Tired After a Full Week

I am recovering after a week of seminar discussions about Dietrich von Hildebrand. They were quite interesting but made for a long week. I generally had about an hour to read some Gotthelf or answer e-mail in the mornings, then a few hours of seminar until 1pm, with 2-3 more hours after lunch. Then in the evenings I would catch up on my reading for the next day's sessions and grade some exams for my online classes. There is something about spending that many hours a day in computer Zoom sessions--especially with the weather as hot and muggy as it was last week--that makes you tired, even without grading exams late into the night.

I did manage to make it through Hildebrand's book on The Heart, so I got to add that to my list of books read this summer. Yesterday and today I also read a short book by Peter Handke, Lucie im Wald mit den Dingsda (Lucy in the Forest with Some Thingummies). I'll have to post about Handke sometime, because I'm working on a paper on him (well, at least in theory I am working on it...). I've read about a half dozen books by Handke and couldn't really say that I've been all that enthusiastic about them, although I did like this one, which was almost like a children's story.

I have read a few other things the last couple of weeks that I'll make note of one of these days.

This morning was also of course church, with the usual masking and social-distancing precautions. We have had pretty low attendance since re-opening. I'm not sure if people are nervous about coming back or if some of them aren't aware yet that we're open again. On a hot day like today, some folks may not relish the thought of sitting around with a mask for an hour. Since we aren't allowed to sing, it does mean that my work at the organ is not too difficult.

I'll have to see if I can get back in the flow with my Gotthelf research this week. It's easy to lose momentum over the summer.

Comments

Dursli

Back to Gotthelf! I have already mentioned that I re-read Gotthelf's novella about the five young women who were ruined by drink. Last week I also re-read the second of his two early novellas tackling the problem of rural alcoholism, Dursli, der Brannteweinsäufer, oder Das heilige Weihnachtsabend ( Dursli the Brandy Drinker, or The Holy Christmas Eve ). This story also warns against the pubs springing up all over the Emmentaler countryside and their consequences for the rural poor. But it is also--even more than I had remembered, in fact--set in the broader political context of the times. Gotthelf begins the novella, in fact, before he ever even introduces the main characters, with about a 10-page discourse on the problematic reception in Switzerland of the ideas of the French Revolution. Its call for equality and freedom, he says, is naturally interpreted by the poorer classes not in terms of true Christian equality and freedom, but rather as a ...

Chinese Painting

The Wall Street Journal has been running some interesting articles under the heading of "The Staying Inside Guide," offering suggestions for artistic or cultural resources to view online during the pandemic. Yesterday I came across an interesting one entitled "Immersive Painted Worlds," on Chinese painting, about which I know virtually nothing. (The article may be behind a subscription firewall.) The article has an impressive number of links to various things online, and I watched the first couple, a pair of 15-minute videos from a former BBC program called "The Culture Show," which together form an episode on "The Art of Chinese Painting." I thought they were quite interesting. The first episode introduced me to the Mogao Caves of Dunhuang , which I had never heard of before. Located in the Gobi Desert, they contain a wealth of wall paintings and statues that are well over 1000 years old and were unknown to the outside world for cen...

Alias, or Real Life

I mentioned yesterday that I'd managed to read several things over the past week. And believe it or not, not all of them were by Gotthelf! On Saturday I decided I should give myself a break and read something else for a change, so that morning I decided to finish off a book I'd been in the middle of for a while, Alias, oder Das wahre leben ( Alias, or Real Life ), by Felix Philipp Ingold . Ingold is a Swiss author, editor, translator, and journalist; there isn't much about him in English, and I don't think any of his books have been translated, but you can read a one-paragraph summary of him here . It was an interesting book, partly because of the premise. It purports to tell the life story of one Kirill Beregow, alias Carl Berger, a Volga Russian of German descent. The hook is that Beregow/Berger is a real person, an acquaintance of Ingold's, and the book is supposedly based upon conversations with him and papers that he left behind, fictionaliz...

Plague Time

Search This Blog