avatarVeronika Kaufmann

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Is There Intelligent Life on Earth?

It’s a rhetorical question, I know. Books remind me — Life is Beautiful — and Intelligent.

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That’s a question I ask myself on a daily basis, especially if I have the 24-hour news cycle on in the background — is it only me or does it seem like the media pushes the ‘Stupid’ to make sure we know about all the ill-advised conspiracy theorists? Yes, information. I get it. But, at this point in time, at this point in history, serious media gives way too much attention to the Stupid. And not enough to the Good. To the Learned. To the Educated. To beauty and genius.

I don’t want to look back at the horrendous four years we’ve had to endure with a complete moron/ignoramus leading the Free World. It was exhausting. There are many leftovers to clean up and I don’t want to know about it. I just don’t. I struggle enough with the ‘this will be over in a year' prediction we all had regarding the pernicious pandemic.

I do welcome a generally concurrent effort of serious media to make an argument for intelligent life on Earth. But I suppose filling up 168 hours a week (minus the ads, of course) giving us details on greedy, really rather awful human beings aka politicians i.e. representatives of the people using campaign donations to finance grocery shopping, furnish their homes, take private jet getaways and pay for their hookers, catches eyeballs and outrage more than the single mom going door to door getting out the vote like Wendy Caldwell Liddel did pre-presidential election. Who is awesome and on Medium. Check her out. Rockstar. Ms. Caldwell Liddel is one of those people who keep me believing in Life is Beautiful, there are more of us than of them. I repeat: there are more good people than those others I shall not name. Vehemently, I do repeat that because often I get the creeping feeling they all want us to forget that fact.

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We Read to Know We are Not Alone

I was just leafing through Gustav Mahler’s collections of letters to Alma Mahler. In a nutshell: Composer Gustav Mahler, who was chief conductor at the Vienna Court Opera House, and Alma Mahler, Viennese-born composer, author, socialite, once married to the aforementioned Gustav, had a difficult relationship with him as he forced her to give up her artistic endeavors. Worth reading up on. Good grief, I bought the book in 1988. And I still haven’t read it. 1988. Wasn’t that even before Madonna was desperately seeking fashion advice? Books piling up on shelves pile up for a reason. A time and a place always arrive, when one picks up a dust-covered book to finally read it. That time is now — it has come and I’m diving into these letters of love and grief with delight.

True Alchemists do not change lead into gold, they change the world into words

Side note: Since I currently live in Vienna, the desire to transport myself back to the days when this city must have been the coolest place ever, fin-de-siecle, the world unaware of the changes lurking a few years ahead, Emperor Franz Josef, and his Empress Elisabeth (she definitely hated her role as empress and fled on the royal yacht every chance she got) multi-cultural, multi-national and some of the most brilliant minds in the arts, music — Gustave Klimt, Stefan Zweig, Sigmund Freud — strolling the Ringstrasse and billowing genius vibes. These people actually lived here. Voluntarily. Until, well, you know what happened. That makes me incredibly sad and angry actually. But that’s a tale to be embellished on later.

Copyright Free Image by Debby Hudson via Unsplash

People sure wrote really long letters back then. Quill and paper long. Amazing what people got up to without devices — you know, like talk to each other and, well, write to each other. I know we won’t go back to those times, but it’s nice to read about these different worlds.

Photographie et Société by Gisèle Freund is another book (and documentary) lurking in the corners of my bookshelves, collecting that patina of dust that says — I’ll be here when you’re ready to read me. A German-born photographer, she fled Germany in 1933, negatives taped to her body, because of that ultimate destroyer of all things, the unmentionable cretin with the weird ‘tache. Gisèle Freund eventually made Paris her home. The book itself is a chronicle of photography over the past 150 years. “The eye, not the camera, makes the picture.” There is intelligent beautiful life on Earth. Never forget that. And for the moment, I tip my hat i.e. chapeau to Gustav, Alma, and Gisèle.

Copyright Free Image by Thiébaud Faix via Unsplash

You are not lost, you are never alone, you are here

When you feel lost because of all the stupid surrounding you, engulfing you — — smothering you, close your eyes and breathe for a minute or two or three or however long you need, and go find the beautiful, the incredible, the genius, the intelligent life that makes our Earth rather wonderful. Often, they’re on your bookshelves. You can never have too many books.

Books
Intelligent Life
Readers
Life Is Beautiful
Illumination
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