as gender was concerned. I hardly know whether women were always expected to have time to play the piano and inform themselves, and were always free from competing claims on their time like child care.

It's a bit fatuous for me to insert myself into the question like this, though. Life in a few essential ways was not the same in the 1950s as it is now, and I can't properly claim any experience or knowledge of it.

I had more Thoughts, of course, but for now I want to close off this blog post!

*As well as making my feet sore and desiccating my hands.

From Chalcedon to Colvin

Martin Luther King, Jr. From the March on Washington, 1963.
Government photo: public domain.
Colorized photography (2016).
Wikimedia Commons.

NOW my reading on the U-Bahn — which, as it strikes me now, is taking up a strangely large part of recent blog posts — has turned from Voltaire to Henri Troyat and Martin Luther King, Jr. To begin with the second book:

In 1958 King published Stride Toward Freedom, where he describes himself leaving university and deciding where to become a minister, and why, and how he changes the Alabamian church where he and Coretta Scott King decided to begin his ministerial life at the birth of the civil rights movement.

A peculiar phenomenon is that things progress, regress and stay the same in an inconsistent way, all at once. It isn't just the decade that matters, but also the generation. Martin Luther King, Jr. mentions young African Americans rebelling against racist society at a time where African American adults who were educated and well-off sometimes did not want to do anything to risk their jobs or status in society. Years ago the Guardian ran an article ("She would not be moved," Gary Younge) about Claudette Colvin, who remained sitting in the 'wrong' seat of a bus when she was fifteen years old, before Rosa Parks did the same. He mentions her, too. Of course, the right of African American children to attend schools that white children attended had also been recognized in the Supreme Court 5 years before the book was published; girls had walked to school past crowds of rabid adults. Emmett Till was killed around that time. But the bus boycotts, the Greensboro lunch sit-ins, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the Supreme Court's recognition of the right to mixed-race marriage had not happened yet; and churches were bombed later, Medgar Evers assassinated later, and voting rights proponents who were registering African American voters were murdered into the 1960s.

Martin Luther King, Jr.'s writing at that time is self-conscious, I think. Part of it is I think a carefulness not to say anything jarring that can undermine one's public standing or one's 'message.' Whether I think this carefulness should be necessary is another question. But to be wildly optimistic maybe it has more to do with being a political figure in the public eye, than with being the potential target of racists who are eager to find excuses to criticize any African Americans in the public eye.

Ta-Nehisi Coates's article "My President Was Black"* about President Obama for the Atlantic, published in January before the inauguration of Donald Trump, is relevant to that issue, too. I think it's called 'respectability politics,' and the Nation of Islam was a strange example of it in a broader sense; in order to be equal to white men, you had to be rigidly well conducted and attired in suits at all times or in general act like a respectable 1950s paterfamilias. (In the end I think the Atlantic article reflects its writer more than it does the subject, because I think he wants to understand himself through President Obama. Besides, I don't remember if there was anything specifically about feeling the need to be exceptionally self-censoring in the article, except perhaps on Michelle Obama's part, because of the fear that arose in white quarters in 2008 that she was 'too angry.' But I found it absorbing to read anyway.)

* You will probably have to un-block the advertising to read it.

***

Next: Henri Troyat's Les Désordres secrets (1974). I find the level of precision in his language to be far behind Molière and Voltaire; it's not that he tried to compete with them at all, it's only that I read them recently so that I see a contrast. I think he has also read too much Tolstoy; an author is far more endurable when he is the Narcissus and not the Echo. But I feel a bit mean in saying this, because his own family escaped the 20th century Russian revolution, and clearly Russian literature, history and society were a highly personal matter to him.

Troyat's tale, a fragment of the Muscovite series, begins during the retreat of Napoléon's French army from Moscow, felt through the eyes of an aristocrat(?). Hailing from Gaul, he had been raised in a noble Russian family, so he feels goodwill toward both sides. Part of the aristocrat's cortège, as he is a French soldier retreating from Moscow, is an actress who has become his mistress. Like her theatrical colleagues, Paulette finds the company's programme far more absorbing than the actions and plans of the Russian or French armies or their leaders, or the risk of attack by Russian pursuers. There is a lack of relevance of her thespian concerns to his emotional rift between upbringing and adulthood, etc.

Of course I don't admire the idea of men taking women as companions whom they don't see as mental equals and whom they cannot speak with frankly and fully about important matters. But at least it's funny if one remembers Jane Austen's passage characterizing the phenomenon:

The advantages of natural folly in a beautiful girl have been already set forth by the capital pen of a sister author; and to her treatment of the subject I will only add, in justice to men, that though to the larger and more trifling part of the sex, imbecility in females is a great enhancement of their personal charms, there is a portion of them too reasonable and too well informed themselves to desire anything more in woman than ignorance. But Catherine did not know her own advantages [...]

I also guess (so far) that Troyat-the-narrator is a more advanced, nicer dinosaur than many others.

***

To Disquiet On The Western Front

The Munich Security Conference creeps me out every year; I find it anachronistic and vaguely threatening, and also mainly an opportunity self-righteously to offer arms and military technology to governments that 1. are marginally more morally corrupt and far less trustworthy than ours, 2. should be spending that money on worthier causes. As a resident of Germany I feel accordingly embarrassed.

But this speech from John McCain — he appears, I will say, far more in his element there than in the dispiriting environment of American punditry — brings a whisper of fresh life into perhaps an old-fashioned idea that through a restrained, diplomatically enhanced militarism we can mitigate wars rather than proliferate wars.

A Discursion on Zaire and Simplicity

Lately I've pestered my parents and siblings with the theory that the 'worldview' that we have with regard to the Middle East is inherited from the time of the Crusades. Firstly, the idea that we have a right to invade it at any time in order to 'set things straight.' (Regardless of the repeated historical proof that this invariably goes wrong.) Secondly, the idea of Muslims as a threatening armed force. Thirdly, I now realize, the idea that there is a competition of morality — or a one-upmanship of religions, in the case of the US, and that our secular ethics/religion are better than their morality.

With much fresher incursions of armed Muslim armies into Europe — and by 'fresher' I mean the Battle of Vienna in 1683 —, the rhetoric of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the hijackings of planes, and warfare along religious or ethnic boundaries in Britain's Commonwealth like the Siege of Khartoum in 1884-5 or the Indian Rebellion of 1857, there are of course far more recent events that prop up the set pieces for a stage of enmity. As Islam postdates Jesus Christ and the other events in the Bible by at least 500 to 600 years, the Bible itself clearly has nothing in particular to say about this religion. Admittedly, to be pragmatic, as a competitor to various Christian churches I am sure it has rarely been held in good odour even by modern religious authorities.

At any rate, the grounds for mentioning these Wikipedia'd findings are that I have been reading extracts from an early play by Voltaire: Zaïre. I suspect that it is almost entirely obsolete; but after running across it in an English novel from the dawn of the 19th century, I was very happy to find it in our bookshelves, and I am in fact re-reading it. As I reread it, its resemblance to a cross (pun unintended) between Othello and Lessing's Nathan der Weise grows.

Its heroine is enslaved under a Turkish sultan. She is a Christian who survived a fictional massacre in Jerusalem during the Crusades, when she was a baby, to be raised amongst Muslims in the harem. Many years later, she and the sultan Orosmane have fallen in love and are about to be married, permitting her to attain the rank of Queen. But, unfortunately, her duty as a Christian-born child enters galumphing into the plot like an elephant — an elephas ex machina if you will — trampling beneath it the vestiges of her innocent happiness. (Although I wonder whether Voltaire wasn't setting her up for a fall from hubris anyway.) No sooner have she and her long-lost father been reunited — he being an aged Christian prince and warrior who ruled Jerusalem until the massacre, whom the sultan had imprisoned due to the political threat he represented — than her father and brother are shocked at and insulted by her profession of the Muslim faith. That's as far as I've read.

The melodrama of the play — I am tempted to call it a soap opera — is (purposely) gripping and amusing. But the understanding of religious faith that Voltaire describes makes me wince — as if religion can be reduced to the physical act of baptism, as well as a willingness to designate one's self Christian and to vituperate any other religion. He casts the dogmatic nature of the Church on these kinds of points in an unflattering light, I think; in his second preface, he also mentions the unamiable habit of denying actors a burial in a Christian graveyard unless they recant their profession.

It is hard for me to reconcile the picture of early Islamic history that I received in university with the events of the play, by the way, although Voltaire (per the footnotes) did read up on the history of that period and place, and I don't doubt that he did it well.

Back to the religious aspects, as well as political: I do think that it's easy to read the play and to interpret into it criticism of more recent French politics. The King Louis of France in the drama is named as a saintly figure, but from a humanitarian perspective I wonder why. If we nonetheless do accept his virtues as given, there is at least an unflattering implicit contrast between the King Louis of the 12th century, the prolific warrior, and the King Louis of the 17th18th century, the prolific skirt-chaser. (Who did also half-empty the French coffers of state to support optimistic foreign ventures like the American War of Independence Seven Years' War, but I don't remember Voltaire making any reflections on that in Zaïre itself [N.B.: which would make sense since the Seven Years' War took place two decades after the play was written; please excuse my egregious error]; and, to be fair, he was also notable for nice things like patronage of the arts.)

[Reinforcing the contemporary political dimension, I do wonder whether Voltaire had already been locked up in the Bastille when he wrote Zaïre, because then it would raise the question whether he was reflecting on his own imprisonment as he detailed the imprisonment of the Christian crusaders. (I still haven't bothered to look that up, unfortunately.)

The prisoners of war are, by the way, I think a poignant element of the surviving legends of the Crusades — Richard the Lionheart, for example, in Ivanhoe, even if he was actually kept in prison by Christian kings rather nearer home than Jerusalem. The murders and general carnage of the imaginary massacre in Voltaire's play are also fiercely alive, but he does have a long tradition in classical tragedies to draw upon even in absence of personal experience.]

Anyway, mentioning the play beside Othello and Nathan der Weise is unfair. I think that both of the other plays are far better. Zaïre was speedily written and, especially once it caught on, more of a 'crowd pleaser.' (It was written in order to satisfy the need for romantic plots in his feminine fandom.) A dashing Orosmane and an endearing, ingénue-like Zaïre were cast to bring his roles to life in France as well as in Britain, writes the French scholar in the introductory notes for the edition I'm reading. After the play had overcome a rough start, the 18th-century audience that flocked to its presentations in France and in Britain was frequently in tears.

A passage in Maria Edgeworth's romance Patronage describes a private theatrical: an unsympathetic, social climbing character plays Zaïre; the amateur actress is hedged about not by the latticed windows and armed guards of the harem, but rather by envious and critical ranks of young ladies who are her social competitors. The higher-minded protagonists of the book hold a conversation about the play's purposeful simplicity. (In general it's also strange to read things from Voltaire's less sexist phase, also in Patronage, for example this epigraph on Cupid: "Qui que tu sois voici ton maître. Il l'est, le fut—ou le doit être."*) But it has the same effect on the audience as the better professional performances.

(The fact that this play would feel so fresh and immediate to characters in a novel that was written in the first two decades of the 19th century, reminds me that the scholarly introduction in the edition that I'm reading also posits that Voltaire's use of the theme of the Crusades in fact anticipates elements of the Romantic period — seventy years in advance of Wordsworth's and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads. Combined with this ideal of 'simplicity' of style, I think he is quite right.)

Voltaire wrote two prefaces to Zaïre. In the later preface, added after his play had reached the British stage, he dissects the way Aaron Hill translated Zaïre into English. I think that, like modesty, 'simplicity' is a virtue that is dangerous to describe in one's self; it is contradictory. So I did smirk when he took up the discussion about his own play's 'simplicity,' and enclosed a brief list of the most 'simple' verses in it. As he used high-flown language and circular phrases to fit the dramatic quality and the verse lengths of his play — for example, nobody in his drama ever travels to/from plain France, but always hails to or from the rives de la France — his threshold for simplicity is not terribly high. I was also amused when he took issue with Aaron Hill's stage directions. One of the 'simple' highlights of Zaïre's dialogue comes as the sultan repudiates his beloved, and she begins to weep. 'Zaïre, you weep!' he observes in the French original, fairly and simply enough. In the English, she flings herself to the floor, and weeps there, and then he exclaims the same thing. That's ridiculous, declares Voltaire. Her flinging of self is far stranger than her crying, so if that horrendous stage direction must needs be kept in the play, at least it would make more sense for her beloved to exclaim, 'Zaïre, you are rolling on the ground!'

*It's apparently taken from his poetic works. Here it is on Bartleby.
The passage in Maria Edgeworth's Patronage is available here on Project Gutenberg.

A Farewell to Decency?

In the past, I've often wished that I kept a sober record of the zeitgeist at particular political stages in time, so that it's easier to separate out what happened when and why we felt what and when what changed.

Despite the needless complexity of that last sentence, I think I'll begin straightforwardly enough with President Obama's final week, ending in President Trump's inauguration. I was blissfully uninformed the entire week, busy with work and also basking in the crepuscular glow of the last days of what felt like if not a golden era, at least a fair silver or brazen one. Then, during the Friday company meeting, an American colleague informed us with what I thought was lurid cheer that the inauguration was taking place; another, who had taken pains to vote against a certain presidential candidate, had watched part of it but couldn't — if I remember correctly — endure her new president's speech. It sounds almost hyperbolical to say so, but it is touching how dignified and deep the grief and sense of responsibility of some of my American colleagues are about the state of politics in their country — not party politics, but real feeling. That weekend there was much dismay amongst the lefties whom I follow on Twitter about the barely conciliatory spirit of the new president's inaugural address, and specifically also dismay about the adoption of the slogan 'America First,' which had been used to justify exclusionist policies during the Nazi era.

I didn't think it was fair to want a head of government to fail. After thinking that he was a terrible person in terms of his treatment of his fellow human beings, whether family or no relations to him at all — I also thought that this that was no guarantee that he would be a bad president. But I had no enthusiasm for his impending regime, and felt that it was best not to immerse myself in ungratifying details.

But after thinking about it on Friday evening, on Saturday morning I went to the Women's March on Washington sister demonstration at the Brandenburger Tor in solidarity with American protestors. For one thing I wanted to help prove that even though President Trump himself was endorsed for the presidency by a majority of the Electoral College, not everyone endorses his style of sexist behaviour or his opinions. But while the others — I felt quite shy — shouted slogans like 'Show me a feminist! — I am a feminist!', I was also happy with messages at the protest that were about broader social justice and rights issues like, 'No hate; no fear; immigrants are welcome here," which were as significant for Germany as they can be to the United States. Human Rights Watch was also there.

There were roughly 500 people there, I read on the news — over 2,000 people officially attended it per the Facebook page — and while there were also French accents and doubtless German people there (like me, I suppose), many protestors were by their accents American; and after all the Democrats Abroad organized the event. There were lights on in two or three rooms in the American Embassy but otherwise no evidence that anyone was 'at home,' a pair of police officers in dark blue standing at the bollards in what was otherwise pretty much a dead zone, and few tourists photographing the protest or the Brandenburger Tor, and then the din of music from a stage at the other side of the Tor that was probably set up for the demonstration against 'big agriculture' in Germany that also took place that day. The tractor cavalcade that was organized for that demonstration incidentally also made me a bit later than I already was to the protest.

It is hard to exaggerate how happy I felt as I came home and gradually read about the enormous protests in London and in the United States as they happened, and that they were all pretty much as free from rancour and as festive as the one I had joined. The inertia and self-doubt and repression of disagreement that I felt had to be overcome during the Iraq War and the Bush years were entirely absent. I felt that any reasonably decent person across the mainstream political spectrum would feel that aspects of the Trump presidency needed protesting against.

In the next week, after the early attempts of Congress to dismantle the Affordable Care Act that tried to make health care available to most Americans, etc. it was the most painful to read about the ban on refugees and partial ban on immigrants that were signed on Friday. I happened to be reading news on Twitter as the Customs and Border Patrol began to apply it. I was on the verge of tears when it became clear what the effects were. I remember feeling unhappy at borders when I was a child, when the customs officials were being apparently disagreeable and pedantic about the tiniest things, when we were tired and bored and tense, and being afraid of being separated from one home or the other. The idea of leaving Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, the Sudan, Somalia, or Yemen, and feeling the same thing in an acuter way, was awful. Then the taxi driver's union in New York City released its statement mentioning that policies like this lead to violent attacks on their employees. Then I did feel a sense of hopelessness.

But I've resolved during this presidency to read in detail about issues and also read more longer-form news, like the PBS News Hour clips on YouTube. As a result, I also kept track of official reactions to the Ban — even Republican senators sent out weak announcements at least nitpicking the Muslim Ban, and the Democratic establishment and experienced public officials as well as groups like the ACLU have expressed such effective opposition. I think, in fact, that some Republicans should receive more credit than they have been getting. But what cheered me the most were the anti-Trump administration protests in Britain; and — because I am childish — the public's online petition to refuse President Trump the formalities of a state visit to the UK because he was 'too misogynistic and vulgar,' which would 'embarrass the Queen.'

Brexit is (I think) a terrible event, too — an example of the movements that led to the right-wing meeting in Koblenz on the weekend of the Women's March, and bound to bring harm especially to politically and economically vulnerable people. Thanks perhaps to these anti-Trump administration protests, the apparent resurgence of the protesting ethos in Britain (which was changed, I felt, into impotent shock after the result of the referendum) was also bearing fruit in the House of Commons, in the debate on whether to begin using Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty to leave the EU.

I watched a few parliamentarians speak on Thursday. While 'remainer' legislators who were representing 'remainer' constituencies attempted to justify their 'yes' vote using their idea of democracy — i.e. voting along the lines of a slender majority — this argument failed to fill me with thrilling conviction. But then, after reading Polly Toynbee's praise on the Guardian's website, I watched the former Justice Minister Ken Clarke's speech. I thought his speech had a depth of emotional interest, reflected political experience, and wealth of parliamentarian tradition, together with his old-fashioned though jovial statesmanliness of air, that 'blew my socks off.' And that praise is although I had no particular or high opinion of him beforehand.

So I alternate between feelings of optimism and bearing an influence, and of despair and a complete lack of hope.

But the quandary of where to help still puzzles me. I want to throw more money at things, but at present I have to budget it.

The Daily Life of a Self-Pitying Drone

To record the events of today is a reasonably humble task, since it has to be admitted that I did not do very much. I slept in to make up for having no more than eight and a half hours of sleep per night during the work week, and got up past 1 p.m.

One of the first things I did is to sketch out a menu for tomorrow, which is now today, and decided to make it a French meal. It will have three courses. The first is a tomato and cucumber salad, and after deliberating I decided to obtain the tomatoes from the organic food store, alongside garlic bread. Then, a stew of beef with onion, carrots, potatoes and red wine, which the cookbook called a daube in the style of Béarne. Lastly, crêpes suzette with a shot of rum.

After that I washed the flowered Austrian (Gmunden) china that we have by hand. It appears to fracture easily, so I placed the dishes in a lower level of water and only lingeringly filled it the rest of the way, as I imagined that the pottery would have accustomed itself to the temperature change. Then, vacuumed the corner room and narrowly prevented a specific gauge of small screw from disappearing into the vacuum bag forever.

A while later, I applied another layer of pine green foundation paint to a cigar box that I sanded down yesterday and want to decorate with very old paints that are however precisely designed for this type of thing. The cigar box lids usually warp, presumably due to the humidity in the paint; so I weighted down the lid after the first layer went on, and it worked. The ambience is nice in the corner room, with the old paint boxes and their dappled lids on the table, the warmth from the stove, the geranium and azalea on the windowsill, and the Christmas tree with the rough-textured pine crib still underneath.

Reluctantly, I then went grocery shopping with Ge. After we had done the main shopping, I went to the organic food store and bought the tomatoes, navel? oranges for the crêpes suzette, and blood oranges, and pretzel sticks to eat after lunch at work. The pretzel sticks are made with spelt flour, which in my opinion sabotages the flavour of everything it's in, but not so much that I can't enjoy eating it anyway. That said, next week I was going to observe a plan not to eat processed food, because it is amusing to follow different eating practices now and then; so eating the pretzel sticks will require exculpatory mental gymnastics.

I read news about the Inauguration-Dämmerung in the US. Then I tried out one YouTube exercise video and a part of another. — In the past week I've been unhappy about work. My tiny sub-department is being scrutinized for inefficiency, and I have had to do a great deal of tasks that I absolutely hate lately, and I haven't taken it very well. I've been on the verge of tears fairly often at work and at home, gone for fewer promenades near my workplace and generally relaxed in fewer ways out of feelings of paranoid guilt, poured my woes into the already afflicted ears of my parents and siblings, and tried to 'anesthetize' myself by wasting time on the internet late into the night, when I try to be at work by 9:15 a.m. — But last week I 'dosed' myself with a dance exercise video, led by Madhuri Dixit—as far as I've seen, a queen of Bollywood acting, a grand personality, and a superlative dancer. It lifted my mood, so exercise should help. And, of course, in general I still love my work and my colleagues.

Anyway, to return to today: after doing language exercises in Turkish, Swedish, modern Greek and Spanish on the website Duolingo — I did the entire Spanish 'tree' in the past two years, and had really meant to finish the Swedish tree before beginning the Turkish one, because juggling a lot of languages would tend to mean that I know a lot of fragments, badly — I watched part of an animé series based on the fairy tale of Snow White, in Greek, on YouTube.

Now I have a new episode in one internet browser tab, and a lecture on quantum field theory opened in another — the lecture, because my interest in matters scientific has intensified especially because of work colleagues and their lunchtime conversations, although school lessons in addition to general reading whenever Virtuous Resolves have arisen over the years has proven unexpectedly efficient. I believe that Linus Pauling observed in the introduction to a chemistry textbook that the study of science has become so far-ranging and fragmented that a scientist cannot be well informed in all fields that are currently being researched. So even someone like me, a former humanities major with a chequered school history in mathematics, chemistry and physics, has a chance at being as able to talk accurately and fruitfully about a fair spectrum of scientific subjects as anybody else.

What remains to round out these days, I guess, is to play the piano or violin, or both, tomorrow. Then to do a lot of cooking, and then eating. And then the weekend should be complete.

January: In Verse

It is easy to protest that the days are longer
as, the great milestone of Solstice past,
we wait for the snowdrop's bowing advent
and the baroque ruff of aconites.

But as we gaze across the winter's sky-breadth
searching paler kinds of ashen grey,
and await knotted fronts that bring us
boreal temperatures, rain, perhaps hail;
and see western winds that shatter the branches,
batter the tree trunks, and struggle like an opposing army
through each space and refuge of the house,
and pillage the coalstove's heat whole,
roaring rudely through the chimney stacks;
— then, as we see the rushing clouds' despair
in the lonely levels up the troposphere —
then facts are misted by skeptics' fears.

Yule's warmth from December has left,
and the Star of Bethlehem arced beneath
the far edge of this hemisphere
— no more to brighten the world with an Epiphany.
Now an early Lent spreads austere unity
to a dark and weak parade of weeks.

On Jane Eyre, Jane Austen and Piety

Today was a tough day at work not because of outward circumstances but because of the excessively gloomy mood I was in. So I've decided to escape reality through one of the long excursions on Jane Eyre that I've wanted to write for a while. It came to mind because of a Guardian online article that recently juxtaposed Mr. Rochester of Eyre with the putative feminist hero Gilbert-something-or-other in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, whom I myself had found one of the pettiest twerps who has ever had a major classic consecrated to him, and whose emotional or intellectual depths were nowhere near those of the heroine, upon whom Anne Brontë bestowed, or foisted, him.

I read Jane Eyre when I was thirteen years old. My mother had recently bought a copy of the book, as far as I recall. It was such a 'rattling good yarn' that I finished it in one sitting, past 1 a.m. although it was a 'school night,' as far as I remember. (Although we have other copies, I was sad that this paperback vanished. It was tasteful, and I am so fastidious about books' covers that every niceish book leaves a long-lasting impression.) Brontë's novel did strike me as a polar opposite to Jane Austen's works, although I do think that they are not so different in their subjects and plots — subjects like the roles self-analysis and logic can play in affecting one's relationships with other people.

A main and glaringly evident parallel is that they were daughters of clergymen; and yet religion plays a divergent role in their works. Not being a good pupil of religion, I haven't read the Bible much. But because so much phraseology from the Bible (King James, even!) appears in Jane Eyre and Shirley, whenever I do read the Beatitudes or bits of Revelations or Psalms it turns out that I am familiar with a lot of passages. It's beyond my capabilities at present, but I was planning to look for a kind of narrative arc patterned on the Bible in Jane Eyre, and maybe write an essay about it. Certainly it's made easier by the fact that I believe that it ends with a quotation from Revelations — although a question is also what order the chapters of the Bible are really, ideally in.

Meditations on the Fourth Advent

It is the fourth Advent Sunday, a very quiet, rainy and grey day, that we spent happily. A breakfast of buns fresh from the bakery: long pretzel sticks, a pumpkin seed bun, curled croissants, and the classic white Schrippen. Eggs, boiled until the egg yolk was barely set; hot cocoa heated in a pot. And a large platter with chocolate covered gingerbread in star shapes, Nürnberger gingerbread coated in chocolate or glaze or nothing at all, wreaths of chocolate with sprinkles, 'domino stones' with their jelly and cake and marzipan covered in chocolate, marzipan also covered in chocolate, and sugar-encrusted squares and stars and circles that are like pâte de fruit except much faker. Coffee and tea, with a lot of bergamot in it and really delightful to drink.

Yesterday evening Ge. had (with a little help) made an enormous lasagne, and we drank the bottle of Spanish red wine with it that I had received as a Christmas present from work. There was still lasagne and wine left today, although I ate the last of the lasagne.

I have been drawing pictures again lately, and after using different media have ended up using mostly coloured inks alongside coloured 'leads.' There is black india ink, but also blue, yellow, green and brown, and they have a more vibrant colour than the pencil crayons and aquarelle crayons I first used. I meant to use watercolour paint, too; and started a collage; but we shall see how that goes.

It has been cold and drafty, so we have needed the coal stove a lot. It was still warm enough that I could sit at the other side of the corner room from the stove, and draw without getting cold feet. I've tended not to watch crime shows and mysteries much in recent years, but yesterday there was an episode of Midsomer Murders that wasn't disagreeable, so I watched and listened to it with half an eye and ear as I was working on the pictures yesterday.

As far as music goes, I've played the violin lately because I felt that I needed a new challenge of sorts. The rudiments are going reasonably badly, which makes sense since I haven't had lessons since I was seven or eight. But after being able to play through the canzonetta movement of Tchaikovsky's violin concert — which is like flying before I can walk, of course —, I am quite pleased. The rest of my proper repertoire, for lack of a more modest word, is Bach's first violin sonata, which I've never played all the way through; and his concert in E major, which is the same situation. But they are intuitive to play and sound good even without a vibrato or many other subtleties of colour that one would need for other composers. (Just like I think that Mozart's easiest opera arias are good to sing in a non-operatic way because they work well if one sings them 'purely,' instead of adopting vocal mannerisms.)

I took the afternoon off of work on December 6th, to celebrate St. Nicholas Day, and played the violin then. I do play simplified versions of other familiar pieces like Dvorak's Humoresque. But yesterday I mostly played Christmas songs, and as far as possible a movement from Bach's Cello suites, from memory; and a Canadian folk song or two that was part of the routine when I was very little. The question is how much the neighbours suffer when I play, but I don't worry about it to a morbid degree, because a beginner's violin practice has certain objective qualities that require a little empathy for one's human environment.

On the piano, I have been trying the beginning of Albéniz's La Vega, but I feel like I'm trying poorly to play jazz. Grieg's piano version of his Dance in the Hall of the Mountain King? has baffled me for a while; it sounds far better when an orchestra plays it than when I try to play it. In fact I gave up on it for a while. I generally slaughter Brahms's first ten Hungarian Dances, too, or at least feel as if I were; but they are such great compositions, in their perhaps excessive, mid-19th-century-esque grandeur, that I've sometimes felt that other music is flat when I turn away from them. The Rachmaninoff C sharp minor prelude that I played yesterday felt, perhaps creepily, dark; but it's not necessarily out of keeping. Part of it is logistically a struggle to play; but it is so brief and compelling that I rarely feel remotely tempted to break it off in the middle. The g minor prelude that I played in 2008 around the time I travelled to New York went better than it did before; I finally have incipient ideas about the phrasing and atmosphere. Beethoven's last sonata, movements one and a bit of two, felt experimental but also better than before, too, when I tried it for the first time in months today.

Trying to play Chopin has not gone better than usual lately. But when I turned from his mazurkas (which I mostly love but can't always do much justice, because my technique is clumsy and besides it's very challenging to infuse intelligence and imagination into pieces which it is easy to play in an elegant but shallow way) to the Heroic Polonaise, it was a nice experience. The rumbling and repetitive octaves, which the left hand plays in a part of the polonaise, remind me of a steam-powered locomotive, which takes me out of the atmosphere. But perhaps ever since I watched the black and white film of young Martha Argerich flinging it off with a tongue-in-cheek air at the Chopin competition, I've felt that the piece calls for a degree of humour and parody. Chopin's 'militaristic' works make me uncomfortable in any case, if one were to take them seriously, especially because I played his pieces to try to work through my feelings about a war a few years ago. They are not abstract entertainment, but a piece of perhaps troubling social/cultural history — but maybe relevant more specifically perhaps to the wars over Poland and nationalist stirrings before the late 19th century, than to every other war or nationalist stirring in history before or since. We do have books of Christmas carols that I also played.

In the U-Bahn, I've finished reading Molière's Tartuffe, and have read instead a part of Alexander Pope's Essay On Man. Where does man stand in the order of animals, humanity, and God? Etc. It sounds very Leibnizian and deist so far to me. (Now I see that the Wikipedia article also mentions Leibniz, so that was obviously a new and far-fetched insight I had!)

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan
The proper study of Mankind is Man.

is one of my favourite quotations. I believe that it is all right to disclaim belief in God, so long as one doesn't believe one is a secular God one's self while being so petty and disagreeable in one's ideas, perceptions and aims, that it's clear that one has no reason other than egotism to pretend greater insight or virtue than any other ordinary human being. (I believe quite strongly in my own religion, though, although uncomfortable questions do arise from time to time about how reasonable and good it really is, so this is hardly an impartial view.) But the problems with the reasoning of the poem, and in fact the ideas behind it altogether — when I last read the poem, it was in search for witticisms rather than in order to wade through Pope's ideas in any persistent fashion, so I didn't begin to think of them — seem numerous and striking.

It's cheeky for a thirty-one-year-old, like me, to say this. But his Leibnizian tendency reflects the kind of buoyancy that does not take into account physical and mental illness, the terrible vulnerabilities (inescapable poverty, defenselessness against cruelty, etc.), and a consciousness of one's own flaws and one's disappointing inability to translate theoretical principles into consistent real practice, that must lastingly wreck one's belief in the perfection of the universe's order at some point in one's life.  To be a little clearer about the consciousness of flaws, every now and then it becomes clear to me that I have genuinely terrible aspects to my personality; they can be papered over like cracks in a wall, and maybe I never enter them, but in certain circumstances they gape. And there have been things that I have done that will have seemed cold and cruel to outsiders, although they had an internal logic. It is not false modesty to say this; but just that as a child I didn't quite imagine what it is like to have a grown up personality, where one grows quite a bit in a lot of directions, some less nice than others. Not that I was a perfectly saintly child, but I guess the imperfections were less sophisticated. That said, Pope never seems to have had an easy life, so who knows how much subtlety there was — after all — in his early worldview?

And that did remind me of the progression that Voltaire went through in the novels of his that I read.  When one considers the bright optimism and belief in justice that shine through Zadig, Candide and his other works come as a shock. Then there comes the brooding and wavering between bog-standard political carping and just (but not as abstract and brilliant as it would have been earlier) social criticism that mark L'Homme aux quarante écus, which is his nadir, in my opinion. A few sentences of his Quarante Écus could have been written in an internet comment today, which perturbed me.