Wednesday - Sunday, March 21 - 25 2012 (diary)

The saying goes that "there is a time and a place for everything", and looking back at my life there has been only one time in my life that I lived in a place which decidedly did not agree with me.   Surprisingly that was as a baby and small toddler during the first 5 years of my life when we lived in Zutphen. Even that young, I hated it.
But as soon as we moved into the country to Martinshof things changed and from that point onwards I have truly enjoyed every place I lived throughout my life (and there have been many) right up to this very day.

As I have related earlier in my Blog the major driving forces throughout my life have been a quest for freedom and a search for increasing awareness.   So is it surprising that at this late stage of my life I find myself living in Darwin, the very place named after the man who provided the key that liberated human kind from the cage of ignorance and opened up our minds to the reality of our existence in this universe.

Interestingly 20 or 30 years ago Darwin was typically a place mainly for young people and at retirement age people tended to leave and "move South". But this is no longer the case.
The NT Government has made it very attractive for retirees to stay here, with generous consessions for pensioners towards the costs of electricity, water, rates, car registration, free drivers licence and even (every 2 years) a travel grant to visit relatives down South (or let them visit here for free).
Hospital and other medical and social services here are also good now, so these days the full spectrum of ages make up the 130,000 odd people who call Darwin home.

I have told you repeatedly that I absolutely love it here and I have arrived at Darwin at the right time in my life. All anxieties and pressures of work, family, finances, etc. that mar most of our lives (as adjacent chart from The Economist clearly reveals) have long gone and I now consciously feel a sense of well being which I can not recall having ever experienced in my life before.
The tranquility and nature setting where I live right now, the sense of freedom which pervades Darwin and its inhabitants, and the superb weather we experience here all contribute to making this a perfect place to live.
As you can see on the chart the average sense of well being (reported by Americans) at my age (75) is around 6.9, but I personally feel that mine is well above that average and somewhere between 8 and 9. As long as my health holds out and no external upheavals come my way I hope that level may hold for some time to come.

Monday - Saturday, March 26 - 31 2012 (diary)

Does it take a lifetime to discover who we really are ? Or is it only after entering retirement age that we have the time and inclination to look back upon our life and start to recognize clear trends in our thinking, feeling and behaviour ?
I am a born annalist, not the dogged fact collecting academic kind, but the creative, intuitive variety who sniffs out a trend, connection or underlying rule sometimes with the barest of firm evidence.   I have loved doing that throughout my life, but strangely enough always applied it to the world around me, never to myself. Until now.

Last month, spurred on by Charles Dickens' 200th anniversary of his birthday (Feb.7), I attempted once again to read through one of this British icon's novels : "Great Expectations". But just like a couple of previous attempts on other novels of his, I got bored with it very quickly (although I did manage to get through 100 pages this time, instead of the 20 odd in past attempts).

Why is it, I asked myself, that I just don't like his writing ? He is an intelligent, competent writer and excellent story teller. He became famous and rich almost overnight, so a real populist writer of his time. Yet on scale of 1 to 10 I give Dickens a mere 3 compared to 9s for his contemporaries like Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy.

I believe it is my (almost lifelong) disinterest in all fiction that does not reflect, or comment upon, reality. I never liked science fiction for example. Many of my school friends in the 1940s and 50s loved the famous (science fiction) novels by Jules Vernes, but I only read 20 odd pages of one, than never looked at another one again. This disinterest continued throughout my life.

Reality of humanity, of nature, of the world and the universe are, and always will be, the greatest mystery in life. Deviation from those themes, although perhaps entertaining and imaginative, in the end are merely artificial trivialities compared to the reality which confronts us every day of our life.

From the little I have read of Charles Dickens I find his characters (much loved by the English public) grotesque caricatures and his settings and environments Alice in Wonderland like surreal.
In fact the tale of the Emperor's clothes comes to my mind, in the reverse that is. I find Dickens' work all clothes, but with nothing inside to inhabit them. Plenty of superficial entertaining material, but no (mind provoking) substance.

As chance would have it, while returning Dickens' novel to the Library I picked up Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago (which won him the Nobel Price for Literature in 1958). And my goodness : what a difference ! Pasternak's writing is pure poetry in prose, unparalleled in style, creative imagination, intelligence and quality.

The English translators (Max Hayward and Manya Harari) apologise for failing to do justice to Pasternak's lyrical language. But they have done their best in conveying at least some sense of Pasternak's emotional exuberance about Russia's nature and seasonal beauty into the English language.
The book is also a testament to that tumultuous time in Russia during WW1 and the Communist revolution that followed it, full of hardship, injustice and bloodshed. (Zhivago's love for the two women in his life, which is the main theme of the original film, is but one of the many facets of this wonderful piece of literature.)