My view of the world

 

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach" (Henry David Thoreau) - but he still went to his mother's house regularly for his meals and laundry in his Walden years.

 

It wasn't in his "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" but elsewhere that I read that Lawrence of Arabia - who was killed in a motorcycle accident at the age of 46 - was in the habit of riding his motorcycle at an excessive speed with the notion that an accident would end his life while he was still in full possession of his powers and so spare him the indignity of old age.

If this is true it shows a great weakness in that strange but otherwise amazing character, because a complete life includes old age as well as youth and maturity. I seem to have skipped maturity, but I make up for it now by enjoying my old age which has its own pleasures, which, although different, are no less than the pleasures of youth. Reflecting on my past as I sit in peaceful "Melbourne" is one of those pleasures.

 

Everything looks better by the light of a kerosene lamp, even my now ridiculous-looking Lawrence of Arabia headdress

 

For most of my life I was assailled by so many impressions, saw so many things, and met so many people, that I had no time to reflect. The very moment I lived was so absorbent that I had no notion for introspection.

In youth the years stretch out so long that it is hard to imagine they will ever pass. Even in middle age, with ever-increasing life expectancy, death is still something remote. I have never kept a diary, but as friends and acquaintances begin to disappear and I can no longer share those memories with them, I wish I had done so, to better reflect on those busy years now, to see for myself more distinctly what they were really all about, and in so doing get some sort of coherence into my life, because if my life lacked anything, anything at all, it was coherence.

 

ماشاء الله - God has willed it - in which case it's meant to have all made sense, my years in Saudi Arabia, my tme in the Solomon Islands ...

 

Reflecting on my life must seem egotistic but to me I am the most important person in the world despite the fact that, from the standpoint of common sense, my life has been of no consequence whatsoever, and it would have made no difference to the universe if I had never existed.

Not that I anticipate to cease to exist, as they say these days, "anytime soon" (and how I hate this phrase!) I keep posting these reflections the same way as I made my will after which I did not die immediately. That was many years ago, and I did it as a precaution, just as these reflections are meant to make sense of my life, so that I can afford to look the rest of it in the eye without too much concern about the past.

 

 

For far too long I have always lived in the future that now, even though the future is so short, I cannot get rid of the habit. This habit has been so strong that it may even outlive me, but for this short moment I live in the moment and enjoy my view of the world from inside "Melbourne", wishing that this moment may last forever, إن شاء الله .

 

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Ein Freund, ein guter Freund ...

 

 

You have to give it to the Germans for making a whole song-and-dance act out of the word "Freund", perhaps because to them — or at least to the Germans I used to knew — a "Freund" is so much more than a 'friend' is to an English-speaker who'd just as soon use the word 'acquaintance' if it weren't so much harder to spell.

An acquaintance whose neighbour I'd been in Camp 1 at Panguna on the Bougainville Copper Project found me through my Bougainville website, after which we kept writing emails, followed by an unexpected visit.

There was nothing much connecting us other than having worked - albeit in unrelated occupations: he an engineer, and I an accountant - on the same construction project, and having been neighbours in the same construction camp, but then so had thousands of others, and the connection slowly fizzled out. Until today when this email arrived:

"Been doing a lot of travel; early last year in the USA for five weeks, and recently eight weeks in New Zealand, of which four weeks were spent camping. End of the month, train to Bangkok for a week, then back to house maintenance issues which are never-ending. Healthwise pretty good but not getting any younger. Trust all is good with you."

There was a time when I would've envied him his travels, but all I could manage this time was a relieved, "Better you than me", because my travelling days are well and truly behind me. And not because I've become immobile and feeble - which I haven't, not yet, anyway - but because, for the first time in my life, I feel totally at home where I am.

Of course, at my age - particularly at my age - I can always do with another acquaintance, if not indeed a friend, to replenish the thinned-out ranks, and so I replied. Something may come of it, or nothing may come of it, it doesn't matter. That's the other thing about getting old: nothing matters other than watching the next morning's sunrise.

Perhaps I'll greet tomorrow morning's sunrise by singing along with Heinz Rühmann (who, incidentally, was my "Patenonkel" before he became too famous for poor people like us), "Ein Freund, ein guter Freund ..."

 

Sonniger Tag! Wonniger Tag! Klopfendes Herz und der Motor ein Schlag! Lachendes Ziel! Lachender Start und eine herrliche Fahrt! Rom und Madrid nehmen wir mit. So ging das Leben im Taumel zu dritt! Über das Meer, über das Land, haben wir eines erkannt: Ein Freund, ein guter Freund, das ist das beste was es gibt auf der Welt. Ein Freund bleibt immer Freund und wenn die ganze Welt zusammenfällt. Drum sei auch nie betrübt,     wenn dein Schatz dich nicht mehr liebt. Ein Freund, ein guter Freund, dass ist der größte Schatz, den's gibt. Ein Freund, ein wirklicher Freund, das ist doch das Größte und Beste und Schönste,     was es gibt auf der Welt. Ein Freund bleibt immer dir Freund, und wenn auch die ganze die schlechte     die große die schreckliche, alberne Welt vor den Augen zusammen dir fällt. Drum sei auch niemals betrübt,     wenn dein Schatz dich auch nicht mehr liebt. Ein Freund, ein wirklicher Freund, das ist der größte Schatz, den’s gibt.

 

 

I was wrong about the Germans being the only ones to make a sing-and-dance act out of the word "Freund". The French did the same out of the word "bon copain", and they seem to have made a better fist of it than did Heinz Rühmann. As for an English version, there simply isn't one.

 

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When in China ...

 

Found on the internet. Source unknown.

 

Remember Trump pointing to Iceland on a map while threatening Greenland with invasion? I bet not many of those rent-a-crowd people that cause all that trouble with their "Palestinian genocide" marches could even point to the place if a map was put under their snotty nose.

Having been a German I am supposed to be biased against the Jews, but even I cannot help but admire how they made the desert bloom while adjacent Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and - if it is a state - Palestine have remained very much the way they were when Jesus last saw them.

In any case, protests, like charity, should begin at home where we have plenty of things to fix before we waste our time and energy on all the problems in the world, most of which remain unfixable for the same reason pharmaceutical companies don't want to find permanent cures.

I don't know how true it is that China is locking up Muslims and turning their mosques into public toilets, but it occurred to me, a neutral bystander, that religion has a lot to answer for. As has had our religion, Christianity, which, thankfully, went through its Reformation which was started when Martin Luther published his 'Ninety-five Theses' in 1517.

That was fifteen hundred years after it got started, whereas Islam only got started in 610 AD (or, as they insist on calling it, CE) which suggests they'd have their own reformation sometime after the year 2100. It's a long time to wait! Should we wait that long? Can we wait that long?

As for those troublemakers who claim to have been hurt in their scuffles with police, give them the same medical opinion we used to get as kids when we hurt ourselves while doing something stupid; "You'll live!"

Don't blame the police who do a difficult job with people who not only want to provoke but also want to be provoked. Always blaming the police will lead to no-one wanting to do their job anymore, and who would protect our properties and lives then when it really matters?

 

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In my native Germany ...

 

 

I almost started writing this post with the words, "My native Germany ...", however, after more than sixty years of having lived just about everywhere else but Germany — and proudly calling myself an Australian despite this country doing its level best to throw away everything that had once made it the best country in the world and embracing everything that will turn it into one of the worst; think diversity, multiculturalism, the Labor Party, and the list goes on — I am as much a native of Germany as I am of the planet Mars.

Anyway, as I was not going to write, my native Germany is a nation of specialists. It's a place where even qualifications have qualifications. Where you can study for seven years to become a window cleaner. That's fine but it left me, who'd been tossed out on the street after just eight years of primary school, nowhere to go but to Australia where I could reinvent myself and become anything I wanted to become.

I didn't need a vocational guidance counsellor to tell me what I wanted to become. In my native Germany I already had my commercial training with an insurance company and followed this up by being paymaster for a large construction company that built autobahns all over Germany.

Lacking any higher education I would never have been dull enough to become an accountant in my native Germany, but after only two years in Australia I became an accountant in South-West Africa, and then an audit clerk in a firm of chartered accountants in New Guinea and then, also in New Guinea, the senior accountant on what was at the time the biggest construction project in the world. Four years later I was chief accountant for a French oil company in Burma, and years later yet, financial controller for a firm of commodity traders in Saudi Arabia.

 

 

Despite the unbroken column of "sehr gut" — except for religion which already then I thought was irrelevant, and Naturlehre which I knew was irrelevant after the teacher had answered my question "Why do I have a belly button" with an evasive "So your stomach can breathe" — in my native Germany they'd still look at my primary-school-only certificate even today and think, "This chap is only good enough for lion taming".

 

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The Death of Ivan Ilyich

 

 

In his "Abridged Classics: Brief Summaries of Books You Were Supposed to Read but Probably Didn't", John Atkinson summaries Leo Tolstoy's more than a thousand-pages long novel "War and Peace" very succinctly: "Everyone is sad. It snows."

He never attempted to summarise Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilych", perhaps because, at just over fifty pages, it's already short enough, or because its themes of death and the search for the meaning of life are a little more difficult to put into five words.

 

 

Actor and director Alexander Kaidanovsky made the only Russian movie adaptation, which includes Tolstoy's living voice reading his story "Wolf".

But back to "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" which brings to our attention the unpleasant fact that we all have to die, and that we might have to suffer a whole lot first. Our medicines might be better than those of Ivan's doctors, but we haven't got any closer to escaping mortality, and many people still die only after a long and painful period of disease.

Perhaps Ivan Ilych will also get you thinking about what mortality means for you. Like Ivan, you might start wondering how you should live your life, and how you can find meaning in it - click here. It all ends soon enough some fifty pages later: "He drew in a deep breath, broke off in the middle of it, stretched out his limbs, and died."

 

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