Mortality and Procreation

"It is remarkable indeed how we human beings are capable of delighting in the mating call of a flower while we are surrounded by the charred carcasses of our fellow animals - but then we are remarkable creatures. Perhaps it is our nature to recognize subconsciously the link between mortality and procreation - between, that is to say, the finite and the infinite - and we are in fact driven by reminders of the one to seek out the other."

That is an extract of The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Moshin Hamid (ISBN:978-0-141-03602-1). The book caught me at the airport. I have no idea why it happened, but I am really glad it did.

We are remarkable, as Hamid says, and obviously some of us are even more remarkable than others. Reading the book you might tend to classify Moshin Hamid into the group of the more remarkable among us.

Having written that I remember a particular occurence that took place maybe fifteen years ago.

In Finland seeing any beggars was an absolute impossibility before. Today, if you see one, you know that they come from elsewhere in Europe. They are one of the consequences of our membership in the European Union and Shengen.

In a thoroughly Protestant country you know that giving out money or anything else to anybody is not an investment in your own better future. Giving away your riches, looking for personal suffering, fasting etc. does not bring us Protestants any special benefits, not in the eyes of other people nor in those of God. This thinking does not favour the institutes of begging and beggars. However, this does not mean that we would not take care of the poor and needy.

For us taking care of them is not the responsibility of individual people. Taking care of the poor and weak is a joint project which needs to be organised as a joint effort. To be able to do that we pay taxes. Taxes are means to construct common good. Taxes liberate us as individuals. We need not worry about the poor and weak. We have systems that take care of their well-being. As individuals we can concentrate on other things - like working hard, for instance.

Why to complain about taxes, if they make your everyday life safe and comfortable? You can send your children to school - walking alone. You need not build walls and fences around your house. You may forget to lock your door for the night and nothing happens.

Would you be a happy tax-payer, if you had that kind of every-day luxury in your life - all paid for by your taxes?

"You have high taxes, but you also get things in return." my Spanish friend said and opened my eyes to see that it is true. In fact, statistics show that Finnish people are willing to pay their high taxes provided the poor and helpless people are taken care of, the educational and health care systems work properly, roads are in good condition and electricity runs as steadily as it does. The government collects taxes. In return citizens get services which makes the normal life run smoothly. So why to complain?

Why do I write about this? I have been reading some Robert Kiyosaki books lately. He seems to be telling that the rich people in his own country - the US - do all they can to avoid taxes. It is as if finding ways to avoid taxes were the main motivation to become rich and wealthy.

From the Finnish perspective the consequences of that kind of thinking look questionable. In a society where just some have and many do not, those who have must make sure that the many stay outside. However, to keep them outside becomes more and more costly which means that in the long run you are losing money anyway. You are forced to build a wall around your house, to reinforce your door, to bar your windows, to pay a high price for your leasure time and sports facilities, to find expensive educational institutes for your children, to escort them to school etc.

Kiyosaki emphasizes avoiding taxes. Maybe Kioyosaki just forgets to tell us about the positive things wealthy people do in the society. If he told that avoiding taxes makes it possible for the rich to employ people, for instance, even us Finns would feel less puzzled with his texts.

Who of the world-famous sociologists was it who said that the development of capitalism is a direct consequence of the protestant work ethic? It must be true in the sense that we Protestants are taught not to be lazy. However, we are also told that all you need to do is just to trust in the unconditional love of God. There is no need make any effort to please him. Just trust and accept his love. You are good and loved just as you are.

No special activities, no searching for special feelings or anything like that is needed, just simple, childlike trust and belief in God´s unconditional love. Really simple, isn´t it?

All these explanations come from what I wrote about Moshin Hamid above. I realised to have written that Hamid as a person might be somehow more remarkable than others. Seen from the strict Protestant perspective I made a mistake. For Protestants all people are normal people. All have have the same "value" as human beings. Some may use their mental and physical capacities more intelligently than others, but each one of us is equally important and valuable.



In Finland you are not disturbed by beggars, but it is highly possible that you will be disturbed by drunken men wanting to communicate with you. It is embarassing and unpleasant.

Years ago I was travelling with my children from Tampere to Helsinki. A goup of drunken men were noisily exchanging their ideas about topics I didn´t like my children to hear anything about. But the train was full and we could not move anywhere else.

Next morning at the hotel breakfast similar not-for-children-to-hear conversation was repeated by another group of drunken men. I felt angry. Later I complained about the occurences to a friend of mine. She listened to me with empathy and burst out: "Yes, isn´t that disgusting! And think that God loves them just as much as he loves us!"

So far it is the best sermon I have ever heard.



Hamid´s text is provocative. As promised by the back cover, it makes you think. I would say that it captures you. You need not go to the Amsterdam airport to find the book. The ISBN will find it to you in any bookshop. Having read it you may realise that many of our thoughts are predetermined, "zu Hause gebacken" much before we find ourselves in the situation proper. We are strongly preprogrammed by our fears and prejudices.

Preprogrammed or not? You might want to test yourself. There was a story in a newspaper:

"They met in a bar in New York. It was getting late. He promsed to drive her home. She realised that he took a quiet, dark route. Suddenly the car stopped. He turned to her saying: "This shortcut is so much quicker. Thanks for your nice company."

Mortality and procreation side by side, all the time, everywhere.

Existing or Strangely Inexisting?

"The word you just said does not exist." says my native Spanish friend having listened to my explanation of the difference between commercial and financial thinking in Spanish.

"Abrigos de verano no hay." "There are no summer overcoats." Julio answers when I ask him if I should wear a summer overcoat when coming to Madrid in october.

"No entiedo. Este no suele pasar. Nunca pasa." "I do not understand. This does not happen. It never happens." the hostel staff keeps on repeating after my trousers have strangely disappeared from the wardrope of my room in Madrid.

It seems to me that beside the worlds of either-or and both-and there is also a world of existing and strangely inexisting things. Not simply inexisting things, but strangely inexisting things.

If something does not exist, it does not exist. And that´s that. But if something is strangely inexisting, your thoughts or your hands have been in contact with the thing. If they hadn´t, you would never be able to have an idea about it. In other words, something has been normal first and then slipped out of the reach of normality into the inexistence.

This quick slipping into the world of inexistence is easy to understand when you think of the inexisting words you might just have uttered.

"Zu Hause gebacken." "Home baked" my teacher of German used to say.

Home baked words and expressions are concrete in the sense words normally are concrete, but they do not correspond to the generally accepted linguistic standards. Luckily all communication is as tightly context-bound as it is. In suitable circumstances we get surprisingly well along with home baked linguistic material. - In fact, if you become too much conscious of it, you might never learn proper ways to express yourself in a foreign language.

In folk music and foreign language learning there are no mistakes. All depends on what you do next.

It takes a bit more effort to accept the existence of the strangely inexisting things, when the inexistance refers to concrete objects and not just to words and expressions.

There are clear climatic and cultural reasons for some things to exist or not. The idea of summer overcoats is ridiculous in Spain. In Finland we need several types of coats and shoes for every season. Even summer overcoats are of several variations.

Maybe we should conclude that the existence and inexistence of something is geographically bound. But if there are no geographical reasons, the slipping into inexistence of a concrete thing may result quite astonishing, even annoying. Let´s take my trousers as an example.

Our Finnish summer has been normal - warm and rainy. Maybe, exceptionally rainy. In Madrid the weather is hot. What is a proper business outfit like in such a hot weather? What to wear in the streets?

You pack your suitcase carefully, although you know that your choices will most likely go wrong. Anyway, in August it is too late to go shopping for something new as it is autumn here. Summer clothing has been sold out long ago. You pick up simple, most generally acceptable garments - like black trousers - knowing that even that choice will go wrong.

In the Mediterranean you concretely feel how the people you meet for the first time let their eyes travel down along your body and then come up again, you almost hear how they decide who you are and what you are good for. In those cultures clothing speaks loudly.

It is quite understandable that you would like to say something reasonable in the same language in return. Anyway, you know that the likelihood of disturbing interference - is all interference disturbing? - is so obvious in so many levels of communication that you try to make your best to minimize it.

The wardrope was empty. The staff was genuinly astounded by the idea that my trousers had slipped into the world of the strangely inexisting things without having left any more traces of their existence than my idea of them having served truthfully in both everyday and special occasions.

Having got back home again it was safe to feel the plus ten degrees weather to greet you - not too coldly. In Madrid it was thirty-five abouts. I also went to buy two pairs of black trousers to replace the untruthful ones. I´ll go back to Madrid in the beginning of December. You can be sure that i`ll keep an eye on my simple black trousers to find out how the slipping into the strange worlds actually takes place.

Maybe we should pay more attention to the different versions of the world we function in, because each of them offers different types of opportunities as well. You know, the worlds of either-or, both-and and the one of the existing or strangely inexisting things.

Bits and Qubits

Once I took part in a seminar about the use of stories in therapy. For me it was an excellent learning experience. The speaker was Baruch Shulem from Israel. In the beginning he told us a story:

In the forest, under the tallest of all trees there was a solitary, whining baby eagle, obviously fallen down from the nest. It was deemed to death, unless a miracle happened.

Expectations are the gate miracles use to materialize. If a miracle is expected to happen, it normally does.

A farmer happened to be walking in the forest. He saw the miserably whining baby eagle, felt pity for it and wondered whether he could do something to save its life.

He remembered that he had hens and chickens in his farmyard in the open air. There was just a fence to stop them from running away. He could easily place the baby eagle in there. And that was what he did.

Day in, day out the hens and chickens lived their normal life running around looking for seeds and grain to eat and running away from any presumable danger. Leading their normal life new generations of chicken learnt to find eatable seeds and to escape somebody having seen any shadow of a hawk. Doing the same everybody else did the baby eagle learnt what was proper chicken behaviour, which aims were correct to aim at and what was worth fearing.

One day there were some children playing on the farmyard. They got interested in the chickens and gathered at the fence. Chicken life was interesting to look at. Some deviations in it were even more interesting. "Look, at that one. It´s not any chicken! It´s an eagle!" one of the children exclaimed.

Everybody heard that. For some strange reason the eagle paid special attention to the words. They somehow stuck in his mind. He got a curious thought: "Who do they mean? If it´s anyone of us, it might as well be me." He knew that eagles fly high. They have wings. He had wings as well. He moved them. There they were! He flapped them. They hit the air with force. For some curious reason they lifted him up a bit. Then some more. Then he found out that he could really fly.

He flew over and above the fence and the farmyard. From above he could see what the life at the farmyard was like. He could also see the forests, lakes and rivers around the farm. He could see the beauty of the world and he knew that he was free to choose.

Life among the chickens and hens had been good enough, but it wasn´t by any means the best life he could lead. If he just used his wings, he could fly free. He could fly high...

Having told the story Baruch Shulem started talking about eagle behaviour and chicken behaviour. Everybody in the audience understood what he was referring to.

A couple of days ago I heard a radio programme about information. A telephone catalogue may have the equal amount of letters as Shakespeare´s plays do. Anyhow the information value carried by the letters in Shakespeare´s plays is much higher, because they are not the letters that carry the information. The information is carried by the relation of the letters to each other.

It´s not your resources that play the decisive role in your life. It is the relation between your resources and your environment that is decisive. Our life is not determined by the opportunities that exist. It is determined by the opportunities that we happen to pay any attention to.

Dreams are the stuff life is made up of. However, in the course of the years our ordinary, normal life makes us believe two things - we have no wings and if we had there´s no need for them.

If we ever had dreams, our normal life makes us shrink their size and soften their motivational power.

If - all of a sudden - you heard somebody say "That one is not a chicken. It´s an eagle!", would know that it is you the words refer to?

The world of bits is digital. It is an either-or world. In that world you are either a chicken or an eagle.

However, there is another world of qubits. Instead of either-or, it is governed by and.

In the world of qubits you are both a chicken and an eagle. Which of them "is on" depends on your desires and expectations and they are determined by your normal life, by the surroundings you have experience of.

Expecting any nice change lately?

Surprises with Consequences

Have you ever been surprised by words - the different combinations of them?

Today I was listening to one of my top-class mentors on a cd. He said that this particular business suits perfectly to people who are ´ambitiously lazy´. Never before had I seen any positive connection between lazyness, ambition and successful business.

My mentor speaks English. Pero ahora cuando trato de explicártelo me encuentro en el centro de un lío linguistico en el nivel más alto - en el nivel de las lenguas, no solo en el del las palabras de una lengua. Now that I´m trying to explain to you what the odd-word-combination surprise feels like - do all surprises feel the same anyway? - I find myself in an upper level conflict, in a conflict between two languages, not only in one of the words of one language. Additionally none of those languages is my native tongue.

So far, two surprises on two levels.

For me English is for working and for various matter-of-facts of life. In that respect I have been very priviledged in life. Had I been born a year before, I would have learnt German at school. That was normal in those days. Among later generations knowing English has become self-evident, because our television programmes are subtitled.

One of the values of subtitles becomes visible when your pre-school children run out into the garden to you to ask what this or that means in their native tongue and then repeat something they have heard on tv in English. Another value of the subtitles is that children learn to read their own native tongue immediately when there is nobody to read the subtitles for them.

Summa summarum - subtitled tv has a solid positive impact on the national economy of a nation, especially when the two laguages are as far apart from each other as Finnish and English are. What I mean by this is that English will not be able to eat up Finnish without us being able to see what is happening. Finnish well never become a dialect of English. It will exist as an independet language as far as there are people who want to speak it, in other words until the year 3702 (cf. my text 11th of April).

Speaking English is more or less normal now. Very many Finns have the irritating habit of dropping in English words and idioms no matter with whom and about what they are speaking. There is a social pressure to know English much enough, on one hand to do dropping in, and on the other hand not to feel anyhow disturbed by the feelings of social isolation, if you do not know enough English to understand other people´s drop-ins.

Having reached something you might have lost something else. The knowledge of German has now become rare.

Approaching a third suprise on the third level.

We were sitting in a café in Helsinki. It was Christmas time. I felt content and relaxed after all driving and shopping. It was as if I had been wrapped in the lively talk around the table, not paying any attention to what was actually said. We Finns have a special talent of feeling happy, although keeping silent and socially unreachable when in company.

When you are among other Finns nobody pays any attention to your silence, provided there are at least two people in the group voluntarily taking the responsibility of uttering something insignificant every now and then.

But it was not a group of Finns now. It was a group of active and intelligent Spanish speaking young adults. All of a sudden I was woken up. The wrapping was opened. Lorena asked me in her beautifully rational and enthusiastic way: "What do you think about this?"

It was as if she had put a beautiful, fresh-baked and nicely smelling ham in the middle of the table. I had the smell. I saw that everybody around me admired what they saw, but I myself could not see anything. I had no idea what I was supposed to take part in. - My daughter did her best to save the situation.

Just at present I have a surprise ham on the table. A business opportunity in Spain. Por eso me estoy cambiando la cabeza. Para poder actuar en español necesito una identidad apropiada en español. Después de un rato en vez de meter palabras sueltas del inglés a la habla normal, voy a drop in castellano.

It is highly probable that various third level surprises will not only change your own life, but also the life of some other people. The prerequisite for major changes in life is called identity work. It is work, but finding out about the surprise is also fun. It makes you feel curious about your long and short-term future. They also say that people who do not have alternatives change quickly.

Have you ever coldly calculated how many options you have in your life?
By what means do you make them feasible?

Sunshine and Stomach Ulcers

"The first sentence of a novel needs to construct a picture." (Leo Tolstoy)

I have a book consisting of the first sentences in 200 novels. Those books have been published in 1954-1986. When I got the book I thought it would be a treasure. It hasn´t been. I find it very irritating to be able to read the first five lines of a world-famous book and ...

All of a sudden there is nothing more.

The opposite page repeats the same drop out.

And the following.

When now telling you about this I realise that practically all of those 200 books have been written by men: Alberto, Amos, Kurt, John, Ernest, Yashar, Graham, Aleksander, Günter, William, Niko, Jevgeni, Wolfgang, Italo, Saul, Zharia, Ladislav, Yasunari, Wole etc.

When really searching I find three women Alice, Toni and Francoise. Maybe there are more of them, but anyhow it seems that 95 per cent of the influential authors of those days were men. Men must have a special talent for literary expression.

In my childhood men had several gene-bound talents that women did not have. Men composed music, played in symphony orchestras, made laws, run organizations and they even knew how to operate the clutch pedal of the car.

During my life time some of these genes have undergone mutations. We have important female composers. One of the most famous Finnish female composers is Kaija Saariaho. She is not the only one. Women play in symphony orchestras. They also conduct them. Susanna Mälkki, is one example of those ladies. Women are active in Finnish and European politics as well as in international conflict resolution.

Maybe the genes started changing when the women in my mother´s generation learned to drive car and used the clutch pedal, too.

I just wonder if the number of women authors has increased since 1986.



It´s now the evening of the fifth sunny and warm day of this summer. The sun is setting. The night will be short, but it is now dark. Maybe you wonder if it is normal in Finland to continuously refer to the ratio daylight and darkness in the way I do. You may even think it to be as embarassing as being able to read just the first five lines of a novel. Perhaps I had better add a few lines more.

I have told you about Midsummer and what it means to be going towards it, the days getting longer and longer. Now we are going towards the shorter and shorter days. I need not tell you anything more about that because somebody else has already done it. It is a pitty the following text has not been published in English. The name of the book in Spanish is Delicioso suicidio en grupo (ISBN: 978-84-339-7120-3, Finnish original Suloinen joukkoitsemurha). The author is Arto Paasilinna. He is a man, which does not make the text bad at all. If you might ever get interested in Finnish men, Paasilinna might give you an idea what is to be expected in the long run, when you start hearing the other one snoring at night...

"El enemigo más poderoso de los finlandeses es la oscuridad, la apatia sin fin. La melancolía flota sobre el desgraciado pueblo y durante miles de años lo ha mantenido bajo su yugo con tal fuerza, que el alma de éste ha terminado por volverse tenebrosa y grave. Tal es el peso de la gongoja, que muchos finlandeses ven la muerte como única salida a su angustia. Una mente taciturna es un enemigo aún más encarnizado y temible que la propia Union Sovietica.

Sin embargo, el finlandés es un pueblo de guerreros. Todo, menos rendirse. Una y otra vez se alza en rebelión contra el tirano

La Noche de San Juan, la fiesta de la luz y la alegría que marca el solsticio de verano, es para los finlandeses una descomunal batalla en la que, de común acuerdo y uniendo sus fuerzas, intentan derrotar a la melancolía que los corroe. Todo el pueblo se pone en pie de guerra: /.../"

Si te interesa saber más de lo que es normal en Finlandia y que no, vale la pena buscar éste libro por Arto Paasilinna. Leyéndolo vas a participar en un seminario de suicidiología en Helsinki, vas a conocer al criador de renos Uula Lismanki, al aguatragedias Seppo Sorjonen, al capitán en dique seco Mikko Heikkinen etc. Tambíen vas a viajar por todo Finlandia y al extranjero. Y sobre todo, vas a aprender dónde ponemos los limites de la normalidad en éste país.

It is a pitty this book has not been translated into English. You can easily find Arto Paasilinna in Spanish, French, German and Italian, in Swedish of course, but not in English. Maybe the sense of humour in Britain and the rest of the Anglo-American world is too sofisticated to cover the new-potatoes-dill-and-herring attitude towards life typical to Arto Paasilinna and the picaresque novel.

If you read in English, you may test your sense of humour reading The Year of the Hare (ISBN: 0-7206-1017-6, Finnish original Jäniksen vuosi) by the same author. The publisher has considered it important to add an explanative title on its cover: A picaresque novel with an ecological theme.

This is how it starts:

"Two harassed men were driving down a lane. The setting sun was paining their eyes through the dusty windscreen. It was midsummer, but the landscape on this sandy road was slipping past their weary eyes unnoticed; the beauty of the Finnish evening was lost on them both.

They were a journalist and a photographer, out on an assignment: two dissatisfied, cynical men, getting on for middle age. The hopes of their youth had not been realized, far from it. They were husbands, deceiving and deceived; stomach ulcers were on the way for both of them; and many other worries filled their days.

They´d just been wrangling. Should they drive back to Helsinki or spend the night in Heinola? Now they weren´t speaking.

They drove through the lovely summer evening hunched, self-absorbed as two mindless crustaceans, not even noticing how wrethced their cantankerousness was. /.../"

Sometimes we need courage to see the life as it is - full of choices. Paasilinna makes you see choices which normally remain undetected.

"La Finlandia intera entrava nella stagione estiva. La acque si erano liberate, gli umani risvegliati. Il sole splendeva raggiante, una brezza leggera turbinava nell´aria. Dalle parti di Lestijärvi, in campagna, una madre di familia sfornava brioche alla canella, a Kokkola, sulla costa, un automobilista ubriaco provocava un incidente mortale. Insomma, era cominciata l´estate." (Lo smemorato di Tapiola (ISBN: 88-7091-098-9, Finnish original Elämä lyhyt, Rytkönen pitkä).

The first sentence needs to make a picture. If there are just five lines of the text available, we have all reason to feel disappointed. How the story will continue is very much up to you. It depends more on the courage you have than on anything else. If there was a dream in the in the beginning, it was a lively and tempting picture. What was it like? What would be the first step to make your dream become true?

Long ago I got a dream - or the dream got me. I wanted to have some business in Spain. Now it seems that this dream will become true. To be able to share the dream with my friends there I need to brush up my Spanish. Just at present this is the first step.

It is funny, but Juan José Millás has a vocabulary I need not stumble with. When reading Paasilinna I have to use a dictionary. Obviously the world he describes is not reachable by academic concepts, which might be one more recommendation to read him.

Janus-faced Imaginations

"How many words are there?" my son asks when we are driving to the kindergarten.

It is a French kidergarten, free of charge, because the French government pays for the teacher and the city of Tampere for the rent. Pascal and Nady, the teachers, are specialised in Montessory pedagogy. In other words, we have luxury in our life.

Anybody can get their children in there. Anyway, they don´t. The simple reason is that luxury does not look like luxury when it is too near and too easy to reach. It is normal and normality can make things invisible and difficult to detect.

When a child starts wondering how many words there are, it is likely that he is learning to identify differences that make a difference as Gregory Bateson says.

"Imagination is strange. Think of Bill Watterson (the creator of Calvin and Hobbes), for instance. He must have Bill Watterson´s imagination and he must also have the imagination Calvin has." my son says in the car another day.

Obviously the car was an ideal place for deep thinking and sharing ideas. At least it was a place where the next occurence did not immediately wipe out the ideas talked about. They had time to become registered and remembered.

Once more we were on our 15-minute drive to the French kindergarten. My son asks:
"Mother, do you know what you should do when you feel really bad?"
"No."
"You should spread it as wide as possible."
"That sounds interesting."
"Yes, that is what Calvin says we should do."

If you ever have children buy them Legos and read them Calvin and Hobbes. Intelligent children are fun when they are small and a challenge when they grow up. When grown-up they make choices that inevitably make you wonder if they use their intelligence reasonably.

I do not mean that we should be overly rational all the time. I mean that it is extremely easy to seriously mess up one´s life for short-term benefits. Life will offer much more than we first believe possible. Being intelligent, obstinate and in a hurry can result in an accumulation of unnecessary life burden.

Little children think clearly. I do not know what my children were doing. I just overheard them: "There you have a problem." my son states in amatter-of-fact way.
"How are you going to solve it?" he asks.
"With rhetoric and reason." my daughter says without the slightest hesitation.

Her method is perfect. The only problem is that there are people who are not reachable either by means of rhetoric or by reason. God save us from them. May he keep them just rare anomalies that do not disturb what is normal.

Bill Watterson´s imagination came to my mind when I read Three Bags Full by Leonie Swann
(Finnish edition Murha laitumella). Maybe you should not read how the book has been presented. I knew practically nothing about it beforehand. It had never occured to me that the sheep really must have an eye on us human beings. If they didn´t, they would not get along in life.

In Spain my friends have sheep that are taken care of by a couple of shepherds. In Scotland I have seen sheep taken care of by dogs only. I know a sheep shearer from New Zealand. So far we are not personal friends, but maybe one day. He is a very entertaining and highly appreciated organisational trainer. Perhaps, his skill to share information and experience with his audience has its origins in the intelligence and imagination of the sheep he has shorn.

As sheep seem to smuggle their way into this text it is well worth mentioning a book I read in winter. It is Bulibasha King of the Gypsies by Witi Ihimaera (ISBN: 0-14-025432-3). It is an introduction to a world you may never have known to exist.

Life is more or less the same anywhere where people live - and anyhow - there are differences that make a difference. And there are people who are able to describe those differences to us. It is luxury, especially if you think what ambitious writing means in practice. I just finished reading El mundo by Juan José Millas (ISBN:978-84-08-07596-7).

He says "... escritura abre y cauteriza al mismo tiempo las heridas." Writing simultaneuously opens and heals wounds.

Millas also describes how he as a child, by chance, found out what happens to people when they have died:

"Los muertos vivían en otro barrio, pues. Había un barrio ocupado por ellos." ... "Las calles, en aquel lugar, estaban empedradas (en mi barrio, la mayoría eran de tierra) y los edificios, altos y distinguidos, tenían en sus bajos tiendas cuyos escaparates no podías dejar de mirar." There was a district in his town - Madrid - where the dead people lived. It was almost like the district where Millás himself lived, but not exactly.

The secret of rich and luxurious life is hidden into the concept "exactly alike, just a little different."

The origin of the differences that make a difference lies somewhere outside ´you´. You need somebody else to mark out the differences that make a difference. Having been marked, we tend to think that it was me who found it. It is just that shared experiences become our personal experiences and what are you able to own if not your experiences...

Writing is solitary work. People who read lead a priviledged life. They are never lonely, for instance.

We all are lucky to have so many words that can be combined in so many ways to point out so many slight differences that may construct new experiences.

At eleven-thirty I had to put on the lights. Nights are getting dark again. So far the summer has been cold, but beautiful. This is quite normal, athough we would prefer having some hot weather sometime, too. Not for too long, just the normal 11 days a year. So far we have had just two of them.

If you live in Madrid, just look around to see whether your barrio es un barrio de los vivos o de los muertos. The difference might be a bit difficult to detect at the first sight, but I´m sure you´ll learn to pick up the real differences that make a difference.

Where does God´s Home End?

"World never comes to an end - if it comes, it will end on the very point where God´s home starts, just exactly at the fence."

World has not come to an end. In the forests blue flowers (hepatica triloba) came out first, after them the white ones (wood sorrel, oxalis acetocella and may lily, mianthemum bifolium) and then the yellow ones (buttercup, ranunculaceae). They went quickly by, as they usually do. If you do not go into forests a couple of times weekly, the next opportunity to see them will be next year.

I told my daughter that the apple trees will soon have blossomed. "Why didn´t you tell me before. I would have liked to see them."

The Finnish spring-summer goes rushing by. To me it is the most enjoyable time of the year. You know that every tomorrow will be longer than today - until Midsummer.

Days, nights, apple trees and Midsummer roses have followed their yearly routines. Bees haven´t. It was strange not to hear them humming in the blossoming apple trees. It was cold, but the Midsummer roses which come out a couple of weeks later were equally quiet. I thought it was warm enough for bees to be seen and heard then. I was worried.

Being in a hurry it is easy to forget that Nature is not just stimuli to our eyes. It is something that smells, tastes, bites, tickles and makes noises. If any one of those chracteristics is missing, we need to stop to think. Somebody has said that if bees disappear, human beings will follow in four years´time.

Bees have built a hive somewhere inside the wall above my front door. Going out I stop listening if they send any messages. Today nothing was to be heard. It is evening, about nine o´clock. My kitchen faces to the north. Just now it is sunlit, which only happens around Midsummer. Bees are still working busily in the garden. It is their normal life at this time of the year.

Swedish historian Peter Englund has written essays The History of Silence (original title Tystnadens historia och andra assäer, Finnish translation Hiljaisuuden historia, ISBN: 951-0-29417-9). I wish I could more often find books like that.

I remembered the book while mowing the lawn and taking up the wildest weeds. Some time ago I heard that the gardens around the typical Finnish 1950´s-houses need not be overly decorated. That was not done in the fifties. The after-war generation worked hard to get the country properly going on. They had no extra time to spend in the garden. Neither could they afford buying all possible plants that we now get from Holland and elsewhere. Apples, currants, raspberies and gooseberrie grew in their gardens without needing any special attention. Potatoes, carrots, dill and radish were grown and they had to be properly taken care of.

Now people can choose between ambitious gardening or just having a lawn. My choice is just the lawn - and I know the British would not call it any proper lawn. It is just a wild, green collection of grass, clover and dandelions.

Rain was starting to fall. First came the individual drops. I could hear how they met the foliage of the old apple trees. It was as if they had been whispering some secrets to them.

Peter Englund starts his book: "I have heard it snowing." "Olen kuullut lumen satavan."

I heard one rain drop, then another one, and that one followed by a couple of more...

Peter Englund reminds us that in the old days wind, rain and birds singing were not just insignificant background noises. They carried messages that needed interpretation. Southern winds brought illness; northern winds intensified depression and made people feel hungry; heavy, icy winds after the 6th of December promised good harvest; if the heavy, icy winds started blowing on a Christmas Eve, the king was going to die.

In those days wind was not listened to because of the noise it made. It was listened to because it had something to say. The same applies to the bees and Midsummer roses today. If you do not hear bees and other insects in and among their flowers, the silence has something to say.

I have been writing about expertise, knowledge and power lately. The topic needs to be crumbled. Otherwise it is too heavy. It needs to be decorated with stories and anecdotes. Often the stories about power are stories about force and cruelty. I have read some history.

Jaan Kross a remarkable Estonian writer. He writes about Estonia during and after the second world war, as well as about his own experiences in the Russian concentration camps in Siberia. The texts have been published between 1984 - 1998. If you ever get hold of them, you have seen a jaguar in the jungle. In other words, having read them your world will have changed. The name of the Finnish collection is Halleluja (ISBN: 951-0-25615-3). I sincerely hope that the collection has been translated into English as well.

Sometimes we go on asking though the answers have already been given. Guido Knopp has written a book called Hitlers Kinder (Hitlerin lapset ISBN: 951-20-7013-8). We often emphasize that everyone has a choice. Having read Hitlers Kinder you might feel tempted to reconsider what you think of the choices in Germany in the 1930´s.

One more deep dive into the history has been King Leopold´s Ghost by Adam Hochschildt (Kuningas Leopoldin haamu, ISBN: 951-31-2850-4). Visiting the Heart of Darkness is more than unpleasant. The only thing giving us some hope is that among us there are always one or two individuals who are brave enough to find out what is really taking place. In the very beginning there may be only one person who is ready to fight to find out the truth.

Peter Englund writes about heroism. Real heroes face death and they risk their own life for others. However, our willingness to find heroes makes the majority of us blind and lazy. History proves that many heroes have been authentic rascals and evildoers.

Why do we learn that just afterwards? It is because of power. Real power is the power to define where God´s home is and what its fence is made of.

Post script If you have read The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, you know what ´the fence´ refers to. The reference to the end of the world and God´s home I owe to seven-year-old Rasmus.