"So? How are you?"

 “So? How are you?” 

Nils calls on the house phone. He wants to talk to Uncle Albert, he has a French idiom he needs help with.*

     After I don’t know how long, I hear Uncle Albert calling me. “He wants to talk to you,” he says, handing me the phone. “Afterwards, I could use some help.”

Nils with Portland cement, USB port

     “I can help now,” I say, “and call him back later.”

     “No,” Uncle Albert says. “After is soon enough. It would be better.”

“Yes,” I say into the phone after I’ve carried it back downstairs.

     “We don’t hear from you,” Nils says. “We” means “Axel and he.” The brothers have been sharing space again since . . . the end of February, I think.

     “Oh,” I say. I don’t say, “If you wanted to, you could call me.” I don’t say, “You know how much I hate the phone. I’m not likely to call you, am I?” I just say, “Oh.”

     “So, how are you doing?” Nils says.

     “How about you and Axel?” I answer.

If there’s anything I dislike more than talking on the phone, it’s answering the question, “How are you?”

05.26.20

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 * About Nils, see here. Uncle Albert, the reader will remember, taught French, for years and years, at Bretagne and Chanceux Colleges (the latter now Chanceux University, of course - since it added that night-school MBA program).

Schools

 Schools 

Fritz Mauthner (1849-1923), philosopher, critic, satirist – and better to be the last than either of the former (even if you influenced Wittgenstein). Also, fabulist! Among his works were the fables of Aus dem Märchenbuch der Wahrheit (From the Fairytale Book of Truth), including the following, in my poor translation. (The original is here.)

The School of Giving and the School of Receiving

                                    by Franz Mauthner

In the midst of all that is floated an island; it looked like Earth. On the island lived two kinds of people, the rich and the poor. The rich gave and the poor received. If only the rich knew how to give and the poor knew how to receive as both were taught by the Book of Joy in the old Sunland! But no one on the island had thought of that, teaching giving or receiving.

     Then, a young King came to power, and he resolved in his heart to make the Book of Joy into law.  “Happiness is duty” was its first regulation. And the young king wished to teach what in the end was needed most, giving and receiving. He built two very large schools and established chairs in them for teachers of that wisdom most needed.

      The one school was set up for the rich, who were to learn to give: a simple building, modest outside and in. Over the humble entrance were the words: “Please . . . Thank you.” These were to remind the rich first to say “please,” that the poor would accept their gift, and then to thank them for doing so. Humility and suffering – that’s what the rich were to learn, who went into the school of giving.

     The other school was set up for the poor, who should learn to receive: a bright and beautiful building, a palace! In gold in marble the motto: “To you will be given, that you may be happy.” For one ruling of the Book of Joy was this: “To receive is even more blessed than to give.” High and splendid was the entryway, wreathed in flowers that would never fade. Proud and happy should they be that entered the school of receiving.

     While the building was still in progress, the young King called the teachers together to instruct them: that receiving was more blessed than giving, that the rich poor could make the poor rich man happier than he could make them. He wanted to impress these things on them. But because they had grown up under a different law, the teachers didn’t understand the Book of Joy. This so grieved the young king, and he was buried under a mound of green. The angel of death smiled an odd smile.

The school for the poor taken over by the rich.

Soon after, the school buildings were finished. The people cherished their thoughts of the young King, and they streamed into the schools, where giving and receiving could be learned. But because the teachers had not understood the Book of Joy, because the poor believed the motto “Please . . . Thank you” was written for them and the rich exactly the opposite motto, “To you will be given that you may be happy,” was forthem, and because tradition did after all invite the rich into palaces and the poor into simple bouses, they ended up, rich and poor, in the wrong schools.

     The rich did not learn giving. What was intended for the poor, that they learn good cheer and pride, the rich learned instead. And only the better among them also learned to be embarrassed by their good cheer and how not to let their pride turn into arrogance.

     The poor didn’t learn how to receive. What was intended for the rich, they learned instead, suffering and humility. And only the better among them learned how to keep their suffering from becoming hate, their humility from becoming self-abasement.

     Now as before the two schools stand on the island, which looks like Earth in the midst of all there is. Now as before the rich and the poor attend the wrong schools and don’t know it. The Book of Joy has been lost.

     Good fairies are preparing a cradle for a prince that is coming. They plan to grant him the grace to find once again the Book of Joy. Then he can teach people right giving and right receiving.

So, as the Philosopher (the second Joseph) said – again and again: “There it is.”

05.26.20

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 * More on Mauthner here.

More verse. More verse!

 More verse. More verse! 

Dear Ted,

I can tell you are sad - or I think you must be - when you don’t write back.

     Do you remember Leslie Becket (one t)? He was in your class, I think, or maybe one higher. Tall, gawky, British - I don’t know how he got to Brownsburg, where we were living then. His parents were killed in an accident or something, and his aunt was there, married to a professor at the college? If I knew, I don’t remember.

     I saw him the other day. He died in an accident, too, hit by a car when he was riding his bike. Not the car’s fault, he said. He was thinking about something else and swerved in front of it. He was always thinking of something else, he said. That’s the way I remember him, too, though, as I said, I don’t remember him well.

     I do remember that he read a lot. He’d go to the college library after school, get out a book from a shelf, sit on the floor, and read until closing. That’s what I heard anyway. Poetry. He read poetry. He’s the only one I know of, among all the people we went to school with, that did that. Except you sometimes. And me.

     He asked about you. People do, the ones I run into from those days. You seem to have been friends with a lot of them, not just your crowd if you had one. I missed that somehow, the how-many people you knew and knew you. I told him I thought you were sad.

     He said everyone was sad these days that had any sense. (That’s not the party line, incidentally.) But, he said, you should read more poetry. And he gave me this. “What a coincidence,” I said. “He (meaning you) is reading German.”

      Here it is. I was very careful in copying it out, so I’m almost positive I have it right. It’s by someone called Ludwig Börne, John Wesley says.

                                                Love, Moira*

„Nichts ist dauernd als der Wechsel; nichts beständig als der Tod. Jeder Schlag des Herzens schlägt uns eine Wunde, und das Leben wäre ein ewiges Verbluten, wen nicht die Dichtkunst wäre. Sie gewährt uns, was uns die Natur versagt, eine goldene Zeit, die nicht rostet, einen Fühling, der nicht abblüht, wolkenloses Glück und ewige Jugend.‟ ^†

05.17.20

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 * My sister, Moira. See here.

 ^† Romantic but true (though I might leave the last two phrases off): “Nothing is more enduring than change, nothing more constant than death. Every beat of our hearts causes a wound, and life is bleeding to death, if there were not poetry. It grants us what Nature denies us, a golden age that will not rust, a spring that will not fade, cloudless good fortune, everlasting youth.”

Thursday the 13th

 Thursday the 13th* 

This came the next day^†:

P.S. What are you learning, besides vocabulary?

For example, that pisan is Malay for banana?

“What are you learning, besides vocabulary? For example, that pisan is Malay for banana?”

If I were writing back, I might say that I was learning that it was important to learn how to listen, das Zuhören,

»das Lauschen mit stillem Herzen, mit wartender goöffneter Seele, ohne Leidenschaft, ohne Wunsch, ohne Urteil, ohne Meinung,«

“. . . to listen with quiet heart, with expectant, open soul, without desire, condition, judgment, or partiality.” Only to listen. To listen to the river – or to anything. But especially to the damn river.

the afore- and ever-after-to-be-mentioned barge

     But then I should add that I was learning that it was equally, if not more, important not to listen to everything the river says with the same ears. The current that runs leise is also strong enough to carry barges of bullshit. For instance, one can discover this listening to the river that

»Nichts war, nichts wird sein; alles ist, alles hat Wesen und Gegenwart.«

That “nothing was, nothing will be for all is, all is here, now.” Yet . . . not too long after, the reader finds how congruous Siddhartha and Vasudeva have become so that listening to the river they often come to the same thought, for example, they remember simultaneously

»ein Gespräch von vorgestern.«

“a conversation they had the day before yesterday.”

     But, how could it be otherwise, how could they not be having the same – the same exact - conversation today as the day before yesterday since the day before yesterday was already today and today in its turn the day before yesterday will be (not to mention the day after tomorrow was), “is” being always at the same time “was” and “will be” and vice versa versa vice ad infinitum.

And that being the case, will the remainder of the book become unreadable? – for a sentence can’t unfold from left to right or a page from top to bottom: every letter is on top of the letter before – and underneath it at the same time - so had I answered I might write, should have written, will write at some point (as Sterne did)*:

“Hallelujah! Holy shit! Where's the Tylenol?”

05.13.20

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 * Comes on a Wednesday this month.

 ^† See previous post.