I'm all for Artificial Intelligence, but not while there is still an acute shortage of the real thing. Anyway, today I took an old photo taken of myself just before we left Berlin during the Blockade in 1949.
If you want to have a go at it as well, click here and upload a photo.
Back in 2021, Colliers in Wollonging published this real estate advertisement, "This is truly a once in a lifetime opportunity to own this very unique and highly sort after piece of Australia. A parkland style estate with deep water frontage on one side, and picnic ground and sandy beach on the other. There is nothing quite like a serene rural-residential lifestyle on the banks of the majestic Clyde River. The peninsular fronts the mighty Clyde River, and is a short drive or boat ride from Nelligen and Batemans Bay. Fernleigh, a 16 hectare (40 acres) of mostly clear and level land ..." (for the full advertisement, click here)
It seemed to have worked, because in March 2021 the property sold for $2,010,00. Four years later, it's back on the market, and the agents are Raine & Horne in Batemans Bay. Guess what they wrote? "This is a rare opportunity to own this very unique and highly sought-after piece of Australia. A parkland-style estate with deep water frontage on one side, and picnic ground and sandy beach on the other. There is nothing quite like a serene rural-residential lifestyle on the banks of the majestic Clyde River. The peninsular fronts the mighty Clyde River, and is a short drive or boat ride from Nelligen and Batemans Bay. "Fernleigh", a 16-hectare (40 acres) of mostly clear and level land." (for the full advertisement, click here)
With real estate agents rarely running out of superlatives, this extreme case of plagiarism is certainly noteworthy - but I do give Raine & Horne full marks for spelling "sought-after" correctly (although neither knew the difference between "peninsular", the adjective, and "peninsula", the noun, and the indefinite article before the 16 hectare looks a bit lost).
The only real change is the price: from $2,010,000 only four years ago to a whopping $3,000,000 to $3,200,000. Good luck if they can get it!
Since this is all they really do before they collect their tens of thousands of dollars in commissions, I would've expected them to be a bit more original. Here is another example: this advertisement by the same agents has been running since before Christmas last year, which is why they wrote, "... the property it is set up as a lucrative Airbnb. It has a fully fenced yard and has been very popular with guests travelling with pets, opening up more rental options. Bookings are in place for Christmas and January so enjoy the extra income or use it as fully set up family accommodation." Unless they've been thinking of "Christmas in July", they should've changed the advertisement six months ago, but the "bookings are [still] in place for Christmas and January", and the owners of the property are still being regularly milked for the extra fee to re-position the advertisement again and again to the top of the display.
It's been a strange sort of day: first I found a hat full of money, and then I was chased by an angry man with a guitar. The only reason I'd driven into the Bay was to stock up for another week on enough take-aways from the Golden Lake Restaurant, after having lived for several days on packets of French Onion soup and Dutch Curry soup (it required Dutch Courage to eat it).
I hadn't been there for quite a while, and was pleased to see they had "anglicised" their menu. No longer the old "number menu" common in Chinese restaurants globally, where dishes were identified by numbers rather than names. It did make it easier for both staff and customers to order, but it also led to such hoary old jokes like this: 'A Chinese guy wakes up his wife and asks for a 69. She replies, "Who eats beef with broccoli at this hour?"' Anyway, a 69 at Leon's was chicken chow mein.
I'm now stocked up with Chicken in Oyster Sauce and Chicken in Garlic Pepper Sauce. The Korean wife of a very old friend in Canberra has also sent me a big container of Korean kimchi, which should go quite well alongside the Chinese meals - all vely nice and all served with flied lice.
While Padma is meditating with her eyes shut at the Vihara Muladharma Buddhist retreat, I don't expect much shut-eye over the next three days from Monday through to Wednesday, with the worst on Tuesday.
I've secured most of the loose things outside as best as I could, filled up the water containers, and set up candles in case of an expected power failure. Everything else is in the hands of the gods. After all, everything I have learned about life can be summed up in three words: It goes on.
Padma sent me this photo of herself and an old schoolmate from their three-day retreat at the Vihara Muladharma Buddhist monastery in Samarinda. She must've swapped her good karma for the camera in her mobile phone despite being instructed by a fat little man with a shaven head and dressed in a saffron robe to use neither.
For twenty-five years she has had the last word in every argument, and anything I said after that was the beginning of a new argument. During her three-day retreat that fat little man with a shaven head and dressed in a saffron rob has had the last word, and Padma kept her mouth shut. Do I have to shave my head and don a saffron robe to keep it that way?
Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life, and never more so on a crisp and cold winter's morning at "Riverbend". "How to Read a Book" is the classic and definitive guide to reading comprehension for students of literature, scholars across disciplines, and anyone who just loves to read.
Originally written in 1940 and first published by Simon & Schuster in 1972, "How to Read a Book" introduces and elucidates the various levels of reading and how to achieve them in order to gain the most understanding and insight from any book. From elementary reading, through systematic skimming and inspectional reading, to speed reading and beyond, readers will learn when and how to ‘judge a book by its cover,’ perceive structure no matter the prose, read critically, and extract an author’s message from any text.
Day Four of being monarch of all I survey. Before Padma left, she told me to stay active, so I romped up to the local gym today. Confused by all those bouncy girls on different exercise machines, I asked the trainer, "I want to impress those girls. Which machine should I use?" "Try the ATM outside," he said. What an attitude!
Being already in town and knowing I was running low on milk and bread, I quickly dropped into ALDI - for the first time in years as Padma usually does all the shopping. My own shopping is limited to the local op-shop which is normally a quiet place where I love to lose myself among the bookshelves to search for hidden gems but not this morning when some dark-complexioned customer, quite surprisingly versed in German metaphysics, was yelling out to no-one in particular, "Fucking Kant!"
I was very much tempted to pick him up on his pronunciation but in the end thought better of it, and walked next door to Dan Murphy's to stock up while Padma isn't looking. As I loaded the month's supply of booze into the boot, I discovered the pool bag with her hairdryer still in it.
Still too early to return to the peace and quiet of "Riverbend", I thought I'd have some fun. Thanks for leaving your hairdryer behind, Padma!
Having grown up in post-war Germany where we were all saddled with the collective guilt of what had been done to the Jews during World War II, Leon Uris's 1960 novel "Exodus" was required reading - in German, of course - before we could even find Palestine on a map.
It was only many years later that I also watched the movie, in Australia and in English, which, although fictionalised, drew its inspiration from the real life-events surrounding the "Exodus 1947". While I was deeply impressed by the movie, I felt ambivalent about rebuilding a nation in a land from which it had been dispersed more than 2,000 years before. Of course, one could always argue that establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine was a much better idea than the so-called "Uganda Scheme".
In the light of what is happening right now in the Middle East, it's perhaps a book and movie well worth re-reading and re-watching.
Looking out the window and seeing the "Rauhreif" on the grass, I'm not surprised they've dropped the term "global warming" in favour of "climate change". Of course, the real agenda of "climate change" was never about saving the planet but all about changing the world. If it had been a scientific issue, it would not have become a political issue (no, I'm not far-right; I'm just right far more often than you are).
It's Day Three as a "Strohwitwer", and before all meals eaten from the same plate with the same spoon, same fork, and same knife all taste the same, I thought it best to give them a quick rinse while at the same time dealing with the outside "climate change" by warming up my hands in the washing-up suds, but then I read the label on the washing-up liquid: Passionfruit & Pepperberry!!! Was I supposed to drink that stuff?
Last night I plugged in a USB stick with the audiobook of Bill Bryson's "The Road to Little Dribbling" on it while waiting for my usual nightcap, the ABC's Late Night Live at 10 o'clock. I must've fallen asleep because it's now quarter past seven in the morning, and Bill Bryson is still reading from his 500-page book. Happiness on a stick!
One quick look out the window prompted me to turn to HIGH the electric heater, make myself a quick cup of coffee in the icy-cold kitchen, and return to bed for more of Bill Bryson. There's no point in even turning on the radio and perhaps hear Trump threaten to bomb Norway if he isn't awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for dropping a million bombs on Iran. I can almost hear his inflammatory rambling and weaving rhetoric, "Hand over the fucking Peace Prize or be obliterated."
After her first night of luxury at the Novotel Balikpapan, Padma whatsapped me from Samarinda where she's booked herself into the Vihara Muladharma for three days to attend a Buddhist retreat.
Her bedroom looks a bit more organised than mine but at least I won't have to listen to all that "Om Mani Padme Hum". Better her than me!
When I got this photo of Padma's arrival at HARRIS Tuban for her first night in Bali, she had already boarded next morning's flight to Balikpapan where she was met at the airport by her cousin and her late father's youngest sister. Tomorrow she'll leave for Samarinda where she was born.
She's complaining about the heat and the humidity there but, having just now come back inside after feeding the wild birds and ducks on the pond, with the white frost on the grass crunching under my feet, I'd swap places with her in a heartbeat. I've always had a soft spot for Borneo, the Land below the Wind - so called because it's below the typhoon region - and its "people of the forest", the orangutans.
By moving even closer to the electric oil column heater before watching this clip of the amazing rain forest on the world's third-largest island (after Greenland and New Guinea), I might perhaps feel a little warmer.
Mudah2an hutan ini kelestariannya terjaga sampai anak cucu kelak juga bisa menikmati keindahan hutan ini.
First delivered as a speech to schoolgirls in Kent in 1926, this enchanting short essay by the towering Modernist writer Virginia Woolf celebrates the importance of the written word.
With a measured but ardent tone, Woolf weaves together thought and quote, verse and prose into a moving tract on the power literature can have over its reader, in a way which still resounds with truth today.
At this late hour of the world’s history, books are to be found in almost every room of the house—in the nursery, in the drawing room, in the dining room, in the kitchen. But in some houses they have become such a company that they have to be accommodated with a room of their own—a reading room, a library, a study. Let us imagine that we are now in such a room; that it is a sunny room, with windows opening on a garden, so that we can hear the trees rustling, the gardener talking, the donkey braying, the old women gossiping at the pump—and all the ordinary processes of life pursuing the casual irregular way which they have pursued these many hundreds of years. As casually, as persistently, books have been coming together on the shelves. Novels, poems, histories, memoirs, dictionaries, maps, directories; black letter books and brand new books; books in French and Greek and Latin; of all shapes and sizes and values, bought for purposes of research, bought to amuse a railway journey, bought by miscellaneous beings, of one temperament and another, serious and frivolous, men of action and men of letters.
Now, one may well ask oneself, strolling into such a room as this, how am I to read these books? What is the right way to set about it? They are so many and so various. My appetite is so fitful and so capricious. What am I to do to get the utmost possible pleasure out of them? And is it pleasure, or profit, or what is it that I should seek? I will lay before you some of the thoughts that have come to me on such an occasion as this. But you will notice the note of interrogation at the end of my title. One may think about reading as much as one chooses, but no one is going to lay down laws about it. Here in this room, if nowhere else, we breathe the air of freedom. Here simple and learned, man and woman are alike. For though reading seems so simple—a mere matter of knowing the alphabet—it is indeed so difficult that it is doubtful whether anybody knows anything about it. Paris is the capital of France; King John signed the Magna Charta; those are facts; those can be taught; but how are we to teach people so to read “Paradise Lost” as to see that it is a great poem, or “Tess of the D’Urbervilles” so as to see that it is a good novel? How are we to learn the art of reading for ourselves? Without attempting to lay down laws upon a subject that has not been legalized, I will make a few suggestions, which may serve to show you how not to read, or to stimulate you to think out better methods of your own.
And directly we begin to ask how should one read a book we are faced by the fact that books differ; there are poems, novels, biographies on the book shelf there; each differs from the other as a tiger differs from a tortoise, a tortoise from an elephant. Our attitude must always be changing, it is clear. From different books we must ask different qualities. Simple as this sounds, people are always behaving as if all books were of the same species—as if there were only tortoises or nothing but tigers. It makes them furious to find a novelist bringing Queen Victoria to the throne six months before her time; they will praise a poet enthusiastically for teaching them that a violet has four petals and a daisy almost invariably ten. You will save a great deal of time and temper better kept for worthier objects if you will try to make out before you begin to read what qualities you expect of a novelist, what of a poet, what of a biographer. The tortoise is bald and shiny; the tiger has a thick coat of yellow fur. So books too differ: one has its fur, the other has its baldness.
Yes; but for all that the problem is not so simple in a library as at the Zoölogical Gardens. Books have a great deal in common; they are always overflowing their boundaries; they are always breeding new species from unexpected matches among themselves. It is difficult to know how to approach them, to which species each belongs. But if we remember, as we turn to the bookcase, that each of these books was written by a pen which, consciously or unconsciously, tried to trace out a design, avoiding this, accepting that, adventuring the other; if we try to follow the writer in his experiment from the first word to the last, without imposing our design upon him, then we shall have a good chance of getting hold of the right end of the string.
To read a book well, one should read it as if one were writing it. Begin not by sitting on the bench among the judges but by standing in the dock with the criminal. Be his fellow worker, become his accomplice. Even, if you wish merely to read books, begin by writing them. For this certainly is true—one cannot write the most ordinary little story, attempt to describe the simplest event—meeting a beggar, shall we say, in the street, without coming up against difficulties that the greatest of novelists have had to face. In order that we may realize, however briefly and crudely, the main divisions into which novelists group themselves, let us imagine how differently Defoe, Jane Austen, and Thomas Hardy would describe the same incident—this meeting a beggar in the street. Defoe is a master of narrative. His prime effort will be to reduce the beggar’s story to perfect order and simplicity. This happened first, that next, the other thing third. He will put in nothing, however attractive, that will tire the reader unnecessarily, or divert his attention from what he wishes him to know. He will also make us believe, since he is a master, not of romance or of comedy, but of narrative, that everything that happened is true. He will be extremely precise therefore. This happened, as he tells us on the first pages of” Robinson Crusoe,” on the first of September. More subtly and artfully, he will hypnotize us into a state of belief by dropping out casually some little unnecessary fact—for instance, “my father called me one morning into his chamber, where he was confined by the gout.” His father’s gout is not necessary to the story, but it is necessary to the truth of the story, for it is thus that anybody who is speaking the truth adds some small irrelevant detail without thinking. Further, he will choose a type of sentence which is flowing but not too full, exact but not epigrammatic. His aim will be to present the thing itself without distortion from his own angle of vision. He will meet the subject face to face, four-square, without turning aside for a moment to point out that this was tragic, or that beautiful; and his aim is perfectly achieved.
But let us not for a moment confuse it with Jane Austen’s aim. Had she met a beggar woman, no doubt she would have been interested in the beggar’s story. But she would have seen at once that for her purposes the whole incident must be transformed. Streets and the open air and adventures mean nothing to her, artistically. It is character that interests her. She would at once make the beggar into a comfortable elderly man of the upper middle classes, seated by his fireside at his ease. Then, instead of plunging into the story vigorously and veraciously, she will write a few paragraphs of accurate and artfully seasoned introduction, summing up the circumstances and sketching the character of the gentleman she wishes us to know. “Matrimony as the origin of change was always disagreeable” to Mr. Woodhouse, she says. Almost immediately, she thinks it well to let us see that her words are corroborated by Mr. Woodhouse himself. We hear him talking. “Poor Miss Taylor!—I wish she were here again. What a pity it is that Mr. Weston ever thought of her.” And when Mr. Woodhouse has talked enough to reveal himself from the inside, she then thinks it time to let us see him through his daughter’s eyes. “You got Hannah that good place. Nobody thought of Hannah till you mentioned her.” Thus she shows us Emma flattering him and humoring him. Finally then, we have Mr. Woodhouse’s character seen from three different points of view at once; as he sees himself; as his daughter sees him; and as he is seen by the marvellous eye of that invisible lady Jane Austen herself. All three meet in one, and thus we can pass round her characters free, apparently, from any guidance but our own.
Now let Thomas Hardy choose the same theme—a beggar met in the street—and at once two great changes will be visible. The street will be transformed into a vast and sombre heath; the man or woman will take on some of the size and indistinctness of a statue. Further, the relations of this human being will not be towards other people, but towards the heath, towards man as law-giver, towards those powers which are in control of man’s destiny. Once more our perspective will be completely changed. All the qualities which were admirable in “Robinson Crusoe,” admirable in “Emma,” will be neglected or absent. The direct literal statement of Defoe is gone. There is none of the clear, exact brilliance of Jane Austen. Indeed, if we come to Hardy from one of these great writers we shall exclaim at first that he is “melodramatic” or “unreal” compared with them. But we should bethink us that there are at least two sides to the human soul; the light side and the dark side. In company, the light side of the mind is exposed; in solitude, the dark. Both are equally real, equally important. But a novelist will always tend to expose one rather than the other; and Hardy, who is a novelist of the dark side, will contrive that no clear, steady light falls upon his people’s faces, that they are not closely observed in drawing rooms, that they come in contact with moors, sheep, the sky and the stars, and in their solitude are directly at the mercy of the gods. If Jane Austen’s characters are real in the drawing room, they would not exist at all upon the top of Stonehenge. Feeble and clumsy in drawing rooms, Hardy’s people are large-limbed and vigorous out of doors. To achieve his purpose Hardy is neither literal and four-square like Defoe, nor deft and pointed like Jane Austen. He is cumbrous, involved, metaphorical. Where Jane Austen describes manners, he describes nature. Where she is matter of fact, he is romantic and poetical. As both are great artists, each is careful to observe the laws of his own perspective, and will not be found confusing us (as so many lesser writers do) by introducing two different kinds of reality into the same book.
Yet it is very difficult not to wish them less scrupulous. Frequent are the complaints that Jane Austen is too prosaic, Thomas Hardy too melodramatic. And we have to remind ourselves that it is necessary to approach every writer differently in order to get from him all he can give us. We have to remember that it is one of the qualities of greatness that it brings heaven and earth and human nature into conformity with its own vision. It is by reason of this masterliness of theirs, this uncompromising idiosyncrasy, that great writers often require us to make heroic efforts in order to read them rightly. They bend us and break us. To go from Jane Austen to Hardy, from Peacock to Trollope, from Scott to Meredith, from Richardson to Kipling, is to be wrenched and distorted, thrown this way and then that. Besides, everyone is born with a natural bias of his own in one direction rather than in another. He instinctively accepts Hardy’s vision rather than Jane Austen’s, and, reading with the current and not against it, is carried on easily and swiftly by the impetus of his own bent to the heart of his author’s genius. But then Jane Austen is repulsive to him. He can scarcely stagger through the desert of her novels.
Sometimes this natural antagonism is too great to be overcome, but trial is always worth making. For these difficult and inaccessible books, with all their preliminary harshness, often yield the richest fruits in the end, and so curiously is the brain compounded that while tracts of literature repel at one season, they are appetizing and essential at another.
If, then, this is true—that books are of very different types, and that to read them rightly we have to bend our imaginations powerfully, first one way, then another—it is clear that reading is one of the most arduous and exhausting of occupations. Often the pages fly before us and we seem, so keen is our interest, to be living and not even holding the volume in our hands. But the more exciting the book, the more danger we run of over-reading. The symptoms are familiar. Suddenly the book becomes dull as ditchwater and heavy as lead. We yawn and stretch and cannot attend. The highest flights of Shakespeare and Milton become intolerable. And we say to ourselves—is Keats a fool or am I?—a painful question, a question, moreover, that need not be asked if we realized how great a part the art of not reading plays in the art of reading. To be able to read books without reading them, to skip and saunter, to suspend judgment, to lounge and loaf down the alleys and bye-streets of letters is the best way of rejuvenating one’s own creative power. All biographies and memoirs, all the hybrid books which are largely made up of facts, serve to restore to us the power of reading real books—that is to say, works of pure imagination. That they serve also to impart knowledge and to improve the mind is true and important, but if we are considering how to read books for pleasure, not how to provide an adequate pension for one’s widow, this other property of theirs is even more valuable and important. But here again one should know what one is after. One is after rest, and fun, and oddity, and some stimulus to one’s own jaded creative power. One has left one’s bare and angular tower and is strolling along the street looking in at the open windows. After solitude and concentration, the open air, the sight of other people absorbed in innumerable activities, comes upon us with an indescribable fascination.
The windows of the houses are open; the blinds are drawn up. One can see the whole household without their knowing that they are being seen. One can see them sitting round the dinner table, talking, reading, playing games. Sometimes they seem to be quarrelling—but what about? Or they are laughing—but what is the joke? Down in the basement the cook is reading a newspaper aloud, while the housemaid is making a piece of toast; in comes the kitchen maid and they all start talking at the same moment—but what are they saying? Upstairs a girl is dressing to go to a party. But where is she going? There is an old lady sitting at her bedroom window with some kind of wool work in her hand and a fine green parrot in a cage beside her. And what is she thinking? All this life has somehow come together; there is a reason for it; a coherency in it, could one but seize it. The biographer answers the innumerable questions which we ask as we stand outside on the pavement looking in at the open window. Indeed there is nothing more interesting than to pick one’s way about among these vast depositories of facts, to make up the lives of men and women, to create their complex minds and households from the extraordinary abundance and litter and confusion of matter which lies strewn about. A thimble, a skull, a pair of scissors, a sheaf of sonnets, are given us, and we have to create, to combine, to put these incongruous things together. There is, too, a quality in facts, an emotion which comes from knowing that men and women actually did and suffered these things, which only the greatest novelists can surpass. Captain Scott, starving and freezing to death in the snow, affects us as deeply as any made-up story of adventure by Conrad or Defoe; but it affects us differently. The biography differs from the novel. To ask a biographer to give us the same kind of pleasure that we get from a novelist is to misuse and misread him. Directly he says “John Jones was born at five-thirty in the morning of August 13, I 862,” he has committed himself, focussed his lens upon fact, and if he then begins to romance, the perspective becomes blurred, we grow suspicious, and our faith in his integrity as a writer is destroyed. In the same way fact destroys fiction. If Thackeray, for example, had quoted an actual newspaper account of the Battle of Waterloo in “Vanity Fair,” the whole fabric of his story would have been destroyed, as a stone destroys a bubble.
But it is undoubted that these hybrid books, these warehouses and depositories of facts, play a great part in resting the brain and restoring its zest of imagination. The work of building up a life for oneself from skulls, thimbles, scissors, and sonnets stimulates our interest in creation and rouses our wish to see the work beautifully and powerfully done by a Flaubert or a Tolstoi. Moreover, however interesting facts may be, they are an inferior form of fiction, and gradually we become impatient of their weakness and diffuseness, of their compromises and evasions, of the slovenly sentences which they make for themselves, and are eager to revive ourselves with the greater intensity and truth of fiction.
It is necessary to have in hand an immense reserve of imaginative energy in order to attack the steeps of poetry. Here are none of those gradual introductions, those resemblances to the familiar world of daily life with which the novelist entices us into his world of imagination. All is violent, opposite, unrelated. But various causes, such as bad books, the worry of carrying on life efficiently, the intermittent but powerful shocks dealt us by beauty, and the incalculable impulses of our own minds and bodies frequently put us into that state of mind in which poetry is a necessity. The sight of a crocus in a garden will suddenly bring to mind all the spring days that have ever been. One then desires the general, not the particular; the whole, not the detail; to turn uppermost the dark side of the mind; to be in contact with silence, solitude, and all men and women and not this particular Richard, or that particular Anne. Metaphors are then more expressive than plain statements. Thus in order to read poetry rightly, one must be in a rash, an extreme, a generous state of mind in which many of the supports and comforts of literature are done without. Its power of make-believe, its representative power, is dispensed with in favor of its extremities and extravagances. The representation is often at a very far remove from the thing represented, so that we have to use all our energies of mind to grasp the relation between, for example, the song of a nightingale and the image and ideas which that song stirs in the mind. Thus reading poetry often seems a state of rhapsody in which rhyme and metre and sound stir the mind as wine and dance stir the body, and we read on, understanding with the senses, not with the intellect, in a state of intoxication. Yet all this intoxication and intensity of delight depend upon the exactitude and truth of the image, on its being the counterpart of the reality within. Remote and extravagant as some of Shakespeare’s images seem, far-fetched and ethereal as some of Keats’s, at the moment of reading they seem the cap and culmination of the thought; its final expression. But it is useless to labor the matter in cold blood. Anyone who has read a poem with pleasure will remember the sudden conviction, the sudden recollection (for it seems sometimes as if we were about to say, or had in some previous existence already said, what Shakespeare is actually now saying), which accompany the reading of poetry, and give it its exaltation and intensity. But such reading is attended, whether consciously or unconsciously, with the utmost stretch and vigilance of the faculties, of the reason no less than of the imagination. We are always verifying the poet’s statements, making a flying comparison, to the best of our powers, between the beauty he makes outside and the beauty we are aware of within. For the humblest among us is endowed with the power of comparison. The simplest (provided he loves reading) has that already within him to which he makes what is given him—by poet or novelist—correspond.
With that saying, of course, the cat is out of the bag. For this admission that we can compare, discriminate, brings us to this further point. Reading is not merely sympathizing and understanding; it is also criticizing and judging. Hitherto our endeavor has been to read books as a writer writes them. We have been trying to understand, to appreciate, to interpret, to sympathize. But now, when the book is finished, the reader must leave the dock and mount the bench. He must cease to be the friend; he must become the judge. And this is no mere figure of speech. The mind seems (“seems,” for all is obscure that takes place in the mind) to go through two processes in reading. One might be called the actual reading; the other the after reading. During the actual reading, when we hold the book in our hands, there are incessant distractions and interruptions. New impressions are always completing or cancelling the old. One’s judgment is suspended, for one does not know what is coming next. Surprise, admiration, boredom, interest, succeed each other in such quick succession that when, at last, the end is reached, one is for the most part in a state of complete bewilderment. Is it good? or bad? What kind of book is it? How good a book is it? The friction of reading and the emotion of reading beat up too much dust to let us find clear answers to these questions. If we are asked our opinion, we cannot give it. Parts of the book seem to have sunk away, others to be starting out in undue prominence. Then perhaps it is better to take up some different pursuit—to walk, to talk, to dig, to listen to music. The book upon which we have spent so much time and thought fades entirely out of sight. But suddenly, as one is picking a snail from a rose, tying a shoe, perhaps, doing something distant and different, the whole book floats to the top of the mind complete. Some process seems to have been finished without one’s being aware of it. The different details which have accumulated in reading assemble themselves in their proper places. The book takes on a definite shape; it becomes a castle, a cowshed, a gothic ruin, as the case may be. Now one can think of the book as a whole, and the book as a whole is different, and gives one a different emotion, from the book received currently in several different parts. Its symmetry and proportion, its confusion and distortion can cause great delight or great disgust apart from the pleasure given by each detail as it is separately realized. Holding this complete shape in mind it now becomes necessary to arrive at some opinion of the book’s merits, for though it is possible to receive the greatest pleasure and excitement from the first process, the actual reading, though this is of the utmost importance, it is not so profound or so lasting as the pleasure we get when the second process—the after reading—is finished, and we hold the book clear, secure, and (to the best of our powers) complete in our minds.
But how, we may ask, are we to decide any of these questions—is it good, or is it bad?—how good is it, how bad is it? Not much help can be looked for from outside. Critics abound; criticisms pullulate; but minds differ too much to admit of close correspondence in matters of detail, and nothing is more disastrous than to crush one’s own foot into another person’s shoe. When we want to decide a particular case, we can best help ourselves, not by reading criticism, but by realizing our own impression as acutely as possible and referring this to the judgments which we have gradually formulated in the past. There they hang in the wardrobe of our mind—the shapes of the books we have read, as we hung them up and put them away when we had done with them. If we have just read “Clarissa Harlowe,” for example, let us see how it shows up against the shape of “Anna Karenina.” At once the outlines of the two books are cut out against each other as a house with its chimneys bristling and its gables sloping is cut out against a harvest moon. At once Richardson’s qualities—his verbosity, his obliqueness—are contrasted with Tolstoi’s brevity and directness. And what is the reason of this difference in their approach? And how does our emotion at different crises of the two books compare? And what must we attribute to the eighteenth century, and what to Russia and the translator? But the questions which suggest themselves are innumerable. They ramify infinitely, and many of them are apparently irrelevant. Yet it is by asking them and pursuing the answers as far as we can go that we arrive at our standard of values, and decide in the end that the book we have just read is of this kind or of that, has merit in that degree or in this. And it is now, when we have kept closely to our own impression, formulated independently our own judgment, that we can most profitably help ourselves to the judgments of the great critics—Dryden, Johnson, and the rest. It is when we can best defend our own opinions that we get most from theirs.
So, then—to sum up the different points we have reached in this essay—have we found any answer to our question, how should we read a book? Clearly, no answer that will do for everyone; but perhaps a few suggestions. In the first place, a good reader will give the writer the benefit of every doubt; the help of all his imagination; will follow as closely, interpret as intelligently as he can. In the next place, he will judge with the utmost severity. Every book, he will remember, has the right to be judged by the best of its kind. He will be adventurous, broad in his choice, true to his own instincts, yet ready to consider those of other people. This is an outline which can be filled, in at taste and at leisure, but to read something after this fashion is to be a reader whom writers respect. It is by the means of such readers that masterpieces are helped into the world.
If the moralists ask us how we can justify our love of reading, we can make use of some such excuse as this. But if we are honest, we know that no such excuse is needed. It is true that we get nothing whatsoever except pleasure from reading; it is true that the wisest of us is unable to say what that pleasure may be. But that pleasure—mysterious, unknown, useless as it is—is enough. That pleasure is so curious, so complex, so immensely fertilizing to the mind of anyone who enjoys it, and so wide in its effects, that it would not be in the least surprising to discover, on the day of judgment when secrets are revealed and the obscure is made plain, that the reason why we have grown from pigs to men and women, and come out from our caves, and dropped our bows and arrows, and sat round the fire and talked and drunk and made merry and given to the poor and helped the sick and made pavements and houses and erected some sort of shelter and society on the waste of the world, is nothing but this: we have loved reading.
I have sometimes dreamt, at least, that when the Day of Judgement dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards – their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble – the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when he sees us coming with our books under our arms, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading."
P.S. Yes, the movie "Who's afraid of Virginia Woolff?" not only pokes fun at the song "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" from Walt Disney's animated version of The Three Little Pigs - which, by inference, means who's afraid of living life without false illusions - but also alludes to the English novelist Virginia Woolf. She died by suicide at age 59 in 1941. She left behind a note in which she expressed love for her husband Leonard Woolf and sorrow for the anguish she was causing him. Twenty years later, playwright Edward Albee corresponded with him, asking permission to use his late wife's name in the title of this new play.
My first two years in Australia and my residency from 1965 to 1967 in Barton House, a privately-run boarding house in Canberra a short distance from where now stands Parliament House, were my most character-forming.
Those were the days of parties, of evenings in front of the then black-and-white telly in the TV Room watching "Z-Car" or "M*A*S*H", laughing at the antics of Agent 99 and Maxwell Smart in "Get Smart" ("Good thinking, 99" was a favourite saying); or being bored to death by Barry Jones' insufferable show-off act on Bob and Dolly's BP Pick-a-Box.
And then there were the evenings spent at the Burns Club or in the Newsroom of the "Wello" Pub across the road, drinking 'schooners' and talking about 'sheilas', followed by a last-minute dash back to Barton House before the dining room closed! And Sunday morning, sitting on the frontsteps with the boys, recovering from the night before, while waiting for the week's washing to run through its cycle in the laundry.
All that 'socialising', cheap as it was, made a big hole in the small pay-packet I received once a fortnight from my employers, the ANZ Bank. Peter Chek, the manager of Barton House, would wait for us at the front office on payday to be the first to lay claim to our money for the boarding-house fees before we had a chance to spend it elsewhere.
He wasn't always successful and on several occasions I fell into arrears, but he trusted me and patiently gave me time to catch up. I knew nothing about this man other than that he managed the boarding-house and also ran a "self-defence academy" somewhere in the city.
Only now, in retirement and during a casual search of the internet, have I learned about Peter Chek's own chequered and difficult life which may explain why he was so patient with us battling young "Bank Johnnies".
According to an article from the Australian Martial Arts Hall of Fame, Albert Peter Chek was born on 9th July 1925 as son of a Ukrainian Russian living in France. He became a prisoner of the German army in 1941 and was sent to work in a concentration camp near Berlin.
After 18 months of incarceration, and one failed escape attempt, he made another attempt, knowing that if unsuccessful it would be his last. In the midst of an oppressive winter after dodging bullets and grenades, and being literally hunted by soldiers and dogs, he hid beneath the carriage of a goods train. When the train finally stopped, many hours later, weak, cold and hungry, he ventured from the semi-sanctity of the train to discover that he had arrived in Munich in the heart of Germany.
Though fluent in French and Russian, his German was not polished enough to pass as a local. Stranded and without identity papers, he wandered the war-torn streets posing as a lost and disorientated orphan that spoke a dialect of German. Possibly by chance or just through sheer good luck, a German soldier who had recently returned from the Russian front took him in.
Provided with this new identity, he lived this way for several years, until he was recognised by a soldier stationed at the work camp from which he had escaped. Again on the run, he remained so until the end of the war. Following the war, he returned to Paris where in 1947, at only 22 years of age, he won a coveted medal in jujitsu, after which he was sponsored by the French Army, for whom he was an unarmed-combat instructor to the elite paratroopers, to travel to Japan and train at the prestigious home of Judo, the Kodokan.
Following an 18-month stay in Japan, he travelled to America, where he lived in New Orleans for almost a year. During this period he also visited Panama City and Colombia where he taught and trained.
In 1950, he arrived in Australia as migrant and worked in a range of jobs including farmhand, chef, and martial arts instructor until 1953. Then he left the mainland for a better job in Tasmania, where he settled and in 1956 began the first-ever school of Judo and Ju-jitsu, known as the "Shihan Check Academy", based at the Sandy Bay Rowing Club in Hobart.
And the article continues, "Between 1964-67 he travelled throughout NSW and Qld before finally settling down in Canberra where he worked as a Government-employed Photographer. He also taught Ju-jitsu and Judo at the local Police Boys clubs as a master-level instructor. It was also in Canberra that he met and married his lovely wife Julie."
I don't know about him being employed as photographer but those were certainly the years when he managed Barton House where he lived on top of the stairs (with "his lovely wife Julie" who used to work for MBF in the city), took his meals at the front of the dining room (with "his lovely wife Julie"), and was always on duty to keep order and the noise down in what was often a fairly rowdy place, but especially on pay-nights.
In 1968 they both moved to Darwin where he managed a government hostel and later a hotel/nightclub. He also taught Judo and self-defense to Northern Territory Police recruits. In 1971 they both returned to Canberra, where he managed public service accommodation hostels before becoming a government press photographer.
In 1981 he was given a Civic Award by the then Governor of Australia, His Excellency Sir Zelman Cowen, for his dedication and tireless work in the interests of the community as a martial arts instructor and member of the community. In 1994, he and Julie moved to Western Australia. He died in 2007 at the age of 82. Many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Barton House's former residents still remember him. I still do.
When I first read this truly amazing story of this unassuming man whom we used to call "Frenchie" to his face without ever knowing anything about his life, I couldn't believe it but when I saw the old sepia-coloured photo in the article I recognised him immediately. The eyes had it!
It's been a wild night with hurricane-like winds and broken branches and fallen trees all over the driveway, which I had to clear before I could even drive into town this morning. Not that I'm complaining; at my age, it's the only wild nights I get.
My reserved parking spot was still waiting for me as I pulled into the shopping centre to have coffee with an old Austrian friend who came to Australia in 1955 and then worked for more than thirty years with the Australian Bureau of Statistics in Canberra, where he must've learned how to defy statistics because at ninety-three years of age, he's both physically and mentally more agile than many others half his age.
(Of course, we conducted our conversation in German: he in his melodic Viennese and I in my goose-stepping Prussian accent; and, of course, we drew some filthy looks from people who already had problems speaking English, let alone a second or third language. Anyway, we've paid our taxes which supported quite a few of those "I was born here" types.)
Not that he plans to hang around for much longer since, after having bemoaned the state of the world for a good two hours, we both came to the conclusion that it's better to check out before it gets much worse.
Reflecting the state of the economy, the shopping centre has quite a few vacant shopfronts, one of which has been converted into "The Book Nook" which offers a wide range of very forgettable books. Instead of labelling individual shelves "Crime" and "Children's Books" and "Non-Fiction", they could've just hung up one big sign marked "Dross". Still, I did re-home a copy of Clive James' "Unreliable Memoirs" which, not surprisingly, had remained unclaimed since I last looked at the display many months ago. I tried out one of the comfortable chairs in the hope another chess player would pop in to give me a game on the giant chess set which no-one seemed to have used yet or they would've realised that the chess pieces were aligned along the wrong side (the rightmost square in the bottom row for each player should be a white square).
Someone in the adjoining Koon Hong Take-Away must've read about the "decoy effect", but failed to understand that the decoy priced at $19.90 must be slightly smaller in size than the desired target priced at $20.90.
I'm home again and inside and keeping warm close to the heater. I won't be going anywhere for the rest of the week, so please be my guest and use my reserved parking spot. Just make sure you also look the part.
Ich wanderte im Jahre 1965 vom (k)alten Deutschland nach Australien aus. In Erinnerung an das alte Sprichwort "Gott hüte mich vor Sturm und Wind und Deutschen die im Ausland sind" wurde ich in 1971 im Dschungel von Neu-Guinea australischer Staatsbürger. Das kostete mich nur einen Umlaut und das zweite n im Nachnamen - von -mann auf -man.
Australien gab mir eine zweite Sprache und eine zweite Chance und es war auch der Anfang und das Ende: nach fünfzig Arbeiten in fünfzehn Ländern - "Die ganze Welt mein Arbeitsfeld" - lebe ich jetzt im Ruhestand in Australien an der schönen Südküste von Neusüdwales.
Ich verbringe meine Tage mit dem Lesen von Büchern, segle mein Boot den Fluss hinunter, beschäftige mich mit Holzarbeit, oder mache Pläne für eine neue Reise. Falls Du mir schreiben willst, sende mir eine Email an riverbendnelligen [AT] mail.com, und ich schreibe zurück.
Falls Du anrufen möchtest, meine Nummer ist XLIV LXXVIII X LXXXI.
For a translation, click here.
This blog is written in the version of English that is standard here. So recognise is spelled recognise and not recognize etc. I recognise that some North American readers may find this upsetting, and while I sympathise with them, I sympathise even more with my countrymen who taught me how to spell. However, as an apology, here are a bunch of Zs for you to put where needed.
He reserves the right to revise his views at any time. He might even indulge in the freedom of contradicting himself. He has done so in the past and will most certainly do so in the future. He is not persuading you or anyone else to believe anything that is reported on or linked to from this site, but encourages you to use all available resources to form your own opinions about important things that affect all our lives and to express them in accordance with Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Everything on this website, including any material that third parties may consider to be their copyright, has been used on the basis of “fair dealing” for the purposes of research and study, and criticism and review. Any party who feels that their copyright has been infringed should contact me with details of the copyright material and proof of their ownership and I will remove it.
And finally, don't bother trying to read between the lines. There are no lines - only snapshots, most out of focus.
