Worth a thought

As you probably know, I am a fan of emphasising the Conservative perspective on events, albeit in moderation. The reason for that is that I deem ignorance of any kind potentially harmful. We need to know about Conservatives.

If you’re not put off by those introductory statements then you might find the following quite interesting. Paul Goodman, writing on the Tory grassroots internet platform ConsHome.com, posted an open letter to David Cameron this morning that illuminates some of the conflict within the Conservative Party about the course currently taken in relation to rioting and rioters. I particularly want to draw your attention to the last two paragraphs in which Goodman comments on the proposed British Bill of Rights. Goodman is addressing Cameron directly and he is making a valid point about the dark side of social morality as expressed by the PM.

“We’re working [said David Cameron in his speech yesterday] to develop a way through the morass by looking at creating our own British Bill of Rights…The truth is, the interpretation of human rights legislation has exerted a chilling effect on public sector organisations…It is exactly the same with health and safety.”

This is the big one, isn’t it?  Since the riots, you and other Ministers have made a series of announcements.  Convicted rioters could lose their council homes.  Even those not jailed could lose their benefits.  Child offenders will be named and shamed.  And so on.  But how on earth is all this compatible with the Human Rights Act?

The full post is here.

Beauty is where you are…

Be where you are, search within yourself, love what you see and appreciate what it gives you. It’s all already here. Love, beauty, success, all already here, all inside you and around you. One can hardly get this across better than Dan Jurak has done in this recent blog post.

After a few days in Banff and Jasper you might think that I'd be posting more photos from the trip. Instead, I am posting a landscape that was taken minutes away from where I live, in a city on the prairies, population close to one million. The sights and sounds of construction are all around me. New houses are being built to camera left. In fact, I had to point the camera more north than I wanted to or I would be photographing the new constructi … Read More

via Dan Jurak's Alberta Landscape Photo Blog

Summer is Over

This week, I helped my friend who really needed a break and said that I would look after her dog while she was cycling in the hillier regions of Saxony and Thuringia. After many walks with the dog through the forest and around the lake I can tell you: summer is definitely coming to an end. The leaves are starting to turn, not only on the trees but also on the water lilies. The big plate-like leaves that swam so green and happily on the lake are now wilting and showing that sickly yellow colour (which will be perceived as golden and beautiful if it shows up at the right time, i.e. weeks later) and they are preparing to sink to the bottom of the lake just as they always do when autumn comes. And it is here already, in August, yes. Autumn has sneaked in stealthily. Unbelievable but true, and many people around here know it.

I normally welcome the change of the seasons but mid-August and the leaves are turning…that’s just way too early! I hope all you guys had a much better summer or are actually still in the midst of it as it should be. I know parts of Canada are in the same dismal situation we in the Northern party of Germany are in; as I heard autumn was approaching fast in Alberta at the beginning of August already.

All this is very sad. I’m not going to stick my head in the sand now; it’s still warm, even if the amounts of rain pouring down on us are of biblical proportions. All the same, here are my best summer pics. It was pretty and maybe we’ll have a few more nice days. But summer proper is over and a very short one it was, too.

This last one is a favourite. The area is a nature reserve near my house. It’s been raining so much this summer that the entire area is now impassable as you can see here:

And last but not least, below is the kind of view that I love most about summer in the Northern Plains and that I will miss very much. See the fat clouds and the equally round and fat trees? Mirror images of one another, great friends and embittered foes, lovers and partners in crime, companions of especially Flemish landscape painters throughout the centuries and signature lanscape items where I am from:

Different when you get there

You know how surreal it can sometimes feel to finally make true on something that had been wanting to do for all your life? And then you really do it, you, in the flesh? ‘How incredible’, I sometimes think in situations like that. There was one such situation last week as I finished my PhD thesis. This was an incredible event in a way because I knew I needed to do this since I was a little kid at school and the teacher asked the class: ‘Who can you tell me what you want to be when you are grown up?’ Ever the bookling, I said eagerly: ‘I want to be a professor in mathematics!’ Because this was socialisam the teacher replied: ‘How presumptuous! That’s like wanting to be a princess! You can’t be a mathematics professor!’ (She was wrong. You could be even then. Though perhaps she meant that I personally didn’t have what it takes for mathematics, which is true.) I think I really wanted to be working at university and be learned more than anything else. That was my childhood aspiration.

So, last week I handed in my PhD thesis which is a good step closer to my childhood dream of working in academia, and what can I tell you: the experience of finishing it was nothing like I had thought it would be. To be honest, the submission of my thesis felt flat, sort of off, and until now I wasn’t sure why that was the case.

Months ago, as I was drafting the last chapters and tweaking theoretical bits in the thesis I used to think ‘once you have submitted this thesis you’ll take time off and you’ll really celebrate because this was a major achievement’. It really was a major achievement, always is, right? It deserves to be acknowledged in the form of breaking out of the daily routine and doing something special. But it wasn’t to be. About four weeks ago I noticed that my thinking on the matter had changed substantially. ‘Take time off to celebrate’ had morphed into ‘you really have to be finished by the deadline because you need to start doing the research for the book chapter on Scottish Tory women; I need to start with that because I need to be finished with the research by October. Simultaneously, I need to start working on a literature review for work. I need to start making plans for future publications, too. Where am I going to publish my PhD?’

The submission of my thesis felt very different from what I thought it would be like because, I think, in the process of writing it, I had become an academic. I truly think that’s how it was. Therefore, once I reached the end of the road I found myself ensconced in multiple projects and with various obligations and plans – a pretty normal situation for someone working at university. I grew up a bit especially in the last few weeks of working on the document, as I saw it all coming together and as I made everything fit together.

Without even meaning to I had become an academic simply by doing the things academics do. It was the active process that changed everything, and most transitions are processes after all, not singular events. This is a trite observation perhaps but easily overlooked. Spoiled in our imagination I for one tend to think of important events in a Hollywood sort of way, as in: ‘When you are in the moment you will feel how great it is.’ But mostly I think you don’t because many important events in life aren’t events at all but longer processes, or phases that one goes through that lead to an insight. There often is no focal point where it all happens and then everything is different afterwards.Think of marriage, for example: longer process rather than singular event; even the wedding is really a process too.

That’s why the mere act of submitting the thesis didn’t have the meaning I had assumed it would have. I am, after all, not a kid any more. I fit the size of the dream much better now than I did back then and I am not so stunned by the enormity of what happened there. Besides, once you get there the dream doesn’t seem so dream-like either. It’s a lot of work, in fact, and, at the end of the day, it’s simply my life now. And that’s actually a good development. Flat, uneventful, but still overall very positive.

(I still haven’t had time off though.)

Why I love books

A few weeks ago I happened to read one of these really great books, you know, the ones that give you that eerie feeling of being connected with the writer and that the two of you are made of the same wood. Packing my bag to return books to the library just now I was wondering if I should return it together with the other books and so I remembered that special feeling. One thing led to another and I am now at the point where I’m thinking: Honestly, it’s not self-evident at all why this one books was so great. And why would one love reading books anyway? What is it about this activity that is so special?

Not that all reading is awesome, of course. Most reading probably isn’t. The book that made me feel warm inside was an edited volume discussing power relations in academia and I read two essays in it discussing the PhD student-PhD supervisor relationship. So there I was, sitting at my kitchen table months and months after I stopped caring about this topic, and someone far away was describing precisely the troubles I had had and discussed them insightfully, without moaning and without accusing anyone. I was touched both how personal the writing was and also how fair and balanaced the difficulties in the PhD student-PhD supervisor relationship were addressed. So on the one hand I felt connected and understood, and I also learned something about fairness.

And that’s what a great book can do for you, I think, and why great books are so utterly invaluable: they connect you to the world and they help you extend your horizon, too. (People can do both as well, of course.) It doesn’t matter whether it’s a fictional or non-fictional book; in this case, it was non-fiction. One of the greatest works of fiction that I have ever come across and that also made me feel connected while teaching me valuable lessons about life was Jane Eyre. It’s truly oOne of the greatest books of all times, for women especially.

Feeling connected is obviously important for the reader as reading is per definition is solitary occupation. Even in a globalised world I consider it a miracle to feel connected to a writer who wrote what I am reading now in another country and perhaps even a different time, and yet we both had similar experiences and subsequent thoughts! This discovery always makes me feel connected, not to the writer as another person so much (though that too, but that’s not so super important) but to the world of ideas. When I see that someone else experienced what I did and reflected about it in a similar way, then I know that there is something to my ideas, enough anyway for some publisher to accept them in an article or book. This in turn encourages me to think and to take thinking seriously. And that’s what a good book can do for you and, accidentally, that’s also why it is so important for children to start to read early ( how else are they going to turn into proper little booklings, hm?).

So I love books because I gain courage from reading and because I know that others feel the same way. I also love books because I learn so much from them all the time. Even a badly edited book or one with semi-poor contents can still impart a lesson. Books in general widen my understanding of what the world is like and they help those of us who can’t travel places and talk to people all the time to widen our knowledge of the world. They teach us about the ‘possible possibilities’ (love this phrase by Steve Hitlin!) in terms of human thought and action so that we know what could reasonably be expected from a person or a group in situation x.

Most reading only makes sense when you are also living in the world at the same time, for how else can you relate to what you are reading? In that sense I think saying that I love books means that I love life and living, too. Books are only good in so far as they are commenting on life.

And that’s why it is so easy to say it: I love books! Reading is only not commendable when it’s all you have. It can’t substitute real social contact and it can’t stand in for the imperceptible learning that occurs all the time as we interact with others. It can only complement these processes, which is why avid readers, whilst sitting in the bar talking, will draw connections between what’s going on right now and some book that they have read or are reading, or why they will interrupt their reading to reflect on a personal experience. Reading is really just another form of living. It’s the reflective life, and such is the life of a bookling. That’s why I love books.