Oh you got blue eyes, oh you got green eyes

It is a conscious effort to stay aware, not young, though youth does have a direct access to awareness, even if a very temporary one, cruelly temporary even - just go ahead and ask Yeats. But the business is not to get numb, not to get used to, not to go through the motions till one dies. To be as intelligent, as aware as one can humanly be, to be as awake as one can be, that surely is the business,.

But I'm younger than that now

After last fall's unpleasant flashbacks it is quite an irony to find myself back at the university for the coming study year. Having steadied and emerged chastened and quite a bit wiser, it now feels rather a privilege to walk back to the rose garden - quick, quick, said the bird... Though then it was of course no Eden for me, hence the useless regrets, but now, so fully realizing all the long progress since, it feels rather liberating to, well, be liberated - to be largely one with oneself, as I so was not then.

Reflections on the latest disturbances

If one has absorbed christian-humanist values one is unavoidably at permanent war with history and humanity. But, with those values, one can't ever renounce the humankind either: a particularly trying circumstance, should anyone ask. So one observes and tries to stay rational and kind, and what one observes is unending hysteria, stupidity and cruelty.

Chained to a dying animal

Yeats is sneaky. One might think he's all horoscopes and fates of civilization and silliness - and then there emerges human profoundities rather effortlessly. No, one is not one's body, never was, even if at the best moments there was a close correlation. And once out of nature we might gain ourselves by being able to reach beyond ourselves, as empirically impossible as it is in this world that we thus cannot accept. No, I'm not sure if this makes sense, if he does, but one is certainly inclined towards that direction.

Bad moon rising

It is interesting to be somewhat well read in history and then live to at least mature middle age: one appreciates recurring themes. A violent illiberal wave preceded my generation and confronted my parent's generation when they were children. But it was convincingly beaten back in the West and by the West. And so I lived in a halcyon era of peace and prosperity leading up to "end of history". I guess basically everyone sensed already back then that there would be no end, as much as it was needed, to grasping, greedy, blind history, to this mad dance. There just are no permanent safety nets. So, illiberal winds are again gathering strength, some gusps are already scarily strong and one does sense a bad moon rising. Maybe here we go again?

One of freedom''s wars (revisited)

A laughing boy exploded into unidentifiable gobs of flesh - I believe Pat Barker has said about the WW1 more essential things than any historian ever has or ever will. Obviously she hadn't said everything or even every important thing but far more than mere historians can. Just as obviously - and most often for all I know - a work of fiction can say far less than a solid work of historiography. But the exceptions do blow the competition away.

A concern with the study of history has always remained with me and I still find it odd how little this subject has been seriously analyzed. I would presume that the best explorations would be works of fiction, not of philosophy.

What liberalism is not?

Well, it is not something selfevident like the air we breath and don't notice and take for granted. It is actually a very specific and very contentious ideology whose present positions are unimaginably dearly bought and which have at times been ever so desperately, even irrationally defended.

The post-WW2 broad social liberal consensus reinforced by the collapse of the Soviet bloc might have deluded us of these facts - and accordingly this lukewarm official ideology of the Western world has become less social and more materialistic, more hollow, increasingly benefiting capital instead of labour, no longer based on once very specific selfawareness and loyalty.

And now it then not so totally remarkably happens that this liberal understanding of the modern world is under a very broad and very intense attack both within and without with scarily few passionate defenders indeed. These structures won't hold without support - where is this desperately needed collective effort to be seen or to be sensed (at least) at this ever darkening hour?

A note to self

I came rather innocently across a book of academic criticism by Geoffrey Hill and have now hard time remembering when was the last time a text has aggravated me so much. Apparently he is not even a catholic. I find a certain style of conservative-traditionalist (or whatever you would call it in his case) approach to literature truly abhorrent: passive-aggressive stuffing in between the lines, ever so, well, catty. From now on one is once burned and that should be well enough.

Ecalpemos

Currently enjoying Ruth Rendell's fiction. At its best it certainly transcends all genres and is simply great literature. As the best writing in pretty much any subgenre does. I have been criticizing the mainstream bias earlier in the blog and even though things probably have marginally improved the silly snobbishness is still there. It is very frustrating but hopefully the situation keeps improving. In the meanwhile having Rendell's unsentimentality and non-cynicism as great, august, entertaining company as the year draws to its end.

Europe's sorrow

I have written earlier about the tragedy of the Russian nation. Such suffering, such gifts to humanity, such corrupt, sadistic rulers. And so today. Asymmetric, highly ingenious web warfare, injecting vile poison to liberal societies. To what purpose? What is the positive vision? There is none but impotent ethnic-gangsteric rage, nothing to aspire for, no progress imagined, an age old despotism wishing for its old glories of rape and conquest. An empty shell, the rulers of Russia, as always.

Butler's jihad

The decades seem to be getting more low and dishonest as they go. One thought the 00's were the low but they seem now only an innocent prelude. The social liberal settlement that has turned increasingly less social and more Victorian liberal seems to be shaking to its roots - and what are those roots now that the historical memory has waned? Rather shallow it seems. So one is left wondering what is to come.

I only wish for a more self-confident defence of the post-war West, the one and only exception from the slow holocaust of all other human history, as partial, as imperfect as it has been, and as reliant on injustices elsewhere. But the alternative to all this imperfection will not be anything better, only a full return to history and cruelty.

Those dying generations

Sailing to Byzantium is one of my key texts as probably has been clear from the multiple and constant references I have made during these years. I can't wait to have humanity to get out of nature and give up our natural forms and assume something better and more complete and more beautiful instead. As we now are we are not whole, not coherent.

And in the meanwhile we are all part of dying generations, briefly in each others' arms if that lucky. It is good for a person to lose his/her perspective for a while to regain it again perhaps slightly wiser, slightly gentler, having been taught a lesson about the ways of this world.

So, the tide has probably turned but this will be shortly seen.

A short note on Bloomsbury

I suppose they are now rather unfashionable, seen as lukewarm liberals at best and not certainly any fighters against oppression, and undeniably being rather a snobbish and incestuous ingroup. This said, and admitted, and despite many flaws and failings they were brilliant and even radical in their own way and did unflinchingly inflict strong blows against established ways, personal is political. I would never dismiss them easily or otherwise.

On seeing happy young people in the past and present

When young myself I often kept surreptiously looking at happy young people being myself desperately unhappy and unable to connect. I could not reach at the world, at my own experience, and, most importantly, at other people. A horrible failure and impotence of courage and character. So, I kept seeing happy young people and idealizing and misjudging them to a degree, not understanding their own incomplete happiness often interrupted by their own mistakes, weaknesses and occasions of bad luck.

Then it happened that finally I too became rather happy while being still youngish and I understood better lifes, and their imperfections including my own, and did connect with the world, experience, with amazing people justly loved by me. The issue seemed quite resolved then and I did not have time or inclination to rehearse the old regrets. Strangely enough though this fall I have restarted seeing happy young people and have felt that decades old pain again for no visible reason but, one supposes, due to certain unhappinesses of the present that manifest through these old traumas. Flashbacks in other words. I wonder even if therapy would be needed but it would seem rather pointless to analyze and grieve for the life my early 20's self so unhappily missed and wasted. Life is indeed a strange and slippery thing.

And if I should not have lost my way?

As I wrote earlier life regrets come in slow long intervals, reflecting undoubtedly the low tides of current life and raising to the surface old hurts, old failures. My youth was dominated by emotional trauma and lack of social courage and understanding. I fled to books and thinking, and there are worse hiding places, and partially through reading and thinking I did achieve a healing and I did return to the land of the living, to the world of acting and feeling, of touching and being touched. I started living, grievously late, yes, but I did start and still do despite the horrendously late beginning.

But deep old wounds never seem to heal completely and the past has a way of returning in bad times and moments taking the shape of regrets and obsessive analysis of what did go wrong and how much of my best years I really did lose, and how much even in these better times I have lost as the recovery has never been complete and I have never been completely free of my old inadequacies. It is curious how strong this reflex can be and how clearly I can both see the complete fruitlessness of going over these long past issues and nevertheless be unable not to do so.

So then, once again the awful, cul-de-sac of a question: if I should not have lost my away after a series of basically unrelated blows at various crucial stages of my development? How much less pain, how much more happiness and love? A stupid, pointless question.