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Forget about Shakespeare; forget about Steinbeck; I have my very own winter of discontent. And I have it every year around this time when I look out the window and ask myself, "What am I doing here?"
I still remember my late friend Noel Butler who, after a lifetime spent in New Guinea, struggled to make himself at home again in Australia, first at Caboolture, then at Mt Perry, and finally at Childers. He never quite succeeded since, as he put it, "my spiritual home will always be New Guinea".
Where is my spiritual home after half a lifetime in more than a dozen different countries? "Über den Himmel Wolken ziehen, über die Felder geht der Wind, ... Irgendwo über den Bergen muss meine ferne Heimat sein." Hermann Hesse
Last Friday, BHP powered from the previous day's close of $60.80 to an intraday high of $63.21 to close at $62.93. It followed it up with a jump to $65.18 on Monday and $65.59 on Wednesday (with an intraday high of $$65.98!)
Only yesterday, it was still flirting with a high of $65.66 before closing at $65.04, which seemed like nothing more than a temporary stall, but then came this morning's news that the costs of its Jansen potash project had blown out to at least US$6.9 billion, which is 42% above the original US$4.9 billion estimate, and it got SMASHED! In its biggest single-session loss since April 2025 it dropped from $65.04 to $61.40!
The market giveth, and the market taketh away! I am back to where I was last Thursday! My diary entry reads: SELL BHP WHEN BACK AT $66!
Could you ever image "Casablanca" or "The Third Man" in anything but black-and-white? I love watching black-and-white movies, despite the fact that they often put actors' lives in danger during driving scenes, as they aren't able to tell if the traffic light is red or green.
No such danger in the medieval allegory "The Seventh Seal" which is set in fourteenth-century Sweden during the time of the Black Death, long before motor cars and traffic lights, and tells of the journey of Antonius, a medieval knight, who challenges Death to a game of chess, with his life as the prize. It is one of the greatest movies of all time which established Ingmar Bergman as a world-renowned director.
A regular movie-goer watching this movie may pick up on a few things: the terror, the suspense, the artful composition of the shots. A chess player, though - and that includes me - sees only one thing: that the chess board that decides Antonius’s fate is set up totally backwards.
Here is a correctly set up chess board ...
... .. and here is the (still) correctly set up board early in the movie:
But then things begin to go wrong. You see, when you set up the board, you're supposed to orient it so that the square nearest to each player's right side is light-coloured - the mnemonic "right is light" might help.
The next rule: when you array the pieces, the white queen always goes on the white square, and the black queen always on the black square.
So what do you see halfway through the movie? A black square nearest to each player's right side which changes the game completely!
It also positions the queen on the wrong side of each player's king at the start of the game (always provided the white-queen-on-white-square and black-queen-on-black-square rule is still correctly followed)
To think that Antonius may have lost his life due to an incorrectly set up chessboard ...
Okay, so the reader is no Leonard Teale whose resonant baritone voice was known to my generation from the long-running police drama "Homicide", but this video clip about literature is a huge intellectual effort. [Buy the transcript]
By the end of this video, you will know all the great works of literature, literary movements, as well as some of the most literary minds from around the world. The video has 3 major parts and 11 sections.
Part 1 gives the answer the most fundamental question. Why are humans the only species who tells stories? What functions do stories have in our evolution? It also highlight some important events in history that shaped the way we tell stories, and the literary movements of the last 4,000 years.
Part 2 deals with the origin of storytelling and how it is rooted in nature. The most fundamental event in a human life is death or the awareness of it. So this part discusses storytelling in four segments each on the topic of death, wars, sex and laughter. In other words, humans woke up to the realisation of death, so the first stories are stories of mortality and immortality. Then we humans moved to wars and wrote epics that lamented the demise of an empire or celebrated their triumphs. Since the victors got the spoils and we moved to tell stories of sex and mating, romance became an important topic of storytelling. In other words, how boys meet girls. With sex came laughter, so storytelling entertained us through comedy.
Part 3 moves away from nature-inflicted tales towards human-centred stories, as in when storytelling meets rationality and humanism. So instead of gods and nature, we humans became in charge of our own destiny. The age of reason also resulted in a counter-enlightenment movement of romanticism which took us back to nature. Then came realism, in which ordinary people became the heroes of stories, not some king or general. Then we moved to naturalism in which evolutionary biology became the window through which stories are told. This was followed by modernism in which we told stories through psychology. And finally magical realism which took us back to the early humans when gods and demons interfered with our stories.
Part 4 again moves away from humanism into what's termed as post-humanism. Here the whole idea of truth telling is questioned. If humanism tried to clarify and solidify things that humans are the only gods on earth, posthumanism, and postmodernism partly fuelled by quantum physics, muddied the water so we no longer know what's going on, despite our scientific and technological advancement, or in some cases because of that.
In this course, the real hero is literature or storytelling itself. Human mortality gave birth to storytelling. Conflicts gave it its fuel and energy. Sex added flavour. Laughter made it reflective. Then came reason to dominate storytelling, through physical reality, biological truths, psychological depth, and finally quantum magical thinking. And today literature seems a bit muddled as it has questioned truth-telling. You could say literature is suffering from old-age Alzheimer. So the question is can literature and storytelling survive robots?
The elderly manager of the ANZ Bank where I worked, Mr Tillett, did all his own typing, sometimes with devastating results. At one time he dyslexically started a letter to a customer with "Dear Madman" instead of "Dear Madam".
After I had come back from South Africa, I rejoined the bank in early 1969, only to leave again for New Guinea at the end of the same year. Mr Tillett gave me a short reference which he dated "1979" instead of "1970". I have often wondered how my life would've panned out had I stayed with the Bank for nine long years instead of nine short months.
It would've been so easy to stay for nine years because the work was undemanding and the surroundings pleasant. Then, after the first nine years, staying another nine years, and then another, would've become almost inevitable. After all, what else would I've been capable of doing, other than to turn up on time, execute some clearly defined functions, and repeat them the next day, and the next, ad infinitum?
Yours truly outside the ANZ Bank Kingston A.C.T. in 1969
Instead, I left my comfort zone to learn and grow and never allowed myself to get comfortable again. By the time I reached Mr Tillett's typographically erroneous date of 1979, I had already moved on through another dozen-plus jobs in a dozen-plus countries, and I kept on searching for new challenges and opportunities right until the end.
Who was better off? That other me who could've gone through life on auto-pilot, routinely receiving small but regular salary increases whether merited or not, routinely drinking with the boys on a Friday night, and routinely watching the footie on a Sunday, before routinely returning to work on the dreaded Monday morning, or the real me who lived on the edge, went from bust to boom and back again, and never quite knew where he was going to be and what he was going to be?
I think there's a time for everything and the time to take risks and test myself was when both my body and mind were still willing and able, and to switch on the auto-pilot only after my body had begun to long for some rest and in my mind I was already typing "Dear Madman ..."
In an age that demands instant gratification, emails have replaced letters, and more is the pity. In letters we used to go into depths; now we skim the surface of things in order to finish and move on quickly.
If we want to include details, we attach a picture or even a video. We communicate by email and replies to questions are generally brief. Compared to letters, emails are little more than an exchange of notes.
For the most part, letter writing has fallen by the wayside, and with it grammar: no more capitalisation of words - you know, those capital letters that make all the difference between helping your Uncle Jack off a horse and helping your uncle jack off a horse - and no more punctuation either which turns everyone into a psycho - e.g. "I like cooking my family and my pets" - or may cost you $13 million, see here.
Letter writing is an art which takes time. You sit down with a blank sheet of paper and pour out your thoughts. There is a sense of gravitas to it, a deliberate act of communicating with someone else whom you can almost image to be talking to as you write. You choose not just your words deliberately, but also your writing-paper, even your writing tool. I still treasure my Montblanc fountain pen - remember fountain pens? there was a time when a man was judged by the fountain pen he kept - with which I carried on many years of correspondence with some of the most important persons in my life.
Unfortunately, I didn't keep their letters. I always thought there would be more but there are only emails - and who wants to keep an email?
Daniel Greenfield is an investigative journalist. Here's something to whet your appetite:
"Forget the Syrian Civil War for a moment. Even without the Sunnis and Shiites competing to give each other machete haircuts every sunny morning, there would still be a permanent Muslim refugee crisis.
The vast majority of civil wars over the last ten years have taken place in Muslim countries. Muslim countries are also some of the poorest in the world. And Muslim countries also have high birth rates.
Combine violence and poverty with a population boom and you get a permanent migration crisis.
No matter what happens in Syria or Libya next year, that permanent migration crisis isn’t going away.
The Muslim world is expanding unsustainably. In the Middle East and Asia, Muslims tend to underperform their non-Muslim neighbors both educationally and economically. Oil is the only asset that gave Muslims any advantage and in the age of fracking, its value is a lot shakier than it used to be.
The Muslim world had lost its old role as the intermediary between Asia and the West. And it has no economic function in the new world except to blackmail it by spreading violence and instability.
Muslim countries with lower literacy rates, especially for women, are never going to be economic winners at any trade that doesn’t come gushing out of the ground. Nor will unstable dictatorships ever be able to provide social mobility or access to the good life. At best they’ll hand out subsidies for bread.
The Muslim world has no prospects for getting any better. The Arab Spring was a Western delusion.
Growing populations divided along tribal and religious lines are competing for a limited amount of land, power and wealth. Countries without a future are set to double in size.
There are only two solutions; war or migration.
Either you fight and take what you want at home. Or you go abroad and take what you want there.
Let’s assume that the Iraq War had never happened. How would a religiously and ethnically divided Iraq have managed its growth from 13 million in the eighties to 30 million around the Iraq War to 76 million in 2050?
The answer is a bloody civil war followed by genocide, ethnic cleansing and migration.
What’s happening now would have happened anyway. It was already happening under Saddam Hussein.
Baghdad has one of the highest population densities in the world. And it has no future. The same is true across the region. The only real economic plan anyone here has is to get money from the West.
Plan A for getting money out of the West is creating a crisis that will force it to intervene. That can mean anything from starting a war to aiding terrorists that threaten the West. Muslim countries keep shooting themselves in the foot so that Westerners will rush over to kiss the booboo and make it better.
Plan B is to move to Europe.
And Plan B is a great plan. It’s the only real economic plan that works. At least until the West runs out of native and naïve Westerners who foot the bill for all the migrants, refugees and outright settlers.
For thousands of dollars, a Middle Eastern Muslim can pay to be smuggled into Europe. It’s a small investment with a big payoff. Even the lowest tier welfare benefits in Sweden are higher than the average salary in a typical Muslim migrant nation. And Muslim migrants are extremely attuned to the payoffs. It’s why they clamor to go to Germany or Sweden, not Greece or Slovakia. And it’s why they insist on big cities with an existing Muslim social welfare infrastructure, not some rural village.
A Muslim migrant is an investment for an entire extended family. Once the young men get their papers, family reunification begins. That doesn’t just mean every extended family member showing up and demanding their benefits. It also means that the family members will be selling access to Europe to anyone who can afford it. Don’t hike or raft your way to Europe. Mohammed or Ahmed will claim that you’re a family member. Or temporarily marry you so you can bring your whole extended family along.
Mohammed gets paid. So does Mo’s extended family which brokers these transactions. Human trafficking doesn’t just involve rafts. It’s about having the right family connections.
And all that is just the tip of a very big business iceberg.
Where do Muslim migrants come up with a smuggling fee that amounts to several years of salary for an average worker? Some come from wealthy families. Others are sponsored by crime networks and family groups that are out to move everything from drugs to weapons to large numbers of people into Europe.
Large loans will be repaid as the new migrants begin sending their new welfare benefits back home. Many will be officially unemployed even while unofficially making money through everything from slave labor to organized crime. European authorities will blame their failure to participate in the job market on racism rather than acknowledging that they exist within the confines of an alternate economy.
It’s not only individuals or families who can pursue Plan B. Turkey wants to join the European Union. It’s one solution for an Islamist populist economy built on piles of debt. The EU has a choice between dealing with the stream of migrants from Turkey moving to Europe. Or all of Turkey moving into Europe.
The West didn’t create this problem. Its interventions, however misguided, attempted to manage it.
Islamic violence is not a response to Western colonialism. Not only does it predate it, but as many foreign policy experts are so fond of pointing out, its greatest number of casualties are Muslims. The West did not create Muslim dysfunction. And it is not responsible for it. Instead the dysfunction of the Muslim world keeps dragging the West in. Every Western attempt to ameliorate it, from humanitarian aid to peacekeeping operations, only opens up the West to take the blame for Islamic dysfunction.
The permanent refugee crisis is a structural problem caused by the conditions of the Muslim world.
The West can’t solve the crisis at its source. Only Muslims can do that. And there are no easy answers. But the West can and should avoid being dragged down into the black hole of Muslim dysfunction.
Even Germany’s Merkel learned that the number of refugees is not a finite quantity that can be relieved with a charitable gesture. It’s the same escalating number of people that will show up if you start throwing bags of money out of an open window. And it’s a number that no country can absorb.
Muslim civil wars will continue even if the West never intervenes in them because their part of the world is fundamentally unstable. These conflicts will lead to the displacement of millions of people. But even without violence, economic opportunism alone will drive millions to the West. And those millions carry with them the dysfunction of their culture that will make them a burden and a threat.
If Muslims can’t reconcile their conflicts at home, what makes us think that they will reconcile them in Europe? Instead of resolving their problems through migration, they only export them to new shores. The same outbursts of Islamic violence, xenophobia, economic malaise and unsustainable growth follow them across seas and oceans, across continents and countries. Distance is no answer. Travel is no cure.
Solving Syria will solve nothing. The Muslim world is full of fault lines. It’s growing and it’s running out of room to grow. We can’t save Muslims from themselves. We can only save ourselves from their violence.
The permanent Muslim refugee crisis will never stop being our crisis unless we close the door."
The dictation text as read out to me from a newspaper cutting of the day
On the 17th of May 1971 I sat for a dictation test before the Justice of the Peace in Kieta on the island of Bougainville. The successful completion of this test was one of the many requirements before being granted Australian citizenship.
Dictation Test for Naturalization; Applicant Manfred P Goerman; Date May 17, 1971
I am led to believe that this is no longer a requirement. Indeed, your eligibility may even increase if you are totally illiterate, not just in English but even in your own native language, and if you hail from a country so benighted that your chances of ever becoming a productive member of our modern society are less than zero.
And so, instead of providing you with an adequate standard of living in your own country through our foreign aid program, we will be happy to empty on you a cornucopia of all the wonders of modern living which are even beyond the means of many of our own citizens.
And should your lifelong dependency on our welfare state compel you to rape and pillage, there are numerous government-funded agencies to guide you through your various traumas and persecution complexes.
Even if your anti-social and indeed criminal behaviour continues and the Immigration Department decides to deport you, we will pay your legal fees to fight us all the way to the High Court until the end of your days.
If you hire some clever lawyers with whom to share the booty, you may even be able to claim a compensation pay-out for wrongful treatment.
How times have changed! It makes growing old easier, knowing that we won't be here to reap the bitter harvest, don't you think?
It's the kind of overcast afternoon which is best spent alone. I made myself a thermos of hot tea, grabbed a box of cookies, and walked the two hundred metres to "Melbourne", to spend the rest of the day in quiet contemplation and some peaceful reading.
Padma is quite happy to binge-watch some action-packed TV drama on iView which is full of "Mord and Todschlag". Funny how they never tell you their movie preferences until after the wedding cake is cut!
"Melbourne" — or "BONNIEDOON"; I even thought of calling it my own "Shangri-La" — is unheated, but even on an overcast day it feels cosy. Remember those kerosene heaters from the 60s? We used to smuggle them into our unheated boarding-house rooms to survive the cold Canberra winters despite their ever-present fire danger and risk of carbon monoxide poisoning. They are still on sale, and I played with the idea of getting one for "Melbourne". For me the danger wouldn't be carbon monoxide poisoning but the possibility that I would be getting so comfortable there that I wouldn't want to go back to the main house.
At $259, it's an inexpensive alternative to voluntary assisted dying - click here
Instead of lighting a kerosene heater, I just light a kerosene lantern. Its gentle flame gives the illusion of warmth while the smell of kerosene takes me back to another time and place when life was much simpler.
"Melbourne" is my own little world and my escape from the world. If I had my time over again — how often have I heard people say that! — I would build myself in a matter of just a few days two or three little "Melbournes": one to live in, another to sleep in, and a third fitted out as a kitchen and bathroom. I would connect all three with a covered walkway, and to hell with living in a conventional house. The nearest I ever came to this was when I befriended a German couple in the 70s who lived a self-sufficient lifestyle just outside Mackay - see here.
I have been dipping in and out of Robert Dessaix's book "(and so forth)", which is as unconventional as its title suggests, but kerosene lamps, as cosy as they are, don't make good reading lights, and I may switch over to ABC Radio National to continue to stimulate my never-idle mind.
The tea is keeping me warm, as is the beanie on my head and the fluffy "Puschen" on my feet. The cooler weather means that the only noise from the river is the occasional splash of a surfacing fish, and with all this peace and quiet around me and the smell of kerosene in my nostrils I feel a bit like Tom Neale. If you have never heard of him, then you must be a newcomer to this blog because I wrote of him and his book "An Island to Oneself" more times than I can remember - click here.
I always keep a copy of his book inside "Melbourne", and so maybe I will read it (again!) after I have finished with Robert Dessaix. Then, with the tea and cookies gone and the kerosene lantern spluttering its last, I shall return, ever so reluctantly, to the main house and the real world.
James Hilton's book "Lost Horizon" was turned into a movie twice - and not very successfully at that; after all, an earthly paradise is best left to one's imagination - however, the radio plays are much better: click here or here or here. So where is that legendary Shangri-La we still yearn for to this day? For a possible answer, click here.
Looking back over my peripatetic working life, I just wished I had been a more widely-read person at that time which would've enabled me to gain a greater insight into the many people I met and the many places I visited.
When I lived in Greece in the early 80s I visited Hydra several times without ever knowing anything about George Johnston who with his wife Charmian Clift lived for some eight years on the island. George Johnston is of course best known for his book "My Brother Jack" and I have read every one of his (and her) many other books since.
When I worked in Port Moresby, one of the old accountants in my office was a Mr Chipps, and the whole office would chortle "Goodbye, Mr. Chips", every time he left the office without my ever realising that they were making a literary reference to James Hilton's famous book.
And of course the same James Hilton wrote "Lost Horizon" in which he gave us the word "Shangri-La". Indeed, the Shangri-La hotel chain bought the rights to his book and placed a copy on every bedside table in place of the usual Gideon Bible. I knew nothing of this when I stayed at various Shangri-La Hotels in Malaysia and Singapore and I had barely heard of Hermann Hesse when I stayed in the suite named after him in the Raffles Hotel in Singapore.
While working in Western Samoa, I visited Pago Pago without ever having read Somerset Maugham's short story "Rain", and I lived and worked in Rangoon before I had ever heard of Rudyard Kipling's "On the Road to Mandalay". Even Saudi Arabia would've held greater fascination for me had I had the time to read Lawrence's "Seven Pillars of Wisdom".
How much richer my travels would've been had I done all that reading earlier but of course as it was, I found just enough time to read the necessary technical literature to allow me to carry out my work. In those hectic days it was an almost unheard-of luxury to find the time to read a novel. Instead, I read 'The Practice of Modern Internal Auditing', 'Petroleum Accounting: Principles, Procedures & Issues' and 'Ship Operations and Management', studied accountancy standards or IATA rule books, improved my laytime calculation skills, compared charter parties and worked my way through case studies in forensic auditing.
To this day I am still fascinated by books about unaccountable accounting or the world's worst maritime frauds. BUT I have also found time to dip into John Donne's "No Man is an Island" and Boethius's "The Consolation of Philosophy", so things are beginning to balance out.
Elon Musk wielded a real-life chainsaw on stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in February 2025. The tool was gifted to him by Argentine President Javier Milei, serving as a literal symbol for the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and their campaign to slash federal bureaucracy.
Punters lined up this week for SpaceX IPO at a US$1.75 trillion valuation, priced beyond perfection, making "the chainsaw man" the world's first trillionaire as the shares hit the boards in New York at $US150, well above their $US135 issue price.
To put it all into perspective, if Elon Musk were to spend ONE MILLION DOLLARS EVERY SINGLE DAY, it would still take him roughtly 2,740 YEARS TO SPEND A TRILLION DOLLARS.
Well done, punters, but I stick to the AI trade with the hype stripped out: copper. You see, every data centre, every transformer, every kilometre of new transmission is copper. And supply can't keep up, because new mines take a decade or more to permit and build.
The world’s largest copper miner, BHP, says that roughly 10–15 million tonnes per annum of additional copper is needed over the next decade.
Go on, google "Who is the biggest copper producer?" The answer, "BHP is the world's largest copper-producing company, generating approximately 1.47 million metric tons annually, followed by Codelco (Chile) and Freeport-McMoRan (United States)."
I am sticking with BHP and their demand forecast in the above graph, because here's the thing: a chip stock can shed a tenth of its value overnight; the copper needed to power that chip has no such problem.
Yesterday BHP shares closed at $62.93. In New York they closed at the Australian equivalent of $64.43, promising a good start on Monday.
BHP trades on the New York Stock Exchange as an American Depositary Receipt (ADR). Each ADR represents two ordinary shares of BHP traded on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX). Therefore, US$90.82 converted at 0.70475 and divided by 2 equals AUS$64.43. www.bhp.com
I reckon there won't be any mondayitis for me come Monday morning.
That was the first thought that entered my mind when I received the above email. Or was it spam? After all, why would the Australian Taxation Office adress me with a simple "Hi", when they already know more about me than my wife does, including my full teutonic name "Manfred-Peter"? I checked the sender's email address and it was definitely 'no-reply@ato.gov.au, so what are they trying to tell me?
From the very beginning when, through too much hubris as well as inexperience, I suffered some very heavy losses, I have always bought shares as an investment, even though I could have declared myself a trader and deducted those losses from my other income and enjoyed many tax-free years. Instead, I quarantined those losses in 'Section 18 Capital gains' of my subsequent tax returns, carrying them forward from year to year, until I could apply them against some future capital gains.
That time came in early May when BHP finally lived up to its long-held promise and shot up to almost $60, and I was able to sell the shares, some of which I had bought as long ago as 2023, for a substantial profit.
I was cloistered inside "Melbourne" all day yesterday, using my trusty old 'Made in Germany' ARISTO-SCHOLAR slide rule, with which I had left the "Vaterland" in 1965, for nothing better than drawing up columns on sheets of paper, so as to match up all the buy-and-sell transactions to calculate the capital gains in readiness for next month's tax return.
I usually lodge my own tax return, but seeing how the tax office has taken a sudden interest in me, I shall present all those buy-and-sell contract notes and my own tabulations to the local office of H&R Block for their 'seal of approval'. After having considered myself an investor for over thirty years, I don't want to argue the case that I should not be treated as a trader. At last count, with an average of six transactions a month over the current year, and a total of just ONE transaction for the whole of the year before, I should think I can hardly be called a trader.
Although my focus is on capital growth and long-term dividend income, I am not a totally passive investor. World events - and recent Trumpian excesses - may make me seek safety in cash when I sell down some of my shareholdings, only to buy back in again when I consider it safe.
(Luckily, I did buy back in again after my sell-down in early May, because Trump said - once again! - that a peace deal with Iran was within reach, and BHP went ballistic, closing overnight in New York at the Australian equivalent price of $64.50. Sometimes, being careful will pay off!)
Now it's time I put away the slide rule and take a rest in my favourite chair outside "Melbourne". Thanks to those recently made capital gains, I may even be able buy a can of white paint and give the old chair a new lease of life.
"If you dream big long enough, anything can come true."
Making fun of the Germans has had 'Pub Landlord' comedian Al Murray's audiences laughing in the aisles, but behind the scenes Murray is a serious historian with a fascination for the real Germany.
In the second of a two-part documentary, Al sets out to discover the truth behind the wartime jokes and banter that still plague all things German. In a breathtaking journey through one of Germany's coldest winters, he discovers a country of warm and welcoming people and two centuries of stunning arts and culture.
From Bach to Bauhaus and the Brothers Grimm, Al falls in love with the true historical, natural and cultural beauty of this much-maligned land.
At my age, I always try to read stuff that will make me look good if I should suddenly die in the middle of it - and Sarah Bakewell's book "How To Live" certainly qualifies for it.
How to get on well with people, how to deal with violence, how to adjust to losing someone you love - such questions arise in most people's lives. They are all versions of a bigger question: how do you live? How do you do the good or honourable thing, while flourishing and feeling happy?
This question obsessed Renaissance writers, none more than Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-92), perhaps the first truly modern individual. A nobleman, public official and wine-grower, he wrote free-roaming explorations of his thought and experience, unlike anything written before.
He called them 'essays', meaning 'attempts' or 'tries'. Into them, he put whatever was in his head: his tastes in wine and food, his childhood memories, the way his dog's ears twitched when it was dreaming, as well as the appalling events of the religious civil wars raging around him. The Essays was an instant bestseller, and over four hundred years later, Montaigne's honesty and charm still draw people to him. Readers come to him in search of companionship, wisdom and entertainment - and in search of themselves.
This book, a spirited and singular biography (and the first full life of Montaigne in English for nearly fifty years), relates the story of his life by way of the questions he posed and the answers he explored. It traces his bizarre upbringing (made to speak only Latin), youthful career and sexual adventures, his travels, and his friendships with the scholar and poet Etienne de La Boetie and with his adopted 'daughter', Marie de Gournay. And as we read, we also meet his readers - who for centuries have found in Montaigne an inexhaustible source of answers to the haunting question, 'how to live?'.
Ich wanderte im Jahre 1965 vom (k)alten Deutschland nach Australien aus. In Erinnerung an das alte Sprichwort "Gott hüte mich vor Sturm und Wind und Deutschen die im Ausland sind" wurde ich in 1971 im Dschungel von Neu-Guinea australischer Staatsbürger. Das kostete mich nur einen Umlaut und das zweite n im Nachnamen - von -mann auf -man.
Australien gab mir eine zweite Sprache und eine zweite Chance und es war auch der Anfang und das Ende: nach fünfzig Arbeiten in fünfzehn Ländern - "Die ganze Welt mein Arbeitsfeld" - lebe ich jetzt im Ruhestand in Australien an der schönen Südküste von Neusüdwales.
Ich verbringe meine Tage mit dem Lesen von Büchern, segle mein Boot den Fluss hinunter, beschäftige mich mit Holzarbeit, oder mache Pläne für eine neue Reise.
This blog is written in the version of English that is standard here. So recognise is spelled recognise and not recognize etc. I recognise that some North American readers may find this upsetting, and while I sympathise with them, I sympathise even more with my countrymen who taught me how to spell. However, as an apology, here are a bunch of Zs for you to put where needed.
Zzzzzz
Disclaimer
This blog has no particular axe to grind, apart from that of having no particular axe to grind. It is written by a bloke who was born in Germany at the end of the war (that is, for younger readers, the Second World War, the one the Americans think they won single-handedly). He left for Australia when most Germans had not yet visited any foreign countries, except to invade them. He lived and worked all over the world, and even managed a couple of visits back to the (c)old country whose inhabitants he found very efficient, especially when it came to totting up what he had consumed from the hotels' minibars. In retirement, he lives (again) in Australia, but is yet to grow up anywhere.
He reserves the right to revise his views at any time. He might even indulge in the freedom of contradicting himself. He has done so in the past and will most certainly do so in the future. He is not persuading you or anyone else to believe anything that is reported on or linked to from this site, but encourages you to use all available resources to form your own opinions about important things that affect all our lives and to express them in accordance with Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Everything on this website, including any material that third parties may consider to be their copyright, has been used on the basis of “fair dealing” for the purposes of research and study, and criticism and review. Any party who feels that their copyright has been infringed should contact me with details of the copyright material and proof of their ownership and I will remove it.
And finally, don't bother trying to read between the lines. There are no lines - only snapshots, most out of focus.
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Yours truly outside the ANZ Bank Kingston A.C.T. in 1969
