12 November 2011 - A bit of metaphysics
NEW! (Added 12/11/2011)
Time as a function of the "desire to desire"
Buddhists and, as I understand it, some Hindu texts, maintain that the highest state of consciousness is the experience of unity of space and time. In this state, there is no desire, just formless bliss, and no experience of time as something linear, a simple journey from the past to the future.
Schopenhauer held that all life (and I think, by implication, all material reality) is the expression of a universal "will", this will being the impulse to material existence, to individuality. It is, in a sense, the will to desire itself, the desire to desire. The satisfaction of desire is thrilling, and "the universal mind" has been tempted out of its state of original bliss by the promise of the thrill of desire's satisfaction.
But as Schopenhauer points out, the satisfaction of desire is momentary: it is preceded by frustration, and followed by boredom. Out of this boredom emerges, before too long, further futile desire.
This suggests a basic principle: you can't invoke something you want, without also invoking its opposite. Beauty only makes sense as a concept alongside ugliness; good only alongside evil; desire only alongside frustration and boredom.
So the universal mind desired to experience desire, for the thrill of desire's satisfaction. Now, desire only makes sense in terms of time: it is an attitude to the future. If we surmise that the root state of mind is timeless bliss, we can posit that the emergence of desire and of time itself were two aspects of the same "fundamental act" - the original symmetry breaking of consciousness from something without form, to something with.
The self and the world
To paraphrase Schophauer (I think): if consciousness sought a basis in an independent, consistent self, it needed a context for this self, and that context is the equally independent, consistent material universe that find ourselves in. This an example of the abovementioned principle: the inevitability of invoking the undesired alongside the desired. It is part of the double-bind of our condition: the louder the "human call" of independent consciousness (Camus), the more appalling the "unreasonable silence of the world" (Camus again).
Mystics are aware that the independence and consistency of the material universe can be partially overridden, by means of the partial abandonment of the independence and consistency of the self. The self and the universe are ultimately of the same stuff. (Anyone who thinks this view is incompatible with science should read Erwin Schroedinger, one of the greats of modern physics, and a card-carrying mystic.)
The abandonment of the independence and consistency of the self, and of the world, can be achieved with difficulty through deep meditation, and more easily - but more dangerously - through hypnosis. The experience of this state can induce panic, because the individual mind can only survive through independence and self-consistency: once things start "getting weird", the individual mind finds itself on the path to its own dissolution. Whether this is ultimately such a bad thing, who knows? But it makes sense that as long as we remain on "this side" of dissolution, however closely we approach it, fear will prevail over what lies beyond.
The ability to apprehend the potential convergence of the self and the external world varies from individual to individual, and among those who apprehend it strongly, emotional responses also vary greatly, from fear to transcendent joy. Generally, those who arrive at the state slowly, through many years of meditation, seem to cope better than those who are thrown into it through hypnotic or psychotic episodes. But there also seems an element of luck: people with strong nerves can approach this state without ill effects; the anxious are overwhelmed by it.
"With every wish, there comes a curse"
... as Bruce Springsteen put it. The superstitious monition, "Be careful what you wish for", is nonsense to western rationalist thinking, to the extent that few educated people will admit to taking it seriously. Nevertheless, when we view people's lives empirically, it is a principle that manifests itself with consistent and startling clarity. (Schopenhauer addresses it in his essay "On apparent purposefulness in the fate of the individual".) Wishes made in bad faith, once granted, usually lead to disaster, sooner or later. Often the individual is not fully conscious of his bad faith, but the "something hidden from us" (Philip Larkin) - the intuited subconcious principle that governs the pattern of our lives - has its own agenda, and punishes what it abhors.
I think this principle manifests itself at the level of humanity in general. In the second half of the Twentieth Century, western industrial civilisation finally attained the state of peace, material comfort and above all control of its own fate that it had always sought. But everything calls forth its opposite: control in the present is bought through chaos in the future. With the decline of oil supplies and the collapse of the global financial system, we are now on the threshold of that chaos: the rebound from mastery of fate, to subjection to it.
5 March 2011 - Conspiracy theories
In the unlikely event that you have spent much time perusing this Web site, you will gather that I take certain ideas seriously that are shunned by most right-thinking educated people. For example, I consider, on the evidence I know of, that the official account of 9/11 is probably untrue. I have explained my reasons to people both on the Web and in real life, and I can safely say that, not only have I failed to persuade anyone that my opinion is reasonable, but that I have failed even to engage them in discussion on them. It's not that people don't believe your arguments - it's that they won't listen to them.
I've been thinking about why this is the case. On a very general level, I would say that the more educated people are, the less likely they are to change their minds about things. Educated people are pretty sure they understand the world; and - perhaps most importantly - they believe in the prime importance of known facts to understand the world. Truth, for them, is built from facts.
The problem with facts is that no one can know more than a tiny fraction of them. A fact-based conception of truth excludes the reality of everything the individual doesn't either know, or know that someone else knows. Is it a fact that a particular sheep ate a particular blade of grass on a particular day, if no one but the mute and stupid sheep could give the answer?
Most people, educated or otherwise, can't handle doubt. The uneducated believe everything that's put to them; the educated are sceptical about everything that's put to them, if it isn't proven. It seems rather rare for someone to be able to entertain an idea as a possibility, and to be at peace with the recognition that they don't know the truth, or more precisely that, while one version of events may seem more likely than another, neither is by any means certain.
There is also the fear of ridicule - surely one of the dominant motives in humankind, and one that powerful people throughout history have known how to exploit. Educated people fear appearing stupid or gullible. Paradoxically, this can make them hardly less easy to fool than the uneducated: all the deceivers need to do is question the intelligence of those who question their version of events. Typically, the questioners are accused of making up alternative stories with unverifiable assertions. Yet their starting point is typically the opposite: not a ready-made, self-consistent theory, but an observation of inconsistencies in the generally accepted theory.
So what of 9/11? Let me say that I don't think uncovering the truth about 9/11 will affect the course of history one way or the other. (With Peak Oil and climate change looming, it's too late for that.) It's not all that important from a practical point of view. My opinions derive mostly from a couple of books I've read, The New Pearl Harbor by David Ray Griffin and Crossing the Rubicon by Michael Ruppert. Now, I am pretty sure I don't have a desire to believe either one side of the story (the official version) or the other. I've not made a career out of contesting the official 9/11 story; I have nothing to lose and would accept it tomorrow, if the apparent inconsistencies pointed up in Griffin's and Rupppert's books were convinvingly explained. But many of the ripostes to their claims are either unconvincing, or non-existent (for example, I don't know of a single convincing explanation of why a third building in the World Trade Center, WTC7, collapsed, and even more oddly, why its collapse was not mentioned, even in passing, in the 9/11 Commission report).
There's something fishy, but almost everybody, including a vast majority of opponents of the Bush regime, doesn't seem to want to look at it. Is it that they're not interested? Fair enough if so, but in that case who are they to deride those who've looked into it? More than that, I think it's that we all draw a line which we consider the limit of possibility. This line is based on experience. As young children, we're capable of believing anything. Then, quite early on, certain beliefs about the world become hardened, and it's with reference to these hard beliefs that we interpret new knowledge.
Someone recently suggested to me that the moon landings were faked. My immediate internal response was something along the lines of "I'm not having that. What kind of idiot would think that?" But then I considered the basis of my belief: firstly, that everybody else believed the same as me; secondly, that I knew of no evidence to contradict my belief; and thirdly, that I'd be rather upset to find that a belief so ingrained that it was almost like a friend might be false. I'm not saying that the moon landings were faked; I am saying that I don't find my reasons for believing they weren't faked completely watertight or free from emotional bias.
Even most lefties cannot entertain the idea that a democratically elected government might commit a false flag atrocity. And the corollary of this attitude is a disgust towards people who are capable of holding such a seemingly fantastical opinion. We all avoid scenarios likely to lead us into self-disgust, whatever the cost to our objective, rational assessments of things.
So do I feel self-disgust for having crossed that line? No. I believe I've looked at the facts dispassionately, and I think that my opinion that many, many things don't add up in the official account is rationally based. But I'm always prepared to change my mind.
15 July 2009 - R S Thomas
Get this:
In the dream
I gave the bird
freedom. In real life
I told it my dream
in its cage. It
sang then notes
of gold hotter
than my tears punishing
itself for my dream.
The first time I read that poem I almost choked. It's hard to say exactly what it means, because (as I think someone said of poetry in general) the only way of expressing the meaning is through the poem's own words. Also, as with many of R S Thomas's poems, it appears to describe an image that came to the poet "in a flash", charged with inherent emotion and not necessarily having a logical context.
Nevertheless, I can't resist performing a little analysis. The poem says, with such extraodinary concision, so much about suffering, love and attachment. The poet loves his bird, but values his attachment to it to it more than he values the bird's own happiness. Meanwhile, the bird empathises so much with the poet's love for it that it feels guilty for being the cause of the poet's guilt. But the bird's pain is double, because simultaneously it feels the yearning for a freedom that, as the poet's dream reminds it, it can never possess. The emotions of the poet and bird become merged in a painful symbiosis of frustration and compassion. Meanwhile, of course, the suffering being described is actually that of the poet: he is describing his own pain at considering what he imagines the bird to be feeling.
Then there is the strange association that the poet makes between the bird's singing and its suffering. Its singing comes over almost as an attempt to inject sweetness into the world in a desperate act of catharsis of guilt and suffering. The phrases "notes / of gold" and "hotter / than my tears" might have sounded clichéd, were their juxtaposition not startling enough to avoid this. How can the bird's song be "hot"?
Many, probably most, poets use simple words in an everyday idiom to express interesting thoughts. Normally the result is banal, and little different, in its emotional impact, from prose. On the face of it, R S Thomas's poems' effectiveness seems mysterious. The words are mostly short, the sentences look constructed in a pretty standard way. This may be true - except that there exist many other possible standard ways of constructing the sentences, none of which would have been as effective. A mediocre poet might have started the poem, "I had a dream in which I let my bird out of its cage." However, Thomas gives the bird freedom: a gift; and an abstract state of being. The succinctness of the sentence, too, enhances its impact. Also consider the reversal of the expected order of "sang" and "then". If "then" had come first, there would have been just that tiny pause before the reader pictured the bird singing - as though the bird had considered for a moment what to do. By placing "sang" first, Thomas emphasises the spontaneity of the bird's response; the reader registers, as one imagines the poet registering, the singing before he even orders it sequentially after the poet's declaration to the bird.
19 May 2009 - The BNP
This morning was spoiled by the appearance on my doormat of a leaflet from the BNP, soliciting votes for the forthcoming local elections.
I've long been concerned about the threat posed by the BNP, but to have its propaganda soiling the inside of my home was a shock. For the first time ever in Britain, the Far Right is getting a smell of real power.
Of course, there is nothing uniquely British about the ascendancy of vindictive, simplistic nationalism in times of economic gloom. To a greater or lesser extent, it happens everywhere. But I fear that a unique combination of local circumstances creates a real risk that support for the Far Right in this country will, in the next few years, reach critical mass:
- The coming recession is going to hit Britain harder than most Western countries. Britain's economy for the past three decades has been "powered" by financial services, i.e. by an assumption of endless economic growth, i.e. by debt. We produce hardly anything the rest of the world wants. Along with the United States and a few silly, greedy, smaller nations that have followed the Anglo-Saxon economic model, we stand to be truly destitute within the next few years.
- A pervasive blame culture. The dogma of individual choice and competition in all matters, from regional economics to health and education, was first sold to the electorate by Thatcherism, but taken up in its entirety by New Labour. Politicians of all hues now appeal largely to notions of individual self-interest, rather than community values; and of rights, rather than responsibilities. If there's something making you unhappy, complain (to your hospital, to your council, to your school). Politicians have wised up to the fact that voters prefer to be encouraged to lay their problems at somebody else's door, rather than get off their bums and work, especially work together, to make life better.
- The decline of serious political debate. To some extent this is linked to the previous point. Our media, like our governments, have found that people prefer a good fight to reasoned debate. Even on the supposedly highbrow news shows, the tone that interviewers adopt towards politicians is hectoring and aggressive, the intention not to bring to task but to humiliate. The recent furore over MPs' expenses is a case in point. A minority of MPs were actively dishonest, but most simply took advantage of the over-generous system they were given access to. Yet the media, including the broadsheet newspapers and the "serious" TV news programmes, are using this minor scandal to suggest that our political system is fundamentally flawed, and that most of our existing politicians are entirely greedy and corrupt. The media are doing this because it plays to the lowest instincts of their audiences, many members of whom will undoubtedly start turning to parties like the BNP as untainted by these scandals - a "breath of fresh air". I'm not suggesting that the media want this to happen, but if they're not careful they'll have helped to bring it about.
- A large, angry, bored, poorly educated and socially amoral underclass. There, I've said it! In past ages, the less educated sectors of society derived their moral code not from abstract ideas of social justice, but from community spirit. In the middle part of the Twentieth Century, they voted for the Labour Party: largely unthinkingly, but also reasonably, because it manifestly represented their interests. Any anger felt by members of the old working class was, to a large extent, kept under control by the sympathy and the human values of the communities they formed. People of similar social background, today, find themselves largely alienated from the society around them, a society which, insofar as it speaks to them at all, speaks of individualism, social competitiveness, moral relativism, and personal satisfaction and pleasure as the ultimate goods. I suspect that many of these people, who may never have voted in the past, will come out of the woodwork in support of the BNP in the forthcoming elections. For the first time, they will feel that politics makes sense to them.
Well, that's enough points. I hope I'm wrong about all this, but I'm worried, because this recession will is not something our society can simply ride out: it is the beginning of a whole new world order (see comments on Peak Oil below). I don't think the BNP will win the next general election; but I think we must watch out for what happens in the one after that. Meanwhile, many cuddly liberals are going to be shocked by the showing of the Far Right in next month's elections.
19 March 2008 - Oil and the current stock market chaos
Climate change is all over the newspapers and the TV news. You'd think it was the most urgent problem facing humanity or something.
Meanwhile, the current stock market chaos is being attributed to irresponsible bank lending on sub-prime mortgages.
The question is: why are the sub-prime chickens coming home to roost now? How come a bank - Bear Stearns - that made it through the 1930s Depression has just been bought for peanuts by a rival? We've had recessions in the economy several times in recent decades, but now some economists are talking about a "Second Great Depression". Can cavalier lending alone really have brought this about? What's different this time?
I only found out about "Peak Oil" last October, through word of mouth. There turned out to be plenty on the Web about it, and the occasional article hidden away in the finance pages of the British dailies.
I won't go into the details - good introductions are here and here - but basically, long before the consequences of climate change bite the developed world, the world economy is going to go into terminal freefall. This is because capitalism is predicated on permanent economic growth, and permanent economic growth depends on permanent increases in energy production.
You don't have to be an economist - perhaps it helps not to be one - to see that capitalism is thus, essentially, an edifice built on sand. Unless a means to harness nuclear fusion is found soon - and they've been trying for 30 years without any sign of a breakthrough - permanent increases in energy production are simply a ridiculous dream. And the breakneck growth of the Chinese and Indian economies, and of the world's population, is bringing this glaring truth into sharp focus.
In particular, production of oil, by far our most important energy source, has not increased for 3 years, despite rapidly growing worldwide demand. That's because all the evidence suggests that oil production has reached its peak. All the high-quality, easily-extractible stuff has gone, and from now on production can only fall. Yes, there's plenty left, but that's not the point: without increasing oil production, there can be no economic growth.
I've read many apparently well-informed and sober articles that maintain that the point of Peak Oil marks the beginning of the end of industrial civilisation - attractions to come including the collapse of democracy, food shortages, resource wars, and the ultimate breakdown of society. Conversely, I've read no counter-arguments that don't seem founded on wishful thinking or vested interests.
My first response to learning about Peak Oil was a feeling that we'd best enjoy the period of normality we have left. I had no idea that it might strike in months rather than years. But there are ominous signs: petrol in the UK at £1.08 a litre - and going up by the week - and suggestions of panic about to erupt in the stock market. Of course, I don't know if this is "it"; but it echoes to an uncanny extent, in both its manner and its timing, what the Peak Oil pundits have been predicting for years.
No economic commentators seem to have been making any connection between the credit crunch and Peak Oil, which makes me think I may be wrong here; but is it coincidence that banks have got scared of lending just at the point where it's become clear that oil production recently peaked? This isn't to suggest that current rising oil prices are to blame for the market chaos - rather, I'm positing that the market chaos, and the rising oil prices, are two separate consequences of the same root phenomenon. The market isn't looking at oil prices, but at oil production.
For the moment, I'm past the point of worrying about it. It's going to happen, and soon. Of course my equability won't last, but for the moment I'm in a state of something like awe, feeling I'm contemplating the beauty of something in the early stages of its dying.
By way of postscript: till recently I'd thought that, yes, there was something fishy about the US government's account of the 9/11/01 atrocities. But this acknowledgement was overridden by my inability to imagine what might impel even as morally bankrupt a government as the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld one to participate in the massacre of 3000 of its own people. Then I read about Peak Oil, and then I read about Mike Ruppert. (I've just ordered his book.)
3 February 2007 - Pedantry round-up
I don't claim never to make errors in my English, but PUR-LEASE, what's going on here??? -
- "Panorama reveals that GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) attempted to show that Seroxat worked for depressed children despite failed clinical trials. [New paragraph] And that GSK-employed ghostwriters influenced 'independent' academics." (BBC News Web site) - Sigh. WHY the full stop? WHY the new paragraph? I just don't understand how you can get this wrong if you've got half a brain cell in your head, let alone if you're employed as a writer by (supposedly) the world's most prestigious news-gathering organisation!!
- "There's an old adage that suggests one shouldn't fix what ain't broke. Aside from the grammatical inefficiencies of this statement, it isn't true." (Stuff magazine) - I hasten to point out that I don't buy this garbage: the magazine was lying around in our office kitchen. I've no idea what the writer means by "grammatical ineffiencies" - I suspect they're talking about "infelicities" but couldn't be bothered to check a usage that common sense says is utterly meaningless. It's also not clear what they're complaining about - the use of "ain't" or the fact that one can't, logically, fix what isn't broken. If the latter, the error is not grammatical but, as mentioned, logical. And to call this an "infelicity", if that's what the writer means, is of course totally missing the point. Often I feel a little bit of a snot-head about pointing out bad English, but (a) for Heaven's sake, these people write for a living in a more prestigious context than I do and (b) this person at least clearly regards himself as a master of the written word.
- "The UK is famed as a nation of tea drinkers, but the coffee shop has again spread through our shores." (BBC News Web site) - Now, OK, I know "shores" here is a metonym, but a few microseconds' extra thought would surely have yielded one that doesn't conjure up visual paradoxes.
- "An estimated 47 percent of Britons drink coffee regularly, they are still in the minority compared to tea drinkers, who make up..." (BBC News Web site) - Barely worth mentioning, this sort of thing, as it's so frequent nowadays. A depressing number of journalists seem incapable of using simple conjunctions to convey relationships between statements. A "but", "although" or "and" after the first comma would help us to understand what point the writer is making regarding the relative numbers of tea and coffee drinkers. And even then, if they really can't handle such subtle concepts as clauses, they could at least have the decency to learn what a full stop is for.
23 December 2006 - The genre-lisation of the modern world, gobbing oiks and language levels in the Body Shop
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In a filthy mood while doing last-minute Christmas panic-shopping today, I was agreeably disgusted by the reorganisation of CDs in FOPP. (FOPP is Cambridge's self-consciously hip independent record store, where the staff have been known to sneer at me for being bald and where it is rare to step foot without having one's ears assaulted by snare-drum-backed expletives pumping through the 1000-watt speakers at 5000 decibels. It is, however, the best record store in Cambridge, which is saying very little, and which is only true because it usually has large numbers of back-catalogue CDs at a fiver each.)
Anyhow, recently FOPP has introduced its own spectacularly arbitrary "cataloguing" system to its store arrangement. If you're looking for a CD of the genre that once subsisted under the quaintly arachaic term "rock/pop", you now have to meditate on the nuances of the terms "Pop", "Alternative/modern rock" and "Classic rock/singer songwriter" before you're in a position to negotiate the ever-shifting organic labyrinth of spotty dreadlocked students and stacked Milan Kundera novels to find the disc of your designs.
It seems to me there are 2 possible rationales for this scheme:
- Sheer stupidity on the part of the store management. This is my preferred explanation, and I would hazard that it is compounded by the notion, misguided or otherwise, that "youths" warm to a store that considerately pre-pigeonholes their vapid and blinkered musical taste so as to give them the feeling that they actually have an "identity" or something.
- Customer manipulation, one of the many scourges of the mature consumer society. This is the technique whereby the management seeks to generate maximum confusion in the visitor's head, forcing him or her to perform multiple tours of the store in the search for the CD they actually came in for, in the hope that by the time they find it they'll have a pile of spot-purchases decided on during their lengthy intramural travels reaching up to their armpit.
If anyone has any inside information on the "thinking" behind this phenomenon, I would be interested to know.
- In the lovely Lion Yard, a group of teenage oiks was standing on the balcony, gobbing on people below. It turned out that they were aiming at some of their "chums", but judging by their dubious application of skill and concentration I would be surprised if a large number of their viscous projectiles didn't find their way into the hair and handbags of innocent bystanders and coffee-sippers. Needless to say, nobody even so much as acknowledged the presence of these naughty "scamps", let alone made any attempt to reprimand them. God knows, I didn't. I thought, "I want to move to Switzerland", and shuffled on.
- Finally, apologies to the assistant in the Body Shop to whom I used the word "denomination" with reference to gift tokens. This was stupid of me, and my hostile impatience at her incomprehension would have befitted Samuel Johnson, wormholed here from the 18th Century, but was poor form for someone who's had 37 years to get used to living in a world where usage of words with more than 2 syllables is liable to lead to brain haemorrhage and possible legal suits.
9 December 2006 - Impressions of Berlin
- 1-4/12/06, and my first visit to Berlin in nearly 16 years. Two previous visits: 1988 and 1991, i.e. just before and just after the fall of the Wall.
- The old centre, including the Ku'damm and Kantstrasse, is now very subdued - a world away from the electric atmosphere it had both before and just after the fall of the Wall.
- The commercial centre has moved almost entirely to the east. I expected this, but wasn't prepared for the degree to which it would change the feel of the western part of the city - now, the latter has an "out-of-town" feel, like a large but unexciting London suburb.
- Even in the east, the atmosphere is cheerful but not exciting - Berlin feels less like a capital city than it did when it wasn't one. Friedrichstrasse now seems to be the main shopping street - there's certainly more going on there than in the Ku'damm by both day and night. Even so, you can't get away from the fact that Berlin is now another interesting and stable large European city, and that the forces of history, which used to lend it much of its vibrancy, have moved elsewhere.
- Another reason for the subduing of Berlin is undoubtedly high unemployment. Naively, I'd expected the new Berlin to be a little pocket of prosperous West Germany in the middle of the former GDR. It isn't: it feels for the most part like an East European capital, a city servicing a large area with severe economic problems. Now that the subsidies have gone, Berlin has had to stand on its own two feet, and its economic and cultural energy seems to have dissipated rather than spread.
- Our hotel, in Charlottenburg, is run by Russians. It's clean, but the decor is very much Soviet bloc style, and they don't supply new soap and shampoo each day.
- Seeing us perusing his menu, the owner of a Vietnamese restaurant in Kantstrasse desperately persuades us into eating there, and we are too weak-willed to resist. As it happens the food is excellent. But we can see why he resorts to the hard sell: it's Saturday night, and only three tables are occupied.
- The Mitte district, where all the reconstructed older buildings are, is now clean, spruce and a very pleasant place to be, busy with tourists and with an agreeable spaciousness about it, especially on the Museuminsel and around the Humboldt University.
- The new dome on the Reichstag is impressive, though perhaps more so from the inside, with its carefully arranged assemblage of glass and mirrors, than the outside. (In profile it's almost as near a sine-curve as a semicircle.) The mirrors that form the concave central column offer jumbled reflections simultaneously of the city outside and of the visitors below. It very immediately and effectively conveys the message, "This is your country, you are its people, and this is your government". You can step out onto the roof of the building, from which there are superb views across the city.
- Being older and theoretically wiser, I wondered if visiting Germany afresh after so long would make me see the Germans as so many English seem to and as I sometimes wonder if as they are, i.e. as pushy, officious and unfriendly. I didn't, but found them polite and cheerful. The sense of order in Germany is linked to the idea of social responsibility, and it's a breath of fresh air to encounter this when in Britain any common civic sense died at least a decade ago. Overall, I was reminded of how much I like Germany, and not just because I studied its language at university. I also studied French, but still don't feel the same affinity with France. I think I'm essentially a north European, a Teuton and a Protestant at heart :)
- The Wall is a distant memory: a generation has grown up since it came down. There's a cobbled line visible in places that marks its route, such as at the site of Checkpoint Clarlie, but for the most part you'd never know it had been there.
- The biggest disappointment was the mess that's been made of Pariser Platz immediately to the east of the Brandenburg Gate. I'd always thought the Gate was impressive standing on its own away from all buildings, but looking at old photos I see it actually used to have buildings butting right up against it. The Gate now once again is part of a larger architectual ensemble, but the buildings on either side of it are undistinguished, and clash in both colour and style with the Gate. A strange misjudgement, since a lot of money and thought has been lavished on new buildings elsewhere in the city.