Life is often not very fair

Schadenfreude.

 

That is one of those complicated looking German words that one really ought to know, apparently, like Aufklärung and Verfremdungseffekt – and be prepared to use them in context.

 

I can remember using Aufklärung in my history essays for ‘A’ level (after painstakingly learning the spelling) more for the effect of throwing in an unaccustomed umlaut and making my rather mundane understanding of European history and the Enlightenment seem just a little more sophisticated. 

 

Although I read a lot about Verfremdungseffekt in my extensive reading of Brecht, having decided that he was one of the easier alternatives as a ‘banker’ question in my Drama Paper in my finals – though I have to be truthful, I have looked up the spelling of the word and in my critical writing I always used the easier term of ‘alienation’ – which was also easier to spell. 

Incidentally, I always consider my greatest two achievements in my finals papers was spelling Houyhnhnms (the intelligent and logical horses in Gulliver’s bitter, misanthropic IVth Voyage) correctly, and quoting four lines of C17th French poetry in my response to Sir Thomas Browne.  I also quoted freely from one of Brecht’s more obscure plays, which my tutor said summed up my response!

Anyway, Schadenfreude came to mind as I left my Catalan lesson in the centre of Castelldefels to unlock my bike and make my way home.  In the pouring rain.

I have never wilfully ignored an opportunity to remind my British friends that I like by the side of the Mediterranean, constantly bathed in sunlight, with good food and cheap wine.

Now the cheap wine is forbidden; my food should be low fat and salt free – and it bloody rained.  How more Schadenfreude could it be?

Well, yesterday I got a registered letter, for which I had to sign, that informed me that I had been ‘imaged’ speeding along the road that runs alongside the Olympic Canal and that I had been fined €300 and two points!

Is this injustice?  My speed was not excessive (in my mind) for this road and (you can hear the whine in my voice) everybody else in the entire world that uses the road goes at the same speed.  So, does this mean that virtually the entire population of Castelldefels has also been signing for a letter that informs that they have been excessive and please to pay the money into the city coffers?

I do think that the totally unrealistic speed limits are there to ensure that the cash cow can be milked at any moment that the city needs a cash injection.

It is also significant that the date of the infringement was a month ago, and on a Saturday.  Since that date the city has installed or constructed or imposed two zebra crossing ramps (that I am convinced are higher than the legal regulations allow – but let it pass, let it pass) that make going at even a snail’s pace difficult.  Add to that the existence of those thoroughly irritating rubber strips at regular intervals along the same road, then it seems as if the municipality is waging an active war against the suspension systems of all motor cars within the city.

And then there is paying the extortion.  The single sheet of the demand came with a bar code that should mean it is possible to pay at a cash machine because they have a little window that reads bar codes.   

And while we are angry (as we are) those cash machines only exist because the banks are viciously mean and hate their customers so much that they reduce all opportunities to interact with them in person.  And then they dress up this glaring lack of concern by telling us that these machines exist for our convenience!  Huh!  As if.  When was the last time that a bank, any bank, did anything altruistic that was not directly linked to their own essential well-being!  And the machine did not read the code and gave a brusque message that basically nothing could be done, so find another way to pay, not specified by the machine.

So, for me at the moment, the old feelings of Schadenfreude are in the ascendant.  This too will pass, but, even though it is negative, it should be possible to find a sort of twisted enjoyment in the negative.  Perhaps the momentary nature of misery should be appreciated as well as that of pleasure – which, after all, is just as fleeting.

And, owning a tumble drier, it is hardly a problem to strip off wet clothes and throw them all in the drier for a few minutes to get them warmly dry again.  Which I did, down to and including my underpants.  And then the door buzzer sounded and it was the post-lady with a package for us.  So, dressed fetchingly in a hastily grabbed pair of summer swimming trunks and a hooded rain jacket, I wetly opened the front gate to get the stuff and returned even more wetly thinking to myself that Schadenfreude really doesn’t give up!

And (again), the book that I ordered on Amazon with what I understood would be a one-day delivery promise, will actually arrive at the end of the month.  Underlining the point, I think!

Looking forward to the end of the week when we are scheduled to go to Name Day celebrations, a lunch in Terrassa, and Friday is a half day for Toni and so we can have lunch together to celebrate the start of the weekend properly!

The search for Truth?

There is something invigoratingly refreshing (as well as totally humiliating!) about discovering that your use of one of your favourite quotations has been inaccurate.

            I cannot pretend to have read Francis Bacon’s Essays, Civil and Moral in full.  Indeed apart from the opening sentence of Essay I, Of Truth I don’t think that I have read any more of them, unless I have unconsciously read them as isolated quotations.

            To test the point I have just made I have traipsed upstairs to get a couple of my dictionaries of quotations: Encarta Book of Quotations (2000) London, Bloomsbury and Chambers Dictionary of Quotations (1996) Edinburgh, Chambers.  If you read through the selected quotations drawn from the Essays (1625) you realise just how much and how far Bacon’s thoughts have penetrated our everyday lives.  Sometimes the wording is somewhat different in their modern form, but his witty, perceptive and profound understanding has found its way into common wisdom.

            My own favourite of his thoughts, here written correctly with the verbs in their original form rather than my own choice is something which has troubled and stimulated me in equal proportions:

         What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.

The question (which you note Pilate ironically states rather than asks, he neither wants nor expects an answer) is perennially relevant and we too often follow ‘jesting Pilate’ and live in our refusal to face the demands of what Bacon goes on to describe as the “difficulty and labor which men take in finding out of truth” and the lure of the preference for its opposite is because, “a mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure” it shuns the “naked and open day-light” of truth because “that doeth not show the masks and mummeries and triumphs of the world, half so stately and daintily as candle-lights.”

Although Bacon’s prose is perhaps too dense for a modern reader, it is worth persevering with because it puts you in contact with a liberal understanding of the human condition.  

I have made myself a promise to read more of the Essays because I see a connection with the prose of someone like Sir Thomas Browne, 

a writer I have always enjoyed reading – and another person whose writings may not be universally well known, but whose thoughts have made their way into our intellectual expression.  

You have to like a writer who can think up, for title of whose second (?) most famous work, Hydriotaphia or Urn Burial, and it has pictures!  

Both Bacon and also Browne are easily, and productively, searchable on the Internet 

If you have not read them before, you might well be surprised to find out how familiar their thought is to you.

Obviously, the quotation from Bacon has been going through my mind as I look at the situations in Spain, Britain and the USA.  

Truth seems to have become an even more slippery concept in modern political life than usual.  Brexit was conducted with “candle-lights” so dim that Truth appeared to be living in some other debate; truth, honesty, integrity and all other positive virtues are signally lacking from the bunch of chancers who have taken the government in Spain, and Trump has found new depths of duplicity and prejudice that actually manage to throw a glimmer of probity on the mismanagement of Britain and Spain!

I have ever found consolation in Literature.  Thank goodness I have a goodly selection of reading glasses to make my contemplation of so many politicians “poor shrunken things, full of melancholy and disposition, and unpleasing to themselves” as something that can be accommodated within the liberal confines of pages of value!