The realm of limbo, limbo and catholicism

My life in Ithaca is very quiet: some evenings I go over to Mitchell and submit to hours of Wagner, some evenings I read children's stories to my friend's real children, still others I watch from my office window beautiful sunsets over Ithaca hills.

Mitchell lives in a Corbusiesque atrocity. It has a curious advertisement in the phone book: "A new environment for living - designed by Marcel Breuer - walk to campus and shopping - modern, beautiful, fireproof."

Ithaca is the same as it ever was - dogs run across the Arts Quad, we wander through the gorges, and check the buds on the trees for signs of the impending spring. At night the bars are full of little women and little but beefy men. Five Burns sisters are singing good rock-n-roll, radiating sex like five demented stars - one is pregnant and due in 10 days - as we dance, just like we always did.

Shipwrecked

Immanuel Kant: "All human knowledge begins with intuitions, then passes to concepts, and ends with ideas."

I have gone into seclusion: I have temporarily lost faith in adults, and I mostly want to quietly work on my physics projects, listen to my friend Mitchell's classical records, and read children stories to my friends children. Of course, I am not terribly good at being a recluse - old friends and lovers keep popping up and treating me with much tenderness.

"all bonds have broken down,
oooo, love is gone
looove is gone..."

Why am I being so melodramatic? It is because of love shipwrecked. Guardian Angel, the woman that I have lived with the last five years has abandoned me at the same time I took a new (permanent?) position in Sweden. I find myself without a family, a home and a country.

"And if my night thoughts could be seen,
they would put my head in the guillotine.
But it's all right ma, I'm only dyyyyying"

Mother Jackie is the same bundle of energy and good cheer as she had always been. She is very busy traveling and writing as art historian - complains that she is overweight (does not stop her from eating
as much as I do) and that a joint in her little finger has become stiff.

Hermann Minkowski in a letter to David Hilbert: "It seems sometimes that through a preoccupation with science, we acquire a firmer hold over the vicissitudes of life and meet them with greater calm, but in reality we have done no more than to find a way to escape from our sorrows."

Sadder is the story of my grandparents. Mother's father died last summer - I visited him almost at the last moment, he could barely talk. He talked to me slowly for a few hours about his life: being persecuted as communist before the war, surviving the concentration camp, life after the end of the war. It was like watching a wavering candle flame... The other grandfather weighs about 120 lb and can barely move - I'll visit them in July.

God, how boring all this petty self-pity is! It all just adds up one and the same thing - the destruction of my world...