The Erie Grip of the Middle

One version of insanity is trying to conduct two conference calls simultaneously.  There is no convenient way to explain to either group that you are double-booked so you just attempt to mute and un-mute and conduct them both.  The phone is broadcasting to the left.  But it is also serving as a Wi-Fi to the laptop on my lap.  From the laptop, an earbud extends up into my cochlea.  The Indian Uber driver decides to put on some Indian film soundtrack music as we speed through the city at 6:10AM and I quickly gesture that the Bollywood accompaniment isn’t helping. 

Traffic in Delhi is more chaotic than Beijing.  I think this is safe to say.  It’s not that Indian drivers are more opportunistic per se, though perhaps they are.  Rather there are just more types of vehicles and animals on the road, and the infrastructure of the main thoroughfares is less imposing and easier to ignore.  The three wheeled carts, and mopeds and bicycles and beggars and assertive pedestrians who, having cut a pathway into traffic unleash a flood of humanity into the flow.  Needless to say, you mustn’t hit a cow.  These are different from today’s Beijing.  But the basic mantra, of “I am more important than you," is the same in either locations.

Lots of time for reading, flying from Delhi to Singapore, Singapore to Hong Kong.  Lermontov comes with the disturbing portrait on the cover, done some time before his unfortunate demise at the age of what, twenty-six or so?  I must read the story of the mermaid on the roof, "Taman" from "A Hero of Our Time," to my younger one.  As Turgenev said, how remarkable that he wrote this at the age of twenty-four.  I’ve never really considered life in the Caucuses before. 

Now I am with Turgenev himself.  “Sketches of a Hunter’s Album” was reputed to be a beautiful work where nothing happened.  Indeed, we go from estate to estate and seeing slices of mid nineteenth century Russian country life.  A time when serfs had yet to be freed and the eerie grip of the middle ages still clings to a world that is also familiar with Napoleon.  In one snippet a retreating French drummer boy is about to be drowned in a hole in the icy river by a pair of peasants.  He is saved by a landowner who takes him home to have him teach his children piano.  The Frenchman doesn’t know how to play the piano but of course it doesn’t matter.

I paid for Wi-Fi on this flight.  There are silly plans by megabit which got me about seven emails and two articles in the New York Times, before it told me I’d expired what I’d bought.  Singapore Airlines suffers from the stellar reputation that proceeds it, so that every minor annoyance, like the clunky old plane I flew this morning from Delhi to Singapore that did not have Wi-Fi, to these ill-considered data plans they make available on this flight become amplified into major annoyances.  Over to the right Daniel Day Lewis appears to be bouncing around in the role of a British dress maker.  I’m sure it’s something everyone knows but me.  I’m going back to Turgenev. 

Wednesday 4/04/18