View all notes
Available query params: commented=1, untagged=1
A manor house in East Prussia, paid for by the military salary of the absent owner, an officer. Inside, a Chekhovian personage — the lady of the manor, a languorous Berlin beauty — along with her twelve-year-old son Peter, his tutor, an elderly aunt who oversees the household, two Ukrainian maidservants, and a Polish groom who tends the horses. A Nazi lives in the new settlement across the way. The first refugees driven westward from the Baltic territories by the advancing front turn in for a few nights at the manor. We watch along with Kempowski as this old world, as if in slow motion, begins to sway. The Baltic refugees are delighted by the bread with sausage that is still served to them here, they mourn for their lost homeland, they move on. The Polish groom is already beginning to prepare the coach, to pack a few suitcases for his master’s family. But the lady of the manor gazes out the window, the son looks through his microscope, the tutor speaks of Goethe’s concept of “perfection.” How long does it take us to notice the end of the world? To notice that the end of the world might mean our own end?
Seen from the West, the collapse of the Eastern Bloc marked the victorious end of the Cold War, and the fall of the Berlin Wall signified the failure of Communist ideals and utopias. The bankruptcy of any economic system that rejected profit motives could be seen in the parade of Trabis, those iconic East German cars that made their way to West Berlin the night that the wall fell. By contrast, the images of the Spanish enclave of Melilla, the televised images of overcrowded refugee boats, and the designs for the Mexican border wall tell very different stories: stories of postcolonial exodus and of the one-way street of globalization, a system in which European and North American countries, and more recently China, move money around the world, forming alliances with the corrupt elites of other nations to exploit their raw materials, often with the aid of war and violence, while refusing to accept the people who flee from these exploited nations, viewing them as a sort of waste product unwelcome “on our shores.”
yep
How free can we actually be, as individuals, even when we are outwardly, politically free? Whose opinions are they really that we call our own? When can we say I and really mean I, and not the father, the mother, the teachers, the friends, whose convictions are reproduced in us? How much I is there really, beyond my upbringing? (Because even if I reject my upbringing, surely that can be seen as another consequence of my upbringing.) You probably know the famous Schopenhauer quote, it goes something like this: A man can do as he wills, but not will as he wills.
Can we exchange our own history for another? Discard it? Retract it? Can we take the convictions and beliefs that we have developed over the course of years, and replace them with a blank slate? Can we unlearn what we have learned, unfeel what we have felt?
[...] the speaker has involved the reader from the beginning, addressing him directly, anticipating his reactions, preempting his judgments, denying him the comfortable role of spectator.
These "notes" are a performance, part tirade, part memor, by a nameless personage who claims to be writing for himself alone but who consistently manipulates the reader--of whom he is morbidly aware--to the point where there seems to be no judgment the reader can make which the writer has not already made himself. In the absence of any other source of information or perspective, we suffer his contradictions no less helplessly than he does. For Dostoevsky's presence as author is enigmatic and minimal, confined to a pararaph of introduction and three laconic sentences of conclusion.
[...] I even think that the best definition of man is: a biped, ungrateful. [...]
lol
[...] give him such economic prosperity that he'll have nothing left to do but sleep, eat pastries, and busy himself with assuring the continuance of world history. And even then [...] He'll even risk his pastries and deliberately choose the most pernicious nonsense [...]
Man loves to create [...] But when, then, does he also passionately love destruction and chaos? Tell me that! [...] Can it be that he is so dedicated to destruction and chaos [...], because is himself instinctively afraid of achieving his goal and completing the edifice he is constructing? [...]
[...] man is a flighty, deplorable creature, and, like a chess player, he may be fond only of the process of achieving the goal, rather than of the goal itself. [...] perhaps the only goal toward which mankind is striving on earth consists of nothing but the continuity of the process of achieving--in other words, of life itself, and not the goal proper [...]
[...] he sails across oceans, he sacrifices his life in this quest, but, I would swear, he's somehow afraid of really finding, discovering it. For he feels that, as soon as he finds it, there will be nothing to search for. [...] He is fond of striving toward achievement, but not so very fond of the achieveent itself [...]
Another thing tormented me in those days: the fact that no one else was like me, and I was like no one else. I am alone, I thought, and they are everybody. And I worried about it.
young CF influenced by this book?
[...] Either a hero, or mud; there was no middle. Indeed, this is what ruined me, because, mired down in filth, I would console myself with the thought that at other times I was a hero, and the hero redeemed the filth. As if to say: it would be shameful for an ordinary man to get mired down, but a hero is too sublime to be completely defiled, hence he could wallow in filth.