Decided to read Earthly Powers for two simple reasons: saw it on a list of 100 must-read books from David Bowie and saw that it's supposed to be loosely based on the life of W. S. Maugham. And of course because it's written by A. Burgess, from whom I've only read the widely-known A Clockwork Orange, the fame of which was much multiplied by its adapted film by S. Kubrick. I don't know which of the two, equally provocative in style, contributed more to its reputation. In any case, I opened the 650-page book with haste and the first page was already charged with words of too much litarary weight for a lousy English speaker as myself. And the omnipresent religious references with intermittent haranges from Carlo Campanati, the fat ugly good-hearted embodiment of the Catholic church who escalated strenuously over the course of the lengthy narration to the throne of the Pope of Roma, made it all the more difficult for a non-believer as myself. But that did not matter. Someone might have put it better than me: all we see from a book of whatever purported topic or parameter is a reflection, or at most an extension or shall we say a projection of the potentialities, of our own humble life. Hence here I am making a vain attempt to fathom the story from the viewpoint of my own not-sufficiently-lived life.
Carlo Campanati, the practitioner of miracles, once saved a dying child's life in a hospital ward with his well-meaning prayers. The child turned out many years later to be heading a religious cult that ended in a mass killing of tens of thousands of its followers. Kenneth Toomey saved the life of a Nazi leader out of intuitive reaction during the assassination attempt from the mother-in-law of his sister Hortense, and the latter was shot to death. Kenneth good-heartedly provided financial supply for the trip to Africa of his nephew John and his wife Laura, and they both died there. Hortense, in order to save the marriage and the reputation of sterile Domenico Campanati, bore children from some other man. The unfortunate marriage had to come to an end anyhow, with Hortense becoming homosexual and Domenico leading a promiscuous life. They eventually re-entered each other's respectively ageing life as Domenico was forced to break the news of their son John's death to Hortense, who lost one eye accidentally a long time ago when a false alarm of John's death was brought to her. They each had a fullfilling career after all, at least judged from an outsider point of view. Kenneth Toomey, at the risk of making public his homosexuality, defended in court the blasphemous works of Val Wrigley, the first love of his who left him decades earlier for the need of financial support and throughout their intertwined years of life never had been easy on him. Carlo Campanati, the Pope of Roma and devotee to a life of chastity, confessed on his deathbed his love to Hortense. He would have opted for a marriage with Hortense instead of his glorious celibate career if he had the choice. Tom Toomey, the brother of Kenneth and Hortense, led the least eventful life as a harmless comedian married to a brainless woman and was deemed the best of them all. At least none of them did anything bad intentionally, Hortense concluded in the very end. The above is of course far from all of it. I was twice in tears throughout the entire book, being the underemotional persona that I have been assuming lately. One time upon reading the letter about the great destiny of Germany writtern by a Nazi converted by Carlo Campanati (partly because of what's been going on in the modern-time Germany). The other time was when Kenneth was defending Val in court. What you would always do for the one and very few you truly loved with heart and soul, no matter how deeply and irreversibly they once hurt you. No matter how irrelevant they have become. No matter how your memory has painted that page over and over till you cannot remember precisely what happened and what on earth it was that hurt you so profoundly. Except for key words, at most. A tin of bully beef with onions and carrots. That's for Kenneth Toomey. "Take this Tile so that I will never lose you". That's for me. Intention has very little to do with the action it induces nor the consequence of it, therefore how should morality be judged, and how should karma, if it exists, be determined? Based on intention or action or consequence? How difficult is it to see life as the palindrome it is, always repeating itself going in circles or between two extremes. Which is it then, a circle or a line of two extremes? Good and bad that are equally good and bad. Right and wrong that are equally right and wrong. We take sides for the sake of taking sides, as what we do in a debate team or essay assignment, and sooner or later we find out that there is adequate reasoning on behalf of either side. As to which side we happen to choose, it's totally up to chance. Aren't we all random beings after all. Who am I to mock the poor Russian girl. It was after midnight that I finished the book, and I saw a message from a friend. I replied him factually and maybe uncompassionately: - Pain is still there. I miss her, and I know she loved me. - I'm afraid pain is something of which we all have our own to bear. I don't know how to console people other than stating the fact, unless the fact itself is consoling but then they would not need the consolation in the first place. Love, home, faith, duty. For what else have you wailed when no one else's around. I guess the most formidable power is to maintain equanimity through it all, good and bad, right and wrong, love and betrayal, etc. They are not that much different from one another anyhow. You must not live to find a purpose; the purpose lies in living per se. Hortense was not wrong after all, too much world and too little time. Choosing wisely and standing up for what you chose at random firmly, there is not much of a difference in the effect. The so-called freedom you always have, but the scope of it you must define yourself. Suffering is inevitable. I don't know how to end this. Just like I don't know how to start the novel I always wanted to write.
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Some weeks ago I took my parents to Musikverein to watch a Mozart concert that could not get any cheesier, clearly staged for tourists who cared more for the interiors than the music (disclaimer: there was no other program in Musikverein during the days when they were in Vienna, and the Oper was in summer break). Still, I had the same sensation as everytime I had to sit inside Musikverein, or in a classical music concert especially one that involves string instruments, for some reason. The helplessness you feel when the world is tumbling down and you have nowhere to hide. Then I had the cheesy realization that you not only cannot change the past, but also have to carry it for as long as you remember it. If you cannot make peace with it then you'd have to carry that not-peace with you. It's part of you. I just have to live with the fact that classical music makes me sad, just as the Jian Guo Men Starbucks makes me sad and ... shit I don't remember all that much, see. I have spent my ration of sadness prodigally.
The past is a part of what you are underneath what you seem to be right now. Like a canvas. When you look at it you see the painting on the surface, perfectly constructed and colored, if you happen to like the construction and coloring. But you don't know what it is underneath, or what it used to be but no longer is yet still part of it. That was the literal presentation of my cheesy realization when it struck me as I was arduously painting over an old unsuccessful painting with white-colored paint, unsuccessfully for a second time. What's hidden is still there. Canvas I can always buy a new one, provided that I have enough money and space, but heart I'd have to keep my own. With its excessive freedom to forget and stubborn resistance to exercise it. You are free because you have the choice for good as well as for bad, for rational as well as for emotional. If you are not exposed to the temptation of the bad then your freedom is incomplete, and partial freedom is no freedom. Burgess wrote: I bought a ticket to Moneta and, on the train, quietened my shaking by pondering the mystique or meteaphysic or theology of war. Was war a natural product of historical wrongs or was it an allegory of some eternal opposition? It seemed to me that good and evil were probably as indefinable as right and wrong, and that the sole reality was the electricity of opposition.... You were doomed to take sides, but did it matter which side you took? And then the words home and duty bellowed from a baby in the next compartment. It probably doesn't matter which side you take, or which guy you marry, for that matter, as long as he brings coffee and omelette or whatever he has for breakfast to your bed occasionally (but the omelette or whatever he makes must be good, that's a matter of principle). I'm always afraid of wasting time, but what if wasting time is part of spending time efficiently. As Matthew Syed said in Black Box Thinking (if I recall correctly), improvement is most of the time incremental. It comes from testing all possibilities, even if they make little sense at the time of testing, and failing. Maybe the only time wasted is that spent on thinking and theorizing. Because it never takes you forward (or backwards) in reality. If you don't know what the perfect way to construct that painting is, simply try it out. Try it out and paint it over if necessary, and then try again. You might say that the true masterpieces are never paintovers. Well I'm trying to make a point here, aren't I? Had the type of fatigue that accompanied me since my wakeup so surely coffee was not to resolve my problem. Still I went to the café at the other end of the little square, or commercial center if you will, in the center of Wolfsburg. Once two Italian men from Lamborghini said they discovered this great café and we must all go there after lunch. Superleggera. The very ordinary sweaters they were wearing seemed extraordinarily fashionable because of their Italianness. We passed on that invitation for some unstated reason, and I got my coffee-to-go from the ubiquitous German chain pastry shop, almost with a sense of shame. How can you ever pass on the invitation for good coffee. I then went and discovered Superleggera as well, on my own terms, after the Italians discovered it. Good coffee indeed. With a bar full of espresso-savoring men, some maintaining the Italian way of drinking it standing. One amazing thing about Wolfsburg is that ostensibly half of the population have Italian heritage here, meaning you could hear Italian half of the time. They switch nimbly between Italian and German, the same way as the Alto Adige people (except their German is probably more German, if you know what I mean).
I ordered my usual cappuccino to go at the bar from the usual ginger-bearded bespectacled young man with an amiable smile. I could well imagine him to be an artist in Berlin, producing the kind of art I neither understand nor try to understand, nor appreciate. But nice chap, no doubt. Not the rush hour after lunch, there were only a handful of people lavishing their time. Two elderly men were sitting at the bar. They watched me indiscreetly as I stood there. Cappuccino zum Mitnehmen? I turned to him. Cappuccino zum Mitnehmen? I said yes. I asked because otherwise you could sit here with us. I smiled good-temperedly and said, no time. They were talking in Italian with the bartender before, but switched to German to talk to me. The bartender made fun of him in Italian. Something about taking a photo. Warum haben Frauen immer keine Zeit? He exclaimed. The bartender answered, weil sie arbeiten müssen. I seconded that statement, and pronounced a light-hearted tschüss. They said ciao. When I stepped into the elevator, I examined myself in the mirror, only to see that I could not look any normal, as good as on any other day. Language is a beautiful and strange creation that serves both as facilitator and hindrance at the same time. To human communication, of course. If there is anything that I know for sure I want to do in this lifetime, it is to understand languages well. Plural form, yes. I myself may have changed a lot but this resolution never has. Or rather, it has changed in quantity but never in substance: sometimes eight, sometimes five. When I was in Lisbon and happened to be in front of the Belém Palace before the president of Portugal and the crowned team were arriving, I inquired an enthusiastic Portuguese woman standing firmly across the street from the palace leaning against the handrail. What's going on? She told me in her enthusiastic tone in Portuguese that the team was passing by here at a certain time. I only made out uma and quarto, but could not fathom if it meant a quarter to one or a quarter past one, or maybe if it's the same rule as in German then it could have meant something around twelve. I never got it, as the team turned up considerably late, well after all the speculated times. I have a Portuguese vocabulary book somewhere in this world, or maybe I have ceremonially given it up by giving it to someone I barely know, as my Swedish textbook. I remember one time I wrote an email to a Swede in Beijing, on a somewhat business development capacity, and ended with a cordial tack så mycket. He replied in a heartbeat. But at the time, I still had more knowledge to support that benign showoff. Now I'd never use that phrase, just as I never say obrigada or even je voudrais, afraid of failing expectations. Once I exhausted Google to search for un cours de francais en fin de semaine à Vienne without luck. I do miss all those French classes taught in German but I'm afraid I've returned most of what I learned to that thin Austrian lady always dressed in black who said to speak French you just have to be elegant und arrogant gleichzeitig, especially the chapter about ménage, which I never really got. I think I caught the whateveritis from Anthony Burgess in his bewildering narration of the story somewhere between twisted facts and loyal fiction. I wonder who Jakob Strehler is, and I must read the (auto)biography of Burgess to understand where he gained his knowledge of all these languages. Travel, I suppose. Travel, and literature. My delicious coffee is finished. My thoughts must rest with it. As we were walking down some steps on Montmartre, I saw through the narrow window of a small theater that two musicians were performing. Performing or maybe rehearsing, since there was no audience. I gave it a second and third look. An old thin Parisian man walking behind me said in a mellow voice, clear English with an acceptable French accent, it’s a theater. I answered, yes, but are they performing? He said, yes. But nobody is watching. They don’t care. They are the kind of musicians with talent and not much care for others’ opinions. They perform in very small places, you see. They don’t make money out of it. And they don’t care. Where are you from? Are those your parents? I said Beijing, to avoid unnecessary explanation of where exactly my hometown lies on the map of China, and yes. He went on to talk about the amazingness of the Chinese medicine and I, or we especially my parents for that matter, should take advantage of the amazing Chinese medicine because they are natural and without the chemical toxic of the Western medicine. I nodded hesitantly. My parents were ahead of us, now standing across the street to wait for me, smiling but didn't know why. So are you from here? Yes, I am an artist. I make portraits, on Montmartre, you know? Yes. He looked across the street and added, take good care of your parents. It’s very important. One day they will no longer be there, and you will be very sad. The gaps between his teeth were black from smoking, but that didn’t affect the seriousness of his statement. They are waiting for you. Remember to take care of them. I said thank you. I didn’t know why, either.
Last night I was sitting in a small Czech pub that only sells Czech beer with a friend, while the Olympic Games were showing on a TV hanging in an awkward angle for me to see. Women Rugby. France won. There is surely a lot going on at any given time in the world but it does not mean that they have much to do with you, or me. The friend quit his job recently and is going to travel around in Europe and South America before heading back to the States. Vienna is just not for me, he reflected, without a trace of indecisiveness. How much time do you need to make a conclusion? The split of a second, I would guess. The second when you fall in love. The second when you make up your mind to leave. It's never longer than a second.
I told him about a phone interview I had recently with an HR girl from a Shanghai-based startup in a field in which I'm highly interested. The girl was a disastrous collection of unprofessionalism (be that a legit word or not, you get my point). And then it got me thinking at what cost I am willing to move back. - At what cost, you mean money? - Well, among other things. Lifestyle, space, degree of freedom. But isn't it always the case that, whenever a choice has to be made, the options must be more or less equally appealing (or unappealing)? Because if not, you wouldn't have to make a choice. - Maybe. Then you just have to find out what the most important criterion for you is, and choose the one that is the most satisfactory on the most important criterion. - Maybe you're right. That's when the man in his fifties sitting alone at the table on my left side jumped in as I threw a brief glimpse towards his direction: - Sorry but I couldn't help overhearing your conversation. It's very interesting. I have traveled and lived all around the world. China, the US, South America. Fantastic places. But believe me, central Europe is the best place to live. Stay here. - It all depends on what you are looking for in life, doesn't it? I guess discussions are held not in order that answers be discovered, though sometimes they do, but rather in order that we know that questions are shared. If anything, I learned to be a little bit more patient over the years that sometimes demanded preposterously that I should wait for an end that was never due. I must say I never really get what's so special about Czech beer. But then again how many of us really honestly appreciate the gouaches découpés of Matisse? The other day a person living in Australia that I barely know strangely asked me: will you marry me. I almost said I shall think about it. |
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