mandarine

Have you ever noticed how we laugh at other people’s supestitions, while we think we are not superstitious ourselves? Some of us find Feng Shue a stupid hassle that comes in the way of home and garden design; some of us eat pork with delight (sometimes with our left hand); most of us skip mass; we can say ‘rabbit’ onboard a boat. And we dismiss any claims that this will bring bad luck, bad spirits, or even hell our way.

And yet we rich westerners fall victim to a very dangerous superstition. A supestition which is destroying the planet, destroying other people’s livelihoods, destroying the livelihood of future generations. We believe that we cannot be happy with less stuff, less comfort, less energy. We sure believe we cannot be happy without a well-paying full-time job, however morally or environmentally or economically questionable said job might be.

All those who have stopped shopping, who have downshifted to a smaller house, who have sold their car will tell you readily: happiness and affluence are totally unrelated. And yet we cling to our stuff and our comfort like barnacles and limpets, and we feel helpless when we find out that our planet is dying, because there’s really nothing we can do about it.

Changing all the lightbulbs or buying a Prius or setting up photovoltaic arrays is OK, because it is about buying new stuff -this fits with our mental frame. But letting go of stuff and habits altogether is something we absolutely dread, unconsciously.

Emily’s challenge is about learning to let go, one finger at a time, so that we can discover not only that it does not cause misery, but it can even bring some feeling of pride (I am prone to this kind of feeling) and achievement. And in any case, it brings exactly the same kind of relief as when one unpacks after a long flight and finds out one had forgotten the anti-crash amulet home: we are still alive and well, regardless of what TV commercials want us to believe.

Emily’s ecojustice challenge is good for you. Everybody else does it. You’ll feel bad if you don’t. Do it now.

Charlotte says that the Queen o’ Memes might have me beheaded if I did not obey the tagging. So here are seven weird things (picked almost at random) about me.

I hardly ever get angry. This is generally a great asset when working with children (including my own progeny), as I can very well act angry and adapt my apparent anger to the situation long before I actually lose my temper. However, I am not 100% anger-proof. I remember losing my temper once on my youngest nephew (who is a worldwide specialist at turning apparently sane people into howling harpies). I was probably the scareder of the two, as I am not myself used to being angry (while he is used to people being angry at him). Next time, as soon as I feel the slightest urge to start yelling, I’ll run for the door.

I hardly ever get emotional. I’ve seen people cry when parting, cry at weddings, cry at the end of a movie, cry when cross. I can’t do that. Sometimes I wonder whether I would cry if someone dearest to me died. The closest I get to crying is with the second movement of Beethoven’s 7th Symphony (the part where the orchestra plays a whole phrase on a single chord), or the flute & cello duet in Dvorák’s Cello Concerto. If you could mix such music with a convincing political speech, a good plea, or a brilliant logical demonstration, you might see me cry.

I never feel hungry. I have already written about this in my article about fasting. This was a new (re)discovery at the time. I have repeatedly checked this fact since then, and I am positive: I can skip dinner and then breakfast, and eat only a salad for lunch, and still my body does not complain, and I am not running towards the fridge. I tend to check more often if there’s chocolate left, though.

I am a sluggish driver. When I was nineteen, on the morning I took my driving test, there had been an ice storm. The whole region was glistening under a 5mm slippery icing. I took my test nonetheless, but it was too slippery to go beyond second gear (yes, I can handle a stick-shift). That’s lucky, because the examiner would have seen how slow a driver I am. And the older I get, the slower I go. In the early years, I had my eyes on the meter to make sure the needle was always exactly superimposed with the speed limit, just as if I was landing an aircraft. This was a dangerous driving habit, as it would occupy my eyes, brains and foot just to ensure a very stiff cruise control function. But it made for an average speed at least 20% below that of fellow French drivers. With the introduction of automated speed cameras, French driving habits have changed dramatically, and the average speed has sharply declined. And so has mine, now a good 20 km/h below the speed limit. I do 110 kph on a motorway, and hardly 70 kph on a straight country road. On the winding roads around where I live, I am seldom above 50 kph. And this driving is so soothing that I find myself slowing down insensibly. Until my co-pilot tells me that she’d be there faster walking.

I am an early riser. I love to be up a 6 in the morning, and have two whole hours to myself while everybody else is still asleep. Unfortunately, I do need a lot of sleep. For me, the ideal night is 9:30 - 6:00. Knowing that the kid is seldom asleep before 9:00, that does not leave a lot of “big people’s time”. The other handicap is that I cannot sleep late. If I go to bed at 2:00, all I will have is four miserable hours of sleep. Maybe that’s a reason why I hate parties.

My brain is on constant overdrive. Everything in life is a puzzle that I must solve, a phenomenon I must explain, a mental note I must take. I have a thousand ideas a day, most of which are plain stupid. You can find the funniest absurd ideas there. Occasionally, there is a nugget which makes it to ‘good idea’ status. The problem is: where I work, people want me to file patents on some of these ideas; turning an idea into a patent is akin to dissecting an eyeball: it loses much of its appeal.

I am a master in casuistic reasoning. I could probably be a lawyer, as I am always very good at playing Devil’s advocate. It takes a forewarned public not to think me a dangerous extremist when I pull the yarn of some twisted logical reasoning. There are always two sides to one truth, and you can count on me for finding the other side.

To wrap things up

I am a cold-blooded, heartless, ascetic, slow, antisocial, raving, and immoral freak. You’re lucky I do not live down your street (but can you be sure of that?)

I hereby declare the 2008 hammock season officially Open.

More of the same (but more funny) at icanhascheezburger.com

Warning: I could not resist a little doom and gloom.

When we are burning fossil fuels, we only see the environmental impact. There is supposed to be a Kyoto quota, and when we consume more, we feel some sort of hypothetical environmental guilt regarding global warming. The concept of future generations is very abstract, and very uncertain, and it does not make for easy arbitrations in everyday’s life.

Digression on market, non-renewables and future generations

As a side-note, just note that market price is fixed just with today’s supply-demand balance. Future generations cannot stake claims on today’s market, while today’s sales will deprive them of their share. Imagine a group of ten friends camping together in the wilderness, with so much tea for breakfast. Four early-risers sit down for breakfast at sunrise, and drink as much tea as they wish. Four others wake up later, find that there is only tea left for three. Two of them agree to drink just half a mug each in exchange of cookies from the other two. The two late-risers get nothing. Had we placed all ten together with the global tea and cookie problem, the share would have been quite different.

For non-renewables, day-to-day supply-demand market rules are a total nonsense.

An unfair negotiation

But let’s not consider future generations. Let’s just focus on today’s market. What does the price of fuel reflect? It reflects the market and the law of supply and demand of today. The more people want fuel now, the higher the price will get.

I want fuel. Fuel price rises. I can afford it. I pay my fuel. Why should I feel guilty of burning it? Because a sky-high price is just a way of saying that somebody else forsook their expected share of today’s fuel supply. It would be OK if it were my retired neighbor in the same affluent neighborhood who said: “OK, you need to drive to work, I will stay at home instead of going fishing, so you can have my share of today’s gas”. But it is not like this. The negotiation power on a market is money, not importance. Therefore, the final share will not reflect an arbitration in terms of what’s more important to humans considered equals (e.g. trading comfort uses for vital ones), and the rich will always get more of the share, however futile their intentions.

Economic theory says that the rich will pay more, therefore get poorer, while the poor save money by not buying the stuff, therefore things even-out in the end. This is only true if the rich do not get richer with what they get to do with the stuff. And if the poor do not starve before that. Because in the meantime, rising gas prices are also pushing food prices upwards.

In a world of scarce resources in which the power scales are already all the way to our side, something has to break somewhere if we want more for us. Whenever I drive my car for a week-end excursion, whenever I turn heating on, whenever I eat a juicy steak, I can only do this because someone else forsook their share of today’s driving to work, their share of today’s stove, their share of today’s food.

My macabre illustration

Imagine yourself and a small child fighting over a blanket while camping out in a blizzard. The colder it gets, the harder you have to pull to keep warm and cosy. You have more strength, therefore you get more of the blanket, although you do not need it as much as the kid does. At some point, the child is too weak and lets go of the blanket altogether. This is called price elasticity in an unfair market.

At least, that’s what the trees believe. Never mind the snow.

Two weeks after moving in, our hens (at least one of them) have started laying. So far, we’ve had six eggs in one week. It would be enough if the eggs were standard calibre. But it takes two of our bantam eggs to make one ‘normal’ egg.

In any case, they tasted delicious.

The context

I have been doing a lot of slate-sorting in preparation of roof works on my third roof. Traditional slates around here are fish-scale-shaped shale (schist?) slabs one inch thick and eight inches to three feet long. The long ones are used near the gutter, and the size decreases as we get nearer the top. This means they have to be sorted according to size.

I have a three planks with small cells of gradual sizes, which I use as a riddle. And one by one, I pick slates from the heap, find the smallest cell in which it fits, and make tidy stacks of matching sizes. This is extremely tedious. The ideal job for listening to audiobooks.

The first audiobook I had been listening to when I started the sorting in January was Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. The second book was Mark Twain’s The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson, again a solo work from LibriVox.

The audiobook

The recording was quite unusual, as the voice was particularly monotone and slow, as close to machine-read as a human can imitate. The tone was gramatically perfect, but there was hardly any warmth and emotion anywhere. This was disturbing at first, but then I discovered that I got used to it very easily.

In fact, I found out that this kind of neutral, unobtrusive tone was what came nearest to actually reading the book with my own eyes: what I was hearing was the equivalent of printed text, and I got to put the warmth and the emotion in there myself. This confirmed what I had suspected: for all I know, an audiobook could be read by a machine (if the tone is gramatically correct) or chanted like monks used to read from the Bible, and I would not be put off. This kind of neutral reading is not ‘being read to’: it is reading with one’s ears. The closest image of this process is me reading a book with my ear to the pages.

However, whenever there was dialogue, then the narrator turned from a machine to an actor. The voices, the southern accent, the inimitable negro expressions were so vivid that it proved without a doubt that the narrator’s dull tone for the rest of the text was absolutely intentional.

The story

The story is built around a ‘Prince and Pauper’ frame, with the son of rich Missouri townspeople being switched in his infancy with the snow-white slave son of their snow-white negro servant Roxy. To save her kid from the doom of ‘being sold down the river’, Roxy switches the clothes, and nobody notices the switch. Valet de Chambers (the name of the slave son) becomes Thomas Driscoll and vice-versa. The problem is that the newly promoted Thomas grows to be a complete brat.

The story has many other characters, among which is “Pudd’nhead” Wilson, a passionate collector of fingerprints (guess who’s going to find out about the switched boys?), with a law career completely thwarted by an unfortunate joke he made on the day he arrived in town. Apparently, XIXth-century Missouri townspeople have this sort of zeroth-degree humour that we French and British credit all Americans with (no offense meant). The funny thing about Wilson is that his actual part in the story is almost completely accessory, but Twain managed to make his presence ubiquitous by starting all chapters with a quote from Wilson’s ‘calendar’, a collection of witty aphorisms and such like:

Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

As to the Adjective: when in doubt, strike it out.

The true Southern watermelon is a boon apart, and not to be mentioned with commoner things. It is chief of this world’s luxuries,
king by the grace of God over all the fruits of the earth. When one has tasted it, he knows what the angels eat. It was not a
Southern watermelon that Eve took: we know it because she repented.

It were not best that we should all think alike; it is difference of opinion that makes horse races.

The story also has a pair of enigmatic Italian twins, which I could not quite ‘locate’. In fact, I understood in Twain’s afterword that they formed part of an initial plot, and were later refactored into secondary characters when the author understood there was not room enough for two stories. This afterword is very interesting: it feels just like a DVD’s ‘deleted scenes’ bonus section. Mark Twain explains his struggles with the manuscript, the story, the characters, and how he untangled the mess by severing the story of the twins off the main story. A great lesson for aspiring writers, I guess.

The author

After Huck Finn, this was my second encounter with Mark Twain, and I must admit I am in total awe. The story is good enough, but the language and the witty criticism of society is so sharp that I cannot help comparing him with Voltaire (and acknowledging Twain’s superiority in the comparison).

I’ll go download some more from LibriVox, to keep me company for the rest of the sorting.

Now is the time for my farmer self to say good-bye and move to roomier premises. The Mandarine half here will presently revert to literary mutterings, amateur photography, dilettante philosophy and leftist social criticism.

For those interested in my experience (and my errors) as a gardener, you can visit my new website, l’arpent nourricier, which I declare open as of now. If you read French, good for you. If not, you can still look at the pictures

My primary objective is to write about this wager of mine that I’ll be able to farm a garden big enough to feed a family while still working full-time (80% full-time) as an engineer. My secondary objective is much more pretentious: I want to transfer to the French-speaking internet all the experience and resources I can from the very vast corpus of resources and techniques for new, small-scale, organic farming from the English-speaking internet. My ultimate goal (apart from the obvious selfless contribution to the good of that part of humanity which happens to read French and among whom I happen to live) is that there is a chance that like-minded people might get to know me, and offer me to participate in projects involving local, small-scale, organic farming.

The name “l’arpent nourricier” translates to “the nurturing acre”. It is too bad that the term “nourricier” in French only conveys the “food” idea, and not the “care” idea that “nurturing” implies. It would have been an even better name.

PS: do not worry about the theme, I will be changing it as soon as I can.

The March installment of our monthly Mandarine on Monday show. Two days late. I hope this does not turn into a bad habit, otherwise Mandarine on Monday will have to become Mandarine le Mercredi to keep the alliteration.

Note that this is the first time I use flickr instead of my server to host my pictures. That way, I do not use my host’s bandwidth, but flickr’s. And you can follow the link to get the picture in any resolution you want.