Today is his special day

Today is his special day, when he reflects on the past year, spends time with his Love, the great Love of his life, writes to his children, revisits old dreams, perhaps goes back to old writing. It is also when he thinks of the resolutions he made at the end of the year, and considers his progress. So, he is taking stock, does a little inventory of what is going well, or not so well. 

On the physical side of things, he’s maintained his resolve to keep fit, with some success. The pain is there, always ready to remind him of the time elapsed since he was last young. He smiles as he writes this, when was that last time? Was it when he retired, some fourteen years back, before he had to face heavy surgery and a slow recovery. What he remembers most is the agony in the mountains, the later hospitalisation, and then the delight of feeling  normality, again, and a wonderful trip to the US South-West. 

Resolutions

He wants to go back to the South Tyrol, the had plans to do so during his stay in Eastern Germany, but it did not happen. He had too much to see, to do, to get on with the two novels he was writing. Yes, what about the novels? He can’t claim success, they are not completed, let alone published, one proved to be somewhat predictive of current events, although he does not take pride in this: those events were predictable, had been predicted by the more discerning observers at the time. He was merely following his instincts, augmented by his recently acquired knowledge of the people.

Yet he has been working on, still, getting one of the novels on some sort of regular post, to test the response. He is not convinced that this is a good idea. A lot of editing, checking consistency, timeline, and more, remains to be done. He’s sought inspiration from other sources, from history, from walking in the countryside that surrounds him. Now he thinks that history is key,  to an understanding of the present, to confidence. Now the French seventeenth century attracts him again, an old passion of his school days: years of horrors and wonders, that gave birth to the monstrosity that is the modern world.

 Today & History

He wishes to have some quality reflection on that time, understand the characters, the places, the hidden powers: the Sun-King, his mistresses, Versailles at the beginning of his reign, Paris before the Revolution that is already bubbling, Bossuet, Lulli, the Mousquetaires, La Rochelle… Memories of his school days set the background to these musings. Inevitably he goes back to earlier interests: Brandenburg, Holland, the unfathomable history of the Austrian hold on the German lands. There, behind the scene, are Rome, Venice, the structures that developed the present hold on all western countries: the banks.

He is seeking a historical treatment of the period, free of the modern obsession with economics. For that side of life he relies on Michael Hudson, who wrote The Collapse of Antiquity, the story of how the introduction of interests paying loans, in ancient Greece, without the safeguard of periodic clearing of debts for the farmers, had given birth to the greedy rentier class, that ultimately was the real reason for the demise of both classical Greece and then of Rome. He’s fascinated by the link between those wealthy patricians who fled burning Rome, and their successors in Venice.

Today’s Spirituality

While those historical periods crowd his thinking, he has also other perspectives. Old age has revived his life-long aspiration to the Spiritual, be it seen from Christianity before it surrendered to the Roman state under Constantine, or from the lens of the Easter Orthodox Church. Years back he visited the great churches of Yorkshire, plundered by vandals to build barns and hideouts. Today he remembers: he sees the events that led from Luther’s statement in Wittenberg, through the Peasants Revolt, through to the Thirty Years War, and the settlement that was the Westphalian Peace Treaty of 1648, as the foundation of the order now being destroyed.

He worries for his grand children. He knows he will not see the outcome of the outrages committed since even before he was born. It is his special day. As to his biography, yes, this is a suitable title. After all, the way he lives is exactly as if every day is a special day.

Picture: Bust of Louis XIV by Bernini, Versailles (1665)