Steiner's Digest

Oh well. Well, well, well. What should I write about? The state of the world? Boring. The state of myself? Equally boring. My postcard collection? Perhaps. I can get quite enthusiastic about it. But then I wonder if others would be able and willing to follow me far into the depths of that particular subject.

I’ve been reading the news, of course. It’s all rather depressing, if you ask me. The usual: a new war in the Middle East, some film festival in dire straits (strangely enough it’s the one in my home city), artificial intelligence about to replace me and almost any other human being in our jobs, the world going to the dogs in so many ways I couldn’t mention them all, even if I had the time and inclination to do so. After all, it’s been going on for such a long time that you almost wish they (whoever ‚they‘ are) would stop gibbering and finally get on with it, just to stop the boredom that’s eating me up from inside.

Of course, there’s spring in the air. Or at least that’s what I’ve been told. I didn’t leave the house though, not today, not yesterday. Friday evening I ventured out to watch EPiC, a film about the King’s legendary concerts in Las Vegas. What I liked most about it were the sporadic shots into the audiences of the time, lots of ladies with adventurous hairdos who were getting hysterical (is that sexist to say these days?) and grasped every opportunity to kiss their idol. He was very philosophical about it, almost stoic; it was just part of the job, he said, but at the same time it was great to see him rehearsing with his band and background singers, cracking one joke after the other, laughing about everything, mainly about himself, just loving the music and the process and the fact that while he was doing his job he didn’t have to answer silly questions from silly journalists, just getting into the groove.

What else happened? Oh, I also watched a film about the opening of King Tut’s (another king) tomb in 1922. It was from 1980, I think, and it was so bad I had to muster all my patience to sit it through to the end. I only watched it because I’d liked it a lot as a child. Funny how most of the things you enjoyed as a child just don’t work anymore on your adult self. Times have changed, you have changed, everything has moved on and you know that’s not a good but also not a bad thing, it just sort of is, and there’s no point in regretting or whining about it.

There’s less and less of that first-time magic that kicked in almost every day when you were young, it has evaporated in a mist of half-knowledge and prejudice and disappointment and cowardice that most people call ‚experience‘. And any new experience you make is immediately judged against the assembled mass of other experiences, thus becoming only a drop in a huge container of colourless liquid, quickly diluted into nothingness, even if it started out as dark as blood. It hurts to see it disappear, but the cries of your soul are not heard, not by you nor by any other human being, even the ones that are supposed to be close to you. You and they only hear the assembled voices of all the meaningless conversations they’ve been forced to have in the past, chitting and chatting and merging into a maelstrom of noise, and among that noise there is only one thing that can be heard or rather felt clearly and that is the approaching silence of death.

That sounds sort of gloomy, I don’t know how it happened, please forgive me. Tomorrow, I know, I’ll be fine, playing the great game again, laughing, frowning, pretending that everything is if not fine, so at least what it is.