Ye Olde Buckinghamshire

So, having aired the major grievances in my existence (c: yesterday, I think I can go without another diary-like blog post for a long time. Today I oscillated between Gawker and other websites, though I wrote Greek exercises and (with inward groaning) renewed my acquaintance with the aorist tense, played the piano and violin, and sang, too. Gawker was unusually rewarding, what with the mice whose presence the New York City Health Department discovered in the Metropolitan Opera, the perfectly aligned sunset that is to make the streets of Manhattan glow red this evening, and the opera based on Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth which is to be performed at La Scala (and the rich selection of Gilbert-and-Sullivan riffs which the blog's commenters wrote on hearing this news).

As for the writing, nothing did materialize yesterday, but I added half of a long paragraph to "The Fountain and the Labyrinth" today. The heroine has arrived in Beaconsfield, so I describe the crossroads where London, Aylesbury, Wycombe and Windsor End meet, as it may have looked in the 17th century, and am about to launch into a depiction of the inn (I chose Royal Saracen's Head). My research yesterday was deeply absorbing, because I found a treasure-trove of old photos and postcards and pictures of Buckinghamshire's towns. There are beautiful scenes like the Pepperpots at a bridge over the River Wye, with a grey flint chapel (/shoemaker's cottage) hidden in the trees nearby; the Church Loft, built in 1534, with the passage leading through into the slightly triste but peacefully quiet Church Lane; and the intricately carven wooden lodge (reminiscent of Hänsel and Gretel), with the ornate brick gate-posts and wrought-iron fence beside it, as well as the stately but compact, lavishly pillared mansion of Hall Barn.

A week or two ago I saw a photo of the Château Chambord, which Francis the First built in the Loire Valley and which was finished in 1547 (the year he died), and the thought struck me that landscapes and edifices can be as beautiful and elaborate and perfect in real life as they are in a painter's imagination. This idea was confirmed when I was looking over the English photos. (But the festooning on the Hall Barn Lodge seems overdone, as if the artist's chisel were bewitched to move compulsively and incessantly like the red shoes in the fairy tale; still, I think that the faces of the cherubs, which don't really fit the bodies, often have an amusing medieval sinisterness, and I enjoy the peaceful curling leafy sprays that end in dragons' or gargoyles' heads). I like the names of the towns, too, like Wycombe and Fingest and Stokenchurch.

For some reason I very much like the St. Bartholomew Church at Fingest, too. It has a great square Norman tower at one end with a double-tented (twin-gabled?) roof on top, slits down the sides, and one modestly large window embedded in its western face. Then there is a nave with a little buttress sprouting out of the middle to the left and right, and at the end there is a chancel, added to the nave in the 13th century, which also sprouts a buttress at each corner. There is an entry porch of dark wood at the nave, a tiny sprinkling of gravestones in the mild green lawn surrounding, and two sombre yews standing guard outside the chancel. While the nineteenth-century brick Methodist chapels that proliferate in the neighbouring towns are at times not without their charm, and there are other venerable churches of which I am also fond, this church was most authentically earthy and plain and impressive.

Anyway, Stowe isn't along the route, but I've been gazing at its National Trust website, which is at times, unconsciously funny. Here are scenes from the Western Garden, where the edifices are meant to represent "illicit and unrequited love":

The Statue of Queen Caroline
A tribute to the consort of George II, her statue was soon moved to the end of the Eleven Acre Lake after her husband fell out of favour with Lord Cobham

The Hermitage
It is said to represent the last refuge of the misogynist, surrounded by evergreens to underline the gloom

Artificial Ruins
Built as a ruin, they have twice had to be rebuilt, once in the late 19th century and again in 1974

The Menagerie
Its earliest function was as a much-admired museum for stuffed animals, including an eight foot crocodile and a thirty two foot boa constrictor. This is now part of Stowe School

A Nile of Ink; Or, a Very Long Diary Entry

It is about 1:40 a.m. and a blank WordPerfect document is open, the cursor blinking and blinking, and the white field glaring and glaring out of the screen, but no writerly inspiration is materializing. I've dipped into my beloved internet sites, have tried to search for classical music videos on YouTube only to be informed that an error had occurred and that "a team of highly trained monkeys has been dispatched to deal with the situation" (it would be funnier if I weren't sure that this error message has been in use for years), and have twirled and twirled in the rolly-chair. All in vain.

Today T.'s and my high school transcripts arrived in the mail, so there is no obstacle left in the way of submitting our university records to the attention of professors, being advised to enter a certain semester, and then filling out our application forms, e-mailing and sending them off (or, as we did last year, hand-delivering them). Until two days ago I had no intention of reapplying to university, deciding instead to boldly stake out my own mountainous path to an author's career, teaching myself better than ever before and working and working until I come up with good stories and poems and articles. But I've changed my mind so far as to wish to give university a chance again.

The night before last caused this change, because it was truly awful. I searched for jobs online again, but had worse success than usual, convincing me that there are no jobs that I want and none for which I am remotely qualified. Then I succumbed to the impression that I was never going to get anywhere and that I am only a burden to myself and the world in general. So I struggled with that feeling for at least half an hour, and then it revived from time to time the following day. Now I am airing the experience here, but I won't talk about it to any single person directly, because my problems seem abstract and slight, my complaints whiny, and also because, if I said to what extent I feel troubled, I would only cause needless anxiety.

What increases the trouble is that I've sensed that everyone I know outside of my immediate family disapproves of the way my life is going and blames me for my status quo. To a great extent I've recaptured my happy optimism – yesterday being an unfortunate and hopefully anomalous relapse – but it doesn't help to feel that I can't rely on sympathy, understanding, or the willingness to suspend judgment in any one (except my parents and siblings). It doesn't mean that these qualities are lacking, but that their presence and extent are, as I said, unreliable. Of course neither I nor the way I'm running my life are perfect, but for this very reason I have burdens enough of my own, so I don't need people adding to them and undermining my faith in myself so that I am less fit to bear them.

This eagerness to judge also makes me distrust people more. I find people as fascinating as ever in an impersonal sense, but as acquaintances I fear them because I worry so much about their opinion of me. Even if I weren't so exaggeratedly insecure and self-centred, true sympathy with other people is an extremely rare good, and I want to have that before I become friends with anyone. It seems to me that many relationships are unpleasant precisely because this sympathy does not exist but people still feel the need to be close to each other, even though that proximity only leads to unhappy friction.

In the meantime, as I've been told often, I could do with much improvement in speech, clothing, posture, and size, to become more acceptable in Society. I agree that my speech could and should be clearer, but I can and do improve it by simply being more careful, and I'm not willing to go to a speech pathologist again to perfect it. It may be a defect, but I've made honest efforts to cure it, and they didn't wholly succeed, and I accept it. As for clothing and size, I think this is no one else's business. I want to dress in a way that suits me, and I don't always do it, and sometimes my taste and sense of the fitting go on a holiday, but I don't pretend to be a work of art and so purely aesthetical criticisms are as superfluous as they are superficial. I don't want to have to hang out a sign that says "I am not a bum, but someone who is in the Respectable Upper Class." Being poor is not shameful in itself, and surely people can make the effort to examine the faces of people as an index of character and intellect, and not lazily rely on sartorial snap-judgments. As for size, I've "slenderized" again lately, but I "slenderized" because I like being lighter and curvy in a more finely-moulded sense, and not because I dislike myself or am afraid of being ugly. The posture thing does bother me too, though to a lesser degree, so I stand straighter whenever I remember and take remarks on it in stride except when I feel tired and humourless.

* * *

As for the New Yorker, it has remained silent; only half of the maximum waiting period of 3 months has elapsed, but I've almost reached the stage of taking out a calendar and marking red crosses on each day that passes. I see my poems as ships that I've sent out to sea, full of wares that I consider beautiful and worthwhile, and if they meet the approval of someone at the other end, I'm happy, and if the ships are sent back I'll go back to building and stocking new ships and try again. Unluckily the tranquillity that I think proper to cultivate under these circumstances deserts me rather often. I have written at least one poem in the meantime, and worked on a handful of stories, and this morning I spent hours researching Buckinghamshire towns along the London-Oxford road for my "Fountain in the Labyrinth" tale, but my writing still feels as if it were suspended until I know the fate of my poems.

By the way, the reason why I sent the verses to the New Yorker is only out of ambition insofar as I want my writing to be of a very high quality, and enjoyable to read, and I (perhaps naïvely) consider that periodical's editors to be good judges of whether I've achieved this aim or not. Fame is only enticing if it means that my peers approve of me, or that I am widely respected; the ambient fuss, like book tours and interviews and photos, etc., sounds bothersome (and, as Doris Lessing recently lamented, can gravely impede one's writing). I think I can afford this idealism; I live in material comfort and am not forced to encounter reality much.
Besides, my principal ambition is to act faithfully according to my conscience, which I think is an admirable aim also because it requires great exertion (and at the same time, as long my conscience winks at it, I plan to continue to channel my human delinquency into being as indolent and day-dreamy and careless and easily amused as I like).

P.S.: I suppose this is a textbook case of "oversharing!" Oh, well. (c:

Songs of a Blithe Spirit

Whilst whiling away the night writing a sentimental story that wouldn't overtask the intellect of an eight-year-old, I listened to YouTube classical music videos for the first time in a while, and came across a black-and-white film where Mischa Elman, accompanied by Josef Bonime, plays Antonin Dvorak's "Humoresque" and François Joseph Gossec's "Gavotte." Altogether I find the film pleasantly atmospheric; from the introductory text, through the setting — a tall window in the back with the heavy drapes to either side, pilasters, the curve of the piano smothered in a sumptuous coverlet, and the pompous bust at the wall — to, above all, the romantic playing and lightly antiquated sound quality of the recording.

Both of the pieces happen to be in the canon of the Suzuki Violin School, in which I was placed at the age of five and remained for two or three years. I play the "Humoresque" rarely now, first of all because I only pick up the violin about every two weeks, and secondly because that piece is particularly difficult to play if one is used to the multitude of notes in piano music — where notes tend to be part of an aggregate and not independent entities — and doesn't know how to make a melody sound meaningful on its own. In the Suzuki score, the second voice is missing, too (but it seems only to be the melody transposed down a third, so maybe I should pencil it in).

Elman, I find, gives the pieces dignity, warmth, and life. The Gavotte is delightfully gay (in the original meaning of the term (c: ) and seems perfectly suited for a session of chamber music in an airy room in the summertime. Also, I hope it isn't pretentious, overgeneralizing balderdash to say that his rendition has an optimistic and naïve mood that is intriguingly unmodern.

And Beethoven's Spring Sonata as played by Henryk Szeryng and Artur Rubinstein is also well worth the listen.

This time I was purposely searching for a poem that might provide a good title for the music post, so, after trying Chaucer's "Prologue" and Hardy's "Darkling Thrush," I lucked out with "To a Skylark." It is one of my favourite poems, though the poet's grandiloquence (exemplified by his line in another work that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world") gets on my nerves now and then. A species of this grandiloquence that I particularly dislike is the Romantic tendency to identify with and apostrophize a greater power. It reminds me of obnoxious classmates who would constitute themselves co-authorities with the teacher, trying to advance from the ranks of the hoi polloi by keeping the others in order; so, for example, if people talked in the back of the room, they turned around pointedly, with a sanctimonious stare of horrified indignation that would have been proportionate if the delinquents were holding a cannibal feast.

One poetic example is the "Apostrophe to Ocean," as it was called in my English Lit 12 class, from Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. The narrator expatiates on his love of solitary promenades to the seashore to "Mingle with the universe"; but, despite the exalted privilege of his one-on-one interviews with the Ocean (something like Bush's chats with God, I presume), he still condescends to "love not Man the less, but Nature more" because of them. Then he goes on and on about how men are killed by the sea, and seems rather to relish it. I'll venture a daring literary theory: "he" is actually a misanthropic "she," which is why she can so easily talk of men in the third person. But I should say that, odd bits aside, I like the verses.

In any case, Shelley's poem turned out to be eminently seasonal, and also topical insofar as it concerns music, so here it is:

TO A SKYLARK
— Percy Bysshe Shelley

Hail to thee, blithe spirit!
Bird thou never wert,
That from heaven, or near it,
Pourest thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

Higher still and higher
From the earth thou springest
Like a cloud of fire;
The blue deep thou wingest,
And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.

In the golden lightning
Of the sunken sun,
O'er which clouds are brightening,
Thou dost float and run,
Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.

The pale purple even
Melts around thy flight;
Like a star of heaven
In the broad daylight
Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight:

Keen as are the arrows
Of that silver sphere,
Whose intense lamp narrows
In the white dawn clear
Until we hardly see, we feel that it is there.

All the earth and air
With thy voice is loud,
As, when night is bare,
From one lonely cloud
The moon rains out her beams, and heaven is overflow'd.

. . .

We look before and after,
And pine for what is not:
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

. . .

Teach me half the gladness
That thy brain must know,
Such harmonious madness
From my lips would flow,
The world should listen then, as I am listening now!

Quoted in: A Treasury of English and American Verse, Fritz Krog, Ed.
Hirschgraben Verlag, 1967

The Sequel: Tempelhof and Delphi

The Tempelhof vote results were released late last evening, and "Nay" triumphed; ca. 60.2 % of those who voted chose "Yea," but the necessary quota of "Yea" votes, which would have had to represent 25% of the 2.4 million eligible voters, was not reached. How fairly the referendum was set up is debatable (well, not much point in debate; it was unfair), but on the whole I admit that I am fast settling into my usual political apathy again. I didn't really understand anyway, why we voters would have a chance to determine the future of however many square kilometers the airport covers, whereas truly serious issues like sending our fellow citizens to be killed and to perform dubious activities in Afghanistan, in our name, are out of our hands entirely. There no one in the government cares for our opinion, except the opposition parties who, as in everything else, are partly honestly opposed and partly want to make political capital out of it. (Or so I believe.)

* * *

As for the Delphi story, which I have temporarily rechristened Omphalos so that the title is more specific, it is not getting along very well. For one thing, I can't understand a heroine who would abscond with a car even though the woman to whom it was intended to be delivered probably needs it herself, or might at least be extremely puzzled if she doesn't get it. But I have already described the route from Athens to Delphi as best I could, relying only on Google Maps; fortunately the hilly areas there are evidently very high, so I see the changes in altitude wonderfully well (unlike in Northumberland, but more about that later). The description is not too brilliant -- probably very clichéd -- but here's a sample:

Barely ten minutes had passed when I was leaving the bright sea of white apartment buildings, and the roar, and the congestion behind me, and was free to follow my own trains of thought as I sped away on the westward stretch of the Leoforos Athinon. The Mediterranean, which I had seen from many Grecian shores at many times of the day, now spread sparklingly blue before me, and the breezes fled past the windshield with an accelerating rush that made me feel nearly as if I were soaring. I turned onto the Ethniki Odos Athinon-Korinthou confidently, not even needing to consult the map, and rounded the bay. The island of Salaminos spread out to the west, the sharp curve of the white sands beside the road was dotted with people, the piers that jutted out from the northern shore below Eleusina were bristling with white boats, and stately yachts of the jet-setting crowd and magnates lay in the water in a bright constellation. Here, again, was the bustle that I knew from the city, translated into the marine idiom.

But the research is going swimmingly. I've pored over photos of the ruins of ancient Delphi for hours and tried to recapture the scenes in word-pictures for my notes. Besides, Goldfinger has come on television twice; it turns out that I was actually thinking of that film, in particular the scenes where James Bond is curving around the Swiss mountainside near Geneva in his dashing Aston Martin. The film was released in 1964, too, and I found myself looking very closely at the clothing, cars, interior design (in the Miami hotel and the airplane), the Swiss gas station, etc. (I also realized what a good film it is; I especially liked the scene in Fort Knox where, amid the shoot-out between the soldiers of Goldfinger and of the US Army, Bond is hovering perspiringly over the bomb whose timer is ticking down to the crucial seconds, trying to stop the dials and wheels, finally resolving to pull out a neat bundle of cables -- then a grey-suited government man comes over, reaches in calmly, and turns the device off with the airy flick of a switch.)

This morning I was lucky again. In preparation for university, based on the hope that I'll be accepted this year, I've been reviewing my Ancient Greek. But I had discontinued my daily sessions for a day or three when, today, I decided to finish Lesson VII in An Introduction to Greek (Henry Lamar Crosby and John Nevin Schaeffer, Allyn and Bacon, 1966). Immediately I realized that there were black-and-white photos of Delphi in it, excellently detailed and taken at roughly the time when Mary Stewart wrote her book. So far I've noticed that the grassy bank above the stadium, which is wooded with firs now, was quite bare then -- a small detail but perhaps useful -- and that there's a "plunging pool" near the gymnasium.

Anyway, even if I never write another word of the story, my toils have been most rewarding. For example, the aesthetics of the site at Delphi have really grown on me: the chalky stone of the higher crags with the splashes of pastel pink and the gnarled growth of olive-tinted scrub, the dark spires of cypress(?) reminiscent of an Italian Renaissance painting, the dusky firs, the aisles running down the seats of the greyish theatre, the warm beige pillars on the Temple of Apollo, the thin paths threading along the slopes below, the flat-bottomed valley winding through the dark green mountain spurs, and the cool pale blue where the sea creeps in at Itea. I haven't seen any purple mountains on the photos yet, though. (c:

* * *

Yesterday I also took another whack at neglected writing projects. For one thing, I added some paragraphs to "Castle Besieged" (a medieval tale, possibly ca. Wars of the Roses, that I am writing for my own amusement) and "Newsbreak" (set in a newspaper office in present-day New York). Besides, I had another Google Maps session. First up was the stretch between London and Gloucestershire, for my tale set in the time of Oliver Cromwell's reign and entitled "The Fountain in the Labyrinth." But probably the land has changed its character greatly since the 17th century; now it is only little fields fringed with forest, whereas I am sure it was once nearly all forest. At least I have ground-level knowledge of how portions of Oxfordshire might have looked (i.e. fresh and green and lovely) thanks to two train rides between London-Paddington and Oxford.

Anyway, passing on to Northumberland, I zoomed right in on Hadrian's Wall, then scrolled back and forth looking for a house on a hill that is near the wall, but had no luck. There were barnyards, grey and square and apparently modern, and a castle; only one knot of buildings could have been a village (Porsbury, in my tale) at the bottom of a hill with a mansion on its top, and that mansion improved on its imaginary counterpart by being nestled in a clump of forest. It appeared to be too far away from Hadrian's Wall, however, though it strikes me now that tinkering with distances is quite permissible under artistic license. As I mentioned earlier, I couldn't see the hills properly because the map lacked relief, but one large, knobbly patch of bare brown was almost certainly a mountain. In any case, it was fun scrolling to and fro to see the dark squiggle where a stream once ran, terraces that may be left over from Neolithic times, crop circles, the odd spirals and ridges and curves of the furrowed fields, and the white specks that were presumably sheep.

* * *

As I was thinking of a title for this blog post, a line of Keats's popped into my head, which I promptly googled, to find his poem "Fancy." It is long, but the first lines seem the perfect note on which to end:

EVER let the fancy roam,
Pleasure never is at home:
At a touch sweet Pleasure melteth,
Like to bubbles when rain pelteth;
Then let wingèd Fancy wander
Through the thought still spread beyond her:
Open wide the mind's cage-door,
She'll dart forth, and cloudward soar.

Democracy on Wings

At around 4 p.m. I went to the Rathaus Schöneberg in order to vote in the referendum on the future of the Berlin-Tempelhof airport. The market, white with the plastic sheeting that shelters the tables, was in full cry, and the sidewalks between the Akazienstraße and Rathaus were bustling with people eating ice cream, going for a walk, talking at restaurant tables, etc. There was no sign of the referendum except two modest posters at the bottom of the city hall stairs, and white pieces of paper pointing one to the side entrance on the Freiherr-von-Stein Straße. There a lone trio of black-clad men from a television station stood conversing with one or two citizens, the door was open, and I uncertainly entered the door that is normally used to get to the marriage office (Standesamt).

Up the dark but broad winding stairs I went, and it was easy enough to find Room 1003. Two other voters were standing in line in a well-lit room that was smaller than many a classroom. One of the two students sitting at a white table to the right examined my notification letter and passport, and pointed me to a modest table in one corner where a grey cardboard shield protected one's privacy. With great effort, I summoned my forces to unfold the ballot and mark a cross on the circle beside "Ja," then I walked over to the table where three plump and friendly women were sitting. They checked off my name on the voter list after consulting the notification letter again, and pointed me to the metal box that served as the urn. A fourth woman stood there, somewhat listlessly holding a blue duotang over the slit, and then as listlessly moving it aside to let me drop in the ballot. My civic duty was thereby performed.

As I went out and descended the stairs, a second television trio, who had been loitering on the landing, stopped me and asked me to say how I had voted and why. Given the fact that I am generally inarticulate and rambly and don't pronounce my "s"s properly, any footage of me would probably be unusable, but I decided to give it a shot and let them decide. Besides, I was giggling internally with excitement like a giddy schoolgirl, though I probably looked poised and serious as far as this is reconcilable with evidently being in a good mood. So I agreed. At that point they swung into action; a fuzzy black microphone hovered from the left, the unwieldy black camera approached from the right, and in the middle there stood the anchor, her smile very white, broad and fixed as she asked me the question.

As far as I remember, these are the pearls of wisdom that I confidently imparted: "Ich habe 'Ja' gestimmt. Ich finde, dass eine Stadt wie Berlin mehr als einen Flughafen braucht. Eine Stadt mit 3 Millionen Einwohner [here the confidence in my tone wavered into uncertainty, because that figure might be wrong] brauch zwei Flughafen." In a nutshell: "I voted 'yes' because a large city like Berlin needs more than one airport." Walking back home, I remembered that "brauch" should have a "t" at the end (if I'm lucky, the wrong pronunciation is a colloquialism), and that the plural of "Flughafen" is "Flughäfen." Anyway, it doesn't really matter, and in any case what bothers me more is that the substance of what I said is unenlightening at best, but most probably stupid.

What the issue was, is that the government intends to close down the Tegel and Tempelhof airports and expand the Schönefeld airport into a huge one called "Berlin-Brandenburg International." Tempelhof hasn't been used by commercial passenger airlines in ages, and apparently only serves dignitaries and businessmen now. So its operation license was revoked, and the government had agreed to redevelop it into a park or something of the sort; a public initiative was started against this closure, however, and that's why the referendum happened.

I think that it is immensely stupid to have only one large airport serve all of Berlin. If something goes wrong, let's say an oil slick on the runway or whatever, there should always be an alternative site. And the convergence of all Berlin-bound flights on one spot sounds unnecessarily dangerous to me. London, though admittedly much larger than Berlin, has Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, and (I think) Luton; even Vancouver, with probably half the population of Berlin, has YVR and Vancouver-Abbotsford.

The official information brochure that we were sent in the mail also presents more specific arguments: apparently BBI would not be large enough to handle all the flight traffic, the closure of the airport would cost Berlin millions in revenue, and ca. 70% of Berliners are for the continuation of Tempelhof as it is. None of the counter-arguments that I've read seem compelling. Pollution drifts with the wind, so what difference does it make if it originates in BBI or Tempelhof? The noise is a pity, but, at the risk of being mean, I will say that people who choose to live nearby, when Berlin's housing market is (from what I've seen and heard) wide open, should suck it up.

Golden Interlude

An odd but very beautiful warm sunset that I tried to capture with Gi.'s digital camera on March 5th, 2007.

Tales of the Armchair Traveller

Once in a while the moment arrives when the computers are all occupied, including my own laptop, and I have no intention of watching television. So I wander listlessly among the bookshelves, and since the English literature by authors from A-S is stranded high above my short reach, I am forced into close contemplation of the children's literature in the hallway, or the literature from S-W. Three to four days ago this paid off when I discovered three works by Mary Stewart, a novelist who dabbled, with considerable success, in the romance-adventure genre during the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Nine Coaches Waiting is the best of these, I think. The premise is that Linda Martin, a half-French and half-English orphan in her early twenties, becomes the governess of the nine-year-old Comte de Valmy in Haute-Savoie, and becomes enamoured of the brooding son of the Comte's uncle, before she finds out that there is a sinister scheme to bump off the Comte and no longer knows whom to trust. In the spirit of the typical novel synopsis, heightening suspense to the utmost, I hereby add ellipses: . . . Anyway, the two or three episodes of vigorous kissing aside, the tale itself is a good yarn, with interesting characters, fine sense of scenery, and a profusion of literary quotations and allusions that do not seem like a wearying attempt to show off but like the overflowing of a genuine love of books. It is not set in an ambiguous time, either, but reflects the decade when it was written, and reminded me vaguely of To Catch a Thief and the less exotic European scenes in James Bond (Thunderball, I think). And I suspect that the dashing description of Paris in the beginning is efficiently excellent, too.

At present I'm at a loss for things to do. I am not working on any story, and I haven't yet tried writing a travel article for the Globe and Mail as I had intended. My fantasy about spending two days in Florence was short-lived, because my enthusiasm wasn't so great; my American prairie idea was abandoned a long time ago because, given my inexperience, it is highly unlikely that I could have earned my room and board, and not having a driver's license in the countryside is awkward. And, for whatever reason, I have not taken the step to whole-heartedly look for a job, though I know now what I could do: homework help, freelance writing, minor proof-reading, minor translating (German to English and French to English, though having 23% in my second UBC French Lit course might torpedo my chances there), secretarial work that does not involve telephoning, dish-washing, and cleaning. I did visit a tutoring office on a mission of inquiry, but it was after-hours and I haven't returned; as for online job-searching (one of the circles of quotidian purgatory that Dante presumably left out), I have not done it for at least two weeks.

The newest castle-in-the-air about moving into my own apartment has been severely damaged by the trebuchet of financial considerations. I wanted to have only one or two rooms, parquet or plank floors, in a building predating the 1930s,and a separate kitchen and bathroom, but with the costs of heating and electricity and water this would have amounted to at least 300 Euros per month. Then I would factor in 150 Euros per month for food and toiletries; I can eat moderately, but if my siblings or other guests come over I would want to have a stock of pistachios, chocolate, etc., too. Payment of health insurance (my coverage under my parents' plan will, so I've been told, end when I turn twenty-three) will swallow about another 60 Euros per month, given an annual income of 9600 Euros. The cell phone costs I'm not quite sure about yet, but they should not exceed 15 Euros per month; an internet connection might require another 30 Euros. A year's ticket for the U-Bahn, buses and S-Bahn in the AB region of Berlin would cost me 670 Euros, which I would be able to pay from my present savings account; it would be cheaper if I am a student, but the university fees and textbook costs would also set me back a few hundred Euros. So, as far as my research has indicated, I could hold two 400-Euro jobs, or one job paying at least 700 Euros (if I had gotten the job at the Café Einstein, it would have been 800 Euros per month), which would be my prerequisites for moving out, and still run the risk of only scraping by.

Anyway, as I was googling Mary Stewart and her oeuvre, the idea struck me that I might try to take the premise of one of her novels and write my own according to her plot-paradigm and setting. So I typed out a first chapter from Amazon.com, found hints about the plots and characters from reader reviews, and began to research the setting, which is at first Athens but mostly Delphi. The point is not to steal ideas, but to try writing according to preset guidelines (as authors with companies like Mills & Boon must do, according to a recent Guardian article), with precise historical detail and "local colour," entirely for my own practice. Once I did pick one of the novels, I was reluctant to go far with it -- the heroine is named "Camilla Haven" . . . ("Linda" is not my favourite name, either, by the way) -- but I thought that I might as well undertake the research.

First of all I went to Google Maps (which was useful a few weeks ago when, for the purposes of a historical tale, I was trying to trace the route that a 17th-century carriage would have taken from London to Gloucestershire, though I doubt that the modern A40 corresponds to that route), and followed the highway out of Athens, around the bay, and along the mountains to Delphi. I noted the landscapes and towns on the way. Then I researched the flora and fauna of the slopes of Mount Parnassos, which overlooks Delphi and the vividly green river valley below that runs out to the sea, and found out historical and geographical details about that mountain and the ancient site of the oracle itself. Now I am much the wiser, though the Greek place names are slipping my memory again.

And, for the first time, I feel tempted to visit Greece. On the whole I've tended to think of it (I know, I'm a terrible philistine) as a hot country full of loud modern buildings and glaring yachts, barren rock and mountains on which forage unhappy sheep and goats under the humourless eye of surly shepherds, tourist beaches, and piles of crumbling stone that are all that remain of buildings and civilizations, which one must read about for hours and hours if one is to understand them. The Greek Orthodox Church intrigues me, and I like the food and wines, the intensely blue Mediterranean, and bees gathering honey on the slopes of Mt. Hymettos, but these temptations are not great enough. Also, I liked learning about Ancient Greece (much preferring it to Rome, esp. before Athens became an empire) in school and university, and am very fond of the myths, but I prefer to create my own picture of it in my imagination. In any case, either in Greece or in Scotland, I should like to see the "purple mountains" that I've encountered so often in fiction and never in real life.

After the Hibernation

After Easter was over, and no more chocolate was to be had, but I was nourished sufficiently to last me a while, I decided to go into winter hibernation. So I crawled under my bed, put on ear-muffs, curled up, and slept for weeks and weeks. Today I reemerged with a wolfish, lean and hungry look, growled at any family members who crossed my path, and ransacked the refrigerator. My voracious appetite being satisfied, I've spent the afternoon gazing out of the window at the clouds, the budding oaks, the drooping red tulips on the Hauptstraße median, and all the cars, while nibbling away at hazelnuts and trying not to swallow the shells as I gnawed these off.

Anyway . . . what really happened is that I indulged in the usual literary and musical pastimes, and also discovered the New York-based culture news blog Gawker. I tend to skip the celebrity news, since I consider it none of my business, and also as beneath my dignity. But I do enjoy the banality of the "celebrity sightings," which are generally in this vein: "I saw Miss X at Peppe's restaurant, corner of 51st and Broadway. She has perfect skin in person, and as she was eating a salad with deep-fried curly things on it, probably calamari, she was saying to a well-dressed female friend that she doesn't like rainy weather." The reader comments are unusually witty and well-written, though there is tasteless joking that jars on me.

On Saturday I e-mailed four poems to the New Yorker. Their genesis was a nocturnal reading session, which I interrupted to open the Text file where I write my notes. After staring blankly at the pixelated white-grey rectangle for some seconds, inspiration struck and I began describing seaside scenes near Opapa's condominium in Sidney in good detail and well-chosen words. Every poem, even after I worked out the rhythms throughout the next days, has its flaws, but I am very proud of three of them. I sent the fourth poem -- a gory tale in extremely blank verse (as L.M. Montgomery once put it) about an eagle who devours a fish carcass on a pier, while fending off a trio of obstreperous crows, in a scene that I really did observe once -- mostly because I've found to my great annoyance that people tend to prefer the poems that I like least.

I thought that the first poem in my original series was nice but too generic, so I've copied it below. Unfortunately a dead crab is, in my experience, too limp to hold onto anything; but besides that small logical flaw the only other evident shortcoming is probably the colon, of which a grammarian would not approve, though the poet might.

In the Darkness of the Seaside

It is night, and on the shore
the darkened rocks are lapped in shadow;
beyond: the distant rush and roar
of the waves that curl the ocean's blackness,
and the tide creeps in oblivion
in along the sleeping sands
gently pushing and amassing
the kelp and seaweed that is passing
from the seafloor to the strand.

In the morning, on the shore,
the wettened fringe will still be there;
frail, thin corpses of the crabs
with tiny legs still grasping
slippery translucent bands
or tangled in a mossy clump
and chalky limpet-shells whose cones
and mussels whose oblong sky-blue casings
decompose, abrade and crack
and turn to dust upon the strand.

My teachers have liked my poetry, but from other quarters I've heard little, also because I usually don't show my productions to anyone, anyway. Firstly, I don't want to submit work to others' judgments when it does not satisfy my own. Secondly, I've taken the lesson of Aesop's fable about the man, his son, the donkey, and the critical strangers to heart. And, thirdly, there is the example of my "Elegy" poem. It may come across as a recycling of ancient clichés, but I wrote it in an English churchyard, in the evening, near weathered tombstones and a pigeon and a yew, and the feeling was genuine. Earlier in the day we had gone to St. Alban's Cathedral, and I had felt very sorry for the people who had been buried under the floor, whose engraved names were fading away to oblivion; I never visited graveyards in Victoria, so they seemed profoundly hallowed and mysterious places, rather than the quietly enjoyable places I find them to be now; and, prosaically, jet lag had made me hypersensitive. I put the verse in the family newspaper because I liked it, and thought that others might too, but I didn't want to submit it to any magazine because of its personal nature and solemn subject.

Anyway, one reader wrote to tell me that I should acknowledge that I was ripping off ("trying to emulate") Gray's "Elegy," which hurt very much at the time, though I think he didn't mean it to have that effect. To him it seemed that I was trying to attain Gray's level, which would have been absurd, whereas I really only wanted to record my mood and the scene. And, to be completely honest, I felt insulted by the implication that I would be so unintelligent as to try to deceive well-read people by plagiarizing a well-known poem like Gray's "Elegy." 'T'any rate, this jumble quite proved the point that if one feels deeply about a piece of art one should keep it for one's self. It's one of my two favourite poems and it has taken a while not to feel that it is tarnished.

Theoretically I much prefer the form of the novel, because it isn't so wishy-washy, abstract, and sentimental. At the same time I must admit that it is as common in prose as in poetry to fudge emotional experiences that one has never had, but that one enjoys in the same way as I don't much mind reading about a gruelling Arctic expedition in mid-summer. Anyway, I could go on and on about this subject, but I won't. The point is that I'd rather write novels, but I am convinced, also by experience, that I won't be in the position to write a good novel for decades, due to my immaturity of character and of intellect.

On Saturday I went to guard Uncle Pu's and Aunt K.'s house in the countryside. I was on my own after the first day and a half because my co-guard fell ill and went to see a doctor and recuperate back in Berlin. So, for three days and two nights I tended the house, and went outside only to fetch the mail, and to dig out chickweed in the strawberry plot (an oddly satisfying experience). I read Die Zeit -- but not front to back, through all the sections, minus the advertisements, as on previous occasions. My feud with the writing style and the mentality of the contributors (self-satisfied, self-absorbed, and not very engaged with the subject) persists; I was wickedly gratified to find an error in one of the many English phrases that were dropped; but the interviews with Helmut Schmidt in the ZeitMagazin were refreshing as usual, and this week's magazine was altogether unusually entertaining. And I liked Katja Nicodemus, the film critic's, interview with director Sidney Lumet. Striking the right tone in an interview is, as I've found in my extensive newspaper reading, highly difficult. Painfully inconsequential accounts of the interviewee's attire, prying personal interrogations, snide denigration or overt hostility, silly adulation, brain-deadeningly unoriginal questions -- these are problems that plague the genre.

As far as interviews go, by the way, the New Yorker is pleasingly consistent; even the recent article about George Clooney (whose appeal I have never fully understood) was serious, and I liked reading it, though it only confirmed my opinion that the actor is agreeable but bland. Somewhat à propos, I feel like relieving my mind about the Washington Post feature article, "Pearls Before Breakfast," that just won a Pulitzer. It deserves the prize for the nice premise (famous violinist dresses in street clothes and plays during rush hour at subway station in Washington, D.C.; how do people react?) and for the thorough work and enthusiasm that went into it; but not for the philosophical and musical sciolism,* or the style, which lapsed here and there into abject gushing.

But, to return to my week of rustication, I also played the piano and violin (Pudel's, which he generously permitted me to play) with much greater freedom than I feel when anyone is within earshot, so that it sounded quite good. And I read the first essay in Samuel Johnson's Rambler, as well as the biographical foreword; the first chapters of Middlemarch as well as a foreword by Gordon S. Haight; the beginning of an unsympathetic essay on Edmund Spenser; and the first chapters of The Old Curiosity Shop. My appreciation of Charles Dickens is unfortunately still greater objectively than subjectively (though I did greatly enjoy Nicholas Nickleby as far as I read it), because the way he keeps nudging the reader, and his characterizations of heroes and heroines, invariably "gets my goat."

Even Middlemarch irritated me, because I don't like the Victorian strain of idealization (verging on kitsch) and religiousness in it. For example:

Dorothea trembled while she read this letter; then she fell on her knees, buried her face, and sobbed. She could not pray under the rush of solemn emotion in which thoughts became vague and images floated uncertainly, she could but cast herself, with a childlike sense of reclining in the lap of a divine consciousness which sustained her own.

Shakespeare himself, I admit, elevated his heroes and heroines into virtuous and wholly unreal abstractions; George Eliot, however, could have brought the modern tradition of differentiated characterization of primary characters to a fine peak, if she had not been defeated by her yearning to conform to the sentimental moralizing strain of her times. In any case, I had worried that I wouldn't bring any new insights to the reading this time (I last read it properly at least three years ago). On the contrary; it turns out that I used to ignore the gentle irony and observations, and the secondary characters like Mr. Brooke and Mrs. Cadwallader, so there is a whole, broad layer to the book that I now discern and value much more.

* sciolism: superficial pretense to knowledge
(I've had to look up the word a couple of times, hence this definition, paraphrased from the Concise Oxford Dictionary, 1964)

A Hoppy Holiday

Today I woke up incredibly early, namely at around 9:15. Our guest G., Papa, and Mama were already awake; T. swiftly followed; J. eventually got up after I prodded him (one nice thing about J. is that he tends to be good-humoured when prematurely roused from sleep); and Gi. and Ge. persisted in slumbering on. Ge. was, it turns out, labouring under the delusion that it was only Saturday. Mama put on the "Hallelujah" chorus of Händel's Messiah -- she searched for our CD in vain and had to play a YouTube film instead -- and T. and I played "He shall feed his flock" on the recorder and piano.

Then those of us who were awake enjoyed an Easter feast: Mama's "Hefezopf" (braided yeast bread) in raisin-less and raisin-filled variants, salami and Schinkenspeck and cheeses, marmalade, painted hard-boiled and freshly cooked soft-boiled eggs, and chocolate, marzipan, and candy Easter eggs. We drank tea or coffee. The table looked lovely, too, with the purple tulips that G. had brought, decorations that Mama's co-workers had given her, the fine white linen tablecloth, the Gmundener plate, and the bright Easter eggs that were scattered over it. And, before I humanely decapitated my chocolate Easter bunny with my knife, I solemnly pronounced, "Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears," and pretended to tweak off the rabbit's auricular appendages. I've used the joke rather often, but still enjoy it. Outside snowflakes were drifting through the air and failing to establish themselves on the wet asphalt, and it was oddly quiet on the street.

After a short boxing match with J., I then began to paint two Easter eggs, on which I had sketched designs yesterday evening, with characteristic lousiness. One egg has a motif of spiral bands, intended to be dark blue, green, red, and yellow; the other has a small church nestled in bare trees on one side, and on the other side there is a woodland scene with dead leaves covering the soil, a daffodil, tree stems, and a golden-green lawn and pale blue sky glowing from behind them, inspired by the Volkspark scene that I described in the last post.

Having rapidly run out of motivation, I turned to the piano, in a bad mood because I've been playing it lousily lately. In the past two months I've started playing ragtime pieces by Scott Joplin -- not only the "Entertainer," which I had learnt when I still had piano lessons -- and these went well, since I find them congenial: light but not superficial, innocent, and cheerful, and pleasantly atmospheric. As I play them I often picture a non-demimondaine saloon in the Wild West.

Then, in contrast, there was the "mighty crash of harmonies" (as an early-twentieth-century story for schoolgirls once put it) of Beethoven's later sonatas, and of Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 (i.e. the first third of that piece). I've started playing the Sonata appassionata in its entirety, largely because I heard part of a Sviatoslav Richter recording of the third movement and it lingered pleasantly in my memory -- Beethoven's longer sonata movements occasionally still seem interminable, so it helps to have a sense of how to make it sound good, and to know that there are interesting motifs and developments later on. Now I also play the Moonlight Sonata and Waldstein Sonata in their entirety. What bothers me is that, though I can sightread these well enough, I don't play them very profoundly or inventively -- and, as usual, if I have a bad day I play these absolutely horridly.

As for the Hungarian Rhapsody, I sightread the whole thing once, but it was pointless and endless and charmless, because there are so many infinitesimal notes that make no sense unless played with the utmost speed. So I play up to the "Friska" and bring as much panache into it as is reconcilable with good taste and sincerity, the mood being somber and stern and passionate at the same time. But, like in Chopin's pieces, I wangle the little notes; for example, where one should play eight notes of equal length in the right hand over three notes of equal length in the left hand -- which doesn't even work cleanly in mathematics -- I divide the right hand's notes into one duplet and two triplets.

Anyway, before I went to sleep yesterday I read about the life of the Roman emperor Vespasian in Suetonius's Twelve Caesars. It was, like all of the preceding lives, a rattling good yarn. My Classical Studies course's teaching assistant once remarked that Suetonius was the "National Enquirer of Roman historians," but this assessment does him an injustice. It's true that, beginning with Tiberius's life, there are salacious tales of doubtful veracity, but the facts are well-rounded and solid, the style condensed and good, and the anecdotes well-chosen and interesting; and I think that the book is a fine introduction to Roman history. Besides, I think that the dramatic quality is great; it is not surprising that Shakespeare evidently took much material for his play Julius Caesar from the Twelve Caesars. Nero's life is tragi-comedy at its best -- as Sir Peter Ustinov proved in Quo Vadis?, despite the general historical inaccuracy of the film -- and Suetonius is unbelievably good at painting his character.

Vespasian seems comparatively congenial, an unaffected and even reluctant emperor, gifted with bluff good humour and the ability not to take himself too seriously; his main failing, as Suetonius stresses, is his tendency to financial exploitation that coexisted oddly with his tendency to generosity. There were two passages that I found particularly funny, one because of its exceedingly concise illustration of the abrupt ups and downs of Roman fortunes, and of the way that "mighty contests rise from trivial things"; the other in its rapid descent from the general to the specific, the serious to the ironic, and, above all, the sublime to the ridiculous, which is quite typical of Suetonius:

"He toured Greece in Nero's retinue but offended him deeply, by either leaving the room during his song recitals, or staying and falling asleep. In consequence he not only lost the Imperial favour but was dismissed from Court, and fled to a small out-of-the-way township, where he hid in terror of his life until finally offered the military command of a province."

"In the distribution of provinces Vespasian drew Africa, where his rule was characterized by justice and great dignity, except on a single occasion when the people of Hadrumetum rioted and pelted him with turnips."*

Last of all, the sun eventually emerged today, so Mama, G., Ge. and I went for a walk in the Kleistpark, past the St. Matthäus graveyard, to the Königin-Luise-Gedächtniskirche and the Zwölf-Apostel churchyard, then back (the whole route unfortunately adorned with copious dog droppings). It was frigid, and tiny drifts of snow remained in the crevices of the tree bark and on the ivy, but the blossoms were as bountiful as ever, and the sky was full of billowing white clouds and glimpses of serene blue. I've noticed that the silhouettes of the trees are not so harsh any more because of the tiny twigs and buds that have emerged; a few days ago this rendered the route to the Volkspark much more attractive than usual, because the tints of the trees blended in so well with the dark brick and brown and beige hues, and contrasted so nicely to the white, of the ambient buildings. And now the trees are a delicate lattice-work against the sky, instead of rakes.

*Source: Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, trans. by Robert Graves (Penguin Classics, 1969)

P.S.: I know that the post title is lame, but I couldn't think of a better one.

In Memory of Two Lives

Last night I remembered that today, March 3rd, would have been Aunt Nora's birthday. She still comes to mind often. We frequently practice the Beethoven variations for cello and piano, the Haydn trios, the "classical pieces for beginners" (e.g. Händel's "Harmonious Blacksmith"), etc. that she, Papa, and (whenever he visited) Uncle Pu played during our Saturday visits to her old house in Victoria. Besides, she bequeathed us her books, so many of our music books were once hers, and we are the richer for a large and eclectic range of literature. I tried to think of a nice story about her, but I remember generalities better. First and foremost there was her generosity -- inviting people often and having bountiful edible provisions (e.g. Veuve Clicquot,), her role as Maecenas for the carpenters and artists and so on with whom she was acquainted, the seeds that she scattered out freely in the bird-house, our Easter egg hunts in her garden, etc. Besides, there was her sense of humour, which could be either benign or biting; her fondness of Einstein and an anecdote about his frustrated music teacher ("Can't you even count to three?!"), of crosswords, and of television shows like Dame Edna; and her habit of saying "Mon Dieu, quel horreur!" quickly when, for example, she nearly stumbled over something.

A few days ago Alice Ricciardi, a friend of Omama and Opapa died, too. I knew of her first when Opapa suggested that I send our family newsletter to her, so I wrote a letter (somewhat timidly addressing her by the first name, but she doesn't seem to have minded) to go with it, and a nice correspondence started. Her postcards and letters were brief and friendly; the cards generally had paintings by old Italian masters -- and, once, a black-and-white photograph of what I suspect to be the Arno -- on the front. When Mama and I went to Europe, she invited us to visit her in Italy. When we finally showed up, it was, I fear, quite unexpectedly, because we didn't have her current phone number. It was a rainy day and we had taken the train from Florence to Camucia. There we found out that she did not live in the town, but quite a ways further out, so we obtained her telephone number, called her and told her that we were at the train station. As it turned out that no taxi was available, we had to telephone again, and then she offered to come and fetch us in the car. I felt intensely guilty about the whole affair, especially as it turned out that her driver's license had lapsed and that she was running some legal risk, but her manner when she arrived was grave but not displeased.

First of all we walked a little through the streets of Camucia to buy dinner; we bought fish at what was probably a small restaurant, bread at a bakery, lettuce and grapes at a grocer's, and eggs in a store devoted largely to meats, with Parma hams hanging above the counter at the back. She had crutches, but got along the cobblestones quite well, as far as I remember. On the way back to her home, the right sideview mirror accidentally hit that of another car so that it snapped back; Alice remarked, "We'll get away with that one," and drove on with some preoccupation but no other feeling apparent. I felt rather awful at the time, but she undeniably handled it well.

Her house itself was an old brick building, which, I think she told us, was built in the early nineteenth century. Three or four cypresses stood to the right, and to the left there were pines, a garden shed, and a white gazebo with cosmea flowers around it. The guest bedroom was on the first floor, and to the right one could enter a long and cavernous living room, where boxes still stood chaotically after her move from Rome, and she told us that we could use the phone there to call home. On the second floor, accessible by an exterior staircase, there was the main living room, a kitchen, and her bedroom. The living room walls, adorned with paintings both modern and older (one scene of Mount Etna erupting had not yet been hung up), were simple, with a crack or two in one corner, and there were low shelves filled with books, like Omama's memoirs.

We ate dinner, with grapes for dessert (or "pudding," which, as Lela says, was the term she preferred), and then I cleaned out the hearth and, on the andirons, made a fire with newspaper, pinecones and pine wood under her direction. Then, in British English with an agreeably snuffly-sounding aristocratic accent, or in German, she told us about the house and the neighbourhood: her English neighbours, who had problems with their house because it was sinking into the ground, which was formerly swampland; the state of the olive and grape harvests; the marauding wild boars in Northern Italy and their predilection for chestnuts; etc. Politics came up, too. She mentioned that nearly everyone she knew in the area was an ex-communist, so it was surprising that Silvio Berlusconi had so much support; her friends in Israel, she said, were also amazed that people would vote for Ariel Sharon. Besides, she talked about her journey to a convention in Turkey, and about her work -- as a psychoanalyst -- with schizophrenic patients. When the subject turned to Mama's drawing, she was immediately interested, too. (I was mostly quiet -- partly because I liked listening, and partly because I only wanted to say something when it was worthwhile -- and it was quite comfortable.)

At that time I had gotten to know the sad part of growing old, like losing one's memory and mental acuity and self-control, and I was worrying about vegetating completely in the sedentary and depressed life I was leading. So it was a relief to meet Alice, who, at over ninety years of age, was most clear-minded, and who -- despite being stranded in the countryside with no friends nearby, essentially without a car, and with no television apparent -- was still interested in and well-informed about the world, and ready to go out and travel with an unforced stoicism. I still know little about her life and work, but as far as I have read about them, both testify strongly to the high calibre of her mind, her tolerance, and her bravery.

Windswept and Tempest-Tossed

The day before yesterday Hurricane Emma swept over Germany, but it appeared quite unspectacular (except perhaps in the mountains or at the shoreline), just heavy clouds and rain with a few strong gusts. I stood at J.'s and Ge.'s window for a while and watched the sky, which was mostly covered by billowy grey clouds with thin darker ones moving along underneath, and watched the antenna on a roof on the opposite building waggle in the wind, and a crude quadrilateral weathervane swinging around forty-five degrees and back again on its chimneytop perch. The doors and windows were often pushed out by gusts, accompanied by a general creaking, and the wind whistled in the oven in the corner room. In the evening news we were treated to another classic scene of a weatherman encased in a large jacket, subjected to the blustering wind and spraying brine of the seashore, clutching an oversized, furry (and, in this case, bedraggled) microphone that resembles a dog of the Pekingese breed, and trying to shout louder than the turbulent elements.

Yesterday and today the sky has still been a troubled grey, with gusts and rain, but the worst of it is apparently over. Before I went to sleep last night, inspired by a quick skim through a volume of Keats ("The Pot of Basil" is even more macabre than I remembered it), I wrote two bad poems. One, rhyming at first and then degenerating into free verse, has no intentional deeper meaning but, if one really wants to, one can read a whole lot into it. It's set in a coral city in whose interior there are great caverns populated by merpeople who look like blue-tinted Greek statues and grow beautiful, supple fins. In the central hall, where the mer-king sits on an enormous pearl in an ancient oyster, his people have gathered around him: his servants, his trident-bearing merman citizens, and ranks of mermaids who, their faces fixed in horror, are soundlessly singing a mournful song like the chorus in an ancient tragedy. Another tribe of merpeople, glittering in bronzen (it probably rusts in water, but whatever) and gold armour, descends on them and kills them all, and the waters of the cave turn turbid. They depart. The oyster slowly shuts on its pearl and guards the graveyard like a sphinx, but the débris settles to the seafloor as if it were only sand that had been stirred up by the silent passage of a giant sting-ray, and it seems as if nothing had happened. The End.

But for the second poem I wrote about the wind, and used the metaphor (which I'm probably not the first to come up with) that it rushes over the earth in search of something. When it stirs the leaves, it is rummaging among them; when it is violent, it is enraged that it cannot find the desired object and wreaks vengeance on whatever crosses its path; when it whistles through buildings it is subdued and dejected. I wrote the poem in French, though my I.Q. invariably drops about 50 points when writing in that language. After it was done, I remembered an infinitely better poem about the wind, namely Jean de la Fontaine's "Le Chêne et le Roseau," which T. and I read in our lessons with Marie. The last line has been echoing in my mind (so has "My Heart Will Go On" from the film Titanic, which I snobbishly abhor; but I have, after all, heard that song a million times).

Le Chêne et le Roseau

Le Chêne un jour dit au Roseau:
"Vous avez bien sujet d'accuser la nature;
Un roitelet pour vous est un pesant fardeau;
Le moindre vent, qui d'aventure
Fait rider la face de l'eau,
Vous oblige à baisser la tête,
Cependant mon front, au Caucase pareil,
Non content d'arrêter les rayons du soleil,
Brave l'effort de la tempête.
Tout vous est aquilon, tout me semble zéphyr.
Encor si vous naissiez à l'abri du feuillage
Dont je couvre le voisinage,
Vous n'auriez pas tant à souffrir:
Je vous défendrais de l'orage;
Mais vous naissez le plus souvent
Sur les humides bords des royaumes du vent.
La nature envers vous me semble bien injuste.
-- Votre compassion, lui répondit l'arbuste,
Part d'un bon naturel; mais quittez ce souci:
Les vents me sont moins qu'à vous redoutables;
Je plie, et ne romps pas. Vous avez jusqu'ici
Contre leurs coups épouvantables
Résisté sans courber le dos;
Mais attendons la fin." Comme il disait ces mots,
Du bout de l'horizon accourt avec furie
Le plus terrible des enfants
Que le Nord eût portés jusque-là dans ses flancs.
L'arbre tient bon; le Roseau plie.
Le vent redouble ses efforts,
Et fait si bien qu'il déracine
Celui de qui la tête au ciel était voisine,
Et dont les pieds touchaient à l'empire des morts.

From: Fables, Jean de la Fontaine (L'Aventurine, 2001)

* * *

Before I finally nodded off, I translated the fable. I worried most about capturing the essence of the words as well as the convoluted and stately word order, and least about reproducing the rhythm, etc., with any great technical fidelity. To do justice to the seventeenth-century language, I tried to use antique-ish terms and grammar whenever they were better than modern ones. (Aquilon, by the way, is the Roman equivalent of the Greeks' North Wind, Boreas.) Today I revised it a little, and found it decent, so here it is:


The Oak and the Reed

One day the oak said to the reed:
"You surely have cause to accuse Nature;
A wren for you is a burden most weighty,
The least wind that by chance
Wrinkles the water's countenance
Obliges you to bend your head,
Whilst my brow, to the Caucasus in powerful resemblance,
Not content with stopping the rays of the sun
Braves the efforts of even the tempest.
For you every wind is an Aquilon;
to me every wind is a Zephyr.
And, if you were born in the shelter
Of the foliage with which I o'erspread the vicinage,
You need not have suffered so greatly;
I had defended you from the storm;
But you are born most often
On the watery borders of the domains of the wind.
Toward you nature seems to me highly unjust.

"Your compassion," replied to him the plant,
"Arises from natural goodness; but relinquish that care:
The winds are less menacing to me than to you,
For I bend but I do not break.
Until now you have, against their fearful blows,
Resisted without bowing your back,
But let us await the end." As he spoke out these words
From the edge of the horizon there rushes with fury
The most terrible of the children
That the North had borne until then in his flanks.
The tree holds out well; the reed bows,
The wind redoubles his efforts,
And does so well that he tears out the roots
Of him whose head had once neighboured the sky
And whose feet were touching the empire of the dead.

Thoughts on Clinton, Obama, et al.

Four years ago I followed the American elections from the very first primary, only to be disappointed not only by the outcome, but also by the silliness along the way. I am certain that this year a Democrat will become the president, but the silliness hasn't diminished in the least. The press coverage is as superficial as ever, fixated on personality and on the candidates' trivial quid pro quos. Four years ago there was the accusation that John Kerry is a "flip-flopper," and now the big deal is that Barack Obama's followers are supposedly developing a scarily fervent personality cult.

Yet again, I wish that the policy proposals of the candidates would be properly covered. To be fair, I could easily look up their platform on their campaign websites, but it is the newspaper's purpose to provide key information. It was only today that I found something truly concrete -- in the Feb. 19 New York Times lead editorial:

The Democrats, Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, have unveiled pieces of an urban agenda. Each has pledged to fight poverty by increasing the Earned Income Tax Credit, which helps millions of working families and has not been increased in 15 years. They would each ensure increases in the minimum wage. Mr. Obama would peg it to the cost of living; Mrs. Clinton would increase it every time members of Congress get a raise. Both would spend on job training and placement, and both have plans to expand health insurance.

It would be too good to be true if the newspapers and news shows would actually discuss the present state of taxation, and where its inegalities and inadequacies lie. With a little effort the subject should not be too dry for the reader, and it would address the real benefit of the voter much more than insignificant primary statistics, e.g. that n per cent of middle-aged, white, Christian women voted for Hillary Clinton in Nebraska.

The political procedure itself is discouragingly flawed. There is the farce that was the Democratic primary in Michigan, for example; firstly, it "did not count" because it was held before Feb. 5th in defiance of the national party headquarters, and, secondly, the ballots carried only the names of Hillary Clinton and three minor candidates (Dennis Kucinich, Christopher Dodd, and Mike Gravel). More importantly, there are the superdelegates; it seems so undemocratic to me that they can vote according only to their personal tastes, and thereby significantly influence the election without needing to respect the preferences of the voters. Of course a few of them (like the congresswoman from Washington, D.C. who recently appeared on the Colbert Report) have stated that they will vote according to the determination of their constituents, but then there are those like the former presidential candidate Walter Mondale and New York State governor Elliot Spitzer, who have already declared their support for Hillary Clinton.

Hillary Clinton's lobbying of the superdelegates epitomizes, I think, why she should not become the presidential candidate: she is content to be a cog in the political machine, and she manoeuvres for power within the establishment, instead of openly and freely letting her platform and competence recommend themselves, to her constituents as well as her colleagues. She is, I'd say, running her campaign like a skilled lawyer who knows the political apparatus and its regulations in great detail, and how to use them to her advantage, but she ignores the spirit of the law that should inform the whole.

Barack Obama, however, does and says as he sees fit without slavish deference to political expediency (though, in the course of his campaigning, he has become careful). As far as I can tell, he is not running for office merely for the sake of the office, but because he genuinely wants to improve government policy and restore America in the opinion of the world. His rhetoric may occasionally be repetitive and vague, but I think that his ideas are sound; at the very least, if he is a decent president and worthy of respect, he will help the chances of a fine successor to the office. And, since there is such a strong desire to repair the damage that Bush has wrought, and since he is personally hugely popular, I am sure that many of the best experts in interior and foreign policy are eager to work for him -- and he is open to differing points of view as Bush was not. He is even more likely to win against John McCain than Hillary Clinton is, according to a poll that came out on Feb. 2nd.

But I do worry that, because he is relatively young, he could still end up being corrupted by the political establishment. He might prove similar to Tony Blair; in my opinion, Blair was idealistic when he became Prime Minister, but he succumbed to bad influences, parted with his soul somewhere en route to Iraq, and thenceforth did everything for money and power while pretending that he is doing it for the soundest moral reasons. But I think that Obama's ego is neither as large nor as vulnerable as Blair's, and that it was Blair's ego that was his Achilles' heel. If Blair had openly invaded Iraq for the self-serving reasons that he had, he would at least still have been honest; but, since he was desperate to keep his own good opinion, he started lying to himself and everyone else, and became completely morally bankrupt. (From his face I surmise that he still has a conscience, but it has no active role in his governance and is now devoted solely to slowly eating away at him from the inside).

If Hillary Clinton does become President, I wouldn't see it as a catastrophe because she is extremely capable, which would already be a great relief after Bush's incompetence. But, as I've already said, I doubt that she would really improve the state of the country because she is too entrenched in its present state. Also, I think that she is inclined to be "tough," and, if this quality is exerted in her foreign policy, it could be as bad as the present unilateralism of "diplomats" who are too stupid, solipsistic,* and hypocritical to merit the name.

* I learned that word a week or two ago. (c:

Sources: "The Spat," by Hendrik Hertzberg (New Yorker, Feb. 11)
"Who Is More Electable?", by Nicholas D. Kristof (New York Times, Feb. 7)

P.S.: February 15th was the fifth anniversary of the first big wave of worldwide demonstrations against the War in Iraq.

Notes from a Field Hospital

Two days ago I came across A Surgeon in Belgium at gutenberg.org. It was written by Dr. Henry S. Souttar about his work at a Belgian hospital as the German army invaded in 1914, and evidently published before the end of the war. Its tone is oddly light at times -- e.g. "The wards were full when we arrived, and I had a wonderful opportunity of studying the effects of rifle and shell fire." -- and the descriptions of Antwerp and its history feel out of place. The ugliness and seriousness of the war have clearly not sunk in yet, and he still seems to find a thrill in it. But he is passionate when he describes the burned-out Belgian villages and shelled churches and fleeing peasants -- also when he theorizes about the Teutonic character with predictably unflattering conclusions and predicts the triumph of the British side in the emotional and dogmatic jargon that I already know from the fiction of the time. What interested me most, since I find medicine fascinating, were his medical observations:

- In the Antwerp hospital where he worked, many soldiers arrived whose wounds were infected by the filth of the fields where they had been fighting. But the bacteria to which they were exposed in the countryside were less dangerous than those in the city. The medical staff dressed the wounds fairly lightly and treated them with solutions of oxygen, and in the worst cases wheeled the patients out into the fresh air. Even gangrenous injuries healed satisfactorily, because the oxygen was so effective. And there were no cases of tetanus.

- Among the most problematic injuries were those where bones were severely broken and even blown away. But a new approach that worked reasonably well was to replace the bone with steel plates. Concerns that the screws which fixed the plates to the bones might come loose did not seem justified. [N.B. Opapa had trouble with such a screw, though, I think, and had to have it operated out.]

- Apparently there is no need to extract bullets from a body -- unless they are pinching a nerve or causing other discomfort, and then preferably only when the wound has healed -- because, if any infection exists, it is only exacerbated when the bullets are removed. [I don't understand how bullets can be infectious, since the act of firing presumably makes them hot enough to sterilize them. On the other hand, since they might do damage if they get into the bloodstream, it seems best to me to remove them routinely as soon as the wound has healed.]

- A practice of which the two sides in World War I accused each other was removing the hard nickel tips of bullets to make "dum-dum bullets." Without the casing tip, the bullet spreads out when it hits its target, and causes severe damage where it would otherwise make a fairly clean perforation.

- A person who has alcohol in his bloodstream does not take chloroform very well.

* * *

Last February I also read Notes on Nursing (1860) by Florence Nightingale, the pioneer of modern nursing and hospital sanitation. In her book, which is not a training manual but a guide for the general public, she explains her ideas about nursing and tries to dispel the myths. She stresses hygiene above everything; a sick-room must be scrupulously well-dusted, well-aired, neat and clean. As a part of this, she refutes the idea that night air is harmful, by pointing out that the day air in cities is a polluted brew upon which the night air is a decided improvement; therefore it is good for patients, provided that they are properly tucked in so that the cold does not affect them.

Her model nurse is stereotypically efficient; she must be clear and firm in her voice and step, inform the patient accurately about her comings and goings so that he can trust her, keep good records so that someone else can take her place at any time, observe well, and report facts and not opinions to the doctor. But she should also be considerate . . .

. . . as well-meaning visitors often are not. Florence Nightingale lists rather awful instances of common thoughtlessness: plunking down on the patient's bed without thinking that it can jar him, bringing flowers with overpowering scents, speaking from angles at which it's difficult for the patient to see one properly, lecturing the invalid about his illness and airing conspiracy theories or raising false hopes, etc. It's exaggerated, of course -- clearly not all visitors are so insensitive, and all patients so sensitive -- but I'm sure that almost everyone does one or two things that prove, on reflection, to be thoughtless and perhaps unkind.

An underlying idea to Florence Nightingale's rules is that the nurse should devote considerable time and thought to each patient, and not be content with superficial observation. For example, a patient may appear to have eaten food when he has really scraped it politely into the garbage. And, if he refuses to eat the food, he does not necessarily have no appetite, but maybe the food came at a bad time or wasn't prepared properly. Besides, she argues against hastily assessing a patient's well-being; redness or paleness have many causes, for instance, and she recommends that decisions about a patient's state of mind be made only after the nurse has had a lively discussion with him for an hour or more, and preferably also after the following night's sleep. I don't know if nurses have the time and energy to take all that trouble, but it makes sense.

Her view of the patient is quite respectful. She points out that a patient can know his own body better than the nurse. For instance, some patients ask for food (fruit, pickles, jams, gingerbread, bacon or ham, cheese, butter or milk, etc.) which it doesn't seem wise to eat but which has no bad effects after all. The times when the invalid wants to sleep, and when he wants to eat, must be accommodated; and even apparently trivial annoyances, whether the cause is a colour or a noise or something else, should be treated considerately.

Finally, she made a reflection that is as relevant today as ever: medicine should not be expected to take the place of letting the body do its work, or of proper diet and care.

* * *

. . . and a non sequitur at the end:

“The truth which makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear.”

-- Herbert Agar (American journalist, 1897-1980), A Time for Greatness
(Quoted in Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, rev. 4th ed.)

Musicking, Novels, and Trivia

When I woke up incredibly late at around 4 p.m., I had already been awake for fleeting minutes intermittently, and through involuntary eavesdropping had the cheerful feeling of being well-informed about everyone else's comings and goings. T. had returned from her work in a school cafeteria, and was talking with Papa and Mama in the corner room; J. had gone to the BVG building to see about his transit tickets, because he had lost the jacket which contained them, but he had also thrown away an old backpack which contained his student identification card, for which stroke of genius I laughed at him later; Gi. and Ge. were holed up in their respective rooms as usual.

So, after conversation and a shower, I read news articles on my laptop and then, when it was occupied by other persons, played the piano. As usual, I am conflicted about whether my playing is good or not, which I find absurd objectively because I am playing for my own amusement anyway. But my slipshod technique and practicing habits do make it less amusing. Anyway, on the programme there was Chopin (Military and Heroic Polonaises, the latter of which went extremely slowly, and a waltz and nocturne or two), Schubert (Sonata D958, Mvt. 2 and 3; Sonata D959, Mvt. 2 and 3; Sonata D960, Mvt. 1 and 2), movements from Beethoven's earlier sonatas (including the short Mvt. 1 and 2 of the Moonlight Sonata), Bach (Italian Concerto and a Goldberg variation). J. came in part-way through, so we played a duet and then he read out a page of a story by Gottfried Keller, where a cook discusses with an innkeeper what food will be prepared for a guest, making funny errors on account of the Gothic script. Lately I haven't minded assisting J. with homework and such things, though a month ago I usually had a startlingly ferocious reaction to his requests for help that was not unlike that of Bilbo Baggins when he wants to snatch Frodo's ring in a certain film.

As for my reading, I have finished the online fiction oeuvre of Rafael Sabatini -- who wrote comparatively good and intelligent, though violent, historical novels -- and now I have arrived at the oeuvre of Charles Alden Seltzer, who wrote westerns. The first book in the list is The Boss of the Lazy Y. I've realized this time that it is over-written to the point of seeming like a parody; the last times I read it I skipped the descriptive paragraphs at the beginning as usual (at university I made an art of reading only the essential passages of books, so that I could go through three or four novels in an evening, though now I tend to conscientiously read them in their entirety), but this time the purpleness of the prose sank in. The hero is described as the quintessence of morose, forbidding virility, and the parallels of his character to the harsh but grand desert environment around him are hammered into the reader's brain with a blacksmith's subtlety. A Mexican eagle, whom the hero promptly addresses with one of the racist epithets that unfortunately litter old westerns, flies overhead; a rattlesnake threatens to strike but is shot by the hero, who surveys the corpse and remarks that it is "man-size." Anyway, I find it funny.

And, last of all, I checked my answers for the King William's College quiz yesterday. It's given out at the end of every year in the Guardian (though I couldn't find it there this year, and had to go to the school website for a PDF copy of it), and it's "fiendishly difficult." The questions are phrased oddly but cleverly, and each set of questions has a theme, like duelling or pirates or places in London. One can usually answer at least two questions if one has a reliable knowledge of Sherlock Holmes, the works of John Buchan, and other English classics that the quizmaster happens to know; but the majority of the questions are, I think, about obscure historical events. This year I had thirteen questions right, which pleased me greatly.

The Vital Virtue, and Other Tales

The New Year has thus far proved drowsy and unproductive for me. Apart from our New Year's Eve celebration, walks to the Volkspark and to the Kleistpark amid the snow, and a visit to B. and A. in Prenzlauer Berg for a small family gathering before G. and N. flew home, I have done very little.

Anyway, here are some of the past week's amusements:

Television: Live and Let Die, Vienna Philharmonic New Year's Concert, The A-Team, sundry crime shows
YouTube: Roman Holiday, Notorious, To Catch a Thief, Spellbound, The More the Merrier, parts of Charade and Rebecca; Royal Canadian Air Farce
New Yorker, Guardian, Globe and Mail, and New York Times articles

Papa, Mama and I watched the New Year's Concert yesterday. In the second half the usual depressing feeling that all waltzes and polkas sound alike did descend on me; but this was temporary and I even enjoyed the "Blue Danube" and "Radetzky March," which I have heard approximately nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine times. It was not as embarrassing to watch the conductor as it often is; though he didn't glower impressively like Zubin Mehta or Valery Gergiev, neither did Georges Prêtre assume a theatrical air of absorption or indulge in giddy mannerisms as his colleagues all too often do. He lightly waved the tempo here, and wiggled his fingers there, mouthed "stop" at the end of the odd phrase, smiled often and evidently enjoyed the concert greatly. I felt that he brought a welcome lightness, but not superficiality, to the music. Besides, I liked the camera direction; not distractingly fanciful, it permitted satisfying views of the musicians, the audience, the flowers and the ladybug ornaments (which did not, I believe, contain chocolate) among them, and the Musikverein building.

My favourite films among the ones that I watched on YouTube are To Catch a Thief and Spellbound. The first is a well-known Hitchcock film where Cary Grant plays a retired jewel thief who is wrongly suspected of returning to his old work. He wants to clear his name, so he obtains the addresses of people who have valuable jewels that might be stolen, and hopes to trap the real thief at one of these places. One of the rich targets is an American woman (Jessie Royce Landis, who played Cary Grant's mother in North by Northwest) and her daughter (Grace Kelly). I like the Monegasque scenery, the brisk but leisurely pace of the plot, the characters, and the care with which the film was made. Its atmosphere is not as tinged with cynicism and darkness as Charade, for instance, is (in my opinion), nor is it too fluffy. Spellbound is another Hitchcock film, about a psychoanalyst, Dr. Constance Petersen (Ingrid Bergman), who works at a mental hospital. The head of the hospital, Dr. Murchison, is to be replaced by Dr. Edwardes. But it turns out that the man who shows up as Dr. Edwardes (Gregory Peck), is not Dr. Edwardes at all but an amnesiac who has assumed that identity. Dr. Petersen, who loves the impostor, does what she can to cure the amnesia and to find out what happened to the real doctor. The plot is melodramatic, but the quality, taste and seriousness of the acting and direction redeem it, I think. I also like how the parallels between detective work and psychoanalysis are worked out; one collects the data, searches out the clues, and tries to decode and synthesize them to find the solution of a problem. And, realistic or not, I like the film's implied assumption that there is no problem that cannot be rationally explained and solved.

As for my New Yorker reading, I found this week's article on Rudy Giuliani especially good and amusing. I much enjoyed the anecdotes that were skillfully employed as needles to puncture the balloon of political oratory. For example, in one chapter of his book Leadership, "Loyalty: The Vital Virtue," Giuliani records how he appointed Robert Harding to be New York's budget director, even though he was criticized for patronage because Mr. Harding's father, as the chairman of the New York State Liberal Party, had secured political support for the mayor. “I wasn’t going to choose a lesser candidate simply to quiet critics,” he wrote. Elizabeth Kolbert (who wrote the article) responds: "This self-praise is particularly noteworthy, since Giuliani also appointed a second Harding son, Russell, to lead the New York City Housing Development Corporation. Russell, a college dropout with no experience in the housing field, embezzled more than four hundred thousand dollars from the agency, and was eventually sentenced to five years in federal prison."

Besides, I've been re-reading the works of Edward P. Roe on Project Gutenberg. This time their kitsch has been sadly apparent, but I find Miss Lou and An Original Bellevery good in their meticulously researched descriptions of the American Civil War. Mr. Roe had served during the war as a chaplain, and he clearly still read and thought about, and discussed, it long afterwards. The second book portrays not only the war itself, but also the riots that broke out in New York City in July 1863, after President Abraham Lincoln declared a draft. Mobs marched through the streets, murdering black people and police officials in the streets, attacking newspaper offices and other buildings, and looting the houses of the rich. (One of the virtues of Mr. Roe is that he is quite unprejudiced about race and national origin; he only indirectly mentions that most of the rioters were Irish.) The army was called in to help the outnumbered police fight the mob, because the city militia had been sent off to fight in Pennsylvania. The police superintendent, Thomas Acton, had already ordered his men to shoot to kill and take no prisoners. Despite his clerical calling, Mr. Roe approves of this course and calls him "courageous," but I find the superintendent's commands unnecessarily violent. Anyway, I had never heard of the riots before I read this book, but the author's description is interesting and most detailed. It reminds me of the looting in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, because it also shows how thin the veneer of civilization can be, especially in turbulent times.

Traditions on Christmas Eve

This morning Ge. and T. bought our Christmas tree from the stand just down the street. It is a plump fir, about four foot tall, and it cost fewer than 30 Euros. With Ge.'s help, Mama set it up on a table in the corner room, and then decorated it.

In the afternoon I decided to go to the Christmas fair at Unter den Linden. So I set off in the U-Bahn, which was not as empty as one might expect, emerged at Französische Straße, and leisurely strode along the two blocks to Unter den Linden. The linden trees have been illuminated by slender tubes of lights that run along the branches, a river of light along which the dark, warmly swathed shapes of passersby made their way. The people were mostly wandering in groups and speaking French or Polish. In front of the Staatsoper an ice skating rink was open, so a modest crowd swept to and fro on it to music, or watched from the perimeters, and two rows of white tents offered seats and warm food and corporate advertising. I walked through to the actual Weihnachtsmarkt. The wooden huts were shuttered up, the cobblestones swept clean, but the scent of frying lingered.

On the way back I decided to walk a station further to Stadtmitte. Friedrichstraße was as subduedly lively as Unter den Linden and it was well-lit. At one point a homeless person was sitting cross-legged with blankets draped over his lap, leaning with his back against the pillar of a building and plunged in its shadow. Though I am usually in a "trust no one" mode when I go out, I forgot this for a moment in sympathy. I was wishing that I could get him cocoa or a hot bun or something of the sort, when he asked whether I had any change. So, for once, I sorted out the large coins (which were not many) in my wallet and handed them over.

At Stadtmitte I stepped into the wrong train through absentmindedness, and ended up at Französische Straße again after all. I forgot my stupidity as I plunged into my present U-Bahn reading, which is Jules Verne's highly readable Tour du monde en quatre-vingt jours. I've come as far as Hong Kong, where the detective Fix perfidiously renders Passepartout unconscious with an opium pipe, and Phileas Fogg and Aouda set forth on the Carnatic. At Mehringdamm I had to switch to the U7 line and waited for six minutes for the next train to arrive. The platform was nearly deserted. At a brick pillar a deep-voiced man was holding forth on sociopolitical matters in slow Caribbean-accented English interspersed with the occasional "mon," and a woman was murmuring assent or laughing in warm but oddly vacant tones. An elderly lady passed by and asked her companion about the Christmas service at St. Marien; on the bench a young man briefly phoned and then waited, hunched over and hands clasped, for the train to arrive.

At home, Mama was preparing dinner: fish, bulgur wheat, tomato salad, and a white sauce with dill and green peppercorns. Papa was watching television. There was one immensely kitschy Christmas concert after another, though one channel varied the entertainment with a documentary about the death of Princess Diana. But then we came across El Dorado, a film with John Wayne and Robert Mitchum. We watched it beginning where Wayne, his new-found friend "Mississippi," and the deputy sheriff concoct a powerful brew of herbs and gunpowder to sober up the sheriff Mitchum, who has been drinking heavily for over a year and is not in the condition to face the band of villains who are threatening him. I find the film most enjoyable. I like John Wayne films in general, but often, as far as I remember, they are too humourless and depressing.

After dinner, we each hurried off to our rooms again. Papa and Mama finished setting up a low shelf that will hold our record collection and will even accomodate the shelf that holds much of our English literature on top. Bach's Weihnachtsoratorium ran on the radio in the background. Until around eleven-thirty I checked my news sites and watched the Queen's first televised Christmas message, broadcast in 1957, on YouTube. It was a concentrated piece of Zeitgeist, elaborately staged, and delivered in Her Majesty's amusingly idiosyncratic high-pitched and sharp voice that verged on sing-song. Her speech seemed the quintessence of the mentality of the hidebound and archaic British nobility; she spoke in her aristocratic accent about the Commonwealth, mentioning in passing that Britain had won the respect of nations by being "honest and kind," lamented the decay of tradition, and in true Victorian vein read aloud a passage from the Christian allegory Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan.

At midnight Papa and Mama opened a bottle of red wine, of which they and Ge. and I partook; and we all gathered in the corner room to sing Christmas carols: German, English, and French. We collapsed into giggles during the "Angel Gabriel," because when we reached the line, "most highly favoured lady," we all had in mind the pastiche "most highly flavoured gravy." Hilarity also broke out during "God Rest You Merry Gentlemen," when we came across the lines, "The witch His Mother Mary/ Did nothing take in scorn." (The proper words, I believe, are, "The which His Mother Mary.") As we were singing "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear," the doorbell rang, and W. briefly joined our round.

Television in the late night was full of familiar films. First of all, we watched Casablanca, until shortly after the scene where the patrons of the café sing the "Marseillaise" and drown out the nationalist tunes of the overbearing German officers. Then, before going to sleep, we watched Arsenic and Old Lace with Cary Grant and Peter Lorre. So this Christmas Eve has been a curious mixture of the old and the new.