To be silent the whole day long, see no newspaper, hear no radio, listen to no gossip, be thoroughly and completely lazy, thoroughly and completely indifferent to the fate of the world is the finest medicine a man can give himself."
Padma has gone shopping which gave me an excuse to go to my little retreat at the bottom of "Riverbend". Just me, surrounded by some of my books and some of my keepsakes, and total silence on the inside and out, which is when the above quote entered my head. Where had I read it before? Of course, it was by Henry Miller, but in which of his books?
The question gnawed at me. Decades of forensic accounting when I had left no stone unturned, and years with management consulting firms who demanded that I would back up everything I wrote with footnotes to its source had left their mark on me, and so I went back to my library near the house to run through my Henry Miller books. No, not "Tropic of Cancer"; no, not "Tropic of Capricorn"; yes, of course, it had to be his book "The Colossus of Maroussi", which he had written after visiting the British writer Lawrence Durrell on Corfu Island in Greece in 1939. No wonder, it had stayed in my memory. And there it was on page 45:
Did I stop at page 45? Of course not! "The Colossus of Maroussi" is a beautiful Greek travelogue. As he wrote, "The light of Greece opened my eyes, penetrated my pores, expanded my whole being". In it, Miller travels to Athens, Crete, Corfu, Poros, Hydra and Delphi. As he describes these places, he also portrays Greek writer George Katsimbalis (the "Colossus" of the book's title), and Lawrence Durrell, and Durrell's first wife Nancy, as well as Theodore Stephanides, the Greek-British doctor and polymath who was Lawrence Durrell's brother's friend and mentor.
Even though I hungered for more silence and for more of Henry Miller, what drove me back to the house in late afternoon was Padma's promise to bring back a roast chicken — not that KFC-[expletive deleted] but a real roast chicken from the rotisserie at Woolies, with a bit of coleslaw on the side. (Did you know that 'coleslaw' comes from the Dutch phrase "koolsla," which is "cabbage salad" [kool = cabbage, sla = salad]? When Dutch settlers brought this dish to America in the 17th century, "koolsla" became "coleslaw" or "cole slaw". You didn't know that? I thought so!)
Having filled the hole in my stomach and the hole in your education, I searched YouTube for anything on Henry Miller's famous quote and found this video clip. Of course, the smartphones and algorithms, of which he speaks, did not exist in his time. This is all AI-stuff, but cleverly done.
I almost wrote 'KI' - Künstliche Intelligenz - because that's what Germans call artificial intelligence which surprises me. They've been throwing out perfectly good German words by the DUDEN¹-load and replaced them with English words, and yet here they 'Germanise' an essentially English initialism². It reminds me of the French who insist on calling a computer an 'ordinateur' — but, of course, you already knew that, didn't you?
The DUDEN¹ is a dictionary of the Standard High German language, first published by Konrad Duden in 1880 (which makes this an eponym).
An initialism² is not an acronym. Acronyms are pronounced as words (e.g., NATO), whereas initialisms spell out each letter (e.g., FBI).
If you want to know why I tell you all this, listen to ABC Radio National's Sunday Extra's "On pedantry *or being pedantic", as I did last Sunday.
