Saturday, December 29, 2007

When am I?

Vacations are weird things. Without any sort of routine, I have no idea what day or time it is. Well, time I roughly know, but early sunset in winter makes anything after 5pm a wild guess. Among the many interrupted books on my shelf is Henry Adams' Education, one of the more poignant aspects of which is that he considers himself to be an eighteenth-century person (due to family history and personal proclivities) stuck in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
I guess in educational aspects you can't be anything but backward-looking. But there is something deeper than that going on here. In a sense, everyone is an amalgamation of one's own formative years in confront- and collabor-ation with one's parents' formative years.
In my case, I think it makes me a mix of the tail end of the Cold War as lived in Berlin (also known as the Eighties) with a dash of Fifties' California and post-WWII Berlin. Happy Days as written by Heinrich Boell, if you will.

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