I had to buy a monthly ticket for the public transport in Berlin, costing €64. With bicycles costing not much more than €100 this is barely worth the price, as long as Charlene will stay for another two more months, and friends visiting in June. I will look for a bike from next month on and look forward to just wander off into town for a few hours.

The Karneval der Kulturen was more crowded than I can enjoy. The parade itself a gay spectacle of dressed up and adults made up with provincial color schemes. This ‘cultural’ spectacle is already not much more than most of such mass festivals, a bread and games spectacle. The local dance groups performing culturally tainted dances was perhaps most enjoyable with its absence of pretention. But the crowd than swallows the massive group of people is too much of a presence for me to enjoy. To walk you stand more in line, to buy anything eatable or drinkable you stand in line or you have to surrender yourself to the greedy spirit of entrepeneurship that pops up in every first floor window and door opening, in the back the mustered cradles of beer and soda. I detest such vendorship mentality and could only suffer to buy something from such pathetic greed for a quick buck.

I have no love for people, despite my tremendous love and devotion to mankind. In abstract and absence, yes, I am devoted to the progress of the specimen, but at equal eye level I discover little beauty, but necessity to restrain, to order and to guide, to tame perhaps, to cultivate, to uplift.

We escape the mass moving step by step in unordened ways, this unorderliness that functions, yes, this I enjoy, but not its pace. Taking a left turn, then right, and finally to dive into the U-Bahn at Südstern. The exhausted faces in the yellow wagons are hilarious. These people fancy themselves to the brink of exhaustion, drag themselves to the subways, to be transported back to their barracks. I always have to think of what Christmas must have been for the slaves of the plantations in the South of the US. Booker T. Washington in his “Up From Slavery” already expresses his great surprise about this yearning for forgetfulness, no ‘recherche’! no ‘paradise regained’! but instead ‘les temps perdu’ and ‘paradise lost.’ Utopia and Eldorado are an idylle of the unhappy few, the tortured souls, the spiritual Brahmans, the high priests that exist outside of the consumption culture of a tragic indulgence.

This indulgence of the stomach is of all cultures, Carnaval, Ramadan, Christmas, these purgences are smeared by the weakness of the flesh. I do not hate, I am too detached to hate, too indifferent if you will, tolerant, blabla. The point of the matter is, I avoid such streams, I cannot enjoy them, parts of them yes, the amateuristic performance, the aloof ponys trudging in a circle, there’s no pretention there, no culture of humanity. Here my thoughts are all concrete.

Started writing on “Trier – Ferment of a Roman History”