"Do you want flies with that?"

 

230 King St, Newtown NSW 2042

 

During the six weeks in 2018 when I underwent cancer radiation at the Lifehouse in Newtown, I often walked past this shop without ever going inside to ask if they had heard of William Golding because I assumed that their name was a play on words on his famous book.

Book titles cannot be copyrighted or the copyright-holders to "Lord of the Flies" may already have tried but this didn't stop the rights holder of "Lord of the Rings", Middle-Earth Enterprises, to try to block this business from trading with those three key words "lord of the" - click here. But IP Australia's trademarks agency decided in favour of Lord of the Fries, saying the "niche vegan restaurant" operated in an entirely different world from the middle-earth enterprises. I still believe that theirs was a play on words on William Golding's 1954 novel which at one time was required reading in schools across the English-speaking world, its title having become shorthand for the breakdown of civilisation.

 

 

I had never heard of "Lord of the Flies" during my schooldays in Germany and nor did I need to, as I had just witnessed the biggest breakdown of civilisation of all times. I read the book and then saw the original black-and-white 1963 movie adaptation only after I had come to Australia.

 

 

William Golding's book suggests the inevitability of violence when all rules are abandoned, and he refers to the boys stranded on the island without adult supervision as "scaled down society". He remarked once that "anyone who believes he could not be a Nazi deludes himself".

The original black-and-white movie is still the best, although there have been several remakes, including "The Beach" with Leonardo DiCaprio, which is often described as "Lord of the Flies for Generation X".

Perhaps they'll make one more at the end of the current US presidency, if they can find an actor who can act as ravingly mad as the real one.

 

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The Real Cost of Net Zero

 

 

Australia’s obsession with "net zero" is one of the most destructive political delusions of our time. Net zero has become a kind of civic religion, enforced by political elites and corporate interests. This is not science — it’s dogma. Worst of all, this is all for nothing because what Australia does is irrelevant to the climate but devastating to our economy.

The truth is, renewables can't do the job. Wind and solar aren't "generators" but “energy gatherers" ... like throwing a net into the ocean. It makes a less reliable system and it makes a more expensive system, and the more you build, the less stable and more expensive the system becomes. South Australia — with the highest proportion of renewables — also has the highest electricity prices in the nation.

Climate change is a problem but it is not an existential threat. The real existential threat is the collapse of our energy and economic systems.

 

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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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