On Writing and Shadows

 
"Austerlitz" by W.G. Sebald and "In Praise of Shadows" by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki.

I recently finished the novel Austerlitz, a 2001 novel by W.G. Sebald. About two thirds through the book, we find Austerlitz holed up in his very gray London flat – a flat stripped of color and containing only the bare necessities for furniture. He is at an existential impasse reconciling a past that refuses to be captured in words. The tension is between the desire to record memory and the failing of words to fully do so. These quotes about writing from that part of the book resonated with me:

“Now and then a train of thought did succeed in emerging with wonderful clarity inside my head, but I knew even as it formed that I was in no position to record it, for as soon as I so much as picked up my pencil the endless possibilities of language, to which I could once safely abandon myself, became a conglomeration of the most inane phrases.”

“All I could think was that such a sentence only appears to mean something, but in truth is at best a makeshift expedient, a kind of unhealthy growth issuing from our ignorance, something which we use, in the same way as many sea plants and animals use their tentacles, to grope blindly through the darkness enveloping us.”

“However much or little I had written, on a subsequent reading it always seemed so fundamentally flawed that I had to destroy it immediately and begin again. Soon I could not even venture on the first step.”

(Maybe I should heed the advice on that last quote?)

Austerlitz's home in London is described as on Alderney Road (near Mile End Junction), near the Alderney Road Cemetery, Mile End – Ashkanz. I went on Google Maps street view to try and at least imagine the flat from the outside.

The “out-of-time" nature of Austerlitz’s flat, as I imagined it, intrigued me. It reminded me of a quote from the 1933 essay In Praise of Shadows, by the Japanese author Jun'ichirō Tanizaki.

"Have you ever felt a sort of fear in the face of the ageless, a fear that in that room you might lose all consciousness of the passage of time, that untold years might pass and upon emerging you should find that you had grown old and gray?"

That quote appears in section 9, with the title “An uncanny silence”, sectioning as given by Wikipedia page. I imagine Austerlitz’s house would be like this.

The essay lays out Tanizaki’s (and by extension the Japanese) aesthetic and as you might guess from the title, it has to do with shadows. Friends gifted us the book to get ready for an upcoming trip to Japan. We will be searching for those shadows and a glimpse of Austerlitz.

A Walk to Alzano Lombardo for Lunch – Burro and No-News

  

Left: Oak trees on Colle di Ranica, Bergamo.
Center:  A horse and a pond.
Right:  A farm above Ranica, Bergamo.

We needed to get out and we wanted to eat somewhere interesting. So, we came up with the idea to go have lunch at Burro (Sardinian restaurant) in Alzano Lombardo. To arrive there, we walked from Bergamo passing through Maresana (trail 533), Colle di Ranica, Croce del Boscone (710m), and then finally dropping down into Alzano. We took the tram back to Bergamo. (You can just as well take the tram both ways.)

Duration: 2.25 hours - one way walking
Elevation: 505 m
Length: 11.4 km - one way going
Location: Italy, Lombardy, Alzano Lombardo

Burro

We had a memorable dinner at Burro back in April and decided to try it again for lunch. And we weren’t disappointed. We did the 3-choice lunch menu paired with a nice French apple cider, Cidrerie du Leguer.

Burro is located about 10 minutes slightly uphill from the Alzano Lombardo tram stop. The Linea T1 tram runs between Bergamo and Albino, with two stops for Alzano.

We highly recommend a visit. Okay, so that’s the Burro part of this post. 

  

Examples of dishes at Burro (Sardinian restaurant) in Alzano Lombardo. Left: Soupe à l'oignon, stilton, pasta sfoglia al semi di sesamo. Center: Fregola, spada alla marinara e cozze. Right: Controfiletto di manzo e pure di patate.   

No-News

Part of the motivation to do this hike was to get out of the house and away from the news. The doom and gloom headlines - at least in the media we are consuming – are tiring. If we see another headline that includes the word “shocking” in response to a certain orange-headed person’s action, we are going to lose it. It would truly be shocking if people were ready for the shit coming their way and had a response ready.

We calculated that we wasted hundreds of hours consuming news (much of it, election related) over the last year. What do we have to show for it? Did the constant daily check-in of the horse race help us? We don’t think so. Yes, we need to be informed but perhaps in a different way.

  

Three book covers: Partisan Nation, Nexus, and Why Information Grows.

In the post-election weeks, we funneled much of our previous news-consumption (attention) to books. Here are a few that have helped us understand what has happened and more importantly have kept us from mindlessly consuming news. 

Partisan Nation: The Dangerous New Logic of American Politics in a Nationalized Era (2024) by Paul Pierson, Eric Schickler.

• If you want a good understanding of polarization in the US and a historical context, this is the book for you.
• There are lots of little gems in this book like this “A common denominator across the recent changes in state parties, interest groups, and the press is that they have fostered a decline in credible, alternative cue givers that in the past created pathways for voters to embrace policies or issues that cut across existing partisan lines.

Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI (2024) by Yuval Noah Harari.

• Harari explores how information networks have shaped human societies from the Stone Age to the present. T he book discusses how different societies and political systems have used information to achieve their goals, for both good and ill.
• To this last point, Harari talks about information flow in democratic, autocratic, and totalitarian systems.  Thinking about our current polarization these lines stood out for me: "Democratic [information] networks assume that everyone is fallible, and that includes even the winners of elections and the majority of voters." And "Simplicity is a characteristic of dictatorial information networks in which the center dictates everything and everybody silently obeys."

Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order from Atoms to Economies (2015) by César A. Hidalgo.

• An exploration of how information and order emerge and grow in the universe, particularly in the context of economic development.
• Key quote: “To battle disorder and allow information to grow, our universe has a few tricks up its sleeve. These tricks involve out-of-equilibrium systems, the accumulation of information in solids, and the ability of matter to compute. Together these three mechanisms contribute to the growth of information in small islands or pockets where information can grow and hide, like our body or planet.”
• We have been on an entropy kick. When we studied entropy back in the day, there was not YouTube to explain things in ways that books couldn’t quite do. Case in point, videos like Arvin Ash: How Did Life Arise from Increasing Entropy?, Arvin Ash: The Stunning link between Entropy, time & information | Science behind Tenet, Big Think: The physics of entropy and the origin of life | Sean Carroll, and Veritasium: The Most Misunderstood Concept in Physics.

 Remember: attention is not a infinite so don't waste yours.

  

Left: The tracks for this hike.

Center: Sign at Croce di Boscone.

Right: Descending into Alzano Lombardo.
  

40 Doors of Bergamo - The Ascent of Man, From Beam to Arch

What is the 40 Doors Project of Bergamo?

This project showcases interesting doors of Bergamo, Italy. In a series of posts, we'll show 40 different doors per post. And, each post has a theme that connects to doors. This post is the third in the series and its theme are the ideas in the documentary/book "The Ascent of Man". 

The Ascent of Man

Not only is the 40 Doors Project about doors of Bergamo, it's also about a few of our favorite things. In the first post, we mention Max Richter (music). In the second post, we mention A Pattern Language (book). In this post, the focus is on one our favorite documentary films, The Ascent of Man (1973), written and presented by British mathematician and historian of science Jacob Bronowski. (The book of the same name is a word-for-word transcription of the video plus additional material.)

Chapter/Episode 3, The Grain in the Stone, discusses tools and the development of architecture and sculpture. One question Bronowski raises is why civilization begin so much later in the New World than in the Old World. Bronowski wanders around Canyon de Chelly in Arizona and discusses the development of the civilization there. A few frames later, he is at Machu Picchu in Peru describing the great Inca architectural wonder.

The answer to his question: man arrived later in the New World, coming across the Bering Straits not later than 10,000 BC and not earlier than 30,000 BC.

Bronowski sits among the ruins of Machu Picchu surrounded by the pillow-like faces of huge granite blocks, perfectly stacked together with mortarless joints in mind-boggling precision. He points out that at the height of the empire around 1500 AD, the Incas were at the same point the Greeks were 2,000 years earlier. In particular, for the Incas and Greeks the beam was a mainstay of construction. The arch wasn't in use (or invented). Bronowski explains:

"Like the mathematics of Peru two thousand years later, The Greek temples were bounded by the straight edge and the set square. The Greeks did not invent the arch either, and therefore their temples are crowded avenues of pillars. They seem open when we see them as ruins, but in fact they are monuments without spaces."

So what does this have to do with doors? Well, we couldn't help but notice the use of the arch in so many doors we photographed, and variations thereof. Bronowski mentions that the ancient Romans where the first to widely apply the use of the arch, but they didn't invent it.

The arches in these door photos vary in the details, but many have what's called an impost, serving as the base from which the arch starts. There are different arches: gothic or ogive, semi-circular, horseshoe, Tudor, and corbel to name a few. The majority of arches in these photos are semi-circular or round. Arches framing a door look more pleasing, especially on larger buildings. Why this is the case, we don't know. We wish we could ask Bronoswki.