The Book of Disquiet

 

 

The Portuguese have a famous, untranslatable word called saudade, which is often translated as "nostalgia", specifically a melancholic and longing nostalgia, although it seems this scarcely suffices to explain this deep and complex emotion.

I briefly mentioned saudade in a previous post - click here - and I bring it up again not to test your memory (after all, there aren't too many times you'd get a chance to use it, are there?) but because Fernando Pessoa's book "The Book of Disquiet" is absolutely saturated with this saudade. I quote, almost at random, "Everything wearies me, even those things that don’t. My joy is as painful as my grief". Or consider the beautiful dictum, "I dream because I dream".

 

 

It's not an easy or even a pleasant read. I dip in and out of it because I have trouble sleeping - although I comfort myself with Elke Heidenreich saying that it's an "old-age-thing" - and because there's no-one who's written more passionately or more perceptively about the existential dimension of sleep than Fernando Pessoa in "The Book of Disquiet".

 

"The clock in the back of the deserted house (everyone’s sleeping) slowly lets the clear quadruple sound of four o’clock in the morning fall. I still haven’t fallen asleep, and I don’t expect to. There’s nothing on my mind to keep me from sleeping and no physical pain to prevent me from relaxing, but the dull silence of my strange body just lies there in the darkness, made even more desolate by the feeble moonlight of the street lamps. I’m so sleepy I can’t even think, so sleepless I can’t feel. Everything around me is the naked, abstract universe, consisting of nocturnal negations. Divided between tired and restless, I succeed in touching — with the awareness of my body — a metaphysical knowledge of the mystery of things."

[…]

"When asleep we all become children again. Perhaps because in the state of slumber we can do no wrong and are unconscious of life, the greatest criminal and the most self-absorbed egotist are holy, by a natural magic, as long as they’re sleeping."

[…]

"All life is a dream. No one knows what he’s doing, no one knows what he wants, no one knows what he knows. We sleep our lives, eternal children of Destiny. That’s why, whenever this sensation rules my thoughts, I feel an enormous tenderness that encompasses the whole of childish humanity, the whole of sleeping society, everyone, everything."

 

I don't expect you to read the book. I don't even expect to finish reading it myself, but at two dollars from my favourite op-shop it seemed like an interesting addition to my library of unread books.

 

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Is 42 really the answer to everything?

 

 

Remember the number 42 which is, in "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams, the "Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything", calculated by an enormous supercomputer named Deep Thought over a period of 7.5 million years?

Unlike that particular answer to which no-one knew the question, my question of how to keep in touch with all those people I wanted to keep in touch with when I constantly kept changing places - listening to the Queen's New Year's Eve Message on the beach in New Guinea and on New Year's Day floating in a five-star hotel pool in Manama in Bahrain, or leaving Apia in Samoa on a Friday afternoon, overnighting on the island of Nauru, and starting work in Penang in Malaysia the following Monday - was to keep a permanent postal address at Box 42 at Duffy A.C.T. 2611.

 

A permanent address, even if it is only a post box number, is handy. For one thing, you don't want the taxman come looking for you all over the world, do you?

Here is my prompt reply - heavily redacted but not because it was part of the Epstein files. Anyway, I had already learned that the best way to answer a question from the Tax Office was to do my own "Please explain" even before Pauline Hanson had entered Australian politics. Of course, what they were trying to do was to categorise me as an Australian "resident" and tax me on all the income I was earning overseas. They didn't succeed!

 

That number was on the last and largest of forty-two postal boxes at a small suburban post office agency run by a Pom, Steve Dow, who once a week would squeeze all the letters received into my box into a large jiffy bag and mail it off to wherever was my very latest place of abode.

 

 

I regularly reimbursed him for the cost of the postage and jiffy bags, and also regularly sent him pretty postcards which he stuck to the wall, making the place look more like a travel agency than a post office.

Many years later, during an inspection by the postal authorities, he was told to dismantle the display, and many, many more years later - but not before I had permanently returned to Australia - the whole post office was dismantled, no doubt because the lack of my mail made the running of this tiny post office agency uneconomical. However, for almost two decades, Box 42 had provided me with an answer to almost everything.

 

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P.S. I just returned after a long and deep sleep in my favourite place, "Melbourne", ahem, "Bonniedoon". Just another afternoon in Paradise!

 

How to get more out of your 650,000 hours

 

 

Even a long human life adds up to only about 650,000 hours. And when that modest milestone flashes past, or at some other point thereabouts, for reasons unknown your atoms will shut you down, silently disassemble, and go off to be other things. And that's it for you."

Ever since I read this in the "Introduction" to Bill Bryson's book "A Short History of Nearly Everything", I have been determined to squeeze as much out of and into those 650,000 hours even though (as I quickly calculated without touching my electronic calculator; I still remember and use almost daily those "Rechenvorteile" drilled into me by my then primary school mathematics teacher more than sixty-five years ago) I have already outlived those 650,000 hours by well over five years.

Anyway, that's my excuse for all those sleepless nights which I spent listening to the radio or audiobooks, the latest of which has been "A Short History of Nearly Everything", and of which I was going to write this morning's post. That was before I found, quite accidentally while searching YouTube, this audiobook of "A Little History of the World" by Ernst Gombrich, which chronicles human development from the inventions of cavemen to the results of the First World War.

 

Read the book online here

 

Its original title in German, "Eine kurze Weltgeschichte für junge Leser", sums up well Gombrich's goal, "I would like to emphasize that this book isn't thought of and wasn't ever thought of as a replacement for history books used in schools, which serve an entirely different purpose. I would like for my readers to relax and to follow history without having to take notes of names and dates. I promise too, that I won't ask you for them." It's the most magical definition of history I have ever heard!

I will get back to you with "A Short History of Nearly Everything" at some other time. Today I want you to spend the next nine out of those 650,000 hours on listening to this "once upon a time" audiobook.

 

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Thamer, you'd feel at home in my workshop!

 

 

Until I returned to Australia in 1985, I had never held a hammer in my hand. This continued for several years until I bought "Riverbend" in 1993 when the constant need for repairs and maintenance made me buy my first hammer, and then another one, and then more and more tools, until I had a workshop full of them.

Not that I have used many of them which means that many have slowly rusted away. Today was as good a day as any to take stock of the whole situation and to sort out what's still usable and what is not, and I spent all afternoon inside the workshop to create some order out of chaos.

 

 

This was a one-man's job, and I had to point to my "ABSOLUTELY NO NAGGIN" sign whenever Padma wanted to give me unwanted advice.

 

 

As much as I would've liked to talk, this was not the time for it, as there was already much to reflect on and to remember, as I looked at the old car signage with which I driven around Canberra for over ten years.

 

 

There were the indestructible plastic sandals from my days on Thursday Island which I found in a dark corner. It seems so long ago and so far away as if it had never happened at all. Are you reading this, Hubert?

 

 

And there, sitting on a shelf that wanted to remind me of life's brevity and next to a mouse trap, was a 'chinlone', a Burmese caneball, which I had often played with my staff in Rangoon more than fifty years ago.

 

 

Looking at the clock, I realised it was five o'clock somewhere and perhaps time to hurry things along and bring things to an end.

 

 

Time for one last look at the "I love Jeddah" and "I love Saudia" sign ...

 

 

... before closing up for the day.

 

 

Thamer, I think you'd feel quite at home in my workshop!

 

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Sunday too far away

 

 

In this Australian classic, Jack Thompson is Foley, the best shearer on every station for miles around. "Sunday Too Far Away" is Foley's story of sweat-soaked days and rum-soaked nights, of bloody two-fisted punch ups ... of scab labour brought in during the shearers strike of '56 and of the poor old bastard who runs the place: the cocky (farmer) who is terrified that one slip of the shears will render his prize ram good for nothing but mint sauce.

 

 

The full-length movie is not available on YouTube. Buy it on ebay. It's worth every cent and the “rissole” story put me off rissoles for life!

 

 

Anyway, today being Saturday and Sunday not far away, this may be a good time to watch it again.

 

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