One of my circles in Slovenian Alps

The mountainous world, as Slovenians say it... is wonderful. After 25 years, I completed the circle atop the Logarska valley, in Kamniske & Savinjske Alps of northern central part of Slovenia, with a climb to the highest top there, Grintovec. Starting from Logarska, as I was usually doing, Grintovec was always too remote for my short climbs. This time, thanks to the good company, I headed for it from the Kamnik side and finally completed this of my circles. The story begins with a short but steep climb to Kokrsko Saddle at 1800m, which is quite evident here:

At the top we are welcomed by the pillars of the cargo lift:

Looking down-yes, this climb is quite steep:

Cojsova house stands here about 110 years (this is a new house, the first was at a nearby location):

It's not really about one man, but about two brothers Zois who first listed the plants in this part of the 
 Alps and financially assisted first ascents in the Julian Alps, even before the 1800s.
  The house is beautiful, with a little more water and a few more toilets would be even better. Be sure to take all the water you need
from the valley below, up there water is scarce.

The primary goal of our ascent was Grintovec, which was the first peak in the Slovenian Alps of such height (2558 m),
  which was climbed, because of its accessibility. From Cojsova house it took 
 about 3 hours of easy hike. The only problem is that you need to choose a good time to catch the top cloudless and have a view around. 
 Clouds from the valley of the Kamniska Bistrica rise very quickly.
 For us it showed good to start a bit later, as during the otherwise slightly cloudy day, the top
 cleared around noon.

To complete this of my circles, it was necessary to reach the Turski groove, which is why I suggested a walk to 
 Kamniško Saddle. The next morning we headed down the path toward a beautiful bivouac

which is very interesting, it should be nice to sleep there...i na a good weather:

Above us was all the time Skuta, an impressive top, just a few meters lower than Grintavec:

Note the exclamation point in a triangle, it is a sign for a "Very demanding trail":

This means that it will look like this:

and you'll have to use your hands quite a lot:

It is nicer when not in the cloud, one can see where one goes:

We climbed the top of Turska mountain:

After quite a rugged walk in the cloud, it was an easy hike below top of Brana:

Finally, after 5 hours altogether, house on Kamnisko Saddle, the most luxury place in the Slovenian Alps:

Those alps for me were, during my student days in Zagreb, the closest target for my first solo walks through the stone. 
This is why visit to them is always special for me, like visiting old friends, a pure pleasure.

Hemingway: "A Moveable Feast"

There is a Quality in Hemingway's writing which comes out only in original. He devised his own English. I had read him in various translations, but since he is writing directly and simple, I suggest anyone knowing English at least a bit, to read him in original from the very beginning.

At the first visit for this time to Kilometer Zero Shakespeare in Paris, I was searching for a book which would match my own position here this time. I found this perfect piece of writing. This book I never read in translation, so it was a new one for me. I still had in my mind a mastery of "Farewell to Arms", which I re-read recently, so I knew this should be an appropriate piece.

Hemingway is here an observer, and sometimes a participant. As usual, no bull-shitting in his writing, he is frank and direct. Made of short pieces about people and places, or himself and his present condition (Paris, 1920-ies), the book becomes a discourse with the author on walks through the streets of the City. It hits you when you walk the street or place which you just read about in Hemingway's straightforward writing. It is like a stamp in time on the place, much better than any bronze or marble plaquette on the wall. And not that there would be missing such, more material ones, in the City... I think his one is to last longer.

Gell-Mann and Jaguar

"The Quark and the Jaguar" is a text by renowned physicist Murray Gell-Mann about...many things. Maybe a bit too many.

Probably the best part of it, in my eyes, is the description of a needed revision in explanations of Quantum Field Theory. True, the descriptions used in current textbooks rely too much on the historical, today quite antiquated, ways to explain the content of the theory.

Apart from this, Gell-Mann gives an interesting wide view of the simple and complex in nature, from his perspective of an amateur ecologist.

For readers of popular science books the following might be useful: It reads as an intermediate between Richard Dawkins' "Blind Watchmaker" and Anthony Zee's "Fearful symmetry" or Michio Kaku's "Hyperspace", but is less entertaining. It is delivered in a more serious tone of a physicist of an older generation. If it serves your preference, it is a good read. It is not so geeky as Hofstadter "Goedel, Escher, Bach" or "Artificial Intelligence", and is also less physics-centered than "Emperor's new mind" by Penrose.

The book is from 1994, which is 20 years ago, but Gell-Mann correctly predicted up-rise of social media and political consequences of implosion of Soviet Union and fall of communism. This makes it a surprisingly up-to date book, and a valuable read.

Billiards at half past nine

I finally found a Polish translation of this book by Heinrich Böll, after a couple of years of searching through 2nd hand bookstores. As it goes, I found the first Polish edition from the year 1961, only two years after the publication of the original.

It's easy to find the story of the book online,Böll was, after all, a Nobel laureate, but I will add some my comments. The book is definitely one of the best of his works. Very briefly, it is the history of the Fähmel family at the time after the First World War and Hindenburg, until the time of post-WWII West Germany. No big philosophy, more a personal psycho - sociological picture of the pathology in the society. Interestingly, it is not about a poor family, and is given in terms of the positive characters: architects, sincere, faithful, morally and socially unquestionable people. No creatures like then and current political or human shit of characters. Nazis are referred to as a primitive and inherently evil people, but more as a social evil than private.

Precisely in this way Böll achieved, at least for me, the most effective condemnation of bourgeois, or rather klein-buergerlich society. A woman from the apartment a couple of floors above the impoverished families in times of great crisis, which lends a half cup of sugar and is considering a debt returned only when she receives a full cup; outraged wealthy citizen who requires the bill in a restaurant charging HALF boiled egg, because he ordered it so, and not the whole egg; boys' arguments that eventually grow into national issues at the cost of people's lives... There is no better way to get to the core question: who are those people able to send a couple of million people in gas chambers and bring out such an ideology as the Germans followed during the Nazi time? In the book, Böll does not even mention those things by name, but they are constantly just behind the horizon; it feels like an army coming onto the city during a siege.

A sad thing is that today similar issues are emerging in Europe. See Ukraina today. Obviously we have not read enough of Böll, maybe a good time to refresh our memory a little?

"The Tartar Steppe" by Dino Buzzati

This masterpiece of Buzzati from 1938, (in original "Il deserto dei Tartari", in my opinion it is better translated like "The Tartar Desert"). I read it repeatedly during last 30 years, but this was the first time in English translation (the previous was always Croatian). More than language, I think the actual time difference in reading made it somewhat different experience-but always an excellent piece of writing, among the 10 best on my list.

In previous readings I would see the waste of life in unimportant routine. This time, the question "which routine is not unimportant?" showed through. Not the philosophical one, but realistic: when one turns 30 years older, is there still the hope, or passion, in its full measure? Or we just follow the routine, want to find smooth, warm place and calm down, not stirring the air much?

I found that there is, for me. But I need the whole Universe for it, anything less. For others, I leave the question to themselves.

This allegory of Buzzati on life and all that is still a masterpiece, because of the setup he chose: bareness of the military life on the remote outpost, where enemy is not realistically expected in any time on the scale of human life. Everything what happens, is there as an unimportant addition to the routine of...waiting. Like waiting for the barbarians, who never come. When they do come, it is too late, the life is over-is it a punishment for the wasted time? Everything is punishing the main character for the failure, from his own body, to people surrounding him. Does he find consolation in anything? Not really, Buzzati does not leave much of the space for him, nor is the decay of hope long and slow, it is sudden, because life, in reality, is not long and slow. Take what you want, make sure you want something to take from it, as at the end, not much remains.

Positive solution for the book ending, in a given setup, would really be only to die in a battle!

R.M. Pirsig: "Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance"

This book is not your usual leisure book. Although it rarely goes more than few meters away from the road or motorcycle, it is hardly a travelogue, or a mechanic's reference book. In fact, we are dealing here with autobiographical work. And a strong one. I found it online as a pdf and put it at Pirsig: "Zen and..."

I read this book for the first time as a teenager, and it had a profound influence on me. And it still has. Sure, I re-read it many times, and every time I had something to learn. This time again.

At first, one can take the message of the book to be one for free will, personal freedom and tune it with "The Wall" music of Pink Floyd all too easily. Spirit of the 1960-ies. Not too bad, for a teenager, if one takes as a motto:

"And what is good, Phædrus,
And what is not good...
Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?"

But as years go, one starts being more interested in what Phaedrus really found, why he went insane. I myself maybe grasped it when I was younger, and then lost it, enjoying too much the "usual" spirit of the book, as I saw it. Or becoming too arrogant to in my thinking that I understood it all. Never be an arrogant reader, it is like if you would be an arrogant side in a discussion. In this reading I recovered understanding of it, and feel a bit uneasy about it, as it shutters the firm columns of our high towers of Science. Phaedrus had, indeed, all reasons to go insane.

In short, what Phaedrus found was that we live in a Myth of dialectic, dualistic world, which is a lie, lie, lie. We are blinded by a (wrong) limiting choice of philosophical path taken in ancient Greece. Not that it was bad or avoidable, but nevertheless, it destroyed our ability to even THINK in agreement with the true world around us.

It is a bit like what was described in the previous book i reviewed here, "1984", where the aim of Newspeak was to prevent even thinking against Party. Simply, they cut the language so to make it impossible. What Phaedrus found is that we structured our philosophy, science, thinking and society in general in such a way that we stay alienated from true underlying picture of the world!

For more, go and fathom the book yourself, I am not a philosopher and I definitely do not feel as a guide for this one. But it does give me a profound shock to understand what Phaedrus found... Kind of a door to something what we'll probably see for the next time only when we meet Aliens.

"1984" today

I wrote before about my recent re-reading of the anti-utopian novels "We" by Zamyatin and "Brave New World" by Huxley. Logically, "1984" also got the attention it deserves: for the first time I read it in original language.

I started reading it with similar question as for the other two: what it can teach us today, is there anything where we fell under some of the prophesied spells?

I remember always having the feeling that Orwell is not so naive to merely describe Stalinism. That he meant more, was an observation of myself as a teenager, when reading "1984" for the first time, about the titular year 1984, when I myself was still deep immersed into a Yugoslavian story. I read other Orwell's books before "1984", so I knew he is not to be taken lightly, that he is a highly responsible writer. However, I see now that I understood his take on Inglsoc in a rather shallow way. This reading, and probably 30 intervening years (!) took me deeper. He really was not at all speaking about Stalinism. Nor the hypothetical Socialist Republic of Great Britain. The society he describes is much more applicable to today's world than we could imagine back in 1984.

When I am writing this, we have news of Mr. Snowden denouncing his own government, we have a character like Mr. Assange immersed in his own thriller. Somehow both cases have to do with obvious involvement of governments in not the best practices. Not that we would not know about it, but we prefer to live an illusion of a politically correct government, not the one actively pursuing control over all aspects of life of its subjects.

Now the perturbation of "un-free" Socialist State of X got vaporized in the working of History, and we can turn to the more important features of Orwell's work.

Naturally, what was missing in the picture with my first reading(s) of "1984", compared to today, was omnipresence of Internet. Now we have Google well groomed into Big Brother, with other online services as Skype, Yahoo, MSN, Facebook, more or less openly prostituting to any government, or, for that matter, group of influence. Phishing for information or direct spying are as common as spies in the border cities along the Iron Curtain were in the Cold War era. Camera of your own laptop could be switched on/off almost at anyone's will, as also the microphone of your headset. And yet, nobody seems to be frightened-we learned to live our benign lives with that fact. Nobody is even disturbed by the very idea. Big Brother? Who cares! We do not have anything to hide, Government(s) spying, advertisements companies prying...welcome!

Is it exactly so? What is then the relevance of Orwell's book for us today?

Privacy is not political matter today, at least for most of us. People like Gen. Petraeus could complain to the Water Works Dpt. of the Universe Services that their email was bugged, but then, it is to their own stupidity they'd think it would not be, or that the bug would not be used! Really interesting would be to have a statistics how many light-weight politicians were blackmailed on the base of their very private emails, on a global scale, but I am certain this information is harder to extract than e.g. how many Roman Catholics men were molested as boys by their priests. Nobody will come out with SUCH information, condemning himself. Or a State, for that matter, (s)he could finish...vaporized. Unperson. We, the ordinary ones, obviously do not have anything to hide, or, at least, not enough interesting that we'd care. We even love Big Brother (see the popularity of Facebook).

Except of the Big Brother screen entering our home freely without even frightening us (today it even follows us everywhere, in our smartphone, and we voluntarily give our privacy away-mind you, I am just confessing to google electronic media what was my reading recently, and even more, I am sharing worldwide what were my most intimate thoughts about it!), is there any other aspect of life from "1984" which we embraced readily or less readily?

One thing was strikingly obvious: mass media became exactly as described for Proles: "[in the Ministry of Truth] There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers, containing almost nothing except sport, crime, and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means..."

Is this not what you felt when ceasing to read your favorite newspaper after years of doing so, because meaningful content has been increasingly hitchhiked by idiotic following of celebrities' life or some similar garbage of today? Did you notice that your favorite newspaper webpage contains more and more of "whose breast popped out of a gala dress" or "who is divorcing whom", or "what is X. Kardashian ...ing tonight", or some other "picantery" of the currently most (un)important movie stars, than any meaningful news?

Sports content of the newspaper, being a proletarian fun previously (except maybe of a cricket column for Prince This of That and his siblings), became almost intellectual treat when compared to the rest of the "news". Not extracting the current war agenda of this or that idiotic USA president or gibbering of equally idiotic Iranian or X-an Prime Minister or President.

Those two features, unlimited powers of observation and fathomless stupidity of the Media, are two most strikingly corresponding to Orwell's prophecy, at the global scale.

Are there some other, minor correspondences between the book and the today reality, which did not yet become so global?

"Minute of hate" is taken in as a media-hypes, be it directed against moslem, gay, pedophiles or anyone/anything at hand, if there is a current lack of the atrocities of war. Until it became too expensive, USA and USSR were maintaining enough wars around the globe to fulfill such role for their population, but currently even they had to shrink the choice, with USA itself becoming a 3-rd world country, and Russia never fully reaching the importance of USSR. In People's Republic of China, Party has to be more careful not to succumb to Romanian danger of calling a rally and sinking below it. North Korea looks as if its leaders would use "1984" as a textbook.

The same is the case with religion, sexuality-it became a plastic to be mold by anyone at power-it pairs well with media as described above. Occurrence of sects or new popes or new religious leaders or, at the equal footing, some more or less sexually transmitted diseases is always at hand-as throughout the history, they are never missing from the picture.

Friendship, love... it is interesting to see that the development is not necessarily towards more freedom, based on the sheer power of numbers. In India or Arabian countries, ossified, outdated patriarchal systems are ruling the day more than ever, and it is not easy to foresee their transformation. In those places, power of the media turns handy to the government, and it could be some of those countries which will follow (or is already following) the steps of North Korea not in the direct political sense, but by a moral policing, being a ruling power in disguise.

There are many facets of "1984" which could be reached in disguise in today world. At the end, we all have a big chance to finish loving some version of the Big Brother, with his all-encompassing eyes and all-embracing powers.