Growing older . . . and hearing voices from the past

"Switch Your Land"
Google Images

As I lay dining on a piece of toast while bedridden with my stomach virus, an old Swiss-German friend with the ever surprising surname "d'Aujourd'hui" was writing me an email:

High Jeff,

Well, that would be nice, in general, but while sick, I had no desire for any chemically induced buzz. Nevertheless, Ms. d'Aujourd'hui continued:

I was thinking about you, asking myself how you might be going. I saw Antonia today, Monica's friend in Fribourg. Maybe you remember her . . .

By the time I read her entire email, I was able to answer. I didn't say, well, I'm going . . . going . . . though not yet gone. I instead replied reasonably to Ms. d'Aujourd'hui's question:

Yes, I remember Antonia. I admit I had to reflect a bit to do so, but that seems to be a matter of getting older - in my case anyway.

Ms. d'Aujourd'hui went on to inform me:

I'm at Zürich for work. And I'm astonished how lively this city is. There are so many people here from all over the world. Summer is really nice here; everybody is outside, gathering in the parks, swimming in the river and the lake. I stay at my brother’s flat; my son is living here, so it is a nice occasion to spend some hours together.

I was at work, too, although in Seoul, and I told her:

At the moment, I'm preparing for my 9 a.m. course, an intensive class on writing. Expository, not creative. Occasionally, I have to correct students' pronunciation, so I sometimes do your [sort of] work, if you're still doing Logopaedie . . . . I still read the IHT - though it's now the INYT - so I know that Zürich is a bustling place, and so is Basel, with its yearly art fair (or whatever it's called). Once in a great while, there's an article that mentions Fribourg.

Ms. d'Aujourd'hui soon signed off:

A lot of Swiss greetings . . . . hope you're as fine as you can be!!

I did the same:

I suppose I'm doing as well as the last time we communicated, though a bit less so. You seem to be doing well. I hope you are.

And so it goes as our past fills up with more and more of our less and less time . . .

Chagall: The Pinch of Snuff

The Pinch of Snuff

Marc Chagall

For the benefit of readers who might have been unable to access the Basel Kunstmuseum's painting, here it is above, and as I noted yesterday, the 'illusion' of two left hands is even more visible in this version from 1923-26 than in the 1912 version! Is this mere chance, random accident?

This painting is also the version whose print poster hung on the wall of my off-campus, Waco room in Speight House, a room-and-board place near Baylor managed by a woman whose name actually was none other than "Buena Vista Verona"! We called her Mrs. V., and she was a tough-talking soft-hearted lady who liked me even though I had long hair and a beard -- I think she figured out pretty quickly that I wasn't so much hippie as hillbilly, a wild man who played basketball barefooted because I could dunk better, but also struggled to become an intellectual by intently staring at a Chagall print in hope of absorbing some culture . . .

And here I am, still trying to figure out Marc Chagall's elusive rabbi . . .

Basel: A Quarter-Century Past

I lived over a year in Switzerland back in the latter 1980s, about four months of that time in Basel, where I first had and then didn't have a Swiss girlfriend named Monika whom I'd originally met in Fribourg in 1986, a breakup that worked out for the best in the long run, though I had my doubts about its beneficial consequences during the summer of 1988. I spent a lot of time in Basel that summer at Andreasplatz drinking coffee in the Café zum Teufel -- though I think it had already been renamed Café Zum Roten Engel -- and writing in my journal (when I wasn't working on my Coptic), depicting in lead of pencils the vicissitudes of a once golden relationship.

Café Zum Roten Engel

Google Images

I've never had an overwhelming desire to revisit that lovely city, though I did go again in the Fall of 1989, for I was -- courtesy of a Fulbright Grant -- living in Tübingen, not so far from Basel, and I took that opportunity to walk the city's streets and seek out old haunts. I never looked up my old girlfriend, despite strolling by the place where she probably lived, for too little time had passed to enable me to deal with that unpleasantness. Besides, as she saw me off at the train in late summer of '88, I had left her with the words, "Leb wohl," and though she found that amusing -- a marginally appropriate response -- I kept my promise implicit in the words of that farewell.

Despite my reluctance about ever again returning to Basel, I actually liked the city, and still wish the best for it. It appears to be doing well, as I see from the art and architecture pages of the International Herald Tribune in an article reprinted in the New York Times as "Basel's New Center for Design" (June 1, 2012 ), by Ratha Tep, who informs us:

On a brisk Saturday morning in April, a group of young architecture students from Bologna, Italy, walked down a white granite promenade in the St. Johann neighborhood in Basel, Switzerland, to take in 14 "starchitect"-designed buildings that have sprung up in recent years. An opaque glass structure by Yoshio Taniguchi resembled a floating box. A soaring Frank Gehry design of contorted cubes stood just beyond. And over near the large Richard Serra sculptures, a Tadao Ando building converged into a razor-sharp triangular edge.

That a group of art and design geeks would be visiting this corner of northern Basel, which hugs the Rhine River, would have been unimaginable just a decade ago, when it was a gloomy stretch dotted with nondescript office buildings and chemical factories. But the new buildings, part of an ambitious 2.2 billion Swiss franc plan by the pharmaceutical giant Novartis to turn its production facility into a gleaming corporate campus, has drawn curious onlookers to the 50-acre site, where a project by the hometown firm of Herzog and de Meuron is still on its way.

Sounds impressive. Unfortunately, the article offers only one photo, but I Googled the company Novartis and found all the necessary photos to accompany Tep's descriptions. Here's Yoshio Taniguchi's opaque glass structure like a floating box:

Here's Frank Gehry's soaring design of contorted cubes (which Tep does provide):

Here's Tadao Ando's building converging into a razor-sharp triangular edge (or so says Tep):

There are twelve other photos of architecture to look at, each of them small, unfortunately, but they will give you an impression of what you'd see if you visit the area . . . which I suppose I never again will.

"Leb wohl," Basel.

UPDATE: Go to the Novartis site and click on the camera icon under each of the tiny photos for a larger image.

Life Can Be a Dream . . .

Jane Austen

"Jaunty Sihouette"

(Image from Pemberley)

Late in Pride and Prejudice, when the ending has turned happy for the characters with whom we identify, Jane Austen puts into Elizabeth Bennet's mouth the following words, which strike me as true:

"We all love to instruct, though we can teach only what is not worth knowing." (Miss Elizabeth Bennet, Chapter 54, Pride and Prejudice)

I am, as you know, an instructor. Sometimes, even, a professor. Consider the difference in those titles, but even as one who sometimes professes, I am -- at the fundament of my existence -- one who instructs. I can therefore teach only what is not worth knowing . . . and thus not worth teaching. What is truly worth knowing, I cannot impart.

But I didn't learn this from Austen or Bennet. I learned it from experience, and so will my students . . . eventually. For instance, my international-relations students asked my advice last week on how to pursue their university studies. They are mere first-year students, and I am old enough to be their father.

"I can tell you what I did wrong. Be sure to make and keep connections. You'll need them someday when you look for a job. Aim to have a career that looks linear on your CV. Otherwise, you'll look like someone who lacks direction. This is especially important after your undergraduate degree. Try to make good grades . . . but don't let grades get in the way of your education. Adopt a personal standard of excellence that goes beyond the next test. Learn as if for eternity."

I think that I said a bit more than that, but I was talking to myself. Not that my students didn't listen. They did. But to understand what I meant? Maybe the practical stuff, but the truly worthwhile? That takes a lifetime, and comes from experience, not instruction. Actually, I did follow some of my own advice in my years pursuing an education -- I always sought excellence beyond the exams . . . well, almost always. But I neglected connections and followed a winding, eccentric path, which isn't necessarily bad if you don't mind going off track.

I spent years in Europe, even a year in Switzerland, working on my Coptic and preparing for a career in Gnostic studies . . . but where did that get me? Several months in Basel chasing a lost girlfriend in the summer of 1988 while living with anarchists and getting tear-gassed by the police. I thought of this yesterday when I stumbled across Steven Erlanger's New York Times article, "For Art Lovers, Basel Doesn't End at the Fair" (June 6-7, 2009). That brought back memories, some good -- like Marc Chagall's 1912 image of The Rabbi enjoying his pinch of snuff, housed in the Basel Kunsthalle . . . the original of a print that I'd kept tacked to the wall of my boarding room while a young student in the late 1970s at Baylor, where I'd pined for passionate love and dreamed of unattainable greatness. But some memories bad -- such as cutting short a friend's defense of my ex-girlfriend with these words describing her behavior that Basel summer of 1988:

"She was selfish. She was cold. She was sometimes brutal. And she was a coward."

I suppose that two of those adjectives could apply to me as well. Take your pick, for it hardly matters anymore, it was so long ago.

After that, my career at least seemed on track, the Fulbright and Naumann doctoral fellowships that I'd won seeming to presage a future so bright that I ought to wear shades. It didn't turn out quite like that. After one postdoc in Australia and another in Jerusalem, I reached a deadend. An Australian friend at the University of New England, Armidale, who had promised support in my job applications, informed me at the critical moment when I needed support and had requested from her a recommendation for a position in religious studies that included courses on women in religion:

"I am on principle opposed to males teaching courses about women in religion."

What could I say to her words concerning this 'principle'? That I'd suddenly discovered the vast difference between the prepositions "on" and "in"? What could I say to myself? That I was lost on an eccentric intellectual path without proper connections in the academic world? That I'd found myself putting trust in the wrong person? That I'd finally learned: It's not your enemies who betray you, but your friends? But all that hardly matters anymore, it now seems so long ago.

Besides, in the course of these detours and deadends, a miracle occurred, and I was granted a future despite all else that didn't go quite as planned.

And life can be a dream . . .