Clarissa's Blog

And this is our sumptuous dinner at the castle:

After years of trips to Spain, I still haven’t figured out how to get fed around here. We’ve gone to great lengths to find food today, and failed abjectly.

It’s curious that shutting down the economy during COVID wasn’t supposed to hurt the economy. But calling cartels with a magic word can hurt the economy. 

Liberals just can’t move on from their belief that words remake reality. They are stuck on it, unable to notice that there’s actual reality and that it’s completely resistant to words.

Trump is already in the White House, and they still aren’t figuring things out. Their sincere confusion – “but we said he’s a Nazi! Why didn’t it make any difference? We said many times that Bidenomics worked and that Kamala had the perfect campaign. Why did nobody care?” – is painful to watch.

We are staying here on our way from Galicia:

I’m sorely saddened by Galicia, my friends. It offers a striking contrast with the Basque Country, Valencia, the parts of Portugal that are right across the border, and even the frequently upsetting Castilla León. It rains a lot in Galicia, which means that everything is covered in mold and smells like mold. But it also means fertile soils and lush greenery. The inhabitants, however, seem to have given up on maintaining the buildings, the streets, and the establishments in a passable state. Everything is blackened, falling apart, crumbling down, and looking sad and unloved.

This isn’t a failure of municipal or local authorities. The markings on the roads look extremely bright and fresh. The government is doing its job. It’s the people that have stopped trying. The number of extremely drunk people at noon on a Wednesday offers an explanation. We drew by a little town called Xinzo de Limia that has 1/3 of the population in my town back home. There’s nowhere to eat in Xinzo de Limia until 1 pm but there are more open and full bars in two little streets than we have in my entire home town.

There’s nothing like this wholesale devastation even in the most rural areas of the Spanish Basque Country. The French Basque Country is an absolute fairytale with its bright, freshly painted houses and clean, pretty front yards.

The people in Galicia are nice but helpless. The coffee is vastly inferior to everywhere else in Spain, let alone in Portugal. I’m not very knowledgeable about Galicia in particular but now I’m curious as to what is causing such a marked contrast with the rest of the country.

People are so out of it, it’s unbelievable.

Yes, he does care. Fetterman has developed a very recognizable brand with this outfit. He’s being consistent with his brand identity. Spectators might have missed him if it weren’t for the outfit. Instead of dissolving himself in the crowd as yet another no-name guy in a suit, Fetterman made himself the focus of attention by staying on brand.

This sweet, childish naiveté is actually quite upsetting to observe in adult people. I screenshotted one of a lineup of comments making the same clueless point.

Oh, you people are too smart for a riddle to stay mysterious for long. Yes, it rains a lot in Pontevedra, and those were umbrella locks:

Here’s a prize for the winners. A language school announcement:

I’m not sure why the “native teachers” didn’t explain that the expression sounds weird in their native English.

We saw these at the entrance to the local museum. Can you guess what they are?

How many people do you have who will stick around forever? No matter what happens, no matter how things shake out, these people will be exhaustively and constantly interested and present in your life. Not occasionally but daily. Bearing your burdens, witnessing your life, being your life. Knowing the texture of your daily existence until that existence reaches its end. How many?

I don’t think it’s a high number. A couple? Three? Maybe four if you are still young. Not a lot.

Marriage is the best way to get a person like that. And even better, to be a person like that for somebody. It’s such a relief, you know? You are done choosing, done making up your mind, done figuring it out. It’s a really great thing.

So if you need to get divorced, go for it. It’s completely up to you. The world is deeply indifferent.

But the next time maybe consider doing it the way I described. I mean, you’ve already tried the other way. It’s time for a different approach.

Think about it, is all I ask.

The Ise Shrine in Japan is a holy site of Shintoism. It’s 1,300 years old, and of course the UNESCO put it on its list of World Heritage Sites. But here’s a problem. The shrine isn’t 1,300 years old in any sense that we can understand. It gets purposefully destroyed and rebuilt every 20 years. That’s why the WEF loves the Ise Shrine. It’s very fluid, and they see it as a metaphor of everything they hold dear. UNESCO was horrified by what any Westerner perceives as a fake landmark and yanked the shrine off its list. Then there was a campaign to castigate UNESCO over this un-PC act but that part of the story is boring.

I’m writing this in the depths of the Old City in Spain’s Pontevedra. The old buildings, the ruins, the uneven centuries-old walls are magical because they are old. I can see the passage of time in them. They are cracked, ravaged, blackened, covered in moss. For me, they are original because they don’t look like they did when they were originally created. The changes made by age testify to the originality of the buildings. For the worshippers at Ise, on the other hand, the real way to preserve the original version of the shrine is to keep it looking as it did originally. And the only way to do that is to rebuild.

When I look at the old walls in Pontevedra, I am awed by the hidden essence I perceive in them. The feeling that the true nature of people and things is hidden in impenetrable depths marks me as belonging to the Western civilization. Once a year, the high priest of the Jews entered the Holy of Holies where the spirit of God would be present. Nobody else could go in, and the name of God was hidden from the faithful. Christians continued the tradition of looking for The Truth in enclosed spaces through their practice of cloistered religious orders. Today, the most atheistic of Westerners work hard to figure out their innermost authentic self that is hidden even from them. The Holy of Holies has migrated into the interiority of human beings but everything else about it remained the same.

In his 2011 book Shanzhai: The Art of Falsification and Deconstruction in China, Byung-Chul Han talks about the differences in how the culture of the Far East and the culture of the West perceive such notions as originality, authorship, and essence. It’s a short volume that I read in an hour but it’s very enlightening. We cannot spend too much time thinking about cultural differences and how profound they are.

Byung-Chul Han says, for example, that the notion of a contradiction isn’t an important one in Chinese thought. That’s why the Chinese copied the Western ideology of Communism and then combined it with the Western ideology of free markets that they also copied. Nothing original comes from China because that’s another concept that has no currency. Han is very optimistic for China, thinking that the sheer ebullience if its exercises in fakery will let it jump into democracy. Which will be yet another idea copied from the West.

Thanks to Shanzhai, I can stop wondering why there’s no original thought coming out of China. I now know: producing original thought is simply not a thing in Chinese culture. This is a great relief. If people are simply not into that, I get it.

A small neighborhood bookstore in Pontevedra shocked my sensibilities, and not in a good way. Books weren’t arranged by author’s name, genre, country, or language. They were strewn around in untidy, careless piles. There was no principle behind the arrangement unless there’s such a thing as principled messiness. It took effort to prevent myself from sorting them nicely.

Only an absolute maniac could find anything in that ungodly disarray. Thankfully, I am a maniac, and here is my haul:

Prepare yourselves, my friends. Five of these are not fiction, so we’ll be able to discover new ideas.

In the meantime, Russia is having another normal one: