Another documentary to fall asleep by

 

 

I don't want to even pretend that I've read Marcus Aurelius's "Meditations" from cover to cover. I haven't, but I'm slowly getting there. After all, there's so much in it that's relevant to today.

Here is a man who ran an empire, and his private worries are not unlike my own worries. Reputation. Mortality. What other people think of me. Whether my work matters. Two thousand years later, and the furniture of the human head has barely been rearranged.

Here is a man talking to himself, making the same exhortations over and over again, because he kept failing at them too. I find this comforting. Take Book 3.10, where he writes: "Each of us lives only now, this brief instant. The rest has been lived already, or is impossible to see." Just before it, he tells himself: "Forget everything else. Keep hold of this alone and remember it."

Knowing that the present is all we have, and actually living there, are two completely different skills. The mind has its own gravity, pulling backward and forward, almost never really in the here and now.

I remember the first time I lived and worked in a really foreign country. That was in 1975 when I worked in what was then called Rangoon in what was then called Burma. I still remember the city, the noise on the streets, the food I’d never eaten, a writing I couldn’t read, the people I came to love - and the one person in particular - it turned me into a different person. That year was longer and richer than any other time.

Everything was new, and so everything was noticed and nothing was automatic. The brain can’t autopilot through what it doesn't recognise yet, and so I lived more intensely and more in the present then and at all the other times when I lived and worked in a really foreign country.

I can no longer move to a new country every year, but I can walk along a street I haven't walked along yet or do a thing I have never done before or notice one physical thing deliberately and on purpose, and so pull myself back into the here and now. The point is not to live perfectly in the present but to come back to it whenever you find you're drifting.

Right now it's time for another cup of tea. Switching on the kettle, watching it do its thing. Noticing the morning sunlight coming through the kitchen window, seeing it catch the steam coming off the cup. Feeling the heat of the cup, and the taste of the first mouthful of tea.

It sounds almost too banal to count, and it certainly doesn't stop the wandering mind, but it helps to make us aware that the only thing we actually have, the only ground we can stand on, is this very moment.

 

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The Lottery of Life

 

 

The chances of winning the jackpot in a lottery is about 1 in 14 million. And yet our brain – that faulty walnut through which we assess reality – has the habit of holding out hopes for our personal happiness equivalent to winning the jackpot.

If we could really see what life was like for most people, if we could peer into everyone’s lives and minds, we would know how frequent disappointments are, how many unfulfilled ambitions there are, and how much confusion and uncertainty is being played out in private and how many breakdowns and intemperate arguments unfold every day.

Knowing this can comfort and reassure us and make us a little more forgiving towards ourselves for not having won the Lottery of Life.

 

 

I won the Lottery of Life when the Australian Immigration Officer in Bremen signed off with a flourish on my "Auswanderungsantrag nach Australien mit Fahrtunterstützung" - but that's a story for another day.

 

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It is a dark and stormy night ...

 

YouTube took away the full-length movie, so this trailer will have to do

 

... and I want to be transported back to a time when both the world and I were still young - and decidedly warmer than tonight's "Riverbend".

Greece may still be envisioned by some as old guys in sheets wandering around the Acropolis spouting wisdom before somebody pours hemlock in their ear, but my guess is that they will change their minds after having watched Melina Mercouri do her stuff in "Never on Sunday".

The film is a mix of Pygmalion plus "hooker with a heart of gold", and tells the story of Ilya, a self-employed, free-spirited prostitute who lives in the port of Piraeus in Greece, and Homer, an American tourist and classical scholar who is enamored of all things Greek.

 

Homer Thrace: She killed them. Medea herself, does she not say, “I killed my children”? Ilya: And you believe her? You don’t understand the women. Medea loves her husband, yes? Homer Thrace: Yes. Ilya: Her husband is interested in another woman? Yes? Homer Thrace: Yes. Ilya: So she said to her husband that she has killed her children to frighten him, to get him back. Homer Thrace: No! Ilya: Yes. She gets him back, and everybody go away and everybody is happy and they go to the seashore. And that’s all! Homer Thrace: If I show you that everything that was ever written about Medea talks of her killing her children. If you ask 10 out of 10 people who saw the play and they tell you it’s true, then by simple logic. . .You’re a Greek, you should be logical. Ilya: Why? Homer Thrace: Because the greatest Greek of them all, Aristotle, invented logic. He said – Ilya: Who? Homer Thrace: Aristotle. . . Ilya: Aristotle! The one that the Captain said thinks men are everything and women are nothing? I don’t care what he said, Aristotle. Homer Thrace: It's extraordinary. Where do you learn all those languages? Ilya: In bed.

 

Both Greece’s film industry and the entire nation took centre stage when the film was released in October of 1960, and it led to massive increases in tourism and location-shooting there.

Some twenty years later, I lived and worked in Piraeus by which time Melina Mercouri was already a not-so-sprightly 64 years old. Piraeus was still as lively and, in parts, as bawdy as shown in this movie, but never on Monday when I went back to work in my office at # 3 Agiou Nikolaou to manage my Saudi boss's commodity trading and fleet of bulk carriers.

 

My office at red pin in centre of map: # 3 Agiou Nikolaou;
my apartment at smaller yellow pin at bottom of map: # 2 Voudouri
click here for GOOGLE Map

 

Oh, you can kiss me on a Monday A Monday, a Monday is very, very good Or you can kiss me on a Tuesday A Tuesday, a Tuesday, in fact I wish you would Or you can kiss me on a Wednesday A Thursday, a Friday and Saturday is best But never, never on a Sunday A Sunday, a Sunday, 'cause that's my day of rest Most any day you can be my guest Any day you say, but my day of rest Just name the day that you like the best Only stay away on my day of rest Oh, you can kiss me on a cool day, a hot day A wet day, which everyone you choose Or try to kiss me on a gray day, a May day A pay day, and see if I refuse And if you make it on a bleak day A freak day, a week day, why you can be my guest But never, never on a Sunday   Indulge yourself and listen to the soundtracks here

 

 

"And everybody is happy and they go to the seashore." Some memories can get you through even the darkest and stormiest night.

 

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P.S. See also Armchair-travelling on a windy day

 

Do you really want to delete this Contact?

 

 

Old habits die hard, and it's been several times that I began to write an email to a good friend "up the road" in Wollongong, only to stop at the very last minute. After all, no email will reach him where he has gone, and so I finally deleted his email address from my contacts.

We do not know what awaits each of us after death, but we know that we will die. Clearly, it must be possible to live ethically, and yet the world is simply ablaze with bad ideas. There are still places where people are put to death for imaginary crimes — like blasphemy — and where the totality of a child's education consists of his learning to recite from an ancient book of religious fiction. There are still countries where women are denied almost every human liberty, except the liberty to breed. Man is manifestly not the measure of all things.

 

 

Consider this: every person you have ever met, every person you will pass in the street today, is going to die. Living long enough, each will suffer the loss of his friends and family. All are going to lose everything they love in this world. Why would one want to be anything but kind to them in the meantime?

Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

 

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Long Service Leave is what you get paid for being bored for ten years

 

Ulladulla Harbour

 

We drove to Ulladulla where we had lunch at the local bowling club. Their previous caterers used to make a delicious meatloaf, but the new caterers' bangers and mash also makes a nice change from the homecooking.

And, of course, I washed it all down with a glass (or two) of Chardonnay. The same friendly young man who always collects the empties was on duty. Jokingly, I suggested that he must be due for long service leave soon. "Actually, I am due for it in a few weeks' time," he replied.

I looked at him again and tried to visualise what his life had been like, collecting empty glasses for the past ten years, and what his future would be like. Perhaps, when the old steward behind the bar had retired, our young man would take over as barman, and in due course retire himself and hand over to another young man who has been collecting empty glasses for the past ten years.

Do such men have dreams? Do they live lives of quiet desperation? Or are they happy with their lot? Perhaps they have found the solution to the mystery of existence which is to say that there is no great mystery at all because human existence is mostly about food, sleep, sex, and finding harmless and pleasant ways to fill in the rest.

 

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