Locally important feast of St. Elijah -- midsummer heat, associated with the storm, widely thought to be pre-Christian in origin.
Steeds and chariots of flame...
The purpose of society is not to preserve and populate the forms of social life and industry. That can be done with a fraction of the population, and if necessary, within a context of near-absolute injustice and corruption, especially when social connections are mediated by technology.
The purpose of society is the answer to a single question: What is it that all of us should do now?
I remember reading Newman's Lectures on the Irish University when I was working at the hardware store on the Upper East Side, just after passing the bar exam. That, and Trollope, preserved some airy spaces in the mind during the hardscrabble days. Which were, of course, shortly to become even more hardscrabble.
Hardscrabbler. Harderscrabble. It's very important to find the right words for things. Cf. I. Berlin's anecdote about Akmatova in the bread line.
Looking at a map of the region in the 11th c. -- with possibly one exception, all of the places that I've visited were cities then. (And I think the one not on the map was in existence then, as well.) Not always under the same names, or in the same country, but still there. Perhaps the norm in Europe.
I have consciously looked for cities that were historical capitals or sees, sometimes in preference to current capitals. The ruins of time...
From the first draft of Gray's Elegy in a Country Churchyard, per today's entry in Chambers:
The thoughtless World to majesty may bow,
Exalt the brave, and idolise success;
But more to Innocence their safety owe
Than Power and Genius e'er conspired to bless.
And thou who, mindful of the unhonoured Dead,
Dost in these notes their artless tale relate,
By night and lonely contemplation led
To linger in the lonely walks of Fate,
Hark how the sacred calm that reigns around
Bids every fierce tumultuous passion cease;
Instill small accents whisp'ring from the ground
A grateful earnest of eternal peace.
No more with Reason and thyself at strife,
Give anxious cares and endless wishes room;
But through the cool, sequester'd vale of life
Pursue the silent tenor of thy doom
Proverbs for Paranoiacs, cont'd: If you are travelling in the Second World, and a large commercial van with dark tinted windows that was outside the apartment yesterday pulls up again the next morning, and then pulls away again a few minutes after you put some towels out to dry in front of the window, it's undoubtedly a coincidence. If anyone's asking.
[Update, apparently just a van in the local commercial traffic that decided to make an abrupt departure at that particular moment. But in the Balkans, any excuse for paranoia is useful. Keeps one on one's toes.]
Rather profound shift in powers of mental focus (not for the good), together with mild respiratory oddness. Assuming it's from the rooms above the Pennsylvania Turnpike, which were quite a shift from the quiet, somewhat swampy city of the Jedi Council. The paradigm for it in my understanding is the beginning of Tarkofski's Solaris -- the earthly home (which we see in the director's ending to be the world of forms), and then this deeply disturbing soundtrack of automobiles and traffic counterbalanced by sedative visuals. From the place of understanding to the difficult work and alienating journey.
Given the preponderance of the visual in experiencing films, people often take the traffic section to be simply soporific and sedative -- but if you listen to the audio on its own, it's actually deeply disturbing.
Walkure on the Bayreuth broadcast for the Sunday late afternoon/evening. Rheingold was in the Starbucks across from the national parliament, which went from daytime to nighttime lighting at the finish, which was quite powerful. But for the first day of the festival, the rooms adjacent to the busy road. Sufficient for the wanderer.
In this listening, I'm seeing Wotan as a sort of protestant figure. (Much to do with the reading of the past year, perhaps.) Building Valhalla against the ones who have gained spiritual power by renouncing earthly love. Walhall seems a more contingent proposition -- not a universal heaven, but a collection of the noble souls that Wotan's Valkyries are able to capture (St. Michael figures, perhaps) after Wotan had intentionally made the mortals' lives difficult and quarrelsome. Built by the human giants, not by the Gods. And he fears that the armies of the ones who have renounced love might even reach these souls that have been taken there and convert them.
And the ending with the Valkyrie who disobeyed him, even though entirely a creature of his will -- perhaps reckoning the cost of reformation, and attempting to ensure that its spirit will reach the future?
More things in heaven and earth, Horatio. Particularly earth.
Bit of a break in the heat. Rooms much more liveable. Still the busy road, but that's only noise. The absence of fumes and heat (presumably a change in wind with the weather) makes much more of a difference. The cost is much higher than what the locals pay in rent, but absent the caravanserai mentality, there would be no market whatsoever, an nowhere to travel to. The caravan continues.
The fundamentals are good -- wood floors, open space, double-glazed windows, but the clothesline is an old synthetic yarn that leaves tiny splinters in the clothing, the air conditioner was literally packed with dry and oily dirt (a half inch on the filter), and there were other electrical/plumbing things. In addition, there wasn't an open laundry room, so it's been a few weeks of hand-washing. It's being run as an inexpensive rental, so this apparently the mentality of an inexpensive rental in this part of the world. Which is odd. There's no reason that it couldn't be run shipshape without doubling the rent, but that's apparently the distinction. Hopefully, the month of exhaust fumes from the road won't cause any lingering cloudiness.
Oddly, I came here from the Jedi Council city, which had its own difficulties at times (Yoda's swamp, perhaps), and just before I left, I was watching Tarkovski's Solaris one night after dinner, and was struck by the soundtrack on the driving scene after the rural home at the beginning. Listening only to the sound, I was struck by how nightmarish it was. Just the constant rush of traffic, but...
In a moment of cynicism, I wonder if the world (multiplied tenfold in the last hundred years) has thought through what might happen if hundreds of millions of people in its most powerful country just start lying as hard as they can -- which seems to be the way things are going. Our mediated ways of understanding the way things are in the world won't necessarily pick up on this, but the context of everyday experience will change, and unrest will grow. And the mechanisms that have been developed to suppress unrest have grown quite potent, albeit quietly, over the last fifty years or so.
Ultimately, you do have to be a good person, if this civilization thing is going to work. ("You," not "one.") You don't have to accept the prevailing notion of the good, but you do need to formulate your own idea of the good, and especially in that case of exception, hold to it with all your being. The real danger is in the (now apparently increasing) thought that neither the common notion of the good, nor private notions of the good, nor the notion of private notions of the good can claim authority. In a crisis, of course, the wagons will circle around the first, but precisely because that will happen at the expense of the second and the third, we, quite wisely, won't entirely believe it.
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