I’ve often wondered what confluence of mysterious forces brought me onto the planet in a particular place on a particular day. I’m not complaining: to be born in Western Europe post World War 2 was to be dealt a very good karmic hand - in my life I’ve known no hunger, war, plague, want, dictatorship, violence, invasion, civil unrest or even forced military service.
So like most people in the UK I have been pretty taken aback by the speed and seriousness of the coronavirus pandemic. My peaceful life means that I have no comparator to scale its true seriousness. As chance would have it though, a week or two ago I picked up The World Of Yesterday (‘Die Welt Von Gestern’) by Stefan Zweig (1881-1942)*. I haven’t finished it yet but it has turned out to be echoing eerily across the years. I had never heard of book or author which just shows how random my literary knowledge is because Zweig was apparently very well known in his day and the book cover is indeed plastered with plaudits by several of today’s cultural giants: “one of the greatest memoirs of the 20th century”; “one of the canonical European testaments”; “absolutely extraordinary”; and so on. Nonetheless, I bought it on the strength of running my eye over the first page.
It’s a personal account of what the author sees as the high point of European culture round the end of the 19th century, and its subsequent destruction. He was an enormously cultured man and seems to have known anyone who was anyone. He can be a bit pompous (and there is divided opinion about him) but there are some absolutely riveting sections in the book, one of which is about what it was like to live in Austria and Germany in the social chaos that followed WW1. Half-starved, demobilised soldiers roamed the streets, profiteers lived in luxury and revolution was in the air. In Germany at one point an egg was worth 4 billion marks - roughly the total value of all real estate in Greater Berlin before hyperinflation set in. Food was scarcely affordable and “Well-nourished cats and dogs seldom came back if they wandered far from home”.
It sounds as though it was absolutely chaotic - and obviously we are nowhere near that - but I found it strangely comforting. Despite this tumult, as Zweig puts it, the ‘flywheel of the mechanism’ kept on turning: “the baker made bread, the cobbler made boots, the writer wrote books, the trains ran regularly and….people came to appreciate true values such as work, love, friendship, art and nature all the more.” He saw it as an unhappy and seedy time but it eventually corrected itself - until the early 1930s anyway.
Now I look out at the quietened streets of south Manchester. Zweig’s phrase goes round in my head: ‘the flywheel of the mechanism kept on turning’. It reminds me of another phrase, a line of verse actually, from The Lankavatara Sutra – an opaque sutra that I am struggling through with a group of friends. It’s pretty opaque but this line flashed out at me one day and lodged in my memory: “Life is like an illusion or dream, but reality is relentless” ** - which seems to be an idea similar to Zweig’s: something just keeps on turning. These are difficult times but I wonder if the words both of Zweig and the Sutra can be of some comfort?
*******************************************************
Talking of comfort, maybe photos can also help. Photography has a public function of course, but also a private function and looking at photos of happy times or peaceful scenes can be very therapeutic. So I hope these three from my travels last year are of some help.
Two Orchids, Lindisfarne, Summer 2019.
Obelisk, Lindisfarne, 2019. The end of a 90 mile walk and a welcome sight.
Shingle Street, Suffolk. 2019: a truly atmospheric stretch of coastline. The cunningly placed human interest in the photograph is Mrs Barker.
*Pushkin Press, 2019, trans. Anthea Bell.
** (The Lankavatara Sutra, Counterpoint Press, 2012; translation and commentary by Red Pine.) Actually, the text reads: “Samsara is like an illusion or dream but karma is relentless. As I understand it, in Buddhist terminology, ‘samsara’ is the cycle of birth and death; and ‘karma’ is the law of cause and effect which is the driving force behind samsara - but I changed these terms so as to access the meaning a little bit more clearly.