Ave Marcus Aurelius!

In the past, I tried few times to approach Marcus Aurelius' "Meditations", but somehow it did not stick with me. I always thought it strange, as in general I acquiesce with Stoic philosophy and am sympathetic with their minimalism regarding demands from the world.

Reading it now in English translation, I think that the problem was that I was approaching it in Polish or Croatian translation, in which it seemed unnatural to me. Was it the projected catholicism in those translations, even if ony in verbalisation, or bad translators, or maybe I was not mature enough yet, I do not know.

So, it took me almost half a century to mature to Marcus Aurelius. Not bad.

In a rather dry Penguin "Great Ideas" English edition, it achieved appropriate form for me, I felt that I am having a discourse with the Emperor-philosopher.

At moments it felt like reading of the excerpts from an email Emperor would write from his seclusion at some of the summer villas. Considering his timelessness-it is not a little feat to be a best-selling author for almost 2000 years after you disappear from the Earth-I give him a credit for being a bore sometimes, with his all too frequent reminders that we are not to dwell the Earth for long, and that both we and our doings will cease to be, all too soon.

So, yes, even in English rendering I did not find him jolly. It was an encounter with rather a sullen Emperor, but at least I could feel the person behind the text. It was not leading me-or the translator-to some shallow musings of a Catholic obsessive manic melancholic.

I definitely admire Marcus' being so down to earth a man, when he could bask in the purpury and not give a damn about posterity, or those before him. He did not make much of them or himself, but he remained true to simplicity of thought, loftiness was a stranger to him.

Ave Marcus Aurelius!

Elif Shafak: "The bastard of Istanbul"

When passing through "Ataturk" airport in Istanbul, I usually visit a very good bookstore there, where I can equip myself with something to read on intercontinental flights. I was waiting for an occasion to read "The bastard of Istanbul" by Elif Shafak since few years when, in the same shop, I bought her "The forty rules of love", and read it with great pleasure.

"The Bastard..." was her first book, and what a beautiful work it is! It is a family book; she found a format to reach, really, to the whole generational span of a traditional Middle East family...mostly female, that is, somehow I have feeling that "real" men of that region will not read her. Some "effeminate" figures like Orhan Pamuk, yes, undoubtedly.

The book reflects her experience as a global citizen of XXI ct., spans between Turkey and USA, between the heavy topic of mass killings of Armenians at the end of Turkish Empire, and everyday life of American average citizen. Whirls between fantastic connection between families and objects in their life througout the century and half the world distance, between shame and domestic matters, spoken and unspoken... It is a beautiful work, another gem in her collection.

It matches my personal experience of Turkey, where in mountain villages of Central Anatolia I met people as traditional and patriarchal as if they'd pop-out from an Ottoman fairy-tale, and in the same time their children, whom I met in the coastal cities of Turkey, were a modern youth, with perfectly modern longings and experiences.

It is a travel which Turkey started long time ago, and it is still uncertain where it will bring her...as the waters of international affairs are murky beyond recognition. It is not at all obvious to me that the swing of the wordly matters will bring Turkey even closer to the West. Could be that the West will, after a XX ct. drunkenness, will whirl back into its familiar vicious circle of blood and thirst for power, Christian supremacy idiocy and malice towards others. Tribal wars of Europe and post-neo-colonialism, to put it in somewhat worn-out words.

Then, thanks to the sheer power of vivid culture, Turkey will have the sincerity and authority to ditch the corrupt West and East equally, and go further on its own. An Empire is an Empire, and Ottoman was not the least of them, however badly it would crash for a moment.

I was astonished by the gamma of good literature in the bookstore-modern, worthy books, not only some bullshit "Kitchen of the East" trash. Someone must be buying and reading them, thinking about the matters moved there. This, and authors like Elif Shafak give hope, indeed, that the world is poised for more ... intelligent, if not easier times. It becomes obvious that people are not satisfied with their TV set and bowl of rice, potatoes or couscous. There is a longing for more, and good, good, long for more, this world IS beautiful!

Also sprach Nietzsche

Long time ago, when the world was young, Nietzsche's "Zarathustra" was my guide through the forest. It was so serious and successful, that I had to literally drown it in a river, as a first batch of kitten, in the way of my independent thinking.

After few decades, more exactly, quarter of a century, Nietzsche's book found his way into my hands. This time in a bit modernized, eInk edition, in English. Good, as I would not like a smell of rotten fish when reading it.

In difference to the previous version, which travelled with me for max. 80km from Zagreb, this one accompanied me from Taiwan to Europe during the last year, and appropriately I finished it in the air, somewhere above India. Really appropriate!

What new brought to me this re-reading of Nietzsche's anti-philosopher, pompous poet and dancer on the wire?

In the first place, I was not impressed at all by his independence on the opinions of others. In my previous readings I admired it a lot, and today it seems obvious to me. Obviously I absorbed well his teaching during my early days, so it became my second nature.

Similar was my (lack of) reaction at morder of the gods, idols and authorities-30 years ago he taught me all needed lectures in this, so it seemed all "obvious" today.

Poetic form, chosen by Nietzsche, is not foreign to me, and I still consider it appropriate for Zarathustra, but it was sometimes tedious in its litanies. In English it was even less impressive than I remember from Croatian translation. In original he is even more popmpous, when he wants to be so, as German can be ueber-pompous, oh yes! A seam for the lowest sewer pipe can be pronounced in German so that it will sound as the most important part of a spaceship! Jawohl!

So, this time Zarathustra did not teach me much, except showing me that i read it on time in last about 20 readings, and that it left an imposing trace in my weltanschaung. Probably this was the last it had to teach me, before disappearing in Black Forest?

Even a century after it's writing, "Zarathustra" has a word for us. In fact, I think it is even more needed today than at his birth. At that time there were many voices agains conformism, and they were louder and louder, we even fought wars for it. Nietzsche only added to a mighty river one independent stream. As a real philosopher, not philosophier, in the sense of R.M. Pirsig's definition from "Lila", he gave his vision of both the problem and the solution.

Today we definitely do not live the epoch of a super-human. I think that since 1968. when the 2nd rennaisance so utterly failed, we only de-evolutionized... I was born after that, so maybe this would explain why a prophet laughing of a divine seriousness was, and still is, so attractive to me?

Lu Xun: "Wandering"

I found this small collection of Lu Xun's short stories at the marvellous 2nd hand bookmarket in Rue Brancion near Porte de Vanves Metro in Paris XVe. Naturally, most of books is in French, but there is also some choice of English books, most of Far East provenience. A place worth visiting, if you are into such things.

The collection I bought bears identation as "1st Edition 1981", translated by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang, published in Beijing by the Foreign Languages Printing House. Very well done, in my opinion.

Not everyone knows about Lu Xun (Zhou Shuren), although he is a writer of fame in China. To make it clear, he was not a communist, although he was a leftist: he was lucky enough to live in times when it was still possible: 1881-1936. Probably he could be termed something as a George Orwell of China?

Checking in Wikipedia about him will bring you into the very interesting period of Chinese history, and following some of the links you can learn a lot (I did, even after living 10 years in Taiwan), I think Lu Xun is a good entrance to learm about China which did not happen...yet.

The short stories are about anything unusual, unhappy marriages, happy and unhappy times of ordinary people, solitary teachers in the province... In a sense it is like compressed Gao Xingjian from one of his two thick novels, but he is not as soft in writing, is more focused. Good, well written stories. One can learn well about Chinese ways of thinking from them. I think they mature well, too, but then, in Chinese world things usually mature well, often becoming a mummies of itself. Lu Xun writing stayed alive. Highly recommended.

A Slave

T. Hoover in "The Zen Experience" relates the following episode from Ch'an cannon:

A local governor asked venerable Ma-tsu, Ch'an master of T'ang dinasty time: "Master, should I eat meat and drink wine?"

Master answered rather straightforwardly: "To eat and drink is your natural right, to abstain from meat and wine is your chance for greater blessedness".

I doubt a Zen master of such posture would be so plain.

My answer, accross the centuries, is:

To eat meat and drink wine, or not to eat mean and drink wine, both is your natural right.

A need for an answer is your natural slavery.

Miroslav Krleza and his cycle on Glembay family

Miroslav Krleza is a Croatian writer of XX ct., loved and hated by Croatians, for his rather unsympathetic and unflattering picture of his fellow citizens. His politycal posture, strenghtened by a veiled friendship with a Yugoslavian dictator Tito from the times before the WWII, enabled him to survive turbulent times and become an Editor in chief of the Yugoslavian encyclopedia, his pet project for more than 30 years. Today the fruit of this effort is called Krleziana, and is one of the monuments of this great man from another epoch.

His works encompass novels, essays, drama, poetry,... It is Krleza, from the former Yugoslavia, who should obtain Nobel prize for literature, not Ivo Andric (a Bosnian Croat shfting voluntarily into being a Serbian writer, hardly there could be a more politycally correct writer for former YU)- but this would be too much for Serbs, so Krleza never made even to being an official candidate from the Yugoslavian side. Something similar to a case of Zbigniew Herbert in Poland (where he definitely would be a logical pick instead of Wislawa Szymborska, after Milosz was already awarded it). Award itself here is not important, but it brings wider knowledge of a writer, and it is indeed a cultural crime to rob the wider world audience of writers like Herbert or Krleza.

In his large opus, Krleza is today most often present in theatre and TV with a cycle of three drama works on a North-Croatian family of Glembay, notorious petty-bourgeois post-feudal capitalists. It is a violent drama cycle, with corpses of lovers and ruined existences falling at the floor in the finals. As Krleza was pre-cursor of existentialism (writing such works well in advance, 10 years before Sartre), his heroes mainly theatrically kill themselves, after a vicious and ruthless self-questioning, tortured by the equally vicious and ruthless reality of their doings and shortcomings.

A drama cycle "The Glembays", "In agony" and "Leda" are three works where Krleza gave a tomography of rotten patrician bourgeouis world of Zagreb at the beginning of the XX ct. Nothing is real here, everything is rotten and false, guided by lowest instincts and money. Honesty is virtually non-existant, even-or especially in-emotional relationships.

Mixed with Krlezian existentialist observations of the world, this work lucidly shows an agony of the falling society. While local in its scope, it is of a general austro-hungarian spirit, and could be well understood all through the lands of the old Empire even today. In this sense it is definitely defining a wider Central-European experience.

Peter Nadas: "Love"

This short novel by the author of immense "A book of memories" and short "The end of a family story" is a report on madness. Madness of love? No. Madness in a lover himself.

Maybe this should be at the obligatory list of school readings, now when marihuana is to become legally allowed in many countries? Namely, the novel is about a night of madness which the main character lives through after smoking a joint. It must be it was a bad one, (or/and the character himself was bad), since it produced a fly-away for the night, a kind which can easily happen after a stronger variety known as skunk.

What was to be a relaxed night spent with the lover became a paranoic nightmare. Maybe it was triggered by a strong contradiction in him: he actually came to tell to the woman that he will not be coming the next time... but he knows he is not able to tell it to her, as it would be too much off beat. So he skips into paranoia.

Nadas gave here a different relation than in his aforementioned books, as it involves only one person, which is separated from the world. We follow his paranoiac visions-very good and thorough description is telling; author probably just gave a relation from his own experience.

Advisable for anyone who would like to know how it is when one gets a slight overdose of a psychotic drug, without actually trying it in vivo. Soft, thoroughly true Nadas' writing.