I bought it in Palo Alto before my real traveling started, and it has lasted me well into the second quarter of this year, of course as frequent visitors of my blog know with another big and some small readings in between.

Once again, my generally high esteem of artists‘ late work was reinforced — while the original book is funny, the later books are far better. I laughed my hardest reading the second last one, „So Long and Thanks for All the Fish“, and the last one, „Mostly Harmless“, apart from still being very funny, I found most insightful. That despite how I just read on Wikipedia the author himself describing this book as „bleak“, and saying he had a very bad year when he wrote it. I suppose that tells us something about the relationship between art and happiness…

Anyway, here are just some examples of important topics of life made understandable with the help of absurdity, Science-Fiction at its best.

Let’s start with Astrology, explained by a modern (you could say cynical) Astrologer, and en passant Parliamentary Democracy, Psychology and maybe life itself…

„I know that astrology isn’t a science,“ said Gail. „Of course it isn’t. It’s just an arbitrary set of rules like chess or tennis or, what’s that strange thing you British play?“

„Er, cricket? Self-loathing?“

„Parliamentary democracy. The rules just kind of got there. They don’t make any kind of sense except in terms of themselves. But when you start to exercise those rules, all sorts of processes start to happen and you start to find out all sorts of stuff about people. In astrology the rules happen to be about stars and planets, but they could be about ducks and drakes for all the difference it would make. It’s just a way of thinking about a problem which lets the shape of that problem begin to emerge. The more rules, the tinier the rules, the more arbitrary they are, the better. It’s like throwing a handful of fine graphite dust on a piece of paper to see where the hidden indentations are. It lets you see the words that were written on the piece of paper above it that’s now been taken away and hidden. The graphite’s not important. It’s just the means of revealing their indentations. So you see, astrology’s nothing to do with astronomy. It’s just to do with people thinking about people.“

In a similar vain, and maybe taking that thought one step further, we get a cosmology for Constructivism (or at least you can look at it like that)…

The first thing to realize about parallel universes, the Guide says, is that they are not parallel.

It is also important to realize that they are not, strictly speaking, universes either, but it is easiest if you try and realize that a little later, after you’ve realized that everything you’ve realized up to that moment is not true.

The reason they are not universes is that any given universe is not actually a thing as such, but is just a way of looking at what is technically known as the WSOGMM, or Whole Sort of General Mish Mash. The Whole Sort of General Mish Mash doesn’t actually exist either, but is just the sum total of all the different ways there would be of looking at it if it did.

The reason they are not parallel is the same reason that the sea is not parallel. It doesn’t mean anything. You can slice the Whole Sort of General Mish Mash any way you like and you will generally come up with something that someone will call home.

Please feel free to blither now.

Next up, a painfully accurate description of the history (and in many ways present working) of scientific Psychology:

Now logic is a wonderful thing but it has, as the processes of evolution discovered, certain drawbacks.

Anything that thinks logically can be fooled by something else which thinks at least as logically as it does. The easiest way to fool a completely logical robot is to feed it the same stimulus sequence over and over again so it gets locked in a loop. This was best demonstrated by the famous Herring Sandwich experiments conducted millennia ago at MISPWOSO (The MaxiMegalon Institute of Slowly and Painfully Working Out the Surprisingly Obvious).

A robot was programmed to believe that it liked herring sandwiches. This was actually the most difficult part of the whole experiment. Once the robot had been programmed to believe that it liked herring sandwiches, a herring sandwich was placed in front of it. Whereupon the robot thought to itself, „Ah! A herring sandwich! I like herring sandwiches.“

It would then bend over and scoop up the herring sandwich in its herring sandwich scoop, and then straighten up again. Unfortunately for the robot, it was fashioned in such a way that the action of straightening up caused the herring sandwich to slip straight back off its herring sandwich scoop and fall on to the floor in front of the robot. Whereupon the robot thought to itself, „Ah! A herring sandwich…, etc., and repeated the same action over and over and over again. The only thing that prevented the herring sandwich from getting bored with the whole damn business and crawling off in search of other ways of passing the time was that the herring sandwich, being just a bit of dead fish between a couple of slices of bread, was marginally less alert to what was going on than was the robot.

The scientists at the Institute thus discovered the driving force behind all change, development and innovation in life, which was this: herring sandwiches. They published a paper to this effect, which was widely criticized as being extremely stupid. They checked their figures and realized that what they had actually discovered was „boredom“, or rather, the practical function of boredom. In a fever of excitement they then went on to discover other emotions, Like „irritability“, „depression“, „reluctance“, „ickiness“ and so on. The next big breakthrough came when they stopped using herring sandwiches, whereupon a whole welter of new emotions became suddenly available to them for study, such as „relief“, „joy“, „friskiness“, „appetite“, „satisfaction“, and most important of all, the desire for „happiness“. This was the biggest breakthrough of all.

Vast wodges of complex computer code governing robot behaviour in all possible contingencies could be replaced very simply. All that robots needed was the capacity to be either bored or happy, and a few conditions that needed to be satisfied in order to bring those states about. They would then work the rest out for themselves.

Also one of my favorites, and very suitable to the recent debate about (former) Pope John Paul II’s Beatification:

He had discovered that the reason for the carnival atmosphere on Saquo-Pilia Hensha was that the local people were celebrating the annual feast of the Assumption of St Antwelm. St Antwelm had been, during his lifetime, a great and popular king who had made a great and popular assumption. What King Antwelm had assumed was that what everybody wanted, all other things being equal, was to be happy and enjoy themselves and have the best possible time together. On his death he had willed his entire personal fortune to financing an annual festival to remind everyone of this, with lots of good food and dancing and very silly games like Hunt the Wocket. His Assumption had been such a brilliantly good one that he was made into a saint for it. Not only that, but all the people who had previously been made saints for doing things like being stoned to death in a thoroughly miserable way or living upside down in barrels of dung were instantly demoted and were now thought to be rather embarrassing.

So much for the more or less deep thoughts. Here’s something that became relevant to me in trying to get the concept of definite (e.g. „the“) and indefinite (e.g. „a“) articles across to people who’s native language doesn’t feature articles at all:

Ford shouted in Arthur’s ear, „Where did he say we were going?“

„He said something about a King,“ shouted Arthur in return, holding on desperately.

„What King?“

„That’s what I said. He just said the King.“

„I didn’t know there was a the King,“ shouted Ford.

„Nor did I,“ shouted Arthur back.

I’ll finish with two little quotes that are well worth becoming aphorisms (and which I have, accordingly, added to my growing Quotes Collection). The first can be seen as relevant to psychological practice, but certainly at least as much to a traveller in different cultures like myself:

It can be very dangerous to see things from somebody else’s point of view without the proper training. — Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Mostly Harmless, p. 742, 1992

And the second, which has the beauty and limitation of perspectivist thought in a nutshell:

“I think we have different value systems” – “Well, mine’s better” – “That’s according to your… oh, never mind.” — Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Mostly Harmless, p. 772, 1992

Maximum City had been recommended to me by several people who’s judgment I trust, and still my expectations have been surpassed. I can’t remember when a book last spoke to me so strongly on so many different levels of observations, experiences and feelings. I can basically use some quotations from it as a sort of diary of many of my own experiences. A non-fiction book of almost 600 pages, a report of an Indian expat to the US moving back „home“ to Bombay with his family, but to me that is only the starting point, for especially continuing to read it now that I have taken in my first week of Nairobi I can assert that it’s topics reach much farther. The book starts with some very good glimpses of what a newcomer sees in India:

India is the Country of the No. That „no“ is your test. You have to get past it. It is India’s Great Wall; it keeps out foreign invaders. Pursuing it energetically and vanquishing it is your challenge. In the guru-shishya tradition, the novice is always rebuffed multiple times when he first approaches the guru. Then the guru stops saying no but doesn’t say yes either; he suffers the presence of the student. When he starts acknowledging him, he assigns a series of menial tasks, meant to drive him away. Only if the disciple sticks it out through all these stages of rejection and ill treatment is he considered worthy of the sublime knowledge. India is not a tourist-friendly country. It will reveal itself to you only if you stay on, against all odds. The „no“ might never become a „yes“. But you will stop asking questions. (p. 19)

I like the connection between the very practical experience described here, and an old and (to me) surprisingly alive tradition of thought, seeing complete subordination as an important value in spirituality, and also in life itself. I have heard several people who teach comment on how difficult it is to work with Westerners, who never stop critically questioning what you want them to do. And I must say that despite a substantial fascination for the Indian concept, I don’t think I could (would want to, could want to) suspend my own judgement like that.

Along with that goes the hierarchical structure of society, apparently much stronger in the North, but to a Westerner already shocking enough in the South:

Every day the flat gets cleaned and scrubbed. We learn the caste system of the servants: the live-in maid won’t clean the floors; that is for the „free servant“ to do. Neither of them will do the bathrooms, which are the exclusive domain of a bhangi, who does nothing else. The driver won’t wash the car; that is the monopoly of the building watchman. The flat ends up swarming with servants. (p. 23)

Another experience I shared to a certain extent, even though luckily the rage didn’t quite get murderous with me:

We also have to learn how to stand in line. In Bombay, people are always waiting in line: to vote, to get a flat, to get a job, to get out of the country, to make a railway reservation, make a phone call, go to the toilet. And when you get to the front of the line, you are always made conscious that you are inconveniencing all the hundreds and thousands and millions of people behind you. All this takes most of our waiting time. All these irritations add up to a murderous rage in your mind, especially when you’ve come from a country where things work better, where institutions are more responsive. (p. 25)

And indeed I was very shocked by many Westerners, I feel women even more so then men, eventually developing a very harsh way of dealing with Indians, like Suketo recommends:

Every morning I get angry. It is the only way to get anything done; people here respond to anger, are afraid of it. In the absence of money or connections, anger will do. (p. 32f)

Even though I found that actually I got very far with being nice but persistent. I actually have beautiful stories of that niceness paying off in the long run, like my regular fruit and vegetable store lady putting back the fruits I had chosen and bringing me different ones, that at home turned out to be just perfect.

And then, of course, there is the way of putting an extra human layer between you and that hostile or at least cumbersome environment. The main reason for my night in the unreserved seating train (which I hope to write about soon) was that the queue for the reserved tickets was filling half the trainstation hall, and the professional „waiters“ there looked like they were prepared to spend the day. With my friends in Bombay, I got confirmed that calling the travel agency of your trust and paying a little extra is enough to have the travel agent do the waiting for you:

You can find a maid and pay her a monthly salary smaller than the cost of breakfast at the Taj. „Send your man“ I am told again and again, when I need service for my mobile phone or money picked up from the bank. „I have no man“, I respond. „I’m my own man.“ They do not understand. In business, in politics, in government, those who can afford it never go in person. They send their man. (p. 82)

Suketu also does a good job of explaining that curious attachment to small amounts of money you develop as a foreigner in poorer countries:

We haggle over minuscule amounts that have no value for us: ten rupees is only forty cents. If we lost forty cents in New York we would never notice it; here it becomes a matter of principle. This is because along with getting ripped off for ten rupees comes an assumption: You are not from here, you are not Indian, so you deserve to be ripped off, to pay more than a native. (p. 32)

To finish off the Indian observations (even though there is much much more to tell both from the book and myself), an interesting twist in perspective on the gender differences in Indian society. And the author’s explanation for the attraction of organized crime for these young man, in the absence of legitimate jobs despite good qualification. Indeed an explosive combination:

It is an exact and precise hell, the life of an unemployed young man in India. For eighteen years you have been brought up as a son; you have been given the best of what your family can afford. In the household, you eat first, then your father, then your mother, then your sister. If there is only so much money in the household, your father will do with half his cigarettes, your mother won’t buy her new sari, your sister will stay at home, but you will be sent to school. So when you reach the age of eighteen, you have your worshipful family’s expectations behind you. You dare not turn around. You know what is expected of you; you have been witness to all the petty humiliations they have suffered to get you to this place. You now need to deliver. Your sister is getting married, your mother is sick, and your father will retire next year. (p. 77f)

Now on to something that I didn’t see in India, but saw in Nairobi — slum life:

We tend to think of a slum as an excrescence, a community of people living in perpetual misery. What we forget is that out of inhospitable surroundings, they form a community, and they are as attached to its spatial geography, the social networks they have built for themselves, the village they have recreated in the midst of the city, as a Parisian might be to his quartier. (p. 59)

And I was especially touched by this emotionally honest encounter with the parallel life of beggars and street people. I have to admit that I most of the time shield myself from letting these encounters reach my feelings like that, and usually don’t give, for fear of a dam breaking I think. The „obscenity of the two currencies“ is something that it is very hard to consciously live with, and life in Kenya confronts me with it even more strongly than India.

I am walking on the road leading to the Strand bookstore when I see a little family: a mother with wild and ragged hair, walking with a baby boy, maybe a year old, fast asleep on her shoulder and leading by the hand another boy, maybe four or five, who is rubbing his eyes with the fist of his free hand. He is walking the way children walk when they have been walking a long time, his legs jerking outward, his head nodding in a circle, to beat the monotony, the tiredness. They are all barefoot. The mother says something gentle to the older boy, still clutching her hand. I walk past them, but then I have to stop. I stand and watch. They come up to a stall on the sidewalk and, as I expect her to, the mother holds out her hand. The stall owner doesn’t acknowledge them. Automatically, I find myself opening my wallet. I look for a ten-rupee note, then take out a fifty instead and walk up very fast to them, my mind raging, thrust the fifty in her hand — „Yes, take this“ — and walk on very fast without looking back, until I get to the air-conditioned bookstore, and then I stand in a corner and shut my eyes.

All day long I feel ashamed of spending money. Everything I spend that day becomes multiples of that fifty-rupee note. Within twenty minutes of my giving money to the mother I have spent six times as much on books. The pizza I order in the evening is two of those fifties. The rent I will be paying per month on my flat will be two thousand times fifty. And so on. What had my giving them fifty rupees changed? For me, it meant nothing: pocket change, less than a New York subway token. But it would probably be a whole day’s earnings for the mother (I can’t think of her as „the beggar“).

And that’s the obscenity here: Our lives have two entirely different systems of currency. (p. 39f)

And in the part of the book I am reading just now, I found many things that I could relate to my observations of and conversations about Nairobi’s lively nightlife, which was quite disturbing and thought-provoking. The first quote comes very close to an account of the nightlife’s benefits from a local friend, even though the African variant doesn’t stop at looking at the girls (Sapphire is a dance bar):

Over time, I started liking Sapphire. I liked the happiness there. Here were people who came after a hard day in a brutal city, and there was music they liked, and booze, and lights, and pretty girls dancing. The girls were enjoying themselves too, making money, being fawned over. (p. 339)

My objections to that practice are also voiced, and partly answered:

„When you spend money on a girl and she comes to you, she’s coming to your money. She’s not coming to you for your conversation or your looks or your good heart,“ I point out to Minesh.

„But it’s the power of my money. I can feel proud of how much money I have!“ One of his fellow customers in the industry once gave him an accounting of his relationship with his steady girl at Sapphire: I’ve spent so much on Ranjita, and I’ve slept with her so many times. So I’ve paid three thousand rupees a night. And I love her. (p. 329f)

Apart from that cynical explanation (save that curious „I love her“), I’m coming to think that attraction is always a mixture of „money, conversation, looks, heart“, or something like that, but in different circumstances different weights seem reasonable. That there are things happening beyond money even in this nightlife is illustrated by the description of „the contest“, and how it can collapse:

It is a contest; the girls try to make chutiyas of the customers [„milk them dry“] and the customers try to get the girls to sleep with them after blowing the least possible amount of money or, best of all, to fall in love with them. (p. 329)

I came across many such stories, of bar girls supporting some deadbeat for years, because they had given their hearts to him. In the end, the biggest suckers — ulloos, dhoors chutiyas — were the bar girls, and the people who made ulloos of them — lovers, parents, siblings — used the same confidence trick the dancers did: love. (p. 314)

I’m aware this post is cluttered with quotes, and still there have been many passages I also marked that I had to leave out. There is a lengthy description of organized crime and the almost equally criminal response by the police (the legal system is described as completely defunct, so the police resort to „encountering“ the suspects and shooting them) that I couldn’t put down. Suketu somehow got access to all the sides in this game — different gangs (there’s a Hindu-Muslim divide, but not only), and open conversations with the „encounter specialists“ and much more about the peculiarities of Indian culture. My only wish for improvement would be some footnotes for the many Hindi terms — the book is a little like the India described in that respect, exclusive of foreigners. Still, as should be clear by now, a strong endorsement from me!

ABSURDITY, n. A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one’s own opinion. — Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary, 1906, http://j.mp/gmLTUn

APHORISM, n. Predigested wisdom. — Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary, 1906, http://j.mp/gmLTUn

PRAY, v. To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy. — Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary, 1906, http://j.mp/gmLTUn

PRESENT, n. That part of eternity dividing the domain of disappointment from the realm of hope. — Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary, 1906, http://j.mp/gmLTUn

PRICE, n. Value, plus a reasonable sum for the wear and tear of conscience in demanding it. — Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary, 1906, http://j.mp/gmLTUn

SELF-EVIDENT, adj. Evident to one’s self and to nobody else. — Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary, 1906, http://j.mp/gmLTUn

TRUTH, n. An ingenious compound of desirability and appearance. — Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary, 1906, http://j.mp/gmLTUn

CONSERVATIVE, n. A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others. — Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary, 1906, http://j.mp/gmLTUn

CARTESIAN, adj. Relating to Descartes, a famous philosopher, author of the celebrated dictum, Cogito ergo sum – whereby he was pleased to suppose he demonstrated the reality of human existence. The dictum might be improved, however, thus: Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum – “I think that I think, therefore I think that I am;” as close an approach to certainty as any philosopher has yet made. — Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary, 1906, http://j.mp/gmLTUn

Man erfährt beim Lesen einiges über verschiedene Schulen der mehr oder weniger psychologisch-wissenschaftlich fundierten Paarberatung. Und vielleicht auch ein bisschen darüber, wie gesund ein solcher Anspruch an das Leben im Allgemeinen und die Beziehung im Besonderen ist.

So bahnt sich das Ganze an:

LET’S say you have what you believe to be a healthy marriage. You’re still friends and lovers after spending more than half of your lives together. The dreams you set out to achieve in your 20s — gazing into each other’s eyes in candlelit city bistros when you were single and skinny — have for the most part come true.

Two decades later you have the 20 acres of land, the farmhouse, the children, the dogs and horses. You’re the parents you said you would be, full of love and guidance. You’ve done it all: Disneyland, camping, Hawaii, Mexico, city living, stargazing.

Sure, you have your marital issues, but on the whole you feel so self-satisfied about how things have worked out that you would never, in your wildest nightmares, think you would hear these words from your husband one fine summer day: “I don’t love you anymore. I’m not sure I ever did. I’m moving out. The kids will understand. They’ll want me to be happy.”

But wait. This isn’t the divorce story you think it is. Neither is it a begging-him-to-stay story. It’s a story about hearing your husband say “I don’t love you anymore” and deciding not to believe him. And what can happen as a result.

Here’s a visual: Child throws a temper tantrum. Tries to hit his mother. But the mother doesn’t hit back, lecture or punish. Instead, she ducks. Then she tries to go about her business as if the tantrum isn’t happening. She doesn’t “reward” the tantrum. She simply doesn’t take the tantrum personally because, after all, it’s not about her.

Let me be clear: I’m not saying my husband was throwing a child’s tantrum. No. He was in the grip of something else — a profound and far more troubling meltdown that comes not in childhood but in midlife, when we perceive that our personal trajectory is no longer arcing reliably upward as it once did. But I decided to respond the same way I’d responded to my children’s tantrums. And I kept responding to it that way. For four months.

(Wer hier den ganzen Artikel lesen will hat noch nichts übersprungen… ;-))

Das ist die „Realität“, die die Frau dem Ende der Liebe entgegensetzt:

You see, I’d recently committed to a non-negotiable understanding with myself. I’d committed to “The End of Suffering.” I’d finally managed to exile the voices in my head that told me my personal happiness was only as good as my outward success, rooted in things that were often outside my control. I’d seen the insanity of that equation and decided to take responsibility for my own happiness. And I mean all of it.

My husband hadn’t yet come to this understanding with himself. He had enjoyed many years of hard work, and its rewards had supported our family of four all along. But his new endeavor hadn’t been going so well, and his ability to be the breadwinner was in rapid decline. He’d been miserable about this, felt useless, was losing himself emotionally and letting himself go physically. And now he wanted out of our marriage; to be done with our family.

Was weiter passiert:

Well, he didn’t move out.

Instead, he spent the summer being unreliable. He stopped coming home at his usual six o’clock. He would stay out late and not call. He blew off our entire Fourth of July — the parade, the barbecue, the fireworks — to go to someone else’s party. When he was at home, he was distant. He wouldn’t look me in the eye. He didn’t even wish me “Happy Birthday.”

But I didn’t play into it. I walked my line. I told the kids: “Daddy’s having a hard time as adults often do. But we’re a family, no matter what.” I was not going to suffer. And neither were they.

MY trusted friends were irate on my behalf. “How can you just stand by and accept this behavior? Kick him out! Get a lawyer!”

I walked my line with them, too. This man was hurting, yet his problem wasn’t mine to solve. In fact, I needed to get out of his way so he could solve it.

Die Philosophie noch einmal „in a nutshell“:

I simply had come to understand that I was not at the root of my husband’s problem. He was. If he could turn his problem into a marital fight, he could make it about us. I needed to get out of the way so that wouldn’t happen.

Privately, I decided to give him time. Six months.

Und das Happy-End:

And one day, there he was, home from work early, mowing the lawn. A man doesn’t mow his lawn if he’s going to leave it. Not this man. Then he fixed a door that had been broken for eight years. He made a comment about our front porch needing paint. Our front porch. He mentioned needing wood for next winter. The future. Little by little, he started talking about the future.

It was Thanksgiving dinner that sealed it. My husband bowed his head humbly and said, “I’m thankful for my family.”

He was back.

And I saw what had been missing: pride. He’d lost pride in himself. Maybe that’s what happens when our egos take a hit in midlife and we realize we’re not as young and golden anymore.

When life’s knocked us around. And our childhood myths reveal themselves to be just that. The truth feels like the biggest sucker-punch of them all: it’s not a spouse or land or a job or money that brings us happiness. Those achievements, those relationships, can enhance our happiness, yes, but happiness has to start from within. Relying on any other equation can be lethal.

Wow. Wow wow wow. Wie kompliziert die Welt doch ist. Und wie einfach das paradoxerweise unser Leben manchmal machen kann. Es lebe der Konstruktivismus.

Der Tod neigt dazu, eine deprimierende Sicht des Krieges zu vermitteln.

Hier also noch eine wirklich tiefsinnige und nachdenkenswerte Ausführung von ihm, zitiert aus der Amazon.com Seite des Buches:

As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know we don’t know.

Since 9/11, Westerners have tried two approaches to fight terrorism in Pakistan, President Bush’s and Greg Mortenson’s.

Mr. Bush has focused on military force and provided more than $10 billion — an extraordinary sum in the foreign-aid world — to the highly unpopular government of President Pervez Musharraf. This approach has failed: the backlash has radicalized Pakistan’s tribal areas so that they now nurture terrorists in ways that they never did before 9/11.

Mr. Mortenson, a frumpy, genial man from Montana, takes a diametrically opposite approach, and he has spent less than one-ten-thousandth as much as the Bush administration. He builds schools in isolated parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan, working closely with Muslim clerics and even praying with them at times.

Abgesehen von dem verrückten Größenverhältnis der Geldsummen unterstreicht auch folgender Absatz die Bedeutung von dezentraler, lokal integrierter Entwicklungsarbeit:

To get a school, villagers must provide the land and the labor to assure a local “buy-in,” and so far the Taliban have not bothered his schools. One anti-American mob rampaged through Baharak, Afghanistan, attacking aid groups — but stopped at the school that local people had just built with Mr. Mortenson. “This is our school,” the mob leaders decided, and they left it intact.

Es kann also sogar in politisch instabilen Regionen funktionieren. Und auf interessanten Wegen zur Stabilisation beitragen:

Still, he notes that the Taliban recruits the poor and illiterate, and he also argues that when women are educated they are more likely to restrain their sons. Five of his teachers are former Taliban, and he says it was their mothers who persuaded them to leave the Taliban; that is one reason he is passionate about educating girls.

Es ist irgendwie eine süße Vorstellung, sich die Diskussionen zu Hause am Abendessentisch vorzustellen. Aber schön!

Das Buch scheint leider seine Stärken dort zu haben, wo es lustig ist (nicht schlecht, aber nicht das wofür ich so ein Buch gerne lesen würde), und sonst eher seicht zu sein. Dabei frage ich mich immer wieder: Müssten nicht eigentlich alte Leute eine Menge darüber wissen, wie man ein glückliches Leben führt? Wenigstens manche alte Leute? Der Vorteil ist ja auch, dass man es ihnen recht gut ansieht, ob sie glücklich gelebt haben.

Aber niemand, den ich kenne, scheint den Alten in seiner Umgebung diese Frage zu stellen. Liegt das daran, dass wir immer zu beschäftigt sind? Oder dass wir denken, unsere Welt und unser Leben seien ohnehin wieder ganz anders? Stimmt das auch? Und wenn ja, ist das eine gute Entwicklung für eine Gesellschaft, und ein gutes Tempo der Veränderung?

Oh, viele Fragen! Wären nur meine Großeltern in der Nähe

„The Hakawati“ von Rabih Alameddine, ein libanesisch-amerikanischer Autor (und anscheinend auch Maler). Ich wurde über einen NYTimes-Artikel zuerst aufmerksam und war neugierig auf ein Buch, das einer alten arabischen Tradition folgend viele kleine Geschichten in eine große Rahmenerzählung packt — man denkt gleich an Tausendundeine Nacht. Außerdem bin ich schon eine Weile immer hellhörig, wenn ich an zeitgenössische Berichte vom Leben in muslimischen Ländern herankomme.

Was ich beim Lesen erlebe ist im Wesentlichen: Fesselnde Unterhaltung, viel subtiles zwischenmenschliches Geschehen, einige kulturvergleichende Einsichten. Und eine beinahe philosophische Auseinandersetzung mit dem Thema „Erzählen“ an sich. Und beinahe heißt hier: Das Thema wird nur am Rande abstrakt behandelt. Zu Beginn der Kapitel finden sich Zitate, die dann nachklingen und einen Rahmen schaffen, der dazu einlädt die beim Lesen erlebten Gefühle zu reflektieren. Das geht vom Anfang, einer herausfordernden Behauptung für Psychologen, die daran gewöhnt sind an die Grenzen der verbalen Mitteilung zu stoßen:

Everything can be told. It’s just a matter of starting, one word follows another. (Javier Marías, A Heart So White)

Über einen Ausflug tief in die europäische Geschichte …

All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them. (Isak Dinesen, cited by Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition)

… und ein Augenzwinkern:

Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. (Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet)

Bis hin zu Gedanken über das Wesen des Menschen:

Man is eminently a storyteller. His search for a purpose, a cause, an ideal, a mission and the like is largely a search for a plot and a pattern in the development of his life story – a story that is basically without meaning or pattern.

Ein Effekt der Lektüre ist für mich jedenfalls, dass ich erneut fasziniert bin vom Konzept des Erzählens in der Psychologie und psychologischen Forschung. Ich bin immer mehr überzeugt, dass da ein Zugang zur inneren Welt von anderen Menschen liegt, der wegen seiner geringen Standardisierbarkeit von vielen Wissenschaftlern ungern gegangen wird, aber sehr lohnend sein kann. Ein sehr knapper Einblick ist wie so oft auf Wikipedia zu finden, z.B. unter Narratives Interview. Ich bin gespannt und froh, dass ich im Herbst als Gabriele Lucius‘ Tutor mit diesem Themenfeld nochmal intensiv zu tun haben werde.

“In a time of war,” Mr. McCain said last week, “the commander in chief doesn’t get a learning curve.” Fair enough, but he imparted this wisdom in a speech that was almost a year behind Mr. Obama in recognizing Afghanistan as the central front in the war against Al Qaeda. Given that it took the deadliest Taliban suicide bombing in Kabul since 9/11 to get Mr. McCain’s attention, you have to wonder if even General Custer’s learning curve was faster than his.

Mr. McCain still doesn’t understand that we can’t send troops to Afghanistan unless they’re shifted from Iraq. But simple math, to put it charitably, has never been his forte. When it comes to the central front of American anxiety — the economy — his learning curve has flat-lined.

In 2000, he told an interviewer that he would make up for his lack of attention to “those issues.” As he entered the 2008 campaign, Mr. McCain was still saying the same, vowing to read “Greenspan’s book” as a tutorial. Last weekend, the resolutely analog candidate told The New York Times he is at last starting to learn how “to get online myself.” Perhaps he’ll retire his abacus by Election Day.

Op-Ed Columnist — It’s the Economic Stupidity, Stupid — Op-Ed — NYTimes.com