About Me

 

 

My father once read to me a letter by his great great-grandmother, written in French. In 1687, the fourteen year old daughter of a French Calvinist had escaped the siege of La Rochelle and arrived with five of her smaller siblings in Amsterdam. Fever stricken and hungry and sharing body warmth with her sisters, she stared with blank eyes at floats of dirty sleet drifting on the icy water of Amsterdam’s “grachts.” The youngest died from exhaustion and malnutrition within days.

We can’t be sure what happened next, but it seems the young woman was reunited with her parents and later married off to a Scotsman in Edinburgh.

As for my mother, she was the granddaughter of Jewish immigrants who’d moved in 1881 from Birkenau to Oldenburg, in Germany, to provide their oldest son, my grandfather, with a better education. He later emigrated and made a killing in rubber and tires in British India. However, in 1914, he relinquished his British citizenship and with it substantial portions of his fortunes and returned to assist the German war effort. Eventually Germany lost the war, but surely, one day the fatherland would give due recognition to such an act of unstinting patriotism?

It did indeed.

In 1942, already of advanced age, my grandfather found himself on a sealed boxcar and shipped back to his place of birth. They told him to strip naked and killed him in the shower rooms.

Six years later, an allied officer fell in love with the old man’s youngest daughter. The first time they saw each other was at the cinema when she ushered the soldier with a torchlight to his seat. There followed a bit of stalking on my father’s part, my mother noticed, and after five weeks, the two did something that was strictly against the rules in occupied Berlin. They fraternized. In 1949, this became the cause for my existence.

According to Aristotle, we are not yet fully human before the fortieth day after birth. It is the moment when most babies learn to gratify their parents for their round-the-clock services with a little peal of laughter. There is more to the old schoolmaster than meets the eye. All my childhood photographs show an insufferably cheerful boy, in blond curls and ringlets running down to his shoulders. As a child I played in the rubble of ruins and bombing sites, overgrown with weed. I grew up in what once had been a baron’s city mansion.

Along a windowless corridor, we and six other families shared rooms with tall ceilings and stucco ornaments of seashells and chubby little boys. The loo was outdoor in the backyard. From time to time some kind of hiss, a drizzle from somewhere behind or in the wall would send a reminder that the structure was crumbling. Nobody heeded the warning until one day a patch of stucco falling from the ceiling missed my mother’s buttocks by a hair’s breadth as she bent over at the stove.

My earliest out-of-house memory is probably a sports event my father took me to. I still have a sharp visual image of a boxing ring and two guys in olive green shirts throwing punches at each other with something, at the end of their forearms, that looked to me like the brown earthenware vessel my mother used for storing her salt and honing her kitchen knife on the vessel’s rim. I had never seen a boxing glove before. I don’t recall protective head gear. The light in the ring was harsh and the cheering all around never stopped. The seat must have been close to the ring; I had a good view of the faces and to my right my father repeatedly jumped up and shouted something.

He was a member of his unit’s boxing squad and he also played ping-pong. He had ambition and a good forehand while I only play a so-so backhand and somehow lack the killer instinct. This was years before I went to school, I must have been four or even younger! Of the time before, I’ve heard anecdotes.

The winter in ‘49 was murderous and there was nothing money could buy to heat the home. So my mother and her friend went out on a pillaging spree. The friend was a neighbor living in a studio further down the corridor. I still recall a tall woman, smelling of marzipan, or mothballs; now and then she gave me a drop of milk in a tiny demitasse and our dog once stole a fish from her.

The two women had to travel some distance before they found a fence with enough planks left to tear it off and pack it underneath me into the pram. My contribution was to lie on top, swaddled in blankets, and look cute. My first career move as a thief. It was a long way home and the two women lugged the pram down the stairs to the underground. A cop took notice, and, as friendly servant to the public, he offered a hand to carry the pram. The moment he lifted it, he realized of course that something here was wrong. Our neighbor saw the change in his face: “Yeah,” she said, with a booming voice, “it’s a heavy baby, isn’t it?” The man looked at her, in fact looked up to her - she was really tall - kept quiet and continued helping the women down the stairs.

Another recollection from the time when I just emerged from the amnesia of early infancy - why is it that we don’t remember our earliest years? - was the towering height and the not exactly pleasing smell of Shanti, and the bristles on his furrowed skin.

My grandmother was working for the local Zoo and on a weekend I was brought out to visit her. One of the elephants was employed as a people carrier, and lumbered along with hordes of squealing kids on his back. My mother was talking with somebody when I, standing closer to the elephant, reached out and began to pummel his enormous leg with the palm of my hand. Suddenly I felt a tight grip around my chest, lost ground under my feet and was lifted up towards an inspecting eye. I was too surprised to feel fear and Shanti had a good hard look at this bundle of stunned petulance before he gently set me down again. I was told that everybody at the scene was screaming; I have no recollection of such noise. Shanti and I became friends.

For the rest of the season I saw him almost every morning and he lifted me up to his back and patiently listened to what I had to tell him. I liked to pull at his bristles and his ears. He didn’t mind. One day his handlers didn’t allow me to get near. The animal was in the must and incessantly weaving from side to side. The smell was intense; it was the last time I remember to have seen Shanti.

My father was transferred to a base in Bavaria and I entered school.

On holidays we used to watch from the window the Catholics follow in procession their priest, a balding man decked in heavy brocade. He held to his face the monstrance, the vessel of the living flesh. Almost every Sunday we burned rubber for - what was the expression? - “a spot of motoring.” We used to stop for lunch in one of the numerous little towns. Only many years later I discovered that our weekly excursions - by whose design I cannot tell - more or less followed the itinerary of Monsieur Montaigne who’d travelled the very same region some four hundred years earlier. The book made me realize the changes this once hospital part of Bavaria had undergone since the religious wars.

After eating we indulged my mother and stared at the loud colors and histrionic displays of the local Baroque churches. “Look at this flatulent angel; this one, he blows the horn,” my mother said. I thought of the chubby little boys with tiny penises on the stucco ceiling in Berlin.

In those days they didn’t yet terrorize kids with such a thing as “preschool” and I assimilated letters rather slow and with dyslexic quirks in the “q,” “p,” “g” and “d” department. These letters are still the most common typos in my writing. Still not fully literate, I sometimes heard voices shouting at me. I looked around, but there was nobody. The episode ended after I had managed to finish my first book at the age of seven. It was Cooper’s “Deerslayer.”

My parents had inherited an odd collection of books with few children’s books.

I was enthralled by a “Youngster’s Encyclopedia” from 1928, with photographs from the interior of a gigantic zeppelin and blueprints for a winged box-kite of about my own size that allowed to carry a camera and do aerial photography. Mind you, 1928! A little later I read “Emil and the Detectives.” It was followed by Tintin and Snowy’s adventures in the jungles of the Andes, a comic book.

The death of Bayard, the mighty battle charger from the “Legends of King Charlemagne,” is still with me.

Bayard was a horse of miraculous strength, who carried his master, Count Raymond and his three brothers out of many hairy situations. So when the seditious count finally surrendered to his king and liege, they hung millstones around Bayard’s neck and feet and pushed the steed into the river. Bayard emerged from the water and cried out for his master. The count turned and looked at him. The horse gained strength and struggled back on dry land. So the King ordered Count Raymond next time to look away and burdened with even more millstones the horse was pushed back into the water. Again Bayard emerges and cries out. The master weeps but will not look at him. So Bayard realizes he is abandoned, he loses strength and drowns. I was in tears.

When I was nine I read the Bible from cover to cover; out of sheer curiosity, nobody asked me to. God’s command not to “boil a kid in his mother's milk” struck a sympathetic chord, but Jesus’ curse of the fig tree left me singularly unimpressed. It still does. The thing is naively presented as an example of miracle working and where it can get you if you have faith, as if destroying a tree isn’t something everybody can do, making it bloom and yield, that would have been the miracle. Besides the whole theological premise of a “savior” is completely lost on me. Here is God’s golden boy. He shares the life of a poor neighborhood, but unlike us, who don’t have a say in this matter. he has the limo waiting around the corner and can leave the squalor any time he chooses. What has any of that to do with me?

I developed a crush on Buddhism. It ended in yawns over the endless litanies to prevent suffering by dissociating yourself from your attachments and meditate yourself into a stupor; I am sure it works for a cauliflower. My attachments define who I am, and if I suffer, well, that is the price to pay for being anything at all. The motto on the Sympson’s coat of arms is “nil desperandum,” never despair.

My reading speed continued to accelerate and there was one night when I read Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment cover to cover in one sitting. A little later I either had contracted the measles or it was after my small pocks vaccination when complications made my mother run in panic to our house doctor across the street, Dr. Loew. I ran a high fever and must have been delirious, but I insisted on reading Dickens' Oliver Twist. A fatal choice, especially when Fagin is sending out his little troopers into your dreams. My mother finally took away the book, and somehow this has affected my entire attitude to Dickens to this very day. I perceived very little of his humor and found the gloom overwhelming: “These tumbling tenements contain, by night, a swarm of misery, breed a crowd of foul existence that crawls in and out of gaps in walls and boards, and coils itself to sleep in maggot numbers where the rain drips in; and comes and goes, fetching and carrying fever, and sowing evil in every footprint” (Dickens, Bleak House). There was no way that I would ever touch again a book by Dickens, not even with tongs.

Years later I made the acquaintance of a London spinster, she was in her twenties and just came back from a trip to Central-America; mosquito bitten and suntanned. We all have seen her, the bony type with a shrill laughter under a head of wiry blond hair. I am fairly tall but she could look down on me with ease. This woman had an uncanny eye for the little ticks of each and everyone and from my apartment she pointed out a whole collection of Dickensian characters parading under the window on this rainy afternoon in August. These days Mr. Podsnap is working on the stock exchange and his flourish still comes in handy when the Dow Jones is dropping. I still have my reservations.

The skies in Dickens’ world are hidden in a “soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes - gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.” I long for the open blue and the sleepy heat of a Mediterranean summer at noon. A nodding donkey is hitched to an olive tree. He must have a naughty dream. “Look at him!” my wife cries. The ears twitch in alarm, and the offending extension between the animal’s hind-legs disappears.

I began reading my first philosopher, Plato, and developed a habit of sleeping in the buff under open window curtains. In the light of the stars I dreamed of suntanned Greeks who walked in the shade of marbled porticos, and debated ‘arete’ and ‘eros.’ I mused over Plato’s archetypes, a sort of transcendental cookie cutter. In his Timaeus, Plato tells a tale of universal inundation.

Unlike the one off event in Genesis, Plato speaks of for ever recurring floods, survived only by the illiterate herdsmen in the mountains, while “those who live in the cities are swept into the sea.” So “just when the nations are beginning to be provided with letters and the requisites of civilization, the stream from heaven, like a pestilence, comes pouring down, and leaves only those alive who are destitute of education; and so we have to begin all over again like children.” The idea of previous civilizations and of more advanced people gone extinct without a trace is not entirely absurd. The layers of sediment on the ocean floor give evidence to eight ice-ages in the last 700,000 years. I thought I ask my uncle, the rabbi, a Polish refugee.

He looked a bit startled and with sad eyes began talking about his shaggy mare in Poland. How her head used to vigorously nod up and down with every step. He always talked about horses. It was the chosen topic between him and me and visiting him was my alibi when I went out to play. We children used to be out all day and I often missed the curfew and got a good talking to.

One day, already running late, I was about to cross the street and had no eyes for the lorry rushing at me from the left. It would have squashed me to pulp had not from behind the hand of a stranger grabbed my arm. A matter of split seconds - I came sooo close, I could feel the vehicle’s slipstream pulling me towards the road. Then the anonymous hand loosened its grip and the hyperactive boy scooted across the street without even looking back or saying a word of thanks. I never told my parents.

Thankfully there were not too many inquiries about my whereabouts.

Almost every day our gang of mixed gender used to meet on the river under the weeping willows. The girls were at least as intrepid as the boys. As a test of mettle we crossed an out-of-town bridge on the outside of the handrail; lose your grip and you drop thirty meters into shallow water, the rapids running only inches over the rocks. Not that we didn’t appreciate the danger. One of us, and it wasn’t one of the girls, looked down and froze and it took some coaxing to get him to the other end. With our bicycles we toured the hamlets towards the looming Alps in the South.

On weekends I was allowed to stay up late and father and son bonded over a common interest in astronomy. My father was an engineer with a healthy disrespect for academic baloney, which in his opinion included the social “sciences” and psychiatry; engineering has to get it right or the wheels won’t spin. So it was a real disappointment for the old man that in the end my interest in the classics got the better of me. Virgil’s elfin world of nymphs and fauns in the Georgic has become my island of tranquility. C. Schneider’s hymn to the Hellenistic world in two mighty tomes, (Kulturgeschichte des Hellenismus, 2 volumes, Munich 1967-1969) has never lost its lure, even now when these books live on only in my memory.

In the last year at college, four of us began pooling funds for an old Mercedes. After graduation we planned to take the route through the Balkans, Anatolia and Iran to Katmandu, then sell the car and from the proceeds pay for the flight home. That was before the Russians had invaded Afghanistan.

On the way we stopped at the ruins of Persepolis, the old capital of King Cyrus (580-529 BC.).

A barren plane; the Sun rising over solitary columns and the denuded "cella" of the royal audience hall; in the cloudless sky a huge bird drawing circles. Once floor long silk curtains, translucent and flapping in the wind, had shielded the king of kings from the glare and the heat. The people here were poor but hospitable and always up in arms over some age-old feud. Overhead of the street bullets were traded from roof to roof because once upon a time the one guy's granddaddy had had the temerity of leering at the other guys granny when she was washing her face. It was not a story with a happy ending. Our guide motioned to the roofs to cease fire and let us pass.

We followed an invitation by the hamlet’s elders. They had cooked a sheep’s head and offered the best part, the eyes, to the guest of honor, me. I fell ill and had to say good bye to my companions and take the plane from Kabul.

Back home I first went into advertising and then studied French history before I dropped my somewhat superfluous thesis on Cardinal Richelieu and after consultations with my professor switched to Roman archeology and English literature. My favorite period is the decades from 380 AD. to 410 AD., when Catholicism had just become state religion and the Goths were about to loot the city of Rome. We think of it as a time of decline and misery, but to the people living it, it may have been a time of vitality and tempered optimism. In Toulouse a clairvoyant engineer attached waterwheels to the hull of a ship and used pairs of oxen as the propellant. Byzantine monks went east and brought back the silk worm, thus breaking China’s monopoly, while a manufacturer in Antioch carved patterns into wood and printed it on textiles, but only the Chinese thought of using the same technology for printing books. Everybody, high and low, seemed to walk through a dream; the gods of the ancients had retired to the shaded corners of the world, but in the desert a goat-feeted satyr was seen to provide the lost traveler with food and water. Breathing mist into the cold air and anxiously holding on to the amulet on his chest, the Christian pilgrim crossed the haunted forests of the North. On the horizon the sun was setting and the dome of the Hagia Sophia dispensed a golden glow over the city on the Bosporus.

I was affected by a pervasive sense of unreality, that deepened when at night I worked shifts as a subeditor for a tabloid and drowned my sleep in uncounted cups of strong black coffee. One of my colleagues did percolate a brew that truly deserved the name “infernal.” It sent the heart racing. The psychologists on the campus paid me a fee for serving as guinea-pig in their studies on sleep deprivation. I saw spider webs in every corner and expected the walls to warp under my touch. In the foliage of the trees and in the grain of my wooden furniture I felt lurking dryads were peeking at me, they became very real and I flinched from the swipe of their fluttering hair on my face. How I found the time to engage in a study of Immanuel Kant is now a complete mystery to me; most of the study was done on the train and on the buss, but I think his philosophy is still holding up.

During the last semester I briefly assisted in Yugoslavia to excavations of a “Mithreum” - a chapel of Mithras - the bull slaying redeemer of the Roman soldier, and then joined a team in Tunisia and Morocco, dusting and photographing Roman epigraphs for a new survey.

A veteran of the French legion assisted the team and liaised with the authorities and the natives. In his youth he had been enlisted the old-fashioned way; he was seventeen when the French had him shanghaied from a coal mine across the border. That was his story and he stuck to it. Now he looked forward to retirement and a little home in the Loire valley. He introduced me to a sheikh (or “Amenokal”) of the Touareg. They call themselves the “Imouhar,” the free people.

A formal visit was arranged, I showered and in my best outfit drove to the camp, accompanied by the veteran. The reception was friendly; I was asked to undress and led to a man-sized cauldron on a blazing fire underneath. Was I to become the meal’s main course?

Water is on a premium in the Sahara, and only a shallow puddle steamed at the bottom of the tub, practically singeing my testicles. The actual cleaning was done by an assistant with a missing tooth in his smile and, as I soon realized, very strong hands. Without using soap he began massaging the dirt out of my epidermis. It was a humbling experience, even with the excuse of an hour’s drive through the desert in an open jeep. I thought I was clean, but the man collected from my skin a ball of gunk the size of a walnut. I got ready for the meal. It was a spicy affair, but the legionnaire’s experience got me through this: don’t try washing down the heat in your mouth with water; use bread and chew it slowly! The meal ended with tea in tiny thimbles, the kind of tea that enables you to speak fluently in fourteen languages at once.

The visit did help the project, but it did not become the beginning of an academic career. A manufacturer of chemical products offered me the opportunity to travel thirty-nine countries on expense account.

I took it.

It would lead me to meet the strangest people. In a restaurant in Madrid with a man in an expensive suit, a bit on the stocky side, well fed, soft skinned, articulate, a handshake like a wet sponge. He arrived in a motorcade, introduced himself under a generic name and everybody else in the room knew him as the king’s chief of security. Before the souffle he passed around the table his identity card and his Beretta. The identity card showed his photograph and an ID number with an endless row of zeros followed by a six at the end. This seemed to be the point. Only the royal family had figures that low on their ID. The Beretta was a guy thing. They do this in those countries.

But before I was meeting this Senior Munos, my contract required me to do six months in research and development.

So I donned a white smock and checked in into the laboratory on a Tuesday. Chemistry had always been my least loved subject, at least before an informal chat with a physicist (sic!) had opened my eyes. Chemists never speak about electrons on the outer shell of an atom. But chemistry, it seems, is all about the right number of these electrons when atoms interact. The researchers in the lab were after a new photosensitive compound and by trial and error the team time and again tabulated several dozens of chemical substances according to the available “radicals” (the little dot to the right of the symbol). Research was still in progress, when my stint in the lab was over.

Most scientists don’t bother with philosophy and if they absolutely must, their darling is Sir Carl Popper and his principle of “falsification.” It’s a neat attempt to rationalize the scientific method. The implication seems to be that nature has only two answers to our questions: “no” and “maybe” but never a resounding “yes.” Obviously Popper overlooked something. Kepler's laws still carry probes and astronauts safely to Mars. Mendel remains the foundation of modern genetics. I am pretty sure that even the most reactionary coffeehouse philosopher would rather not live in the age before Louis Pasteur. Science is a method to establish facts which lead to the prediction of further facts. Once the prediction is proven right, the facts prior in the chain can no longer be falsified.

I was on the way to meet a client in Czechoslovakia, still under the communists then. Almost at midnight I entered the outskirts of Prague. I knew that a hotel room was waiting for me. A moldy time capsule of gilded elegance in scarlet velvet. The maids, instead of dusting and changing sheets, would rather have coffee in the lounge with the head waiter. Guests were invited to join. But I still had to get there. After a long day on the road I was still threading my way through the suburbs. Not really a difficult task; the lights of the city’s approaching downtown floated assertively across the windscreen. In the street cafes underneath these lights, I knew, socialist tourists from East-Germany were making themselves obnoxious. They felt like the communist elite and everywhere strutted about with a big chip on their shoulder. The area I was driving through however was pitch dark and suddenly I was caught in a crossroad that seemed to receive one way lanes from every possible direction. It was eerily quiet. Prague is the hometown of the writer Franz Kafka and the moment gave a whole new meaning to the word "Kafkaesque." I tried backing out, but I already knew exactly what was going to happen next.

There would be a cop waiting to give me a ticket. And so it was.

I was asked to wind down the window for a nose full of exhalations from a cigarette and stale beer in his breath. The man steadied himself with one hand on the roof of my car. The law clearly was in need of a shave, but he was the authority, and I understood that there was no point in protesting my innocence. So I paid and didn’t ask for a receipt. Lost in thoughts the man continued holding on to the roof. I waited. At last he took off his hand and gave way. The film director Milos Forman used Prague as location for his film Amadeus with the secret police as extras on his set. Most of them were in it more for the American cigarettes and the cans of pineapple than the sinister suspicions of the regime. Time and again Milos had to remind his American crew to “forget logic! This is Checkoslovakia.” Actually Forman used the wrong word. It was not the lack of logic that was worrying here.

I continued on my way towards a hopefully heated hotel room. The next day, my contacts directed me into a haze of yellow dust and brimstone. It came from factory stacks and burning dumping sites which surround Prague like a circle from Dante’s hell.

For six months I took residence in Los Angeles on a business visa.

It was then when I learned that in America only the drivers license is a “proper ID.” A passport wouldn’t even open a bank account in those days. This has changed, or maybe there are differences in the various state legislations. To get to Los Angeles I decided to travel the Interstate 80. A friend in New York provided me with an old Cadillac. She was put together from two wrecks from the fifties and although the paint was not great - I would lie if I said it was pink - the tail fins were as flashy as ever. It got me safely across the continent, although the handwritten license plate on a piece of red cardboard in the rear window made the patrol officers pulling a face; but it was perfectly legal. On weekends I went on trips to Nevada.

Las Vegas is a strange place. When approached at night - in a Buick Skylark, red as a fire engine, if you must know, I had to retire the Cad - there is first the tunnel of Nevada’s nocturnal void left and right, the front lights frantically licking the rushing tarmac. Then gradually something ghostly is filling the windscreen.

From the distance it looks like an abandoned, fully lit landing strip for airplanes, crossing from left to right. For a long time it hovers motionless on the horizon. One has to come much closer to see that this oasis of light is anything but abandoned. That night I was determined to make ten thousand at the roulette. That was my target. Oh I was good, I could set myself targets.

I started with five hundred and in a very short time I piled up stacks of chips before me, worth a trifle more than five thousand. It should have been the signal to leave and had I done so I probably would still be gambling. I didn’t.

The croupier and I were the only people at this table. My target was ten thousand. The croupier looked at me and barely noticeable shrugged his shoulders when I placed my next bet. Two hours later I left the Casino without my American Express card. Cold turkey. Never again the clinking of stacked jetons and the nervous patter of little thuds hurtling across the crap table. No more sympathetic noises from the young man next to me who says he is admiring my game. A typical night on the strip. The trance of neon lights; people sliding by in their cars like in a fluorescent fish tank. The chills after the adrenaline crash when stepping out into the street. Aimless walking the streets and then backtrack to the car park. The face hit by a drop of water from some air-conditioner.

I still had a car key and a car fitting to the key. Back in L.A. I was offered a career change and I can’t deny that for a moment it got me thinking.

The offer came from a mild mannered man with the looks of Mahatma Gandhi, without the loincloth. Kirby his Doberman was positively worshipping him. Gandhi owned five houses with a Jaguar (the car) in each garage and was married to a woman in her first pregnancy. There was a blonde mistress and her just born baby, and a Japanese ex-wife, the mother of an already married son, who was serving with the marines. They all were living together within a mile’s distance and helped each other changing diapers and dress for parties. Gandhi’s firm was registered in Switzerland and he conducted most of his business from his fax machine in the bedroom. Do you need a tank or a fighter plane? Gandhi is your man. For handguns just go to Walmart.

In the end I thought better of it and my employer did send me on a new assignment to South East Asia and China. I boarded the plane. In China I met my first wife and I settled down to spend eight years teaching and studying. It inflicted a bit of a culture shock.

At moments the surrounding suddenly shrank to a chaotic congestion of screeching traffic, of shop signs I couldn’t read, of disintegrating concrete and an unspeakable, roach infested ugliness in the utilitarian architecture. This was still the eighties. But after midnight the city was able to exude an intoxicating magic. We toured the abandoned streets on our scooter, a red Vespa, the drifting dust from the numerous construction sites had settled, and despite, or perhaps as an effect of the polluted air, the krypton lights disseminated the gentle luster of a gigantic jellyfish hovering in the greenish, slightly hazy translucence of the sky, with countless tentacles dangling onto the empty playgrounds. Now and then we stopped there for a moment on the swings; from the chains our hands rubbed off the slimy sweat of the great humidity overhead. At this late hour even back home it could be quiet. Chinese families are noisy affairs; the headlight over the door to your room is left open, the clan would be very unhappy should one of their own drift out of earshot. Privacy is still a foreign concept.

During my studies a Jesuit helped me to find my way through the Chinese classics. I learned something about the Jesuitic touch in these matters. These guys really study a foreign culture from within and they develop sensible theories. Walter J. Ong’s SJ “Orality and Literacy” has remained a key-item on my bookshelf.

In retrospect it was a period of quiet content. “That which befalls men befalls the beasts and man has no preeminence. Wherefore nothing is better than to rejoice in your own works” says Kohelet (Ecclesiastes 3:19-22), which is fine by me. The one Chinese writer I consider as a an absolute must read is the Han historian Ssu-ma ch‘ien (145–90 BC.), a stupendous story teller with the temperament of an anthropologist. What was his reward? They castrated him for standing up and defend the integrity of a colleague in office.

His work was written before the innovation of ink and paper. With untiring patience, the clerks of Ssu-ma’s department singed signs with read hot needles onto uncounted bamboo slabs, 1,500,000 words altogether. Ssu-ma was not your typical Confucian gentleman: uptight, polished and slightly bigoted. In fact it would be difficult to rubricate Ssu-ma under any philosophical school. He was a sensitive individual with loyalty high on his agenda. Status and influence however came for a price, it was a life under tight supervision. The court officials were confined in dormitories and given leave only once every five days to wash their hair.

From Ssu-ma’s letters one realizes that he did not think of his treatment as an injustice; by standing up for Li Ling, who was not even his friend, he knew he had it coming, and his refusal to commit “honorable” suicide marked him in the eyes of his peers, but he could not bear the thought to leave his work unfinished. People sometimes wonder whether there is anybody I actually do admire? Ssu-ma certainly is deserving of admiration. So is Antonin Chekhov, who was more than just a great writer, so is, for the same reason, Montaigne, Theodor Mommsen, and Voltaire.

It was around nine o’clock in the evening after rush hour. The street under the windows of my apartment block was empty and barely lit. My wife should have come home for some time by now, and I decided to walk into the direction from which I was expecting her arrival. About a kilometer further down the road it became utterly desolate except for a parked pickup with a load of protruding scaffolding poles. The poles extended towards what seemed a large puddle of axle grease on the tarmac. I noticed the crumpled wreck of a red Vespa on the sidewalk.

My brain refused to register what the senses reported so loud and clear. Then I suddenly realized I’d stepped into the puddle.

Later that night, a friend - the chief surgeon of the local university clinic - helped searching for my wife in the hospitals and morgues up and down the city. We found her and when I was asked to identify her they kept her upper body covered; they said it would be better not to look at her face if I could help it.

In 1991 I returned to overcast skies and soggy days in England.

In 1997 I began a correspondence with the person who became my sweetheart and whom I have to thank that this website ever materialized. If the reader wishes to thank her, do feel free to drop an email. Dawn and I first moved to Florida and in the year after 9/11 we went back to England, and, with the blessing of the immortals, we shall live happily ever after in Kent. We first moved into an apartment overlooking the River Thames. Only a hundred yards away from my desk was the crypt where Pocahontas is laid to rest.

This desk has now moved to a place deeper in Kent where we have purchased property, surrounded by green and trees and a quiet life.

The best piece of advice I’ve ever received?

My aunt insisted that there is nothing, nothing at all, that cannot be said in plain language and so that everybody will understand it.

A wish?

I would like to end my life in France, in the light and smells of the South, the Occitanie, the ancient land of the troubadors and of the Cathars; or perhaps at Avignon, where the dust is resting easy on the car’s bonnet. But before it comes to this, I hope I have finished a substantial novel, a novel I enjoy writing and hopefully the reader will enjoy reading just as much.

 

© - 3/24/2008 - by michael sympson

6,500 words, all rights reserved

 

to be continued