Jeder stirbt für sich allein

 

 

Who in Moruya reads Hans Fallada? There it was, a dog-eared copy of "Alone in Berlin", which is the name of Hans Fallada's book "Jeder stirbt für sich allein" in its English edition (or "Every Man Dies Alone" in the USA).

Dog-eared or not, I picked it up to give it a new home at "Riverbend", alongside "Little Man, What Now?" and "Who Once Eats Out of the Tin Bowl". But back to "Alone in Berlin" which is based on the true story of working-class husband and wife Otto and Elise Hampel who, acting alone, became part of the German Resistance. It was one of the first anti-Nazi novels to be published by a German after World War II.

 

 

After I had picked up this dog-eared book, I saw my German GP, who removed the sutures from a biopsy he had done last week. "Better a biopsy than an autopsy", I'd said, and let him have his pond of flesh.

 

 

The results came back with a "nothing to see here", which made me feel relaxed enough to ask him if he had read Hans Fallada. Of course, he had, as he had grown up in Russian-occupied East Germany, the GDR.

 

 

The book was also made into a movie, an English version which I have on DVD and which is available on YouTube only as a trailer, and a much better German version which has been uploaded to YouTube in full.

 

Click here

 

Having limited my book purchases in Moruya to just four - Fallada's book "Alone in Berlin" plus Bernhard Schlink's "Homecoming", Tony Abbott's Australia - A History", and "The Fourth Revolution - The Global Race to Reinvent the State" - I thought I stop over at the Mogo Bookshop. The shop had been closed ever since its original owners, Helen and Patrick, had been forced into early retirement by the onset of dementia.

The new owner is from Cape Town in South Africa, and so we talked about Cape Town, which I loved and where I had almost taken a job after leaving South-West Africa, and about South African writers. Did she have any books by J.M. Cotzee? She did, and so I bought "Summertime".

What a small and wonderful world it is! The Mogo Bookshop is now on my list of places to visit whenever I tear myself away from "Riverbend".

 

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Standing room only

 

 

Another hot day made me spend it in the cool library. All double-brick, high ceilings, and with heavy velvet curtains blocking out the sunlight turns it into a naturally 'air-conditioned' refuge, even though it's standing room only.

As I slowly worked my way through all those books that had piled up on the floor over the last few months, I reflected on how empty life would be if I were unable to read. And then, I don't know how, I was reminded of Evelyn Waugh's short story "The Man Who Liked Dickens", in which, deep in the Amazonian jungle, one man becomes the prisoner of another who has never learnt how to read, and must read to him the entire works of Charles Dickens in daily instalments in perpetuity.

 

A dramatised version of the sbort story

 

Evelyn Waugh later expanded this short story into his book "A Handful of Dust", changing the names of the two protagonists from Mr McMaster and Paul Henty to Mr Todd and Tony Last. The movie of the same name - click here - also includes the story towards the end, starting at 1:35:00.

Read the short story here, or do a Mr McMaster and have it read to you:

 

 

I shall continue to work my way through those books so next time I seek refuge in my 'air-conditioned' library, it won't be standing room only.

 

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As long as we live, they too will live; for they are now a part of us as we remember them.

 

 

A friend knows our difficulties and shadows and remains in sight, a companion to our vulnerabilities more than our triumphs, when we are under the strange illusion we do not need them ..."

"The ultimate touchstone is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self, the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone."

Which is how David Whyte described the word 'Friendship' in his book "Consolations". And what a fitting description it is of my best friend, Noel Butler, who bore witness to my life's many trials and tribulations for almost thirty years, until his untimely death in August 1995.

Basically your friends are not your friends for any particular reason. They are your friends for no particular reason. The job you do, the family you have, the way you vote, the major achievements and blunders of your life, your religious convictions or lack of them, are all somehow set off to one side when the two of you get together.

If you are old friends, you know all those things about each other and a lot more besides, but they are beside the point. Even if you talk about them, they are beside the point. Stripped, humanly speaking, to the bare essentials, you are yourselves the point. The usual distinctions of older-younger, richer-poorer, smarter-dumber, male-female even, cease to matter. You meet with a clean slate every time, and you meet on equal terms. Anything may come of it or nothing may. That doesn't matter either. Only the meeting matters.

Noel Butler was such a friend. We first met aboard the liner PATRIS in 1967 when he was going on a European holiday and I was returning to Germany. The PATRIS had been scheduled to call at Port Moresby in New Guinea but, following the Six-Day War between Egypt and Israel, the Suez Canal closed and the ship was re-routed around the Cape of Good Hope.

However, the many New Guinea expats who had already booked, Noel amongst them, still joined the ship in Sydney. As did Graeme Bell's All Stars Band. And so for the next four weeks I would sit in the ship's Midnight Club and listen to the many yarns of high adventure told by those larger-than-life New Guinea expats while Graeme Bell's All Stars played their ragtime music.

During the day, Noel and I would sit on deck for hours, hunched over a chessboard. Our mutual love of chess and my interest in New Guinea started a friendship which lasted until his death thirty years later!

We kept up a regular correspondence during all those years which Noel spent mostly in Wewak in the Sepik District, before PNG's Independence in 1975 and old age forced him to return to his homestate Queensland.

I had come up to PNG in late 1969 and worked there for several years. During this time I visited Noel on his small country estate outside Wewak and Noel came to spent Christmas 1973 and Christmas 1974 with me. Or at least he tried because by the time he arrived on Bougainville in 1973, I was in Arawa Hospital being prepared for an urgent appendectomy; and when he came to see me in Lae in 1974 I was already packed up and ready to fly out to my next assignment in Burma. Then it was my turn to spend Christmas 1975 at Wewak but I could only stay for a few days as I was already booked to fly out to Tehran in Iran.

Our paths crossed more frequently after I had temporarily come back to Australia in 1979. I visited him several times and observed with some concern his struggle 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, after a lifetime spent in PNG, "my spiritual home will always be New Guinea", a sentiment we shared.

 

 

Some friends are more or less replaceable with other friends. Noel was not. I last heard from him sometime in April 1995. He'd sent me a funny "Childers by Night" postcard which was all black except for those words. On the back he had written, "Hope your outlook on the future is not as black as this; mine is but that's inevitable." I was then far too young and far too busy and far too full of myself to think that this was more than just a funny card. Four months later, Noel was dead.

Again, to quote David Whyte: "... an enduring friendship goes on after death, the exchange only transmuted by absence, the relationship advancing and maturing in a silent internal conversational way ..."

My friendship with Noel has continued for more than thirty years "in a silent internal conversational way". Today is his birthday, which we never celebrated because we never knew each other's birthday. We never allowed our friendship to become too sentimental. We had both been loners for most of our lives and didn't want to be reminded of our non-existent home and family. It's something else we shared.

 

 

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Something to think about over breakfast as you tuck into your avocado on toast!

 

According to the blurb, "Siimon (with two i's) Reynolds is one of Australia's young business success stories. Aged 35, he has already co-owned and built four advertising agencies." At 35 years of age, what could he possibly teach me that I haven't forgotten already?

 

All my life I've been eager to embrace the new day. There had never been any question that I would've wanted to 'sleep in' and miss out on a day's work, but for reasons I would not even want to go into here, I have felt like not wanting to get out of bed these last few mornings.

It's a slippery slope, and to stop me from sliding any further, I decided to take another trip to Ulladulla for lunch at the bowlo and a visit to my favourite op-shop for some more books. "I" decided but in the end it became a "we", and so "we" set off just after breakfast, because if it had been just "I", there would've been no or only burnt dinner tonight.

It was bangers and mash at the bowlo, washed down with a chardie, followed by blueberry cheese cake. If that wasn't enough to make me happy, the above book on offer at my favourite op-shop promised to get me over the line in just eight minutes. To me, happiness is no laughing matter, but, having spent more than eighty YEARS trying to be happy, I didn't think another eight MINUTES would be much help, and so I passed it up for "Lessons in Letting Go". Not that I believe I am a hoarder of bookx, because when it comes to books, it's not hoarding, is it?

 

 

However, the real treasures I discovered were a copy of Bob Carr's book "My Reading Life - Adventures in the World of Books" and "Origin Uncertain". While I found Bob Carr's book in the BIOGRAPHIES section, Anatoly Liberman's "Origin Uncertain" had been well and truly hidden away under "L" amongst all the other usual dross in the FICTION section.

 

 

It's the sort of book I can read all day. As it says on the dust jacket:

"Lost origins of words revealed. We like to recount that goodbye started out as "god be with you," that whiskey comes from the Gaelic for "water of life," or that avocado originated as the Aztec word for "testicle." But there are many words with origins unknown, disputed, or so buried in old journals that they may as well be lost to the general public. In Origin Uncertain: Unraveling the Mysteries of Etymology, eminent etymologist Anatoly Liberman draws on his professional expertise and etymological database to tell the stories of less understood words such as nerd, fake, ain't, hitchhike, trash, curmudgeon, and quiz, as well as puzzling idioms like kick the bucket and pay through the nose. By casting a net so broadly, the book addresses language history, language usage (including grammar), history (both ancient and modern), religion, superstitions, and material culture. Writing in the spirit of adventure through the annals of word origins, Liberman also shows how historical linguists construct etymologies, how to evaluate competing explanations, and how to pursue further research."

Something to think about over breakfast as you tuck into your avocado on toast!

 

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The Rage and the Pride

 

 

Last night, past midnight, my wife found me furtively hunched over my laptop. "What are you looking at?" she asked accusingly, as I quickly turned on the screen saver. "Nothing", I said. "It's not nothing. I saw you looking at a picture."

I was found out. Game over. I clicked the mouse and the picture filled the screen. There she was, in all her glory. Another real beauty, smooth and shiny. "Oh, God", my wife sighed in disgust, then grew silent. I just sat there, my head hung in shame, waiting for her to say something else. Finally, she spoke: "Why can't you look at porn like a normal guy?"

On the screen was a photo of the hardcover "Printed in Italy" edition of Oriana Fallaci's book "The Rage and the Pride", for sale at $28 plus $11.47 postage, on which I had just pushed the   Buy It Now   button.

 

Read the book online at www.archive.org

 

In this book, with her well-known courage, Oriana Fallaci faces the themes unchained by the Islamic terrorism: the contrast and, in her opinion, incompatibility between the Islamic world and the Western world; the global reality of the Jihad and the lack of response, the lenience of the West. With her brutal sincerity she hurls pitiless accusations, vehement invectives, and denounces the uncomfortable truths that all of us know but never dare to express. With her rigorous logic, lucidity of mind, she defends our culture and blames what she calls "our blindness, our deafness, our masochism, the conformism and the arrogance of the Politically Correct". With the poetry of a prophet like a modern Cassandra she says it in the form of a letter addressed to all of us. Published just after 9/11, this book is even more pertinent now than it was twenty-five years ago.

 

For some unkown reason, this embedded video plays in Italian.
Click here for the English narrative

 

What is happening in Europe right now reminds me of the fable about the boiling frog. Do you remember it? It claims that if you drop a frog into boiling water, it will jump out immediately, but if you put it in cool water and slowly heat it up, the frog will not notice the danger and will boil to death. Let me tell you, a live frog will jump out to save itself. Real frogs do not sit still and boil to death; only Europeans do that.

 

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