Discursive Aside (previously named Leap of Faith) page 3
Today I want to share a few things I’m reading:
(1). The Awful German Language by Mark Twain. He’s really one of my favorite writers, and this piece on the German language offers me more at every step of my own German language pilgrimage.
When a German gets his hands on an adjective, he declines it, and keeps on declining it until the common sense is all declined out of it. It is as bad as Latin. He says, for instance:
SINGULAR
Nominative--Mein gutER Freund, my good friend.
Genitives--MeinES GutEN FreundES, of my good friend.
Dative--MeinEM gutEN Freund, to my good friend.
Accusative--MeinEN gutEN Freund, my good friend.PLURAL
N.--MeinE gutEN FreundE, my good friends. G.--MeinER gutEN FreundE, of my good friends. D.--MeinEN gutEN FreundEN, to my good friends. A.--MeinE gutEN FreundE, my good friends.
Now let the candidate for the asylum try to memorize those variations, and see how soon he will be elected. One might better go without friends in Germany than take all this trouble about them. I have shown what a bother it is to decline a good (male) friend; well this is only a third of the work, for there is a variety of new distortions of the adjective to be learned when the object is feminine, and still another when the object is, and they must all be as elaborately declined as the examples above suggested. Difficult?--troublesome?--these words cannot describe it. I heard a Californian student in Heidelberg say, in one of his calmest moods, that he would rather decline two drinks than one German adjective.
I can’t decline anything. I read the rules, but they make no attempt to stay in my mind whatsoever. I’ve tried and tried, and I think I’m just congenitally not made for declinations. I think of the title of the David Sedaris collection of essays detailing his life in Paris and attempts to learn French: Me Talk Pretty One Day. That’s how I feel, thrashing about in the murky complexity that is the German language (and culture), hoping to talk pretty, one day. That day has not yet come, alas.
(2). Article in the New Yorker from 2015 by Rachel Aviv on what could and does go wrong in Belgian euthanasia.
The right to a dignified death is viewed as an accomplishment of secular humanism, one of seven belief systems that are officially recognized by the government. Belgian humanism, which was deeply influenced by the nineteenth-century Freemasonry movement, offered an outlet for those who felt oppressed by the Church, but it has increasingly come to resemble the kind of institution that it once defined itself against. Since 1981, the Belgian government has paid for “humanist counsellors,” the secular equivalent of clergy, to provide moral guidance in hospitals, prisons, and the armed forces. Humanist values are also taught in state schools, in a course called non-confessional ethics, which is taken by secular children from first through twelfth grade, while religious students pursue theological studies. The course emphasizes autonomy, free inquiry, democracy, and an ethics based on reason and science, not on revelation.
[…]
Last year, thirteen per cent of the Belgians who were euthanized did not have a terminal condition, and roughly three per cent suffered from psychiatric disorders. In Flanders, where the dominant language is Dutch, euthanasia accounts for nearly five per cent of all deaths. (The percentage is lower in the southern, French-speaking parts of Belgium.) The Flemish media have adopted a mostly uncritical approach to euthanasia, running numerous articles about the courage of people who have chosen to die. Last year, De Standaard, a prominent Flemish newspaper, published a long tribute to a depressed mother who was euthanized after being abandoned by her boyfriend and becoming disillusioned by her psychiatric care. “I am forever grateful to her that she handled this so well,” her twenty-four-year-old son told the paper. “I am so glad we were able to say goodbye in a beautiful way.”
The suicide rate in Belgium (excluding cases of euthanasia) is the second-highest in Western Europe, a phenomenon often attributed to the Flemish personality type known as “binnenvetter,” a person who holds emotions inside.
[…]
He asked Tom why he had scheduled the meeting.
“Because you killed my mother,” Tom replied.
Distelmans responded calmly that it was Godelieva’s “absolute wish” to die.
Tom said that his mother’s “absolute wish” was also to be a good grandmother. He had brought some of her papers and letters, and he began reading from the draft of her suicide letter to him and his sister. “I feel frustration and sadness because I have not been able to build a connection,” he read. Then he showed them an apology letter that he had written to his mother when he was twenty, after one of many fights. “Forgive me,” he read. “You have dealt with the worst. . . . You care about me. I am not living up to your expectations. That hurts. I don’t know how to deal with that.”
Distelmans was silent. “He was very cool, very distant,” Bieseman said. “He didn’t seem to be touched.”
When Tom saw that his reading had elicited no response, he pushed his chair back from the table and stood up. Bieseman recalled, “He was screaming, ‘You went along with the madness of my mother! You went along with her tunnel vision, her defeatism. You’ve just taken away the suffering of one person and transposed it to another!’ ”
[…]
She died with three photographs in her pocket: a picture of her holding Tom on her lap when he was a baby, a picture of her feeding one of Tom’s young daughters ice cream, and a photograph of her and her daughter walking together through a field.
Based on Casteur’s notes, Tom submitted a complaint with the Belgian Order of Physicians and the public prosecutor of Brussels, alleging that Godelieva’s condition had not been incurable. A reunion with her children and her grandchildren, he argued, might have alleviated the loneliness that was at the core of her suffering.
[…]
Last spring, Tom was reviewing his eight-year-old daughter’s journal for school, as he does every night, when he saw in the pages a flyer with Distelmans’s face on it. “Euthanasia lecture: With Wim Distelmans,” it said. It had been put there by his daughter’s non-confessional-ethics teacher, who is also the chair of the local humanist chapter. Tom and his wife e-mailed the school’s principal to complain the grandmother of one of her pupils. The principal apologized for causing discomfort but explained that the “flyer has only an informative character which gives parents the opportunity to get informed about this contemporary humanist subject.” She wrote that the subject of euthanasia was in keeping with the curriculum, but she said that she would advise teachers not to discuss it until after the second grade.
Tom thought about pulling his daughter out of non-confessional ethics but decided not to, because it wouldn’t make sense for her to study Catholicism—the other class offered during that period—and he didn’t want her to have to sit alone for two hours every week. She was popular, and he didn’t want her to feel like an outsider.
(3). Article by Michael Engelhard in True West Magazine: “Nome’s glittering gold strike of 1898 lured thousands north by sea to seek their fortune in Alaska’s Bering Strait goldfields.”
Joseph Carroll, a fleet mail carrier and expert trailsman, absconded with three dogs and the wrong sled. He’d been in a bad frame of mind for a day or two, it was said. Thieves wheelbarrowed coal away, and from a permafrost cache, snatched 20 sacks of flour and 17 dressed chickens saved for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Brazen burglars slashed tent sides, pumping in chloroform to rob marks the moment they fainted.
The daughter of a Russian trader and Eskimo mother, Changunak Antisarlook Andrewuk, “Sinrock Mary” or “The Reindeer Queen,” at one point owned Alaska’s biggest reindeer herd—the government six years earlier had launched a program to convert starving Inupiaq seal and walrus hunters into capitalists, recruiting “Laplanders” as instructors.
[…]
Behind Nome’s false-fronted boxes lay dozens of prostitutes’ cribs fenced off in the “Stockade” with their own phone system and messengers. Women billed as “actresses” or “vaudeville entertainers” worked at saloons where their popularity boosted lucrative sidelines. “There were more of these in Nome than in any mining camp I was ever in,” Trelawney-Ansell recalled. “Nothing in the worst days of Montmartre in Paris, or on State Street, Chicago, ever paralleled the shows given here.” Cigar stores too could serve as a front for ladies of the night. A few escaped this meat market. “Charlie the Bear made off with Halibut-Face Mary. A stinker named Misery Chris eloped with Toodles, and the King of Denmark stood up before the preacher with Deepwater Dorah,” wrote Frank Dufresne, Klondy’s future husband. As town got more civilized, the retirees’ primrose past was forgotten or politely ignored, since “in almost every case the old dance-hall habitués became the strictest sort of wives.”