So be merry, so be dead

For my fortieth birthday this summer I wished for a reprint of Paul Fussell's classic The Great War and Modern Memory. It was such a remarkable, even shattering experience to encounter it shortly after I had begun my studies in Helsinki in the late 80's. Of course, I already then found the idea of Liberal England strangely sympathetic and was aware of its strange death during the nightmares of the 20th century - but Fussell brought that theme to life in a spectacular fashion. I still largely accept his view on the importance of the WW1 to modern experience.

This is not to say that these concepts - like the "strange death" of liberal England - would not be outside impositions, they are, but currently we don't have any other means to bring coherance and life to history which is the challenge that a book like The Great War and Modern Memory so brilliantly meets. It is only too bad that most modern historians seem largely unaware that there even is a problem here - perhaps that is due to the unfortunate side effects of postmodernism. In comparison to the current crew of mainstream historians literary history like it was written by people like Fussell or Bergonzi is sheer intellectual pleasure, such wide range and such intellectual confidence is very rarely seen any more.

Inspired by Fussell, I'm am going round through these by now familiar landscapes. I am currently in the middle of Vera Brittain's classic "Testament of Youth", and no doubt "Goodbye to All That", "Undertones of War" and Sassoon's memoirs will follow later. Strange how this particular loss of innocence seems to echo through the decades for so many people and into so many different circumstances. Of course, it was a very narrow section of people, not very representative in any sense, but for them history had devised a trap the like of which has not often been seen.

They were the fruit of the high, unreal civilization of liberal England, and it is not easy not to be moved by images such as Vera Brittain's visit in July 1914 to the public school of her beloved brother and her gifted fiance - and watching them march in the Officer's Training Corps in the middle of that brilliantly beautiful summer. Surely a strange quietness in the blue sky and in the windless trees there, boys' cries muffled by the still, unmoving air... Much of the modern cynicism, pessimism and despair originated in the mad slaughter of these innocents.

In undoubtedly a very disproportionate way I identified exceptionally intensely with that experience, feeling the loss of a very protected innocence myself and having also a sense of bitter suffering and mute, helpless endurance. Of all the various figures, poets and writers, it is then Charles Sorley that stood out most painfully. His eighteen to my eighteen was a humiliating contrast. I had barely been able to formulate the need for a coherent voice, a coherent person - and there he was in his brilliant letters: a sane, sensitive, balanced, proportionate, authorititave voice. Everything I so burningly was not.

Strangely history echoes through our lives, our experiences. I was of course overly romantic, not making justice to the actual occurrances, the actual persons. But even now Sorley cannot but feel such a rounded, brilliant figure, such loss to the world, his eighteen being easily more than a match to my forty even though the competition is slightly more even now... What would he have done, what would he have written - such irreplaceable loss. Or Rosenberg, or Owen. Not representative people at all, but in their unrepresentativeness surely very crucial to our modern experience. Unmoored as we are, no longer having faith in coherance and progress, in art being the way forward for the whole civilization - lost in no-man's-land. They point, illuminate the way how we ended up there.

No permanent home here

It is very difficult to describe the atmosphere, the ethos of Finnish Pietism (herännäisyys) to outsiders. Harsh modernity has largely compressed Christianity either to bland mainstream churches going through the motions or to intellectually shrivelled, panicky fundamentalism. Those two versions, competing in shallowness, are familiar to all. Mysticism escapes this fruitless dichotomy, all fruitless dichotomies. Listening to Zion's Songs (Siionin virret), those amazing cadences of folk melodies from the 18th and 19th centuries, one is amazed that there still is, in this ice cold human world, forms of Christianity that can unite esthetics and ethics (almost in quasi-Eliotian way), that can make faith even now, even today, an intellectually relevant position. I

ncredibly for any human organization, Finnish Pietism has renounced power and manipulation, thus stubbornly maintaining a living connection to that amazing vision of universal redemption two thousand years ago - through weakness and powerless longing towards the true homeland, the loving absolute. Grace is not earned, not conquered, not owned, not maintained by human power, nor mediated by human hands. A beautiful, sad, living vision, a fit philosophy. This comment comes partially from outside, more Athens than Jerusalem surely in me, but a part of me has never left, and never will. Such strange thing, such luck to have encountered a living, credible form of Christianity - so easy to think these sorry days that none exist.

Vita brevis

It is strange to encounter milestones in one's life that so short time ago seemed unimaginable. We begin in timelessness and then are caught by that strong stream that does not remain the same though it keeps the name. I would imagine that we end by returning to a kind of timelessness: the stream goes on but we drift downwards, are left behind, not any more interested in what is to come. In that sense this is the swift mid part with very little time for reflection and distance, being in mid-arc, mid-flight. Earlier one had the illusion of finality, of reaching the finished state - I don't believe that this is so for any person, not for me certainly, and it would surely not be very satisfactory state of affairs, not to change, not to journey on. Our experience here is very strange, concrete and fickle, stable and ever changing, inexplicable at heart.

Jam tomorrow

One of the bright spots of this unexpectedly tough spring has been the re-reading of Orwell's Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters. Such a magnificent voice. He was certainly no saint and had many unpleasant traits (as we all do), many blind spots. No matter: integrity, honesty and tolerance will shine through. We have not seen his like since, not many ages have.

Curiously it was his democratic socialism that struck me this time quite powerfully: how decent, how civilized would his ideal society be. Especially in comparison with us: our hedonistic, uncaring, semi-sadistic consumer society based on capital and profit. Surely, if we were better, we would be Orwellian socialists, somewhat austere, tolerant and informal, arguing about gardening and perfect cups of tea over pints of bitter before the last orders - which would come early in the evening, then vanishing into the soft English night still discussing in good humour, perfectly equal, perfectly free...

But we are not better, we are what we are, and so the social democrats had to solve the class problem by making almost everyone a part of the middle class by taxation, welfare structures and decent universal education. And when almost everyone became middle class, they promptly shod any traces of socialist inclinations - which is why the democratic left is in such serious intellectual (if not always electoral) difficulties in most of the West. And now that the social democratic balance of interests is slowly but surely eroding in favour of capital and corporations: there is no vibrant intellectual alternative, no credible voice of dissent and progress, unlike in Orwell's own era.

I wonder what he would now say? In any case, his proposition I suppose was never really on offer - we are what we are. Having stumbled into the social democratic solution (I am still amazed how well functioning that set of balances was: no actor too strong, no interest pre-dominant) we are now stumbling out of it, irresponsibly speeding ahead towards who knows what further collapses of morality and ethics.

Duty and virtue

Following even distantly the modern liberal democratic political process you are stricken how decadent and corrupt we have become. The impulses of Christianity and the Enlightenment are growing ever weaker. What we mostly have left are possessions, a hedonistic drive towards more and more comfort and entertainment cynically manipulated by the blind, shortsighted elites. The most rapid descent appears to be in progress in the USA: the high enlightened principles of the American Revolution are rapidly vanishing in front of our eyes, the Bush administration has brutally effectively enlarged the realm of possibilities for rolling back the spirit of that great rebellion against the arbitrary power of the executive. This is not to say that there once was a halcyon time when virtue ruled – human governance is inevitably a corrupt process and without a certain earthy sense of pragmatism the results can be quite frightening. But you do have, you must have, countering ideals, high goals, a code of ethics, of morality, a sense of boundaries. Without this counterforce the government, the political process will rot to the core. A healthy balance is needed, but currently the social and economical structures don’t produce responsible politicians and good citizens – they don’t produze citizens at all, they produce consumers. There is no balance.

Every day on this planet is an astonishing collapse of morality. Every week die 250 000 children under the age of 10. Consider that for a moment, the reality of that description. There is a huge, an unimaginable amount of human suffering in the world that we already have the physical means to prevent. If we are lucky, if the civilizational progress will continue (rather debatable proposition at the moment) we will one day be condemned as coldblooded, callous murderers. It is a small comfort that there is a partial defence for this - namely that wickedness is an inbuilt feature of all human organization, that it is does not come from outside and is not in our current power to prevent. From a moral perspective that is no defence. We desperately need ideals, we need a sense of duty, a concept of virtue, an understanding of the necessity of ethical boundaries. Without those influences our existence will become a pointless combination of sadism and hedonism, and eventually a moral collapse will lead to a physical one. We can’t built a lasting civilization on consumption and profit.

His dark familiar

I have been keeping quality company during my unpleasantly long work trips these last few days: a selection of Orwell's essays and journalism preceded by Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five. Reading Orwell's heavenly prose is not only a huge pleasure but somewhat challenging too - any personal writing seems especially wooden and clumsy in that particular comparison. There really are few things in the world to compare with good writing, nor many skills that I would rate higher. (Come to think, I can't name one.) Slaughterhouse-Five is one of those books that I have first encountered too early: I think I must have read it when I was 13 or 14. These added years have added scope and it is strange to find completely new echoes and meanings in that classic text. I don't really know any wider scope than fiction, it is the widest scope, widest, most serious view that I have encountered. 

Perhaps philosophy would be a contender if someone hadn't absolutely forbidden philosophers to write about the nature and structure of the immediate human experience in any meaningful language. (Of course some have luckily disobeyed, like poor Friedrich, for instance.) So, even in the midst of these busy days with their scattered busy trivia I have been able to keep contact with essential matters, the long views - not a bad achievement as they go, as much as one would hope for a much more relevant, essential professional life to accompany a most relevant, essential private life.

From Athens via Jerusalem to the shopping mall

For me history is at the centre: it is the central science, the central study. In comparison physics seems a simple if an esoteric field, mathematics a self-evident logical game with only fairly mechanical complexities etc. etc. About the structure and workings of the subject matters of all natural sciences we understand so much more than about our inexplicable human experience of being in the world. We have next to no penetration of this chaotic process, being immersed in it, seeing only dimly and never far. We have ever more minute comprehension of the nature and dimensions of space-time but have no theory of historical causation. 

We can explain the physical universe in the language of hard science but can't do the same for the smallest, shortest of historical moments. Perhaps that is why we have only a very limited perception of the strangeness of our path, of this mad shooting arc that has brought us to this completely unique new, complex ever manically shifting society, only mere decades old. One can only wonder what is yet to come - will the explosion into more complexity continue or will it all come to abrupt halt at some stage? In any case there is no control of our direction, we ride a huge wild wave without any meaningful way to influence its course. What will come after the mall? We have no idea, no influence.

La trahison des clercs

In the course of the bonfire of decencies that has been the American political process in recent years, we were famously informed that "facts on the ground don't matter". And it has been the bewildered complaint of the derailed progressive forces that this attitude is not only accepted but actively practiced by increasing proportions of the mainstream media. Facts are not reported, controversies are - there are only conflicting interpretations, conflicting languages that are cited, and increasingly few attempts are made to evaluate these often totally absurd claims against reality. No doubt this is largely an economic phenomenon: the modern media is very tightly integrated to corporate structures, to these gigantic, unimaginable concentrations of wealth and power - which of course will inevitably corrupt any intellectual enterprise. But I think the attack has been so deadly because it has been two pronged all the while, and the other thrust has come from the back: the humanities have now been dominated for decades by a very debased form of postmodernity that indeed does replace the words like "facts" and "reality" within quotation marks having no legitimate meaning. In the current academic folk religion in the literature and media departments reality has no substance and fundamentally only power is the meaningful settler of any disputes. Can we then blame the poor journalists for their education?

Now of course we know that nothing that Derrida, Kristeva, Foucault and other captains of the army of unalterable law ever wrote challenged the physical reality in any way. Findings of physics, the laws of mathematics are perfectly, even religiously protected by these texts - physical facts remain as objective as ever and reality as real and robust as it has always been. This has been the correct fall back position of most defenders of this complicated web of continental philosophies. The problem is of course that on the ground this is hardly ever even mentioned as of course it would delegate these much trumpeted findings to somewhat more humble level. Facts are as solid and trustworthy as as they have ever been but there are some great complications in formulating them in human language. And it is these intricate complications that the various streams of postmodern thought have helpfully clarified. Of course, they have done this in as unclear and messy language as humanly possible - and in the process whether then intentionally or not hiding the fact that these new insights are hardly very revolutionary at all. (It is no wonder that postmodern thought has so docilely co-existed with the triumph of free market orthodoxy.) Needless to say these complicated philosophical insights have virtually no importance to the mundane every day process of reporting and analysing events.

So, progress is currently bogged down in two front war (and not doing particularly well in either). Just when facts are crucially important, when truth should be spoken to power, we discover that "facts" are irrelevant and "truth" is an oppressive, anti-pluralist concept. Progress itself is seen as a dangerous, hegemonic concept and a direct cause for the calamities of the 20th century - from Kant and Mill you somehow get straight to Auschwitz (as nonsensical as it is to think so). One should not wonder that the chief beneficiary of this collapse of selfconfidence are the modern, atavistic conservative forces supported and created by the blind and self-destructive structures of capital. Of course we are now seeing many signs of waning of the force of this great bundle of theories: scholastism has been quite exhausted by now -the seats of power have been conquered but hardly anything else very meaningful. All that needed to be written and what was intellectually valuable was essentially said already by the late 1970's. What we now have in humanities, three long decades later, seems to be a gigantic cul-de-sac, a huge waste of intellectual energy, the main legacy of which seems to be only the undermining of enlightenment values and all faith in political progress.

Beautiful lofty things

It is curious how often it seems necessary to hold a one sided, impossibly rosy view of the human nature in order to have progressive views of society and history – and how often it is seen reasonable that just to show otherwise is enough to disprove this progressivism. Certainly there is much else in us than just pure drives towards understanding, harmony and reason: there are dark, atavistic, animal impulses in the depths of all our minds. A large part of our integral experience is completely amoral. Our conscious being is ephemeral, disjointed, our experience far from unified, we exist only partially and are only too often panicky, fearful and aggressive, powered by ancient reflexes for flight or fight. There are grasping, ugly creatures within all of us, waiting for their chance to emerge and take control.

These instincts can’t be denied or willed out of existence (and it would be disastrous to even try), but all the same, their mere existence is surely no argument. We do have countering forces, intelligence, will to meaning and understanding, instincts for protection and solidarity, for beauty and truth, moments of coherence. We remain poised, seeing far beyond the prison walls, a kind of experiment: what will once emerge out of these disjointed beings? I would not think that this disharmony, this uneasy equilibrium would be satisfactory as a permanent solution, as much edge as it does give to our wild, untamed lives.

Time present and time past

The grandparents of my parents were children of the last great famine in Western Europe. In the late 1860's several concequent bad harvests led to widespread starvation and disease, and almost 10% of the population of Finland died. It can be said that I have been largely formed by people in whose immediate historical memory this disaster was. There is thus a tenuous living connection that undoubtedly will no more be carried over to the next generation. Our son was born ten months ago into a dynamic, postmodern and cosmopolitan high-tech society that is busily consuming and being amused by the global entertainment industry. He will have no real connection with that passed away rural civilization.

It is in fact almost inconceivable to think that this land of brightly lit shopping malls and cutting edge mobile techonology was starving to death by the roadsides only mere five generations ago. Certainly this is not much thought about now: we occupy ourselves almost entirely with the present and the near future. The speed is too high, too dangerous for any meaningful reflection. So much has changed so quickly. I myself - as can be seen so clearly in retrospect - witnessed the ending of the last remnants of the rural Ostrobothnia that was still the unquestioned mental and cultural background of my parents. This huge change happened with astonishing speed largely only after the Second World War with the social change skipping industrialization and shifting the emphasis directly from agriculture to services in one generation. I still believe that I have the feel, the texture of that rural civilization that now has vanished. It is a wild ride we are on, uncontrolled and uncontrollable.

Many believe that there is no use in remembering even this quite recent past, only the previous half hour in historical terms - certainly such remembrance can sometimes hinder finding new perspectives and new solutions to largely unprecedented social situations. Still, without this long view we would surely get a wrong understanding of our position (on the crest of a huge wave racing towards an unknown destination), we would see the current moment out of all proportion, one-dimensional and shallow. It is hard to believe, even if civilization will eventually persist, that we are now done with all collapses and calamities. There is too little behind us though to know anything for sure: this mad, chaotic progress is only a few centuries old - there is no way of predicting how this process will continue or whether it will continue at all.

In any case it is difficult not to feel half-nostalgic about those times and meanings that were once so real and immediate and which now seem unimaginably distant and strange. I suppose it is more the fact of passing than the content of what has passed: most things are much better now. But so much has so easily vanished from living memory, and this is what will happen to our moment too - hard to imagine though that anyone would feel any nostalgia about this society but that no doubt also depends on what's to come.

The great tradition

I was recently reading a biography of George Eliot and was much struck by the majesty of the turn of the British non-conformist intellectual elite towards political liberalism, agnosticism and progress during the middle part of the 19th century. Yes, this great shift surely was absurdly highminded, demanding impossible moral and intellectual rigidity (and frigidity) from people, expecting things not remotely possible in this fallen world, doing not only much good but also much harm in the process. This said, compared with the contemporary high Tory wallowing in the miserableness of the human condition, there is a tone of great human decency in this partly absurd wish to create (and the expectation of seeing) a new Jerusalem on Earth. They were momentous times indeed and we still do feel the impact of this great hope for improvement and progress - even if it is ever weakening, being gradually drowned by the current Western orgy of consumerism and materialism. Of course, coming from the liberal Christian background of modern Finnish Pietism, there is much that is familiar with this peculiarly Protestant form of secular longing for a proper home in this world. There is an unmistakeable continuum of thought originating both in the sources of the Reformation and in the Reformation itself that is still supporting progressive political structures around the world - surely, naturally, getting gradually fainter as is any faith in conscious progress.

The winged chariot sung

It was on remarkably many levels that the news of the death of Jaan Kross were felt. Such an irreplaceable loss. Being an Estophile his unique broad perspective on his native country has of course been hugely influential in forming a personal understanding on Estonian history and culture. Still, I did not read him for information but for art: the excellent Finnish translations brought out the majestic rhythm of the language, the intricate beauty of the sentences. The texture is dense and deep - and the interplay between theme and language is mostly flawless. The result is a slow, universal, almost a mystical beat behind the surface action that the reader becomes only gradually aware of: a huge canvas is painted with sparse, understated strokes. The themes themselves were mostly Estonian but his was a universal Western voice, concerned with our particular modern predicament of unmoored individuals in time, at the mercy of history. There are not many such writers in any generation and it was quite a miracle that such an authoritative Western voice would be coming from such a small nation - quite like the improbable emergence of Sibelius from the nationalistically awakened and in many ways narrow confines of Finland. Such a body of work, such a life - we can only be grateful and priviledged to have been able to share even if only partially this majestic, polyphonic historical and cultural perspective.

Tempus adest gratiae

I must confess to liking the Christmas time. Perhaps it is due to the awful darkness of the sub-arctic winter (these days we don’t even reliably get permanent snow to Southern Finland before January which makes the 20 hours long night pitch dark and the 4 hours long “day” quite dismal). So, all lights and candles are very welcome in the midst of this darkness. But, in some respects, so is the message of that ancient story. Christianity is much, or more accurately, totally, disfigured by the various official Christian churches and sects and their incredibly primitive dogmas and superstitions. Any average Dawkinsian atheist can blow away the Bible as a science (or even philosophy) book along with all the assorted fundamentalists and traditionalists that read it as the literal word of their literal, small minded "God".

But I would argue that something immeasurably valuable of all the world religions escapes their dismal followers with their dismal sects and power structures: and so I do seriously believe that heavens really did open to the humankind two thousand years ago, regardless of any empirical evidence for or against. This particular message of forgiveness and redemption echoes on even through all these organizations and dogmas that seem as if designed to silence it.

Gaudete, Christus est natus...

Confessions of a book addict

It is only quite lately that I have considered that my intense relationship with reading could perhaps be seen as somewhat eccentric. It has been such an integral part, a central part of my life that I haven't really noticed my reading habit as anything very odd. By the age of eleven I already had a system set: there were two libraries that I would visit weekly, our own Nurmo Municipal Library and the Provincial Library in Seinäjoki. I would have a maximum limit of eight books for each visit and in most times I reached that limit. That made on average ca 14-18 books per week for about ten years. (How that was manageable, I wouldn't know.)

About the time of my tenth birthday I had already exhausted the children's departments and had moved on to adult shelves. So, I was a true addict already then, an escape artist, with my thoughts most of the time anywhere else than in the rather grim reality that was my life those times. Anything went: thrillers, detective stories, serious novels, fantasy, science fiction, history, biography, even poetry already in those early days - I was not a discriminating reader, if anything the preference was for the lighter stuff that I now see was often horribly badly written.

This I suppose is still fairly understandable - I was growing up in any case, gradually getting more interested in more than mere escape, reflecting, reconciling books with experience and vice versa. But that magical initial burst is still quite inexlicable to me: around the age of 9 years I had read all the books we had at home (well, not quite all: I mostly skipped, strangely, the plentiful religious literature there was). For the time and place we had a wide selection with the emphasis on the classic Finnish fiction of the late 19th and early 20th century. This selection was combined with an utter respect for books and learning that no doubt is getting quite rare these days.

So there I was, compulsively reading Kivi, Canth, Jotuni, Kauppis-Heikki, Aho, Lehtonen, Leinonen and many others: a 9 year old boy from a very sheltered home background - I surely couldn't understand anything I was reading about. What could it have been about? It was a long ago, I have changed and can now hardly remember what I was searching for, but I do remember, I do remember that the experience really was magical, strange, compulsive - I had found a gate and gone through it and have since never returned, or glanced back.

For that first burst I have no real explanation - simultaneously I did go for conventional children's literature which I could genuinely understand and enjoy, but I did enjoy also those other books at home, having clear preferences and favourites among them though I certainly couldn't have understood much of those serious adult motivations and complexities of language and meaning. Since that long bygone time reading has been an integral part of my life, a very central part. By my twenties I averaged I think about a book per day. I switched to English around my 19th birthday, first basically for the wider selection, then for the glories of the English literary tradition.

Helsinki City Library, University Library and Student Library were paradises for me: I remember feeling drunk at the mere sight of the endless, dusty shelves of the Student Library Book Storage. Bright flames in great darkness were those places for me during that bleak time. I think I exceeded the limit of my earlier times for many years, I gulped down English literature. And even these days I think I read on average about a couple of books per week navigating still regularly back to those self-same beacons of thought and feeling. It really was a true gate, a true escpae, a true portal to something more than what is routinely, self-defeatingly on offer in this mortal world.

Themes have changed though - escape gave gradually way to intellectual search which in turn has been much replaced by more independent and more detached reflection. I'm now not able to read badly written fiction or clumsily thought out, shallow factual studies. Fiction and history are the main interests, I have overcome my snobbish (History Department) disdain of biography (if well written and thought). I can still enjoy good thrillers (say Barbara Vine) or thoughtful science fiction (in many ways a more politically and socially relevant genre than mainstream fiction that has largely lost its intellectual self-confidence and scope in the postmodern era), but altogether the subject matter is more serious and fiction is now in a distinct minority (poetry is something separate again, intensely meaningful but in some sense hardly literature for me, I have a very narrow selection of poems and poets that I return to again and again).

Writing this I notice that I find it very hard to describe the actual, concrete meaning of books to me, the actual texture of the feeling of reading, the rush - the polyphony of voices, of angles, the added scope, the limitless complexities of language, meaning and experience... In some sense all texts are speculative fiction, whether they are fiction or not, just as in some sense our lives are a speculation, a gamble - we are provisional and shifting, never fixed and permanent. We see myriad possibilities but no absolute solutions. So I read sceptically and critically but with an open mind and suspended judgement, coming only to provisional conclusions, trying to take in all possibilities, all meanings. As impossible as it is.

In many respects reading has been my true occupation all these years: I have kept endlessly travelling through strange landscapes while supporting myself by in comparison with trivial occupations. At first it was a panicky escape, but lucky in direction (at a time when luck seemed to be in very short supply). Though not to paint any overly rosy image: for long, immensely painful years there was no reconciliation between mind and body, between intelligence and experience, I was immature, uneven, only partially a real person.

I have changed much since, for the better, being now more settled, intellectually, emotionally more self-confident (though remaining an abysmally poor writer as always), pursuing now the origin and course of love, and not fundamentally meaningless intellectual abstractions. But to this day I have remained thoroughly addicted, thoroughly hooked, still spending long hours somewhere else, with this glorious dialogue and two-way interpretation that is reading. I am now in much less of a hurry and much more inclined to draw more permanent conclusions, thus narrowing the scope - it is not possible ever to reach any real certainty, so we have to settle with what limited understandings we can have in this world.

Writers like George Eliot and E.M.Forster have become the lodestars: I keep trying to connect, to reconcile, to comprehend our experience in a liberal, open-ended fashion, avoiding absolutes and unsupported certainties. It has been a strange pilgrimage through a rapidly passing civilization - but with such excellent, incomparably grand company. I can't imagine how it would be without this added scope, without these long views, without these harmonies.

That madcap Lord Mayor of London

The last 18 months have been an education. For the first time in life to lose a truly close person without any regard to any personal wishes on the matter was an admirably clear lesson of the limits of this world. Then to have welcomed a new person here, utterly vulnerable, without any real guarantees whatsoever of being able to protect his way has been a logical continuation of that selfsame lesson. 

This is what we have here, at maximum, and these things, these people, are what we will lose, one way or the other. Much of our human activity is designed to enable us to forget this state of affairs. But it is the wildest, unsafest ride imaginable and you have to be stubbornly narrow indeed to remain unaware of this. The terms are brutally harsh but in this brief span there is admittedly some tragic grandeur - and also moments of pure exhilaration in not having any safety nets available: a strange journey through the wildness.