Steiner's Digest

Another day, another dollar. I did my duty, listened to others, provided more or less valuable input (probably less), made decisions because I had to and pretended that I knew what I was doing.

What will remain of that day? I feel that the things that would have made it special or worthy of remembering, its real impact so to speak, passed me by. I didn’t pay attention to them. The shape of the clouds in the pre-spring sky, the young and hopeful face of a girl who’s about to become part of ‘us’, the many noises that make up the ever-changing, disharmonious and frightening symphony that’s played every day in this ‚great‘ city, keep it alive and buzzing and distract its inhabitants from themselves, mellowing into the sad and desperate Babylon Blues of the evening — these and many other ingredients were there, but I was busy warming up the same soup once again, busy muddling through, trying to trust the process without even knowing what the process was.

The East German theatre director and playwright Heiner Müller always signed his books with the same words: ‘Without hope. Without despair.’ One could call that fatalism or stoicism or the courage to endure everything or – wisdom. It’s something I’ve always aspired to and the few people I’ve met who had it left a deep impression on me. To know that there’s no hope, no goal, no peak or undiscovered treasure, but to go on regardless — that’s true greatness. Perhaps. It has nothing to do with the ‚greatness‘ of history’s manic egotists, butchers and dreamers. There’s no bravado in it, no will to succeed in the eyes of others or one’s own ambition, just an unshakable sense of personal integrity.

I guess that’s my one last great ambition – to reach a state of mind that allows me to go forward without even trying to arrive somewhere. Just picking up flowers along the way. If there are any. If not, just as well.