On spotting a pattern

Readers may — should — be aware of PostSecret, a kind of anonymous clearinghouse for secrets that people write on postcards and send to Frank, who posts (a selection of) them on the web. (To be clear: people post their own secrets, it's not for outing your friends or even enemies.) I read the site every Sunday (it updates once a week), and am always moved by at least one of the secrets.

For a marvellous time, there was a PostSecret iPhone app too, which did much the same thing — but without Frank's intervention, so people could and did post secrets at any time of the day or night. Since I liked the website so much, I bought and regularly read the app too.

The app had several effects, the one relevant to this story was that it increased by several orders of magnitude the number of secrets being published. This sudden superabundance made it really easy to spot patterns and commonalities. One pattern which I noticed early on, and which fascinated me, was this:

My dead [person I was very close to] spoke to me and saved my life.

Some examples (quoting from memory, obviously; the sense is correct even if the words may be misremembered):

I heard my dead father whistling in the kitchen like he used to do, so I went down to see. The stove was on fire.

The light was green but my daddy told me to stop the car, so I did. As I stepped on the brakes, a car ran through the red light in front of me. My secret: my daddy died three years ago.

My best friend died in a car accident n* years ago. I was driving across a highway bridge with my kids, when I heard her voice from the back seat telling me to change lanes. I did, and a truck blew out a tire and veered across the highway to crash into the barrier right where we had been. It would have killed us all.

Had this just been one secret of a single person, I'd have written it off as a hallucination or the babbling of an idiot. But there were hundreds of these! There was at least one every week!

I was and remain fascinated by these stories. I'd love to know what happened to these people: what exactly did they experience?

Am I saying that the dead remain on earth and communicate with us? No.

Am I saying that something inexplicable and very interesting happened to these people, which we would do well to study? Hell yes.

The app was taken down recently in an unfortunate victory of arseholism over decency. A minority of users were posting porn and/or abusive and insulting pictorial comments, taking advantage of the fact that the posting process was automated and instantaneous. A self-organizing committee of volunteers emerged who tried to dam the flood, but they were overwhelmed by the quantity of garbage that had to be found and deleted. Ah well.

* Can't remember how many years, it doesn't matter to the story.

Buddha's belly, Jesus' tear

It's a funny word, "retreat:" so many meanings in so many contexts.

I'm on a retreat with Susan's* SecondLife meditation group, the third that I have attended with them (all this year). I even organized this one, which was something of a stretch for me. I've never tried to arrange a week-long event for a group of people before, and while it has worked out well there were definitely things that I did wrong. I'm going to write a piece on organizing retreats for the group's wiki, to help those who come after me to avoid my mistakes.

I discovered something quite unexpected today during a short meditation on Being (the group's shorthand name for The Everythingness Of Everything). I'm a very visual person, I think in images and analogies, so I began by visualizing the Being that was around me at that moment. I realized that I was imagining daylight, so I stepped back a pace (think here of the film Powers of Ten (and if you haven't seen that yet, rectify the omission at once)) to view Being including day and night; saw the stars in the sky and stepped back once more to include the observable universe, and so on.

Eventually I stepped back and saw Being as Buddha's belly, and felt myself as the Buddha whose belly contained Everything. This was something of a surprise since I'm not a buddhist and don't usually have any associations with that image. I realized that I myself was not yet in the picture, so stepped back once more to see what could enclose myself-as-Buddha-containing-Everything.

To my astonishment, the next step was to see Everything in a tear rolling down Jesus' cheek. My hands started to shake in my lap, tears rolled down my own cheeks. It was an hour before I was calm enough to talk about that image with the rest of the group.

The enormous strength of my reaction to that image staggered me. I don't know where it came from, because I think that I'm not a Christian. And yet I can't deny what I felt (and still feel, it echoes around in me now three hours later).

There's an unknown unknown here, waiting to be discovered.


* For new visitors who know one or more of my various "me's" in SL: I keep my SL identities separate out here in the blogosphere. Susan is the name (anonym) that Udge uses for that other avatar whom you know. Please do not use any other name for her if/when commenting here.

Tel Aviv: first attempt at a summary

Trainblogging again, on the way to Munich to meet a client. Things always go crazy just before Christmas, as people realize that they haven't yet spent their year's budget. It's amazing that even in these hard times of belt-tightening etc, some corporations still apparently think that saving money is a bad thing. If you give me a budget of X and I spend X minus ten thousand, then surely you should thank me for reducing the corporation's costs, not punish me. Because that is what many corps still do: If you do not spend all your budget, then not only does it not carry over to next year, but you might find that your future budget gets cut by the amount you saved! The corporation forces its employees to waste money. How absurd is that? Bah.

Anyway, that's not my problem, except insofar as it causes a rush of urgent business in December.

Here I sit in an EC (older, slower, no electricity or canned radio) on a cool and sunny Wednesday. There's been a lot of rain recently, the rivers are all running fast and high, and the lowlying fields are wet. Hasn't yet been a frost except in the uppermost highlands, but that may change this weekend.

I haven't finished with Israel yet, though it is six weeks behind me now and all but forgotten in the mudslide of mundaneity. I have not yet sorted and posted my photos (nearly said "slides", how quaint) on Flickr, and probably won't have time for that before January.

But I do remember, with pleasure, walking the sunny streets and sitting by that perfect sandy beach. After the first Soup Salon, on my second day in Israel, Savtadotty and Miriam and I walked down Rothschild (pronounced in the European way, meaning "red shield," rather than the American "child of Roth") to a wine bar and sat outside (at 9pm, in late October) for an hour. I looked across the broad street, with its double row of plane trees and central stripe of garden, at a house on the opposite side, where a group of six thirtysomethings were having dinner by candlelight on their large balcony. I watched for a while, then pointed them out to the others and said "This is just perfect, you live in paradise." They agreed; then Savtadotty said with a wry smile "Even paradise is sometimes just another place after you've lived in it for twenty years."

Paradise indeed; had I been twenty years younger, I might well have stayed. (That marks the first time I have said such a thing about myself. Getting old.)

I met one of Susan's Second Life meditation buddies (whom I had previously met in Princeton last summer) and his wife (whom I hadn't met before) at the Manta Ray, an excellent fish restaurant at the beach. The food was marvellous, the wine was good, the conversation excellent; considering the quality of experience the bill was quite moderate. We talked much of expatriatism, as they had both lived abroad (separately and together) for several years. She had just finished two years as a Fellow at the IAS in Princeton, working on theoretical computation (I think she was teaching data-mining systems to act intuitively, but don't ask for details), which is how her husband met Susan in SL.

Perhaps I was lucky in my choice of restaurants, but I found the food in Tel Aviv unexpectedly good, the standard is universally very high. Fresh food, well cooked, well presented. It's not cheap, one can eat for less in other cities; but a meal of the standard that we had at the Manta Ray would have cost more in Germany.

Given my love of symmetry and repetition, it was appropriate that the week ended with a second Soup Salon, which went on until well after 10pm. It was such fun that we decided to meet the next morning for brunch, before my flight, at Idelsohn on Ditzengoff. Memo to anyone having dealings with Israelis: take appointments and timekeeping with a generous pinch of salt, and be prepared to wait. I got there at the agreed time and had the staff put together a long table for the eight of us, at which I sat alone for twenty minutes until Lisa and Savtadotty arrived. Anyway, it's just a local habit that one gets used to, the mirror image of the equally irritating Swiss über-punctuality. It was a very good brunch, in great company; and then I took a taxi to the airport. (No trains or buses run in Israel on Saturdays, travellers be warned.)

The airport. Israel is perhaps the only country in the world that is harder to get out of than into. Immigration on the way in was a bagatelle: the border guard looked at my passport, asked whether I was there on business, then waved me through. Getting out was an adventure.

It starts with a very long lineup, as usual, but slower-moving than most. The line is patrolled by young women (I'd guess that at least 80% of security and border-control staff in Israel are women) who pick people out of the line and draw them forward into a small open area. I was one such person. She took my passport and boarding card, then started asking questions about who I was and where I had been. "Who did you meet? Where does she live? Do you speak Hebrew? Do you have family here? Where does she live again? Did you pack your own suitcase, and has anyone else been able to get to it since? Who did you meet? You seem nervous, why are you nervous? Who did you meet again?" After about ten minutes of this, she decided that I was a hard case and went to get her superior (a slightly older young woman), who repeated the process with more emphasis on my supposed nervousness. Superior decided after five minutes that I was a harmless idiot, and sent me to the first baggage examination, literally pushing me in at the head of a long line of waiting people. My bags passed through the x-ray, and I was sent to the second baggage examination, this time by hand: swiping my laptop with the magic wand and feeling around in the depths of the suitcase while a colleague watched my facial expression closely.

That too passed, and I moved on to passport control, by contrast a mere formality. Off to the gates, passing through a third and final baggage examination on the way, this time the now-traditional x-ray scan and sensor gateway setup.

The reason for all this caution is obvious, and I am not complaining at all. I am not going to be lured into a trollfest of competing polemics, least of all by myself.

OK, I've been trying to avoid saying this, but the words are forcing their way out. The principle joy of being in Israel, even more than the weather, even more than the universally marvellous food, was being surrounded by Jews. Imagine an entire city populated by the offspring of George Steiner and Susan Sontag: that's what Tel Aviv is like. People of the book indeed. I have a fixed belief that the Jews as a group are the cleverest people in the world, and meeting the Israelis confirmed that. It's the result of millenia of knowing what's in the gene pool and minding that you stay at the deep end of it (in my favourite cousin's wonderful phrase).

Or perhaps it's just the fallacy of self-selecting groups in action: I like people who are like me, and they like people who are like themselves, so it's very highly likely that I will like their friends too. Tiny but utterly representative example: on the way down Rothschild to the wine bar on that first Friday, Jane walked with us as far as the bus-stop, saying as we arrived "I hope I won't have to wait for ages"; turned around and there was the bus pulling up. "Mirabile dictu!" she cried, and with a wave stepped on board.

Tel Aviv felt like home.

(On the train back to Stuttgart, after an embarrassing and short meeting. There is an internet connection available in the train (of course, just as each ICE train is a travelling cellphone node) but they want €30 for sixty consecutive days. Ain't paying that.)

Jewishness intrigued me as a child, because I could never figure out what it meant. I heard people said that other people were Jews, often vaguely implying that this was somehow a bad thing, but I could never figure out how they knew — nor why they cared so much about something that seemed so petty (in the sense that I couldn't see it and didn't care when I did). The amusing thing is that the people whom I eventually learned to spot as Jews were clearly superior to the rest of us. They were the best students: the musicians, the comedians, the ones whose assignments when read out loud in class had us roaring in laughter or nodding our heads thoughtfully. Theirs were the bylines that I learned to look for in the New Yorker and the Times Literary Supplement; the names I spotted in film credits and at Massey Hall.

I was three years old when Eichmann was captured and tried, so it is unlikely that I have any direct memories of the event; but I do remember something about him appearing in the papers in the mid-sixties (probably in connection with Stanley Milgram). I remember at that time asking my mother why the Holocaust happened, because I just couldn't understand why Jewishness was so important, so utterly other as to make genocide seem a reasonable response. I don't remember my mother's answer, but I do remember that it didn't satisfy me, didn't explain how or why this could happen. The search for that answer has been a lifelong occupation.

I remember a few years after that, aged 15 or so, spending the summer in an intensive music course (a string chamber orchestra run by my violin teacher); hearing two of the violinists (far better players than I) playing a strange and lovely song in duet. I asked what it was, and they replied in surprise that it was the Kol Nidre, hadn't I recognized it? I felt quite flattered after I looked it up at home that evening.

Interlude the second

I'm not finished with Israel yet, there is at least one more post in the works. In the meantime, I've been re-reading Evelyn Waugh's marvellous Brideshead Revisited. This book has gone through a complete cycle of affections with me: when I first discovered this novel as a student in England, I loved it and re-read it many times. For some reason, probably a slowly arising general discomfort over Waugh's often caustic wit, it drifted out of favour for a few years. I tried again in the early Eighties, and disliked it: it seemed dated and contrived, full of unloveable characters and improbable incidents. I put the book down after about fifty pages and left it for two decades.

Then I moved to Germany, and it was out of reach and forgotten until a friend brought me a box of my books (one of many from an attic in East London, where the rest hopefully still remain), which proved to contain my copy of Brideshead. I remembered my vague distaste and didn't pick it up for years, until I returned from Israel last week. I'm enjoying it again, and I think I know why.

When I first read the book, I associated with Charles Ryder, the narrator and not-exactly-hero as we met him in the initial pages: I too was freshly arrived at University, feeling exhilarated and also vaguely out of place, excited by the people I was meeting and the unknown worlds opening up to me. When I read it again in the mid-Eighties, there was no character of my then-current age and station to identify with, except perhaps the prig and bigot Brideshead himself. Reading it again now, thirty years on, I can again associate myself with Ryder, this time with the older, wiser and sadder narrator. Or perhaps I was just unfair to it the second time around.

Anyway, here's where I am right now, at a paragraph that brought a lump to my throat and a certain moisture to my eyes. (WARNING: This is a pretty serious spoiler. Those who have not yet read the book should stop reading now.)

"Poor Sebastian!" I said. "It's too pitiful. How will it end?"

"I think I can tell you exactly, Charles. I've seen others like him, and I believe they are very near and dear to God. He'll live on, half-in, half-out of the community, a familiar figure pottering around with his broom and his bunch of keys. He'll be a great favourite of the old fathers, something of a joke to the novices. Everyone will know about his drinking; he'll disappear every month or so for two or three days, and they'll all nod and smile and say in their various accents, "Old Sebastian's on the bottle again," and then he'll come back, dishevelled and shamefaced, and be more devout for a day or two in the chapel. He'll probably have little hiding places about the garden where he keeps a bottle and takes a swig now and then on the sly. They'll bring him forward to act as a guide whenever they have an English-speaking visitor, and he will be completely charming so that before they go, they'll ask about him and perhaps be given a hint that he has high connexions at home. If he lives long enough, generations of missionaries in all kinds of remote places will think of him as a queer old character who was somehow part of the Home in their student days, and remember him in their masses. He'll develop little eccentricities of devotion, intense personal cults of his own; he'll be found in the chapel at odd times and missed when he's expected. Then one morning, after one of his drinking bouts, he'll be picked up at the gate dying, and show by a mere flicker of the eyelid that he is conscious when they give him the last sacraments. It's not such a bad way of getting through one's life."

Indeed.

Still

As in "still here," but also as in "motionless."

It's been a busy month, much has happened in my work and social (and Second) lives, though having said that there are few examples that immediately come to mind that I might mention. I'm reasonably calm and not unhappy, and even getting a few things done.

Weather was miserable for most of the last month, cold and windy and raining most days, and sometimes snow on the ridge of the Killesberg when I looked out my kitchen window mornings. Last year at this time it was sunny and warm.

Listening to Beethoven's Fifth Piano Concerto, a surpassingly wonderful piece of music which I have written about before. Fine accompaniment to a greyish and idle weekend's bloggery.

I've been using Twitter as a kind of microblog, writing sometimes several tweets a day (and occasionally none for several days at a time, yes yes). Unfortunately there seems to be no way for non-Twitterers to access this, my current tweets are displayed on this page but if you don't want to keep refreshing the page you will have to get a Twitter account of your own.

Thinking about summer. Beta and Lumi are getting married in mid-July; I am invited and do want to attend. The SL meditation group is holding a week-long retreat in Berkeley at the end of August; that too I would love to attend. There's no way that I can afford to cross the ocean twice this year, but neither can I spend six weeks hanging about in North America. To further complicate matters, Sis and BIL are planning a tour of Italy in late September/early October, and we have arranged to meet in Venice for a long weekend or equivalent. I guess the Berkeley retreat loses out. Perhaps I could find something retreat-like a little closer to home?

I've started reading the New Testament again; not really sure why, but probably prompted by discussions in the meditation group meetings in SL. We were brought up in the ethics and standards of the Protestant tradition, though neither the Bible nor God were ever explicitly mentioned at home (Sis, feel free to comment on this if your memories differ). As far as I can remember, my first encounter with the Bible was in Grade 6: over the entire year, we read and discussed a chapter of the King James Version every morning. I don't know that this was a formal part of the curriculum, but it was in any case never challenged by us or our parents. Mr. Bowman was a very good and thoughtful teacher: he didn't present Christianity as the absolute truth that we must believe, we simply read this particular book and talked about what "good" or "right" might mean. I found it fascinating and very moving, this was perhaps the class and the subject in which I learned to think.

That experience had a lasting effect, years later I could still quote from memory much of what we had read, and I can see now how strongly it shaped my thinking. I could not have said so at the time, having neither the mental tools nor the necessary critical distance, but at least part of my strong positive response to Camus (and Buddha, and Mahatma Gandhi) was in the echoes of Ecclesiastes raised by their thinking. Right action seemed obvious and self-evidently true when I first encountered it years later, as did the Wu wei of Taoism.

Thinking about that now, I cannot believe that I would not have discussed that with my mother, so much of it would have been new and confusing to me as a 12-year-old, yet I have no memory of doing so. Perhaps I should ask her, while I still can. [Updated: perhaps we did discuss religion at home after all. I remember seeing a particular Playmobil set, of a Roman centurion on horseback with a cloak, and a beggar on foot, and saying to Slim that this was clearly Saint Martin (she, the supposed Christian, didn't know the story). Now, Martin is not a Biblical figure, he dates from the fourth century AD, so I would guess that I did not learn about him from Bible lessons with Mr. Bowman.]

Still alive

Just a brief post to allay the dire suspicions of those who harbour such things.

Two snippets related to my last post. Reading in the "New Yorker" from December 26, 2005 (it's a long story) I find this quote from Philip Pullman, author of the trilogy "His dark materials:"

Although I call myself an atheist, I am a Church of England atheist, and a 1662 Book of Common Prayer atheist, because that's the tradition I was brought up in and I cannot escape those early influences.

In a reply to one of this week's Posted Secrets, an e-mail commenter said

Whenever I go into a church building, I apologize to God for not believing in Him.

Exactly.

In other news Darren Broadfoot lists 44 fascinating and little-known facts about William Shakespeare.

In other, other news here's an amusing little art-history quiz: Famous or not?. Give it a try. I shall post my score in a day or two, to avoid intimidating you all. (Apologies to whomever I am borrowing this from, I can't remember else I would have credited you. Honestly.)

In otherest news Last but not least, here's a new favourite blog that I haven't mentioned before: the story of Charlie, an orphaned coyote pup being raised by "me and a tomcat in a one-room log cabin in Wyoming."

Back at work

After a lengthy Christmas and New Year's break, I was finally inspired to knuckle down and do some work on translating the Münsters' wiki, and as usual I quite enjoyed it once I got started. It seems to take roughly 90 minutes to translate a page of wiki; given that I can do three or four pages before my brain turns to mush, it would be possible to work out quite exactly when I shall be finished—if I cared to do so. This should be quite a good month financially (crosses fingers, knocks on wood, spits over right shoulder).

And with that, my dears: Shabbat shalom, good night, sleep tight, enjoy the weekend.

No: One more thing. Writing "Shabbat shalom" reminded me of a strange thing on New Year's Eve. Each of us around the table told what had been special about 2007. As I was speaking, it occurred to me in retrospect that 2007 had been a spiritually active year, what with the walk to Santiago de Compostela, and CDs by Arvo Pärt and John Tavener and Hendryk Górecki, and starting to read the Bible in German (the original 1545 translation by Martin Luther in modern type).

The particular prompter was getting a Concordance to the KJV for Christmas last year (I asked for it); at least twice a week I look up some turn of phrase or another, and that often sends me to the KJV itself to read the context. I spent most of a day in September flipping from Concordance to Bible and back, searching for an apposite quote for the back cover of the booklet to my parents' 50th anniversary party, before settling on Ecclesiastes 9:7-9 (it begins "Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart; for God now accepteth thy works.")

I find it quite amusing that I, a soi-disant non-believer, should have four Bibles, a Concordance and Harold Bloom's wonderful "Book of J" in the house—and requested for Christmas this year a copy of the Apocrypha in the KJV translation, made at the same time by the same committee but not included in the "official" KJV Bible. (I would point out in mitigation, and in fairness, that I also have a Koran, the Dhammapada and two Tao Te Ching's.)

Getting back to New Year's Eve: in the course of the discussion at table I mentioned—as one does—Jacob saying to Rebekah that he was a smooth man, and his brother Esau a hairy man. The others were taken aback that I should quote from the Old Testament rather than the New. Famous Photographer in particular was quite insistent that it was wrong of me to quote from the OT: the Bible is the word of Jesus, why quote from that outmoded, obsolete, Jewish stuff? I was drunk enough to be annoyed but not enough to challenge him, so I let it pass; but I now wish that I had insisted on an explanation of what he meant.

All three would probably describe themselves in terms that an outsider would classify as "agnostic," none of them goes to church more than once a year except for weddings and funerals; and yet there is this strong, reflexive Christianity lurking just below the surface which lashes out when it perceives itself to be challenged. Odd.

What do I believe? More in the Old Testament than the New, for whatever that is worth. I don't believe in God, but the God in whom I don't believe is He of Genesis, who walks in his garden in the cool of the evening and enjoys a good meal in the company of his friends. I believe in the Protestant Work Ethic: the admonition "Get up, there's work to be done" is deeply rooted in my soul. I believe that Saint Augustine was an obnoxious prig, a hypocrite and a liar. I believe that Marx was right, and that every organized religion exists for the purpose of protecting the rich and legitimizing the powerful. Here comes the big one, and I have to confess that I hesitated to write it down: I believe that Jesus is not God, a concept that appears to confuse many Born-Agains.

My hesitation amuses me, and reminds me of the story of Luis Buñuel visiting a church with a younger artist. Buñuel spat in the holy-water stoup and invited the other man to do the same. He declined politely, and on being mocked by Buñuel replied "It is not necessary for me to spit in the stoup, Don Luis, because I do not believe in God."

Don Juan in Hell

Reading from one entry to the next in the Wikipedia, as one does, I land on Don Juan and am intrigued by the summary of the legend:

Don Juan either raped or seduced a young woman of noble family, and killed her father. Later, he encountered a statue of her father in a cemetery and impiously invited it home to dine with him, an invitation the statue gladly accepted. The ghost of the father arrived for dinner, as the harbinger of Don Juan's death. The statue asked to shake Don Juan's hand, and when he extended his arm, the statue dragged him away to Hell.

So far, so good: this the story as we know it. However, in the Wikipedia's version, the legend has a second act:

In Hell, the Devil meets Don Juan. The Devil tells him that everyone in Hell is cast in a role, and then presents him with a Jester's suit, telling him, "You'll make an excellent fool." Don Juan is insulted by this, protesting that no other man was his equal, "I am the man who made a thousand conquests!" Intrigued by that claim, the Devil tells him that if he can correctly name one conquest, he would not have to wear the suit. Thus began the parade of women. Not one could Don Juan name correctly. Finally, a woman stands before him, tears on her face. "Yes," the Devil says, "this is the one woman who truly loved you". Helpless, Don Juan looks into her eyes, then turns to the Devil and says, "Give me the suit".

Wonderful. (Assuming, of course, as I do, that he means "Yes, you're right, I concede that I was a fool.")

One of the things I like best about Mozart's (which actually means Lorenzo da Ponte's) Don Giovanni is that he remains true to himself and the way he has lived, even in the moment of his death. He knows perfectly well that the ghost of the Commendatore has come to end his life, and that to refuse to repent consigns him to Hell, and goes consciously, willingly, unrepentantly to his doom:

Statue of the Commendatore: To supper you invited me, you know a host's obligation. So answer: will you in turn come and sup with me?
Leporello: For God's sake, no! He is not free, excuse him.
Giovanni: Never will I be accused of cowardice.
Commendatore: Make your decision.
Giovanni: I am decided.
Commendatore: You'll come?
Leporello: Tell him "no"!
Giovanni: My heart is firm within me, I know no fear. I'll come.

I have always found the Christian tradition of a deathbed repentance washing away all sins to be repugnant: One may be the worst bastard on earth, breaking commandments and rules and hearts, spreading misery and despair in all directions—but just whisper a "yes" to the priest and shed a tear or two and your soul goes to Heaven? Bah. What an insult, what a slap in the face to the rest of us, to the miserable victims of this bastard, that he should be permitted to repent. Hooray for Giovanni, a man with the courage of his convictions.

Fifteen down, fifteen to go.

Friday

Walking home at sunset, it occurs to me that the Jews were right about that too: it's just obviously the correct and fitting time for the Sabbath to begin. It was a pleasure and a delight to be walking home in the fading daylight, as the shops were closing for the evening and the birds were giving their end-of-day songs.

Speaking of the Sabbath reminds me of something I forgot to mention earlier. When I was in Düsseldorf for four hours between trains last month, I walked around the Altstadt and on impulse stopped in at a church. There was only one other person there, a man in a wheelchair who sat at the back as though waiting for someone, yet paid no attention to me or his surroundings. I sat in a pew near the front and thought about life and death and the whole damned thing, then lit a candle to the memory of AH and watched it burn for a while. I remembered a morning many years ago when I was a student in London, working on a project about the (Roman Catholic) Westminster Cathedral—not to be confused with the (Anglican) Westminster Abbey—and stopped in one morning on my way to college to have another look at the building. I noticed a man going from altar to altar, praying and lighting a candle at each one; he made no attempt to stay the tears that were flowing down his cheeks, literally dripping from his chin as he prayed. I watched him with an odd feeling of awe and respect, and realized that I envied him his belief.

In other news The world is once again spinning around towards Spring, the sun touched the rooftops across the street at 8:15 this morning. I saw a tiny plant growing in a crack in a south-facing stone wall which was already flowering. Photos tomorrow, if I remember where it was.

In other, other news I bought myself another little toy, an Airport Express station so that I can hear my iTunes playlists through proper speakers. It's very nice. Setup was easy, once I figured out that my firewall was blocking the Airport from asking for instructions; and to give Apple their due, this was the first suggestion in the troubleshooting section of the manual. A look at the TCP logs reveals that I've already sent over four gigabytes of music wafting through the air in this way. Dear me, how time flies: a gigabyte used to fill a very large, heavy and expensive physical disk.

I was amused to discover, while configuring the system, that there are three unprotected WLAN networks available from where I sit, so I need never pay excess-volume charges again. Not that I would do that, of course.

In related news Philip once asked whether I could post an MP3 of a song that I had written about. Well, I found a service that does exactly that with exemplary simplicity: choose a file, set its expiry date, click on "upload," note the resulting URL. Here is a test, a 5 megabyte MP3 of my current most-often-put-on-repeat song. Don't delay, it's only there until 22:30 CET on Saturday.

What I haven't yet figured out, is how to tell you what it's called and who's playing without leaving a google-trail here that the copyright police could follow; and I would ask any commenters to please refrain from mentioning any such info. Anyone wants to know should mail me at the address up top, and I'll send you all the details.

[Updated] the solution is obvious: Amazon to the rescue. But please: mention no names.

By way of a preamble

Today was summery again, sunny and actually hot: 28° downtown. Very pleasant, almost too nice to spend the day working. The air was very clear too, I could see the vines on the Rothenberg from the terrace of G and U's office = home (roughly eight kilometers away).

Reading an odd/funny story by Savtadotty yesterday, and the Velveteen Rabbi's review of a woman's story of her conversion (Jewish to unspecified Christian, by context one of the resurgent Protestant/Baptist variants) this evening, has started me thinking about belief, both in general terms and specifically my own beliefs. It started when I googled ha'Kodesh Baruch ho which had been mentioned in a comment, and landed on an interesting and useful Jewish theology site. The first section of the linked page summarizes many philosophers' and rabbis' views of God, some of which resonate more than others:

The Kabbalah's view of G-d includes: G-d exists but is unknowable; the ten sefirot is how G-d manifests Himself in this world; the human body is a microcosm of the universe; G-d is Self-limiting; the world is imperfect; and, man is partners with G-d to help repair the world.

Martin Buber's view of G-d includes: G-d cannot be defined and G-d's existence cannot be proven; man enters into a relationship with G-d when man enters into a genuine dialogue with others in man's daily activities; laws are given by G-d to individuals (there was no on-time revelation at Mount Sinai); and, evil comes about either through G-d withdrawing from man or man's own lack of decision or direction.

I could live with that.

I'm not quite sure what direction this will take, but I feel that there is a series of posts brewing which will appear at some stage, perhaps even in the form of a NaNoWriMo entry. We shall see.

In other news I have a dictionary and a thesaurus from the old black-spined Penguin series, which were among my first purchases at university in the late Seventies. They have stood together on bookcases for nearly thirty years, and were always in the same order: thesaurus on the left, dictionary on the right. (I once had the companion dictionary of quotations, but it has disappeared; it used to stand to the left of the thesaurus.) I knew which was where and could get down the right one just by touch, without looking. Well, about a week ago, I accidentally put them back in the wrong order, and even though the mistake was corrected immediately, it has completely thrown me. I can no longer just grasp the desired volume: I hesitate, overcome by uncertainty, and have to read the titles. How odd.

In other other news today's Dilbert is quite brilliant.

Reading list for August 2005

Lots of good reading last month. Don Juan was excellent, if you like Handke (many find his affectless style offputting). The Don is one of the most fascinating recurring figures in Western literature, and Handke's is a worthy addition to the canon. Recommended (though much would depend on the quality of the translation).

Biting the Moon was a surprising change of style, and a delight. Much tougher than the Richard Jury stories, with the eyes-wide-open lucid horror of a nightmare. The setting (midwestern USA) is immediately believeable, the characters realistic. Also recommended.

'Tis was a disappointment after Angela's Ashes, largely because of the person whom Frank McCourt reveals himself to be (or grows into): his absentee drunkard father. My sympathy peaked early, then dwindled to a mild dislike. I would probably walk a fair distance to avoid meeting him in a bar.

But the book of the month is without any doubt Der Fall Judas (roughly "The Case for Judas"), which presents the theory that Judas should rather be canonized than reviled:

Without Judas [there would be] no cross; without the cross God's plan for salvation could not be fulfilled. There would be no Church without this man: no salvation without the betrayer... A rebellious Judas could have saved Jesus' life - and would have doomed us all. A tiny movement of his head, shaken instead of nodded, as Jesus said "That thou doest, do quickly" - and God's plan would have been brought to naught. The prophecies of the Old Testament: a mockery... in the face of the old carpenter of Nazareth, who - because Judas had refused to betray him - lived out a comfortable old age in Galilee, not crucified but carving crosses, long since forgiven for the fiery speeches of his youth.

(my translation)

The name of Walter Jens was unknown to me, but having once registered it, he is everywhere. He and Hans Küng were among the liberal intellectual theologians who shaped the young seminarian who is now the less-than-liberal Pope Ratzinger. Finding the book will be tricky (it's twenty years out of print), but is well worth the effort. Noorster, my dear, I am deeply in your debt for recommending this wonderful book.

Currently reading
William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
Walter Jens, Der Fall Judas

Recently read
Martha Grimes, Biting the Moon
Peter Handke, Don Juan
Donna Leon, Wilful Behaviour
Frank MacCourt, 'Tis

Next month's list
Last month's list

Not sleeping

I slept for about half an hour, then woke up abruptly thinking that something in the room had moved. That was an hour ago, I've cleaned the kitchen and made hot chocolate, and am now (in theory) winding down to try to sleep again.

The competition takes shape very slowly, we still haven't managed to fit all the required spaces into the restaurant area. We've all had a turn at planning it now, and none of us has managed to make the thing work properly. My instinct when faced with a problem this close to intractable, is to assume that we have overlooked something pretty fundamental, but that does not seem to be the case. It's just a difficult problem. Once more unto the breach, dear friends.

In other news, I went to the Staatsgalerie on Saturday afternoon for another look at the Picasso exhibition (pretty much as I remembered it, no surprises there) and went on to see the Herrenberger altar again, where I found a surprise and a revelation. First the surprise: in the second panel (depicting Christ's trial and scourging) I noticed for the first time that "Levit. 6" was written along the upper edge of his loincloth. I had to read the chapter twice to figure out the reference, because it is not in any way prophetic.

The revelation was appropriately in the last (fourth) panel, depicting the Resurrection. I had always been puzzled by the posture of one of the guards at the sepulchre (the scene is from Matthew): lying on his back with his feet in the air, coins tumbling from his pockets, jamming the butt of his crossbow into the ground, he appears to be tumbling backwards head-over-heels - but where does he fall to, and why? I had previously noted that the sepulchre stands on a section of ground that appears to be rising out of the plain, with sharply defined cliff-like edges: pushed up by the earthquake that opens the sepulchre (Matthew again). This time I noticed what was beyond the edge in the utmost lower-right corner: blackness, nothing; a very significant nothing, a non-barking-dog of a Nothing. The background to this panel is the Last Judgement, and the breaking up of the ground around the sepulchre is not an earthquake but a reference to this. The soldier is falling backwards into damnation, and neither his wealth nor his weapons will save him.

Sticky books

Jane Crow tagged me with a quiz:

You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?
Marcel Proust, Swann's Way. I already quote from it on the slightest of pretexts.

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?
Yes, of course: Emma Bovary, Justine, Jordan Baker, Dolores Haze.

The last book you bought is:
David Taylor and Brian Jepson, Learning Unix for Mac OS X Panther. The last piece of reading-for-pleasure that I bought was Zonenkinder by Jana Hensel.

The last book you read:
The book I most recently finished is The Koran translated by N.J.Dawood.

What are you currently reading?
As always, I'm reading several books concurrently:
Neale Donald Walsch, Conversations with God: an uncommon dialogue.
The Bible as a crossreference to both of the above.
Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Alte Meister also related to the above. I bought this 525 page reference catalogue for the sake of the 23 pages on the magnificent Herrenberger Altar which I visit regularly. After ten years of staring at it for an hour every two months, it still surprises and delights me.
Denkanstöße 2005, a local publisher's annual sampler, from Richard Feynman to Michael Moore via Gidon Kremer.

Five books you would take to a deserted island:
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past.
Philip Larkin, Collected Poems.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby.
W. Somerset Maugham, The complete short stories.
W. Shakespeare, Collected works.

Three people I choose to "stick this" to and why:
Krenneke because he needs a nudge to start writing again.
Smartmom because she is a book person: she blogged about finding a book by the elder Thomas Wolfe.
Savtadotty because she too is very likely a reader of catholic tastes ;-)