Travels with Epicurus

 

 

When Daniel Klein goes to the dentist for a regular check-up, he is informed that he needs a section of his lower teeth removed and replaced with either a denture plate or implants. The implants would require frequent trips to the dentist over the course of a year, a lot of money and a lot of pain. The denture plate on the other hand would leave Klein with the unmistakable clunky smile of an old man.

Though Klein initially opts for the implants, he soon questions his decision. Is it better to a spend a precious year trying to extend the prime of his life, or to live an authentic old age, toothless grin and all? Klein decided the answer lay in a place where people seemed to know the secret to a long, happy and healthy life - Greece. He travels there with a library of his favourite philosophers and observes other septuagenarians and octogenarians, and contemplates his own life, particularly seeking out wisdom from renowned hedonist Epicurus. From that journey comes this sincere and humorous book on ageing and an Epicurean way of living.

 

Photographs from Hydra by Billy Hughes, who journeyed to Hydra, Greece, with author Dan Klein who was finishing his book "Travels With Epicurus: A Journey to a Greek Island in Search of a Fulfilled Life".

 

Read a preview here

 

I love this little book! Apart from offering very age-appropriate advice, it reminds me of Greece and the island of Hydra, of George Johnston and his family on Hydra, of sunkissed days and warm nights drinking retsina and listening to bouzouki music. It all comes back to me now!

 

Aegean islanders like to tell a joke about a properous Greek American who visits one of the islands on vacation. Out on a walk, the affluent Greek American comes upon an old Greek man sitting on a rock, sipping a glass of ouzo, and lazily staring at the sun setting into the sea. The American notices there are olive trees growing on the hills behind the old Greek but that they are untended, with olives just dropping here and there onto the ground. He asks the old man who the trees belong to. "They're mine", the Greek replies. "Don't you gather the olives?" the American asks. "I just pick one when I want one", the old man says. "But don't you realise that if you pruned the trees and picked the olives at their peak, you could sell them? In America everybody is crazy about virgin olive oil, and they pay a damned good price for it." "What would I do with the money?" the old Greeks asks. "Why, you could build yourself a big house and hire servants to do everything for you." "And then what would I do?" "You could do anything you want!" "You mean, like sit outside and sip ouzo at sunset?"

 

Joseph Coté hasn't got the best reading voice (and he only reads the Prologue and Chapter One), but in the absence of anything better --- the online copy of "Travels with Epicurus" I could find is in French; click here ) -- - it will have to do until I can lend my friend in Canberra my much-read and much-loved copy when we meet again over a coffee.

(My BHP shares have gone up by more than two dollars since our last meeting at the club on the 21st July, Roman, so it'll be my shout! 😀 )

 

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P.S. I've since then bought a few thousand shares in the lithium hotshot Pilbara Minerals - the very same shares I had recommended to a bloke who was going to cut my grass but then discovered that he can make more money by spending a few minutes pressing the 'BUY' and 'SELL' buttons on the CommSec screen (which I had shown him how to use) instead of sitting for hours on a ride-on mower - and notched up a few extra dollars, so that coffee may come with a piece of cheesecake!

 

Now you know why I didn't stay in South Africa

 

"SKIN" is one of the most bizarre and moving true stories to emerge from apartheid South Africa: Sandra Laing was a black child born in the 1950s to two white Afrikaners, unaware of their black ancestry. Her parents were rural shopkeepers serving the local black community, who lovingly brought her up as their 'white' little girl. But at the age of ten, Sandra was driven out of white society. The film follows Sandra's thirty-year journey from rejection to acceptance, betrayal to reconciliation, as she struggles to define her place in a changing world - and triumphs against all odds.

 

I was searching YouTube for a trailer, perhaps even a full-length copy of the Australian movie "The Skin of Others" when I came across this one, "Skin", a British-South African 2008 biographical film about Sandra Laing, a South African woman born to white parents, who was classified as "Coloured" during the apartheid era, presumably due to a genetic case of atavism.

 

Click here to read the online book (SIGN UP - it's free! - LOG IN, and BORROW)

 

Based on the book "When She Was White - The True Story of a Family Divided by Race" by Judith Stone, it displays all the ugliness of the apartheid era. This horrible and often quite arbitrary racial segregation still existed when I lived and worked in South-West Africa in 1968/69, and it made me leave again despite the great beauty of the country.

When apartheid came to an end, there was renewed interest in Sandra's story by the media. Sandra's mother saw Sandra interviewed on television and wrote to her to tell her of her father's death two years earlier. The letter provided no return address nor any other clue as to her whereabouts, but receiving it prompted Sandra to renew her search. She found her mother living in a nursing home and the two were happily reunited (although her two brothers continued to refuse to see her).

Oh, and Sam Neill does a passable imitation of the Afrikaner accent!

 

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Today I went back to Burma

 

https://archive.org/details/ghosttraintoeast00ther_0/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/ghosttraintoeast00ther_0/page/264/mode/2up

 

You think of travellers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time. Travel is not merely the business of being bone-idle, but also an elaborate bumming evasion, allowing us to call attention to ourselves with our conspicuous absence while we intrude on other people's privacy - being actively offensive as fugitive freeloaders. The traveller is the greediest of romantic voyeur, and in some well-hidden part of the traveller's personality is an unpickable knot of vanity, presumption and mythomania bordering on the pathological. This is why a traveller's worst nightmare is not the secret police or the witch doctors or malaria, but rather the prospect of meeting another traveller."

So begins Paul Theroux's book "Ghost Train to the Eastern Star", a repeat journey of what he wrote about in "The Great Railway Bazaar" thirty years earlier when he travelled across Asia and back again by train. On that first trip he must have visited Rangoon in Burma at about the same time I lived and worked there, but we never met and so his worst nightmare never came true. Instead, my worst nightmare came true when I read about his revisiting Rangoon in the early 2000s and facing in total disbelief the unreality of seeing that hardly anything had changed.

 

 

I lived and worked in Burma in 1975, when the people, frustrated by the military repression, had already taken their refuge in Buddhism, which preached patience and compassion. Thirty years later, their patience and compassion had remained unrewarded, and Burma was still as decrepit and low on morale as it has been since General Ne Win and his dreaded Tatmadaw had turned it into a brutal dictatorship in 1962.

I had not only loved the country and its soft-tempered and helpful people of slender, soft-voiced beauty with creamy skin and the loveliest smiles and gentlest manner, but also fallen in love with one very special person whom to this day I still remember with deepest fondness and profound gratitude for the truly wonderful five years she has given me.

Don't cry because it's over. Smile because it happened. I'm still trying.

 

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"Livet må forstås baglæns, men må leves forlæns."

 

 

Give me any beautiful and profound quote in French or Latin, even in gutteral German, and I happily requote it in its original, because translating it into English would take too much away from its original beauty and profundity.

Not so with "Livet må forstås baglæns, men må leves forlæns", and not only because Danish - which sounds a bit like German on steroids - is spoken by a mere six million people but because "Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards" sounds so much better. As for its profundity, we can all relate to it, even though none of us has Søren Kierkegaard's linguistic facility to express it so elegantly.

What this beautifully poetic summation boils down to is this: that in those moments when you pause to reflect on what your life has been like, you may feel that you understand your life, but your understanding is only temporary, because life is a forward motion in which you must always take new actions and make new choices, which will have changed your understanding by the time you reflect on life again. In other words, there is no such thing as having a perfect understanding of your life prior to living your life.

 

 

So why bother to try and understand it at all? As Kierkegaard wrote, "Marry, and you will regret it; don't marry, you will also regret it; marry or don't marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world's foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too; laugh at the world's foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both. Believe a woman, you will regret it; believe her not, you will also regret it ... Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will regret that too; hang yourself or don't hang yourself, you'll regret it either way; whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy."

That's probably a good summary of my own three-quarters of a century full of hyperactive living which I wished I could have come up with by myself - if I had Kiekegaard's linguistic facility to express it so elegantly.

Now it is time to pour myself a large glass of Oyster Bay Chardonnay, while you no doubt start googling to read up on Kierkegaard. Not that it matters all that much: do it or do not do it — you will regret both. 😀

 

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When you sell a man a book you don’t sell him just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue – you sell him a whole new life.

 

Read the book online at www.archive.org

 

I love this little book. It is only a couple of hundred pages and you can read it in a couple of hours on a slow Sunday morning, and when you have finshed, you wished you could keep on reading.

 

This is not an excert from this book. I just added it here to let you know how I feel about literature, about books, and about reading

 

Roger Mifflin, the “hero” of the book, is the owner of a bookstore on wheels. He has wandered around America's Midwest selling his books and built up both a reputation and a following. But he wants to write a book of his own, so he decides to sell. He pulls his wagon next to a farmhouse where the farmer is himself a famous author. But the author is out on a tour, and Roger talks instead to the sister of the author.

Helen is the "heroine". She is a spinster and getting a little tired of her brother gallivanting all over the country while she is stuck on the farm. On the spur of the moment, she decides to buy Parnassus and take off for some adventures of her own. She writes her brother a note, gives Roger the money for the business, and they take off down the road.

Helen is soon enchanted by Roger and they end up spending more time together than intended. There are misadventures and opportunities, which I won't tell you about because I don’t want to spoil it for you.

 

 

This is a sweet, old-fashioned story told in a simple, eminently readable style. There is plenty of action as well as long paragraphs on the beauty and utility of books. My favorite line from the book is "When you sell a man a book you don’t sell him just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue – you sell him a whole new life." I’ve always found this true. My favorite books are the ones that carry me away to another world.

“Parnassus on Wheels” carried me away to a time very long ago. When people moved slower and took time to talk face to face. When a tinker's wagon pulling into town was a big deal and would draw a crowd. Fill that wagon with books, and I could see myself living that kind of life.

 

 

If you love books, you will love "Parnassus on Wheels".

 

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From Woy Woy to Wagga Wagga

 

 

This one-hour BBC documentary from 1987 is a highly entertaining journey with that unpredictable and crazy funny-man, Spike Milligan, who takes us to some special places in his adopted and beloved big country, ‘My Australia’.

Spike welcomes us to his home-town of Woy Woy on the NSW Central Coast - which he once described as "the world's largest above-ground cemetery" - and introduces us to his lovely old mum and other friends in the area. One notable lady is the late ‘Aunty’ Beverley Spiers, who knew Spike for many years and - was once engaged to him!

In this film, our renowned Anglo-Irish comedian shows that he is just an ordinary person, and we also see what makes him laugh. Spike’s friendly and engaging personality coupled with his casual way of talking to his audiences, makes us feel like we are right there with him. He is as familiar as an eccentric uncle or neighbour, but you always enjoy listening to him - no matter what he says!

We also go with Spike to some other interesting towns with funny names, including our national capital, where we see a serious side of our host. Along the way we meet some great Australian characters - even a politician and an actor - but one other bloke is a bit of a handful, and can you believe - even drives our mate Spike a little bit up the wall!

Without Spike there wouldn’t be the Goon Show. Without the Goon Show there wouldn’t be Monty Python. Without Monty Python there wouldn’t be the huge influence they had on comedy and culture --- and on me!

 

Spike and I share the same greatest failure in our lives: fast-forward to 13:55; I also agree with his final words, "Thank God, I'm wearing clean underwear!" which is what my mother always made sure of every time I left home just in case I got hit by a bus on the road.

 

Sadly, Spike left us in 2002, a few months shy of his 84th birthday. His gravestone bears the inscription, "I told you I was ill".

 

Arriving back in Australia in 1968 with his intended address his parents' house at Woy Woy: 393 Orange Grove Road

 

I leave you with some of my favourite Milligianisms:

 

Money can't buy you happiness but it does bring you a more pleasant form of misery. My father had a profound influence on me. He was a lunatic. I can speak Esperanto like a native. A sure cure for seasickness is to sit under a tree. I'm not afraid of dying; I just don't want to be there when it happens. Then God created light and saw that it was good. Then he saw the quarterly bill and saw that it wasn't good.

 

I remember this last one every time Origin Energy send me their bill!

 

 

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AI at its best

 

 

Christopher Hitchens, British and American journalist and author of eighteen books on faith, religion, culture, politics, and literature, died in December 2011 at the young age of 62.

His lasting legacy are his films and television appearances and books, some of which I have read and many more which I still hope to read.

Given the absurdity of elevating a reality television star into the highest office of the land, Hitchens has felt compelled, from his imagined vantage point, to unleash his full arsenal of wit and moral clarity on Trump's authoritarian ambitions, his contempt for free speech, and his role in corroding democratic norms. Any resemblance to the real Christopher Hitchens is parody and shouldn't be interpreted as factual.

 

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Sunny side up!

 

 

A word of warning: never buy a two-storey house unless you are a former member of the Cirque du Soleil! I'm not as I already get light-headed just from looking down to tie my shoelaces.

So when one gable end on the house came loose, I called in the experts with scaffolding and a head for heights. One was John, a carpenter, the other Sunny, grandson of a German friend - "Sunny side up!" Get it? 😄

The job is done, and we already discussed a few more urgent repairs. I hope BHP will keep paying those healthy dividends to pay for them all.

 

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My Life in Pictures

 

September 2018

 

With the exception of September 2018 when we were holed up in a bedsit apartment in Sydney near to the LIFEHOUSE where I had only days earlier undergone an unpleasant cancer operation - see above - my life can be documented by more birthday cakes than I thought I would ever eat; to wit:

 

2008

2011

2012

2017

2021

2025

 

With a bit of luck, we may still be able to reuse the "3"-candle from my 63rd birthday in three years' time, provided I don't burn it at both ends.

 

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P.S. A regular reader of this blog seems to have discovered a Freudian slip in this post of the kind where you say one thing but mean your mother. I wish to assure that particular reader that, while I dearly loved our two little dogs, both of whom have since crossed the rainbow bridge, those other inanimate animals do not reflect deeper feelings or needs or affect my other relationship in any way at all; in fact, it was my wife's idea to place them on the table, perhaps to distract from the lack of birthday presents which we dispensed with many years ago.

 

Wer die Wahl hat, hat die Qual

 

Click here

 

Although I had worked on mainframes before and even had a couple of Apple IIIs in my Piraeus office, the joys of working with Microsoft were never revealed to me until I came back to Australia in April 1985 which also coincided with the release of Microsoft DOS 3.1.

 

The Apple III in all its (relative) glory

 

Personal computers needed two persons to carry them, and came with an A: drive (and sometimes with a B: drive as well) to "read" those very floppy 5¼-inch disks with a capacity of 360KB, and hard disks were typically 10MB or 20 MB (the Apple III had a 5MB hard disk which we thought would last us for ever). Larger hard disks had to be partitioned into C: and D: drive before MS-DOS 3.31 allowed larger partition sizes.

 

 

Computers were heavy beasts which first had to be "formatted" with a low-level format followed by a high-level format, after which the SYS files were transferred from the A: drive to the harddisk, followed by the user-created config.sys and autoexec.bat files. (I am not even going to bore you with 'interleaving', FAT - file allocation tables - and IRQ - hardware and software interrupts.) Only then could any application software be added, of which there were not many, such as WordStar, a very clunky word processor, or VisiCalc, an equally clunky spreadsheet, or the very first and rudimentary accounting programs. Monitors came in screen displays of either green or orange, and printers were of the noisy dot-matrix variety, devoid of any fonts or graphics capabilities. And to brighten up the day, we always had the 'Hangman' game to fall back on.

 

 

Those were the days and we thought they would never end because we thought we had everything we would ever need, but, of course, there's always more, and today's mobile phones have not only displaced the phone, the torch, the watch, and the camera (and in cases of extreme addictions, even whole families), but also have a computing capabilty that we would never have believed possible in those days of floppy disks and noisy printers, which is what I was reflecting on as I wandered the aisles full of computers in the local Harvey Norman store, followed by Steve, the "sales consultant", who was eager to earn a commission.

 

Click here

 

I still have my trusty old HP which has kept me going for more than ten years, but which is probably past an upgrade to the new WINDOWS 11 operating system, and so I am forced to make a choice between a very mobile "Clearance" laptop which I can easily take outside to sit on the sunny verandah while I type my daily blog and a more like my current HP-style "Hot Deal" large monitor on a stand. I don't want to spend too much as the old Valhalla burials where I could take everything with me, are a thing of the past. "Wer die Wahl hat, hat die Qual." Look it up!

 

 

This may be the last upgrade I'll ever need before my final downgrade!

 

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Money isn't everything, but it ranks right up there with oxygen

 

 

As a self-funded retiree, I have only three paydays a year: when BHP pays its dividends twice a year, and when the Tax Office refunds me some of BHP's franking credits. Today was BHP's second payday and we celebrated it with a nice lunch at our favourite Thai restaurant followed by a couple of glasses of Chateau de Cardboard at the local club.

Of course, no day in the Bay is complete without a quick visit to my favourite op-shop where I picked up the above two titles. They were only a couple of dollars each, and after pensioner's discount just $2.80 for the lot. How could I pass them up? Why, I may even get around to reading them! Not that I pay much attention to those stockmarket soothsayers, as I'm pretty much rusted on to my BHP shares which have been paying me a steady dividend for more than two decades already.

To top it all off, BHP shares put on a good performance today, going up by 3.5% on rising copper prices, to $41.67, which is still a long way off from their $50-price tag when iron ore was selling at $220 a ton just a few years ago. With China's economy losing steam and the Simandou project in Guinea in West Africa gearing up production, we'll never see those days again and I should've sold out, but that's hindsight for you.

Barring dinner and the 7 o'clock evening news, that's it after another day in the life of - well, I'm just glad my name isn't Ivan Denisovich.

 

 

 

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Two Germans and an Austrians walked into a coffee shop ...

 

from left to right: two Germans, one Austrian

 

The waitress saw us coming and wanted to know, "What is this, a joke?" but became quite conciliatory as she watched us creakily taking our seats. "What will it be? Coffee? Donuts? Defibrillators?" (I'm only joking; they don't sell donuts!)

With the niceties over, we settled in and talked and talked and then talked some more. Frank and Othmar had both come out in 1955 - by which I mean 'come out to Australia' and not all that 'pinched buttock prancing' down Oxford Street - while I, being the youngest of us three, hadn't joined them until late 1965, but our hopes and dreams and experiences had been similar. If only we had known those were the days, we wouldn't have been in such a hurry to put them behind us.

By the second cup of coffee, our talk had all but deteriorated to the level of The Four Yorkshiremen except in numbers, and we decided to leave some of it until the following week, same time, same place (I could also have written 'same place, same time' but it's taken sixty 'naturalised' years for 'same time, same place' to sound more 'natural').

While waiting for the blood circulation to return to our legs and before creakily getting off our seats, the friendly waitress helped us to take the above photo for posterity. Of course, I tipped her on the way out. "Thanks, Hun!" she smiled. Well, at least she got that one right!

 

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P.S. Hello, Frank and Othmar, I think it should be all right to publish the above photograph unless you're fearing that someone out there is still chasing you for outstanding alimonies, in which case please let me know and I will immediately blur your image to match your failing eyesight.