Advices and Queries - 5

"While respecting the experiences and opinion of others, do not be afraid to say what you have found and what you value. Appreciate that doubt and questioning can also lead to spiritual growth and to a greater awareness of the Light that is in us all."

 

I suppose this may refer, partly at least, to what Quakers call 'ministry', but it can be understood more broadly: as an advice to strive for balance between paying proper attention to what others are saying, respecting their right for a point of view different from ours, even pondering whether that point of view may not have aspects to accept as our own; and between having our own point of view, based on experience and consideration, one which we are ready to defend before other people, and would only give up or change with a very, very good reason to do so.

Bord och stolar

Nyligen läste jag att många köpte skrivbord och/eller skrivbordsstolar när de började jobba hemifrån.

Jag förstår inte folk som lever utan skrivbord och kontorstol trots att de inte behöver. Faktiskt, det är det första jag köpte varje gång jag flyttade. (Nej, andra - efter en ny vattenkokare. Men ändå.) Skriver de där människor inte ens? Det är så mycket lättare med ett lämpligt bord och stol ...

(Okej, jag förstår inte heller dem som använder mobil när de kan använda bärbar dator. Jag är en gammal stofil.)

Des œufs

J'ai toujours aimé les œufs, mais il y avaint des longues périods quand je n'ai pas pu les manger, pour différentes raisons - soit je n'ai pas eu de temps, soit je n'avais pas de réfrigérateur, et ainsi de suite. Mais je m'en suis ennuyé, et la semaine dernière je les ai achetés. Maintenant, je rapprends à les bouillir.

Religiousness as a form of immaturity

I don't mean this condescendingly. But it occurred to me the other day that one of the reasons why people believe in a god is a certain reluctance to accept that childhood is over. When you are a child, it seems that your parents are omnipotent and however much you mess up, in the end they can mend the shambles, they can - and will - get you out of any problem you might have stumbled into. As you grow up, you gradually realise this is not true. But you are reluctant to admit that some mistakes are final, even fatal, that you can't rely on ultimately getting justice, and so on, up to and including the horror that in the end you will inevitably die. So to keep sane you replace your no longer tenable belief in all-powerful, all-healing parents with a belief in an all-powerful, all-healing god.

James Herriot: If Only They Could Talk

I loved James Herriot's books ever since I've read them (the four taking place before the war) for the first time as an adolescent - in fact, in my late teens I thought that if I could take just one book to a desert island, it would be one of these. Like in real life there was humour and there was sadness; but most of all there was kindness, and it all happened in a landscape I loved without having ever seen it.

In time, other books inevitably replaced them as my favourites, but I kept liking them a lot. Over the years I've read all the eight books, most of them more than once, the first four several times. Eventually I concluded that I liked best the very first one, describing the young vet's first year in Darrowby. So I was completely annoyed when the Kindle edition I bought turned out to miss the last chapter or postscript, making the book feel like a printed one from which some barbarian has torn off the last few pages.

But before discovering this I was enjoying once more the rest of it. Including the following quote I'd meanwhile forgotten, concerning one of the remoter farming families: "They seemed to me to be survivors from another age and their world had a timeless quality. They were never in a hurry; they rose when it was light, went to bed when they were tired, ate when they were hungry and seldom looked at a clock."

I realise this must be a bit idealised (what if there was some emergency? did they all get hungry at the same time? and so on), but that's just the nitpicker in me talking. I believe that families and communities like this did, hopefully still do, exist, and all I can do is envy them, regretting that the only times when I can temporarily live like this are those rare ones when I can safely ignore everything and everybody.

Overly active editors

I perceive editorship as a very responsible job. But it does annoy me when an editor, no doubt with the best of intentions, believes that he can present the author to the reader better than the author himself did.

I'm not talking about such obvious examples as The Picture of Dorian Gray. There, at least, the editor could argue that without his deletions both Oscar Wilde and himself might have ended up in gaol (although even so it would have been decent to consult the changes with the author, instead of simply making them).

There are less conspicuous, but no less irritating approaches. I've recently read What's Wrong with the World by G. K. Chesterton. In my opinion one of his best non-fiction books, but unfortunately the edition I downloaded was an American one - with American spellings. Seeing things like color in a text by Chesterton seemed as inappropriate as colour would be in a text by Mark Twain. Why on earth 'translate English into English'? Did the editor think his audience was stupid enough to mistake the original spellings for typographical errors and blame the publisher for sloppy work?

This particular case is the more ridiculous as, for instance, they kept the expression public school, with the meaning it has in England. Not that I would have it otherwise. Ian Rankin complained in one interview that when his books were published in the US, his Scottish hero, while remaining in Edinburgh, didn't talk about a car's boot, but about its trunk and so on. I get the shivers when I imagine Trainspotting still happening in Leith, but 'translated' into Cockney, lest Londoners found it hard to understand.

Not that today's British editors are guiltless. Take the 21st-century edition of The History of Mr. Polly I bought to replace the one I had given to a friend. In an introductory note the editor admits he made changes like omitting the full stop after titles (so Mr. Polly himself becomes Mr Polly), reducing hyphenation (for instance today for to-day), and so on, the idea being 'to make the text more accessible to the reader'. I find it hard to imagine a reader who can enjoy this particular kind of old tale, yet prefers replacing the endearing quaintness of the old orthography with something 'more accessible'.

In short, I dread the day when Alan Breck asks David Balfour 'And hey, dude, am I not a cool fighter?'

Yoshirō Mori

Alors, le président du comité d'organisation des Jeux olympiques a dû démissioner. Peut-être adéquatement. Il a dit que des femmes en gestion sont plus compétitives et plus loquace que des hommes. Bien sûr, c'est absolument vrai, mais est-ce poli de le dire tout haut ?

Leabhar ùr

Bha mi gu math teabadach, ach aig a cheann thall cheannaich mi leabhar an clò, ged a bha mi air cur orm nach cuireadh mi ris an dà a bha agam a-cheana, agus iad sin an dà leabhar is annsa leam. Ach cha mhòr nach bi leabhraichean sa Ghàidhlig ri fhaotainn ann an cruth digiteach; chan eil agam ach aon (agus chan eil mi buileach cinnteach gur e fileantach a tha san ùghdar), 's mar sin, dh'òrdaich mi clò-bhualadh de Chaogad san Fhàsach le Dòmhnall Iain MacÌomhair an-diugh. As dèidh sin 's na dhèidh, cha robh mi air tiodhlac Nollaige 2020 a cheannach dhomsa fhathast.

Advices and Queries

I've read again after some time Jim Pym's Listening to the Light, which includes in its appendix Advices and Queries (the latest, 1994 revision by the British Yearly Meeting), the "potted guidebook to the Quaker Life" as he describes it.

These 42 paragraphs are not categorical commandments to follow unquestioningly ("for the letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life"), but short statements and rhetorical questions meant to make those concerned ponder whether their behaviour is really consistent with the Quaker philosophy and way of life.

Naturally, Quakers being an offshoot of Christianity, their God is sometimes invoked in a way as irritatingly servile as in the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. Nevertheless, there is a lot or really good passages and I'll try to gradually write a bit more about some of these in the coming weeks.

Done with WordPress

Today I've finally transferred here my remaining old WordPress blogposts, deleted the blog and closed my account.

I used to like the WP website, but it fell victim to a not uncommon disease: developers continually making major 'improvements', which actually kept making it ever less user-friendly, at least for those of us who are primarily interested in the words we write, with the editing interface remaining by and large what we're used to, not changing every couple of years or so.

So to celebrate I opened a bottle or (red) wine; if I remember correctly, my first one since I went into my self-imposed exile.

Rich entrepreneurs entering politics

Amongst the many things G. K. Chesterton criticised about contemporary England in his What's Wrong with the World (1910) was the notion that a politician should be rich to be incorruptible. He wrote, "Our national claim to political incorruptibility is [...] based on the theory that wealthy men in assured positions will have no temptation to financial trickery. [...] The English statesman is bribed not to be bribed. He is born with a silver spoon in his mouth, so that he may never afterwards be found with the silver spoons in his pocket."

In other countries I've noticed this concept too, albeit not necessarily with people born filthy rich, but likewise with people who became so. Every few years or so somebody enters politics with the professed goal of eliminating corruption, claiming that he can be trusted to be impervious to its lure because he's already made his pile. And one hears prospective voters parroting the mantra: "I tell you man, [unlike the rest of them] he's so rich already he doesn't need any more".

I don't say there are none who mean it. But I can't recollect a single case of somebody who, when considering what good to do for his fellow mortals with his wealth, chose politics, rather than donating to a charity, building a school or a museum, funding some medical research, or doing another such thing in which the above-mentioned temptation was scarcely present. And I wonder why those prospective voters forget the old proverb, "the more you get, the more you want".

À nouveau dans la cuisine

Je n'ai pas entrée la cuisine en commun de l'hôtel presque depuis j'ai déménagé ici, bien que l'on ne puisse pas cuisiner dans sa chambre sauf avec une bouilloire électrique.

Mais il y a deux semaine, en revenant de l'hôpital, j'ai désiré des pommes de terre assez pour me faire acheter une boîte de conserve de goulasch de pommes de terre aux saucisses viennoises.

À vrai dire, enfin je n'ai pas osé utilisé la cuisine ce jour-là ; mais j'y suis allé, après deux jours, pour cuisiner une boîte de conserve différente (saucisses fummées aux haricots blancs (mais pas à la sauce tomate)), et hier soir, finalement, pour le goulasch.

Je conjecture que ce n'était pas ma dernière fois dans la cuisine ...

G. K. Chesterton: Alarms and Discursions

Overall I wasn't too impressed with this book, basically all the other collections of Chesterton's essays I'd read were better. Still, there are some good chapters, most notably perhaps The New House. In this one, GKC managed over just a few pages to mention the human tendency to go from one extreme to the opposite one, apply it to people escaping from overcrowded cities to places hardly inhabited at all, and conclude that, like most things in our lives, decent housing is a matter of balance between two extremes - in this case, between having your neighbours too near to and too far from you. (Personally I've always regretted that as an unbeliever I couldn't be a monk, with a cell and thus private space of my own, yet a member of a community of men.)

Devanagari

Some years ago I had an idea about learning Sanskrit or Hindi one day. Last month I tried Hindi on Duolingo, but pretty soon gave it up. Maybe I could learn the alphabet with the help of a personal tutor; a course beginning with associating particular phonemes with particular letters is for people with much better hearing than mine. If you can only guess which sound you've just heard, how can you pair it with the correct symbol?

Tadhalan mo chàirdean

Chan eil fhios agam an e buaidh a' bhìorais (le uimhir nas lugha de chothroman aig daoine leis an àm aca a chur seachad) no buaidh na h-aillse agam (agus iad ag iarraidh m' fhaicinn mus am biodh e ro fhadalach), ach bha dà thadhal agam bho chàirdean na colaiste san Fhaoilleach: Black sa chiad àite, agus an dèidh sin Jamie is Falcon.

Iongantach. Tro na trì mìosan ar fhichead roimhe 2021 agus a bha mi a' fuireach san fhàrdaich seo, cha do thadhail ach mo phiuthair orm - aon thuras. A-nis, dà thadhal rè mìosa singilte - agus bu chòir do Bhlack a' tighinn a-rithist an ath-sheachdain, leis an dà eile, tha mi an dòchas, mus deireadh a' Ghearrain ...

Chemoradiotherapy over

If going through several examinations (while still attending at work) until getting the diagnose was the first stage, then preparations (like having a catheter and PEG tube inserted) for and the actual therapy was the second. One which is, after the last rays yesterday and the last dripping today, finally over too.

It would be a lie to say it was as hard as the previous stage, or as my previous radiochemotherapy four years ago. In fact, during the first half I could actually feel my state slowly but surely improve. But later I began gradually tiring more easily instead, days when I hardly did anything other than what I thought really necessary becoming more frequent. Going out for a radiation session might only take a few hours, but once back I would as likely as not just have a meal, doze (or not) in bed for a couple of hours, and maybe later do a bit of language studies before going to read in bed again. I would eat significantly less as well, although surprisingly I kept my weight all through.

Well it's over now, and a month-long third phase begins. Except for going the messages I shouldn't have to leave my digs more that once a week - although I think I better take a constitutional now and then, just to get some fresh air. The main thing is getting my strength back, partly at least (I suspect a month is too short to get from 50 kilo back to 60, the more so as for another week the side effects of the therapy are expected to continue), and catch up on all the things I have been neglecting.

And then on 2nd March a CT scan, with results the next day. I hope that till then I'll write here about other things than my health. I naturally want to get these things off my chest, but doing so I feel unpleasantly like one of those old geezers for whom their own health is the only remaining interesting topic of conversation.