Sunday, January 28, 2007

Six years later

I met N. in the summer perhaps, it should have been 2001 or not even - while I was still a rather spooky schoolboy, I wore a little tie and my pullover was often unkind, showing on the front a little wadge like those armshields used by royal families in those days before the turmoil of time. My days at the time were very directionless and somehow I happily lamented my fate daily, the toll of Hyperion's belovedmost; seldom I spoke to my father about the daily life at school where I spent all those hay-resembling days, being there was perhaps the greatest achievement of my life but yet one that bestowed upon me very little happiness or at least I used to think so.

School was very uninteresting for me, but the school days were all what I ever wanted... some kind of deliverance from the evils of ignorance and conformity which I experienced daily in my own surroundings and person. It was some kind of a late childhood and even though I wasn't to keen on playing sports (in fact I had been a total failure, at least whenever I was commanded to in school hours), I enjoyed the feeling of educated freedom and the increasing amount of books in foreign languages which I owned, even some adult novels that at one point or the other I bequested to Camille and Angela - not because they were erotic or unproper, but perhaps too overwhelming for my age and never went in together with the poems of Hoelderlin about Hyperion and Greece or the little books about the saints of the churches and the immaculate mothers.

I could see myself as I did yesterday whilst I watched the movie.... the little Jewboy at the boarding school lamenting his fate with the funny irony of the lyrical age "Sir... do you ever reflect about your life? You see? I'm Jewish, small, homosexual and I live in Sheffield!". I could only remember those serious and piercing conversations with the school counselor about not taking drugs or how terrible it was that most of the class really knew whom I was in love. This wasn't true though, for I had no real or imaginary loves back in the day, except for some burnt-blonde and rather innocuous-looking lad whom I often saw at the shopping mall almost everyday after school... after whom I sort of chased for months and months on no end, it was a rather frustrating love experience I must say. Then at the same time the guy I had been presumably in love was some little bastard that for whatever reason I befriended, perhaps it was the lonely irony and the closeness somehow. At the same time he was in love with my best friend and in return for all the private details of his life I received in return a lousy pullover.

The only lessons I found interesting had been those with M.J. because they were not at all distracting but rather imbued with a feeling of self-knowledge, of security, of stronghold. What later I knew Karl Jaspers to have called "the homeland" in his letters to Hannah Arendt; this had been true at the time for me... and I was familiar at the time with the German poems about Greece and Arcadia,

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