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Ethan turns 13 on Tuesday, and I need some ideas on how to make his first birthday in Slovakia special. From my own experience, I don’t think he would enjoy spending it in a hospital. Do you have any better ideas?

I found little in this chapter to comfort me. Writers are like that, you know: they can use their magic for good or ill. They can spin essays and poems and books that make you want to sing – or they can, seemingly without malice, weave a mortal sentence and coldly thrust it through your heart.

Consider, if you dare, these innocent paragraphs. But be careful: they lead to a dark place:

In a world in which life so perfectly responds to life, where flowers mingle with flowers in the wind’s eye, where the swan is the familiar of all swans, man alone builds his isolation. What a space between men their spiritual natures create! A girl’s reverie isolates her from me, and how shall I enter into it? What can one know of a girl who passes, walking with slow steps homeward, eyes lowered, smiling to herself, filled with adorable inventions and with fables? Out of the thoughts, the voice, the silences of a lover, she can form an empire, and thereafter she sees in all the world but him a people of barbarians. More surely than if she were on another planet, I feel her to be locked up in her language, in her secret, in her habits, in the singing echoes of her memory. Born yesterday of the volcanoes, of greenswards, of brine of the sea, she walks here already half divine. (more…)

It is almost impossible to write about chapter four without sounding silly – but that has never stopped me before, so here goes….

Saint-Exupéry begins by letting us know how difficult it will be for him to convey to us the experience he is about to describe:

Every airline pilot has flown through tornadoes, has returned out of them to the fold – to the little restaurant in Toulouse where we sat in peace under the watchful eye of the waitress – and there recognising his powerlessness to convey what he has been through, has given up the idea of describing hell. His descriptions, his gestures, his big words would have made the rest of us smile as if we were listening to a little boy bragging. And necessarily so. The cyclone of which I am about to speak was, physically, much the most brutal and overwhelming experience I ever underwent; and yet beyond a certain pount I do not know how to convey its violence except by piling one adjective on another, so that in the end I should convey no impression at all – unless perhaps that of an embarrassing taste for exaggeration.

(more…)

We live in the age of the computer, and I couldn't help thinking of the Internet in particular as I mused on his musings. Then he said this:

The central struggle of men has ever been to understand one another, to join together for the common weal. And it is this very thing that the machine helps them do!

It seems to me that the Internet in particular answers this purpose – we have never drawn closer than now, never been more able to join together for the common weal. You and I have at our disposal the collective insights and experience of millions of our fellow human beings, and we can share it all instantly. Thirty years ago if some odd contraption in your house or car broke, you might have taken days to track down someone who could fix it. But now you just describe the problem in a few keywords to Google, and he shows you the original owner’s manual, or some other owner’s description of how he fixed the xact same problem you had. And that other owner lives on another continent.

Yes, there are still rotten people in the world who abuse the Internet and dump their garbage on us from time to time. But that defect is in fallen human nature. The invention itself, the machine itself, is glorious.

And it makes us wonder: what next? Is the Internet as close as machines can pull the human race, or is there something more?

In the second half of the chapter Saint-Exupéry tells a story of the courage of Guillaumet. Guillaumet is forced by a snow storm to crash-land high in the Andes. He take shelter under his plane for two days till the storm passes. Then he begins his long walk out.

He suffers terribly in the cold. Every few hours he must stop to cut his shoes back further to make room for his swelling feet. He begins to lose his memory, and at each place he stops he forgets something vital: a glove, his watch, his compass. He is ready to die. But one thought drives him forward: if his body is not found, he would not be declared legally dead for four years, and his wife would suffer. So he walks five days and nights, and makes it home. (more…)

On the recommendation of our insane daughter we watched No Country for Old Men, by the inimitable Cohen brothers.

First warning: if you are made uncomfortable by violence in movies (as I suppose we are supposed to be), prepare yourself. Paula wasn’t prepared, and she jumped around, screamed, got out of her chair and stood in the hallway, and so on. This movie is similar to Fargo, but set in Texas. In fact, the Tommy Lee Jones character here is very, very mcuh like the Francis McDormand character in Fargo.

Second warning: if you like endings that bring resolution, you will be

[Yes, I left that sentence unfinished on purpose. Get it?]

On the bright side: the writing is fabulous, the acting is excellent, and the quality of the film is first-rate.

Still, I have a third warning: the philosophical perspective of this film is nihilistic and presents a world devoid of God, which leads to a desperate view of humanity. Luck seems to be our only hope – and our only hope is for a few more miserable days to live out our meaningless lives in this meaningless place.

Which could give you a lot to think about and discuss with some friends….

Paula and I usually have a hard time picking movies in a DVD shop. More times than not we walk out of the shop empty handed. But on Saturday we picked up The Painted Veil on a lark – we didn’t know a thing about it other than it had Edward Norton. We got lucky – very lucky.

The movie is set mostly in China in 1925 in a village where there is an outbreak of cholera. Edward Norton is a doctor who does research on microbes that cause diseases, and he volunteers to work there partly because he hates his wife. These two miserable people married for the wrong reasons, expected from each other what neither of them could give, then hurt each other terribly. It’s no wonder they come to hate each other.

But the wonder – and the beauty – of the movie, is how they come to love each other.

All the Invisible Children is actually a collection of seven short films by some highly regarded directors (Spike Lee, Ridley Scott, John Woo, and others). I recommend that you watch the movie because it will make you aware of some things that children suffer around the world – but the movie is far better than simply a glorified “public-service announcement” on behalf of suffering children everywhere. The movie will make you angry and frustrated many times, but will also remind you of hope and love. And, if you are in a reflective mood, it will make you think about the complex nature of humanity.

We watched this recently for a movie night at the Building, and had afterward one of our best discussions ever.

By the way, our version didn’t have English subtitles, and the films are from several different nations and languages, so I couldn’t understand the dialogue in some of them. Oddly enough, my favorite was the one from Brazil, and it wasn’t in English.

Today I very uncharacteristically took Paula to Bratislava for a bluegrass festival in the square outside the US embassy. We rode the train, just the two of us. We did it on impulse. Very romantic. Our first date since January. (Maybe that isn’t so romantic….)

Anyway, it was a gorgeous day, about 74 degrees F and sunny. Most of the bands sang in English, and even tried to imitate a Southern drawl. They did pretty well, but a few vowels and some strange locutions gave away their Central European heritage. But it was great fun.

Paula saw an opening on a bench in the shade next to two young women, so she took it. I went and joined them. They did not appear to be Slovak – in fact one of them was dressed in a type of Muslim garb, including a scarf. Paula started a conversation with them in her broken Slovak, and it turned out their Slovak was as bad as ours. They said they were from Turecko (Turkey), and asked where we were from. When we said “USA,” they got very excited and asked, “Can we speak in ENGLISH?!?!?”

It turns out they are exchange students at a university in Bratislava, and we were the first native-English speakers they had spoken to. One invited us to her flat for Turkish food. We sadly had to decline, but we exchanged contact information and will try to get together with her someday soon. She was delightful. In the picture below, she is wearing the scarf:

One other interesting thing: we walked along the square and found another interested listener sticking his head out the window. I guess he liked the music:

Having described to us this new craft of the pilot, Saint-Exupéry now introduces us to the “new breed of men” that were cast for it. And he has something to say about the relationships that develop:

Men travel side by side for years, each locked up in his own silence or exchanging those words which carry no freight—till danger comes. Then they stand shoulder to shoulder. They discover that they belong to the same family. They wax and bloom in the recognition of fellow beings. They look at one another and smile. They are like the prisoner set free who marvels at the immensity of the sea.

Happiness! It is useless to seek it elsewhere than in this warmth of human relations. Our sordid interests imprison us within their walls. Only a comrade can grasp us by the hand and haul us free.

(more…)