“The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia.”

 

Read Richard Dawkins' book "Unweaving the Rainbow" online at www.archive.org

 

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?" (click here)

 

 

I am trying to pique your appetite for wonder with these words written by the visionary and often controversial (which is the social fate of every visionary) British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. Hate him or love him, he's got a strong point of view and is not afraid to voice it.

 

 

It's not an easy read but nothing important ever is. Try and stay with it for the first dozen pages. If you're not totally hooked by then, you can always go back to your favourite comic book. WOW! OH! ... BAM!

 

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My family tree is more like a bonzai

 

My parents in Berlin in 1948

 

I blame two wars - the World War from 1939 to 1945, and the domestic family war which led to my parents' divorce in 1952 - for not having much of a family tree; in fact, the only "branch" there ever was and which I climbed were my grandfather's knees shortly before he died in the early 50s.

 

Moi in der Augustastraße in Berlin in 1948

 

I was a less-than-welcome "Peter-come-lately", born at the end of the war - after my "big brother" (1932), and three sisters (1934, 1940, and 1942) - in what was then the Russian-occupied "Ostzone" which in 1949 became the "German Democratic Republic". We had already escaped the "Workers' Paradise" the year before, during the Berlin Blockade, and joined the long queue of destitute refugees in West Germany waiting for anything, including housing. Back in the East, my father had been a "Volkswirt" (economist) with his own large entry in the telephone book; in the West we didn't even have a house, let alone a telephone.

 

 

For the first two years we lived "on the edge" in an unheated metal shack without toilet, kitchen, electricity, or running water, literally on the edge of town, that town being Braunschweig in the more benignly British-occupied Lower Saxony from where I eventually emigrated.

That was still fifteen years away. In the meantime, it was an ongoing battle for adequate housing, enough food, and warm clothing. Nothing like today's claimed "poverty" sitting in front of a flatscreen television; that was real hunger and cold nights and shoes with cardboard soles.

 

My first day at school in 1952

 

If this photo is anything to go by, things must've got a bit better by the time I entered school in 1952. Not that schooling ever interfered with my education: all I ever did were the compulsorary eight years of "Volksschule" (primary school), after which even the few Deutschmarks I earnt as an articled clerk helped to keep our bodies and souls together.

 

"Mein erster Schulgang" - My first day at school / Wouldn't it be fascinating to
know what happened to those forty-one eager faces in the past seventy years?

 

Ask me about geometree, symmetree, and treegonometree, but not about my family tree which is more like a bonzai which is like Chinese foot-binding except it's applied to a tree. Like foot-binding, my family tree kept me hobbling along for nineteen years until I hit my stride in my adopted new home Australia.

 

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Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be Will Be)

 

 

Uncertainty is a universal human predicament: 'the future’s not ours to see', as this song, popular in the 1950s, put it. In Germany, a whole generation grew up with the refrain in their ears - in German, of course: ""Was kann schöner sein / Viel schöner als Ruhm und Geld? / Für mich gibt's auf dieser Welt / Doch nur dich allein! / Was kann schöner sein?"

 

 

And what could've been more uncertain than growing up in post-war Germany? Perhaps that's why this song was so popular: it reflected resignation, acceptance, sometimes even optimism about the future; in any case, its fatalism made light of the dark situation we all were in.

Even after the more existential worries have been taking care of - food, a roof over our head, a job, etc. - we still worry. I certainly did as no period of my life was ever totally free of dread-filled apprehensions.

What we seldom ever get around to doing – once the dreaded event is past – is to pause and compare the scale of the worry with what actually happened in the end. We are too taken up with the next topic of alarm ever to return for a "worry audit". If we did, a strange realisation would dawn on us: that our worries are nearly always completely – and deeply – out of line with reality. Extended out across a year, such a "worry audit" would, I am sure, yield similar conclusions. Perhaps the world is not – for all its dangers – as awful as we presume. Perhaps most of the drama is ultimately unfolding only in our own minds.

Looking back over a lifetime of worrying about the future, it helps to remember Mark Twain’s famous dictum: ‘I have lived through many disasters; only a few of which actually happened’. "Que Sera, Sera."

 

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How many times can one watch 'Casablanca'?

 

 

Retirement would be a lot harder, were it not for ABC Radio National, my large collection of books, and my equally large collection of movies, but how many times can one watch even as good a film as 'Casablanca'?

Radio National gets me through the night when sleep won't come, and my growing number of unread books give me something to look forward to, while those timeless movies of yesteryears are a welcome relief from TV's tedious cooking shows and home renovation programs (not to mention 'Midsomer Murders' with its endless supply of dead bodies).

It's the beginning of another beautiful day in retirement and I might watch 'Casablanca" for just one more time.

 

 

Brian Herde, you've been one of a kind!

 

 

We worked together on the Bougainville Copper Project. Then we met again in mid-1974 in Port Moresby where I worked as internal auditor with AIR NIUGINI and he as accountant for Tutt Bryants. Then he visited me in Lae just before I flew out to Burma, and we spent Christmas 1975 at my friend's place in Wewak on my return.

Coming back from Iran and taking another job in Moresby in 1976, I spent many weekends with him, and when I left for another job on Thursday Island, he visited me there in 1977. Later that year I relocated to Honiara and he came to visit me there for Christmas. The following year, 1978, I took a posting in Penang in Malaysia and he invited himself there, too, for what was from memory a four-week-long holiday. Then I took a break from being his constant host, during which time I briefly met up with him again in Adelaide on one of my frequent business trips from Saudi Arabia, until my transfer to Piraeus in Greece in 1983, when he wrote to asked if I had a job for him there. I flew him out at company expense, put him up in a hotel in Piraeus, and paid him US$3,000 a month, and he set to work for me for three months.

That was Brian Herde: always good company, in exchange for which he demanded nothing more than full free board and lodging. After his last uninvited visit to my home in Canberra in 1992 - or was it 1993? - we lost contact and our twenty-five-year-long friendship had seemingly come to an end. During all this time we had never discussed financial matters other than those pertaining to our work, but you can't be a good friend with someone for all that time without having at least some inkling of his financial position, and my inkling of his financial position was what in the vernacular is best described as being "filthy rich!"

 

Searching the Ryerson Index shows that the official death notice was published
in the Advertiser newspaper in Adelaide, which is where Brian grew up.

 

Which made it all the sadder when around this time last year I found on the internet this death notice. He had died just two years past his retirement age without ever enjoying all that accumulated wealth!

Still, wanting to know how he had met his untimely death, I wrote to Townsville Hospital. They asked me to pay a non-refundable $57.65 search fee — there was a time when fees were charged in round figures; now it's $49.95 or $57.65 as though someone had calculated with the help of some highly complicated formula the exact cost of the service — even though they couldn't guarantee that they would find anything.

 

 

All his free board-and-lodgings over twenty-five years had cost me plenty, so perhaps another fifty-seven dollars wouldn't have mattered, but then I thought, "Let dead friends lie", and just had a toast to his memory. As I will again today. Brian Herde, you've been one of a kind!

 

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