R.L. Swihart's Blog, page 102
July 1, 2020
Long Beach CA: Bluffs, Beach, and Pier
The beaches will close this weekend in Long Beach CA -- COVID has cancelled most of the festivities for the 4th, though I'm sure there will be some private noisemakers. Will make the best of it by walking there over the next couple of days: Bluff to Beach to Pier and back again.
June 28, 2020
Charlie's Friend
Charlie's a Boston. He acts tough but is all bark and no bite (he's afraid of the neighbor's cat). The squirrel is one and many. All over the place. This morning he greeted me and put on quite a show. I lucked out and got a little rain in CA while walking along Marine Stadium (rowing center side). Pascal told me to be content (happy) in my own room, so I'll hang out inside for the remainder of the day.
June 26, 2020
Frisch's Stiller: Clip #3
We live in an age of reproduction. Most of what makes up our personal picture of the world we have never seen with our own eyes—or rather, we've seen it with our own eyes, but not on the spot: our knowledge comes to us from a distance, we are televiewers, telehearers, teleknowers. One need never have left this little town to have Hitler's voice still ringing in one's ears, to have seen the Shah of Persia from a distance of three yards, and to know how the monsoon howls over the Himalayas or what it looks like six hundred fathoms beneath the sea. Anyone can know these things nowadays. Does it mean I have ever been to the bottom of the sea? Or even (like the Swiss) almost up Mount Everest? And it's just the same with the inner life of man. Anyone can know about it nowadays. How the devil am I to prove to my counsel that I don't know my murderous impulses through C. G. Jung, jealousy through Marcel Proust, Spain through Hemingway, Paris through Ernst Jiinger, Switzerland through Mark Twain, Mexico through Graham Greene, my fear of death through Bernanos, inability ever to reach my destination through Kafka, and all sorts of other things through Thomas Mann? It's true, you need never have read these authorities, you can absorb them through your friends who also live all their experiences second-hand.
June 24, 2020
Frisch's "Stiller": Clip #2
Here we must go back a little. Stiller, as we know, took part in the Spanish Civil War, while still a very young man, as a volunteer in the International Brigade. It is not clear what impelled him to this militant gesture. Probably many factors were combined—a rather romantic Communism, such as was common among bourgeois intellectuals at that time, also an understandable desire to see the world, a desire to subordinate his personal interests to some higher historical force, a desire for action; perhaps too, at least in part, it was flight from himself.
June 20, 2020
Rereading Frisch's "I'm Not Stiller"
'The village was called Paricutin. Now that is the name of the new volcano,' I finished my story, 'and if you ever go to Mexico, my dear Doktor, drive out to this Paricutin. The roads are terrible, but it's worth while, especially at night; glowing stones fly fifteen hundred feet into the air, and there is a rumbling like the rumbling of an avalanche, and just before it begins smoke always billows up from the crater like a giant cauliflower, but black and red, red underneath where it catches the light from the flames below. Not so long ago the eruptions succeeded one another at pretty short intervals—six minutes, ten minutes, three minutes, each eruption throwing up a cascade of glowing stones, most of which were extinguished before they struck the ground. It's a first-class firework, believe me. Especially the lava. From the middle of a dark heap of dead slag, on which the moon shines without detracting from its blackness, the lava shoots out bright crimson, in spurts, like blood from a black bull. It must be very thin and runny, this lava, it sweeps down over the hillside almost as quick as lightning, gradually losing its brightness, until the next eruption comes glowing like a blast furnace, gleaming like the sun, lighting up the night with the deadly heat to which all life is due, with the molten heart of our planet. That's a sight you must see. I remember that our souls were filled with a jubilation that could only find an outlet in dancing, in the wildest of all dances, an outpouring of horror and delight, such as the incomprehensible people who cut the warm heart out of the living breast might have understood.'
