“Do not confuse movement with action”
Ernest Hemingway
Thursday
The start of last year was exhausting. A new school brings challenges.
This year should have been smooth sailing. Yet here we are in our second week and every teacher looks done for the year.
Late nights and a Principal that runs on high-frequency energy drain the staff. He cannot be blamed for the unplanned visits; a government delegate last week and his majesty, the Highness Sheikh Sultan bin Mohammed Al Qasimi arriving next week with military entourage.
His team, the umbrella shielding and protecting us from his most ludicrous demands, is a saving grace.
Yet here we are creating pretend lessons on ridiculous time frames, decorating classrooms instead of planning lessons. It is an entire sham to appear like we are an amazing school.
The sad reality is, if the school were to run like it does every day, his highness would see amazing education. We are a good school with an excellent team and it is insulting that the Principal thinks we need to pretend to be educators.
The icing on the cake was when the Principal, after demanding fraudulent teaching, insisted the classes look authentic.
“We are nothing but lies, duplicity, contradiction, and we hide and disguise ourselves from ourselves.”
Blaise Pascal
Home late. Bed. Exhausted.
Friday
Sleep in. Gym.
Earlier this week I finished Jack London’s White Fang and started Sea Wolf.
White Fang is a fun read, but it is not a great novel in the realm of The Call of the Wild.
“He was a silent fury who no torment could tame.”
Jack London
There is nothing much on today.
I watch some footy.
Read.
We decide to watch a movie.
Shell decides on Zone of Interest. She is a fan of the actress Sandra Hüller who has a lead role in the movie.
The story is stark, bleak, and confronting. Mainly due to how understated the scenes are.
It tells the story of the Höss family, Rudolf, Hedwig, and their family. SS-Obersturmbannführer Rudolf Höss is the first commandant of Auschwitz and the entire story mundanely unfolds in their beloved house, with gardens and pools next door to the concentration camp.
Their side and back fence is the 5m concrete, barbed wire topped wall that separates their home from the death camp.
The beauty of the film is you never see the atrocities, you only hear them. As the boys play and the daughters swim, there is the constant rumble of German shouts, screams of pain, begging, baying of dogs, and gunshots.
As the trains arrive Hedwig discusses the vegetable patch. In the background, the constant ash spewing from the smoke stacks as 8000 Jews a day are incinerated, and morning tea is made.
At one point, displeased with her staff, Hedwig informs a young woman “she will have her husband turn her to ash and spread her in the garden.”
It is a movie about what is unseen, even the sounds from the camp are muted and stifled.
In the last scene, after his exceptional work in the efficiency of murdering Jews, Rudolf is promoted and sent to Oranienburg to oversee the logistics of terminating some 800,000 Hungarian Jews; on receiving the news he will return to his beloved home, he peers down a dark hallway.
There is a tiny pinhole of light in an old door. It is opened and we are in current times and staff are preparing the crematorium ovens of Auschwitz for tourists to visit.
An outstanding achievement by Jonathon Glazeer who somehow captures all the horror of the death camp without ever showing a single death.
“The one thing you can’t take away from me is the way I choose to respond to what you do to me. The last of one’s freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given circumstance.”
Viktor E. Frankl
Saturday
“Time drips, heavy, slow…”
Albert Camus
It is four weeks since I have returned from holiday and been back in the gym.
The before and after photos were incriminating.
It is time to see the progress so far.
Except for one weekend where I ate and drank myself to a standstill, my diet has been good and I have not missed a gym session.
Interestingly, I am two kilograms heavier in the after picture. Adding weight to the argument that the scales mean little.
Sound progress in four weeks. Another four will see me back to where I was before the holidays.
Perfect timing to undo the work on my next trip.
“My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them.”
Jack Kerouac
We head to the mall and purchase an air fryer. Family and friends have all been positive and we don’t have an oven in the apartment.
We cook some salmon. The results are good, although I need to experiment with temperature as the skin was rubbery and not crisp.
I read for the afternoon while keeping an eye on the footy.
Political Dissent in Democratic Athens is as exciting as its name indicates. I will plow on. I have one more book in the Plato reading list before I move to Aristotle.
“In politics we presume that everyone who knows how to get votes knows how to administer a city or a state. When we are ill… we do not ask for the handsomest physician, or the most eloquent one.”
Plato
Political Dissent in Democratic Athens gets the better of me. I switch to Sea Wolf and finish it in a single setting. Every bit as good as White Fang.
The Jack London collection is enormous. Over 50 novels in fiction and nonfiction, almost twenty published poems, and 12 manuscripts unpublished. more than 200 short stories and countless articles, letters, and correspondence.
Prolific considering he passed away at 40.
After Sea Wolf I read two short stories, his famous, To Build A Fire and Bâtard.
“You stand on dead men’s legs. You’ve never had any of your own. You couldn’t walk alone between two sunrises and hustle the meat for your belly”
Jack London
I go to bed knowing I am getting sick.
Sunday
“The meaning of life is that it stops.”
Franz Kafka
I am ill, but I should pull through. Maybe.
It was inevitable. With the hectic start to the term, Shell was sick last week.
What counts is rest. There is no chance of me taking a day off the gym and this will prolong the illness. I know this is a fact, that I need rest, and I won’t take it.
“If your brains were dynamite there wouldn’t be enough to blow your hat off.”
Kurt Vonnegut
I could spend the next few years working through the Jack London catalogue.
I have decided to read one of his biographies, Wolf: The Lives of Jack London, by James L. Haley.
There are quite a few London biographies, and after some research, Haley’s seemed to be the most balanced. Other biographers either cast him as a novelist for young boys or an adventurer who wrote occasionally.
What I am most interested in is London’s political values. A staunch Socialist with a strong distaste for social and economic injustice.
Shell sends a quick message to the Principal offering to come to school and help prepare for the Sheikh visit. It is more of a courtesy, as there is nothing for us to do other than physical lifting.
Surprisingly, he asks us to come in.
So here we are at work on Sunday moving furniture.
“You like to imagine yourself in control of your fate, consciously planning the course of your life as best you can.”
Robert Greene
His majesty arrives tomorrow and the stage is set. His entourage is large, and they have gold gilded seats. Should someone need a tissue, golden tissue boxes. I am not sure who gets the golden desk.
Home and some reading.
I feel unwell and I am not looking forward to the hysteria heading my way tomorrow.