Communication ...
... fast and slow
Quotes of the week
“Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something.”
Plato
“Be sincere; be brief, be seated.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Hello,
Recovered from illness and operation, I decided to start my days a little bit earlier this week. I have been lazy lately and stayed on in bed to read and whoops, half the morning is gone. To start the day at around 8 a.m. is fine and I even manage to do a few things before breakfast. This week I wanted to talk about communication. I heard on the radio that some of the social media channels were down for some hours the other day. I don’t know if it was only in Sweden or also elsewhere. It turned out that it affected some people very badly; not being able to keep up with their social media channels, and other people who were happy that they did not have the possibility to check it out, and managed to do a lot of other things instead. It sounds rather awful to be so addicted to the social media, but I guess this is how it is today.
Fast and slow communication
Communication today is so fast that we hardly have time to cope with it. News, mostly negative, are following us through the day. I think it affects most people negatively with so many bad things going on in the world today. And we hear about it right away. As it happens. It was not always like that.
I just started reading part 2 of Gunnar Wetterberg’s biography on Axel Oxenstierna. Oxenstierna was the most important person in Sweden during the first half of the 17th century. He was Chancellor and second in command after king Gustav II Adolf. He organised the administrative structure of Sweden, along with a lot of other things, still visible, and part of our society today. Or as Elisabeth Åsbrink put it in her book The Words that Formed Sweden (my translation of title): “What Sweden would have been without Axel Oxenstierna is almost difficult to comprehend.” That was a short parenthesis on the great man.
On 6 November, 1632, on a foggy day at the battlefield of Lützen (close to Leipzig in Germany) king Gustav II Adolf was killed. Oxenstierna was at the time around 200 km (birds way) away. The following days he travelled in the area and it was only on 11 November he heard the news about the king’s death. The king’s wife Maria Eleonora was in Erfurt, not too far away from Lützen, but was only told on 16 November that her husband was dead. Mainly due to her somewhat troublesome relationship with the king. Wallenstein, the Bohemian military leader fighting opposite the king in the battle of Lützen, only got the information on 19 November. The news did not reach Sweden until 8 December, a month later. It is almost impossible to imagine today.
Difficult to say what is better; fast or slow communication. The fast communication makes us part of it all; we see and hear everything. This might be a good time to look for the wisdom of the Stoics. Not to let the bad news influence you too much. Focus on what you can control. It is not things that upset us, but our judgements about things, Epictetus advices. “You have power over your mind, not events”, says Marcus Aurelius. Even he, a powerful Roman Emperor who controlled the world, was aware that not even he could control certain events. So how much can we, ordinary people, control the world around us?
A book club
What is better to get away from the world than to enter into the world of literature. I have found a new book club group with a diverse set of nice international friends. We met today (Thursday) to discuss Patrick Modiano’s book Dora Bruder. We had a great discussion on the book which is a mixture of biography, autobiography and detective story.
The narrator/Modiano finds an ad in Paris Soir in December 1941 looking for Dora Bruder, a 15-year-old Jewish girl gone missing. As the narrator investigates the disappearance, talking to family members and looking for public records Modiano takes us around the places frequented by Dora and her contemporaries. He remembers his own youth when he, like Dora, ran away from school. We also understand he had a complicated relationship with his father. He finds similarities with his life and Dora’s and somehow through his memories he comes closer to Dora and her fate.
Although we do get some information on what happened to Dora we don’t get the full picture. Only that she ended up in Auschwitz together with her family. As we follow the narrator in his search for any information on Dora we realise that the story is a typical Modiano theme of memory and loss. As is usual with Modiano he takes us through the streets of Paris. One in the group had lived in Paris and followed the story on a map which she showed us. It is a great way to make the story come closer to you. And, to follow Modiano on his walks around the streets of Paris.
My blog this week
Just one blog post about what I read during February.
There are a few more reviews to come. I have read two great book. The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima, a Japanese classic, so beautifully written. The other is Un été avec Homère/A Summer with Homer by Sylvain Tesson. A wonderful account on how Homer influence our society, still today.
See you next week.
I think the main problem with the internet is that every idiot can and therefore will comment on everything, whether they know anything about the subject or not. That's what I love about blogging. You meet intelligent people who are really interested in getting to know everything, not what someone who thinks he's important is telling us.
I never even noticed that social media was down, so I must not be as bad as I thought. LOL I spend more time writing for my blog and definitely reading than being on social media. And I also have other interests, so no harm done if I have to live without it for a while.
I have a love-hate relationship with today's never-ending onslaught of information. Constant news, always breaking (though sometimes that's an overreach!); social media. My only social media is FB (well, and the blog). I spend a lot of time with the blog but very little on FB -- I check birthdays and do a quick scan, maybe post if there's something to put up. But I hear of people who spend hours surfing the internet, not for research, but because they fall in and can't get out. That's not healthy. I'd rather read. Or paint. Or DO something!