7/14/23

Thursday, July 14, 2023

Bastille Day

In bed at 9:15, awake at 4:13, and up at 4:30 to let Lilly out, back aching and ears ringing.  65℉ with a high of 83℉, possible T-storms till 10, then sunny.  AQI=38, Good.  Wind is WSW at 10, 6-12 &22 mph.  The sun will rise at 5:24 and set at 8:30, 15+5.   

Bottle Brush Buckeye coming into blossom, beautiful sky, beautiful clouds

Patio time.  I went out at 7:30 to a pretty noisy backyard.  The sounds from the freeway were louder than usual with rush hour traffic sounds augmented by backup beeping from construction trucks probably working on Port Road.  The only bird I heard was a crow.  I listened to  3 songs from Tracy Chapman's first album, Revolution, Fast Car, and Across the Lines.  What a singer, what a songwriter.   

Milan Kundera has died.  I don't know much about him other than he was a Czech writer who considered himself and wanted others to consider him a French writer.  I also know that he wrote a novel called The Unbearable Lightness of Being which was the basis for one of my favorite films of the same name, starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Juliette Binoche, and Lena Olin, each of the latter very beautiful.  This was the film that gave me a life-long crush on Juliette Binoche.  But I'm thinking of Kundera today not only because of his death at age 94 but also because I came upon an essay he wrote published in the April 26, 1984 issue of The New York Review of Books titled "The Tragedy of Central Europe."  The article reminds me of a fascinating course I watched a few years ago and to which I paid great attention on Great Courses Plus on the history of Eastern Europe.  The lecturer in the course treated the nations east and south of Germany and Austria as 'Eastern Europe,' but Kundera points out that "“Geographic Europe” (extending from the Atlantic to the Ural Mountains) was always divided into two halves which evolved separately: one tied to ancient Rome and the Catholic Church, the other anchored in Byzantium and the Orthodox Church. After 1945, the border between the two Europes shifted several hundred kilometers to the west, and several nations that had always considered themselves to be Western woke up to discover that they were now in the East.  As a result, three fundamental situations developed in Europe after the war: that of Western Europe, that of Eastern Europe, and, most complicated, that of the part of Europe situated geographically in the center—culturally in the West and politically in the East."  He relates this history to the revolt against the Soviet Union in Hungary in 1956, the 'Prague Spring' in Czechoslovakia in 1968, and the several revolts in Poland in 1956, 1968, and 1970 (and later still with the Solidarity Movement.)  In 1960 and 1961, I attended Sunday masses at St. Emeric Church at 17th and State Street, a parish founded by Hungarian refugees from the brutal invasion and bloody massacres in their country by the USSR in 1956.

- The history of the Poles, the Czechs, the Slovaks, and the Hungarians has been turbulent and fragmented. Their traditions of statehood have been weaker and less continuous than those of the larger European nations. Boxed in by the Germans on one side and the Russians on the other, the nations of Central Europe have used up their strength in the struggle to survive and to preserve their languages. Since they have never been entirely integrated into the consciousness of Europe, they have remained the least known and the most fragile part of the West—hidden, even further, by the curtain of their strange and scarcely accessible languages.

- The Austrian Empire had the great opportunity of making Central Europe into a strong, unified state. But the Austrians, alas, were divided between an arrogant Pan-German nationalism and their own Central European mission. They did not succeed in building a federation of equal nations, and their failure has been the misfortune of the whole of Europe. Dissatisfied, the other nations of Central Europe blew apart their empire in 1918, without realizing that, in spite of its inadequacies, it was irreplaceable. After the First World War, Central Europe was therefore transformed into a region of small, weak states, whose vulnerability ensured first Hitler’s conquest and ultimately Stalin’s triumph. Perhaps for this reason, in the European memory,  these countries always seem to be the source of dangerous trouble.

- In the nineteenth century, the national struggles (of the Poles, the Hungarians, the Czechs, the Slovaks, the Croats, the Slovenes, the Rumanians, the Jews) brought into opposition nations that—insulated, egotistic, closed-off—had nevertheless lived through the same great existential experience: the experience of a nation that chooses between its existence and its nonexistence; or, to put it another way, between retaining its authentic national life and being assimilated into a larger nation. Not even the Austrians, though belonging to the dominant nation of the empire, avoided the necessity of facing this choice: they had to choose between their Austrian identity and being submerged by the larger German one. Nor could the Jews escape this question. By refusing assimilation, Zionism, also born in Central Europe, chose the same path as the other Central European nations.

-  [N]o other part of the world has been so deeply marked by the influence of Jewish genius. Aliens everywhere and everywhere at home, lifted above national quarrels, the Jews in the twentieth century were the principal cosmopolitan, integrating element in Central Europe: they were its intellectual cement, a condensed version of its spirit, creators of its spiritual unity. That’s why I love the Jewish heritage and cling to it with as much passion and nostalgia as though it were my own.  Another thing makes the Jewish people so precious to me: in their destiny the fate of Central Europe seems to be concentrated, reflected, and to have found its symbolic image. What is Central Europe? An uncertain zone of small nations between Russia and Germany. I underscore the words: small nation. Indeed, what are the Jews if not a small nation, the small nation par excellence? The only one of all the small nations of all time that has survived empires and the devastating march of History.

- Central Europe as a family of small nations has its own vision of the world, a vision based on a deep distrust of history. History, that goddess of Hegel and Marx, that incarnation of reason that judges us and arbitrates our fate—that is the history of conquerors. The people of Central Europe are not conquerors. They cannot be separated from European history; they cannot exist outside it; but they represent the wrong side of this history; they are its victims and outsiders. It’s this disabused view of history that is the source of their culture, of their wisdom, of the “nonserious spirit” that mocks grandeur and glory. 

- In Paris, even in a completely cultivated milieu, during dinner parties people discuss television programs, not reviews. For culture has already bowed out. Its disappearance, which we experienced in Prague as a catastrophe, a shock, a tragedy, is perceived in Paris as something banal and insignificant, scarcely visible, a non-event.

. . . . . . . . . 

Kundera wrote this piece 5 years before the Berlin Wall came down and before the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.  He argued that what provided some unity to 'the West' in the medieval era was religion and thereafter culture, in the sense of literature, music, art, and philosophy, and that what the Soviet communists attempted in their invasions and pressures on Central Europe nations was to destroy their roots in Western culture.  He argued in Western Europe "culture has already bowed out," disappeared.  The article seems beautifully and brilliantly written with instructive descriptions of the inherent tensions in Central Europe, many nations with distinctive languages and traditions within a relatively small area, frequently shifting state borders, and always with Russian imperials to the East and the Austrians and Germans to the West.  I also enjoyed his acknowledgment of the contributions of Jews to Central European culture though mindful of the Holocaust, the destruction of European Jews, and the ubiquitous Christian anti-Semitism that plagued the Jews in Central and Eastern Europe even before the Holocaust.  Also, after 2 world wars that started in Western Europe, I wonder to what extent it can be said either Religion or Culture or anything else had any significant unifying effect within Europe.  And finally, Kundera was almost 85 years old when Putin invaded and annexed Crimea and 93 when he invaded the rest of Ukraine.  I assume he would not have thought of Ukraine as part of Central Europe, but rather as part of Eastern Europe with its deep Orthodox traditions.  If that is so, I wonder whether he would have agreed with Ron DeSantis in considering the current war there as just 'a border dispute.'

LTMW I see that the sun is moving south, 59 degrees compared to 56 degrees at the solstice.  On the 18th, the sun will rise at 60 degrees.  At the autumn equinox, it will be at 88 degrees and a little more than 12 hours of daytime.  A neighbor walks his little dog at 5:30, an M.D., surgeon I hear.  He rarely looks at the dog and I wonder what he is thinking about, work?  family? the world?  I think of Tereza's dog in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, named Kerenin, after Anna Kerenina's husband in Tolstoy's novel.  I enjoy watching a song sparrow or pine siskin feeding on sunflower seeds and a chickadee on the niger tube.  I put a fresh orange out yesterday and see a finch feeding on the half-orange mounted above the nesting basket.

Targeted Mailings.  Hardly a week passses without receiving another solicitation from one elderly living facility of another.  St. Camillus, Azura Assisted Living and Memory Care, Newcastle, Meadowmere, Sarah Chudnow, so many.  Today we received a mailing from 'the North Shore's newest' elderly facility, Lumia Mequon, "Illuminating Wellbeing, Senior Living, Assisted Living, and Memory Care."  I do not welcome these maillings.  I assume we are on all their mailing lists from name, age, and address information they purchase from the Wisconsin Department of Motor Vehicles, but perhaps from some other source(s).  Each mailing screams at me "You're in your 80s, Buster.  What do you expect?"  For the better part of 4 years we watch Jimmy Aquavia's experience in a VERY upscale senior living facility, Newcastle Place, $$$$.  He was miserable there for the most part, especially as his memory and hearing losses got progressively worse.  Now he is 89 and in a different (and suprerior) facilty in Alexandria close to his daughter and POA Katherine and husband Jordan, coping as well as he can with progressive Alzheimer's, hearing loss, and confusion.  There should be humane ways of ending life when the time comes.  We're like John Mellencamp's Jack and Diane  -  'Oh, yeah, life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone.'