Clarissa's Blog

Thanks to reading Chirbes’s diaries, I become more confident in my film criticism. He despised the movie Pan’s Labyrinth for the same reasons that I do. The movie has a cult-like following among pretty much the entirety of my colleagues, and showing it to students is almost obligatory. I almost died of boredom watching it and still haven’t fully recovered from its vulgarity, on the level of the plot, characters, imagery, and sound. This is exactly how Chirbes felt about this movie. I feel deeply vindicated.

I wanted to share a couple of pictures of what I see when I exit my house. This kind of greenery exists nowhere else in my neighborhood. This was completely my own vision. I love wild, crazy greenery that allows you to do something akin to forest bathing right on your porch.

The feeling of privacy is amazing. When I go out onto the porch, none of the neighbors can see me at all.

One of Rafael Chirbes’s greatest intellectual concerns was the suffering of Germans at the hands of the Allies in the closing years of World War II. I learned from him about the vast amount of literature, including memoirs and fiction, on this subject. I’m not entirely sure why this was of so much interest to him. Did he identify with the Germans because his own side, the Republicans, were the losers in the Spanish Civil War that they brought about?

I am not aware of any other non-German, Western intellectual who would be as profoundly devastated by the suffering of the Germans in World War II. Even if the issue is mentioned in passing, it never is articulated as the foundation of anybody’s worldview. Curiosly, Chirbes, whose French was at the near-native level, but whose German was rudimentary, read and thought very little about the suffering of the French during World War II. He loved French literature, of course, and read an enormous amount in the language, staying current on all of the recent award winners and bestsellers in France. But the writer’s interest in the devastation of World War II was mostly concentrated on Germany.

The entire issue of immigration hinges on one’s reaction to the following news item:

You either believe that violence and beheadings in Haiti and Syria are a disembodied force that occurs in those geographic areas without any human involvement, or you believe that people who are violent in those places will be violent in any other places. The authors of the AP article clearly think the former. The SCOTUS decision recognizes the latter.

To be a citizen of the world, a being without tribe, homeland, or God, is to be unprotected labor up for grabs.

Rafael Chirbes, Diarios

I’m 1,200 pages into the diaries, and it’s become clear that few things annoyed Chirbes as much as the concept of cosmopolitan citizens of the world. He knew that it was all one big scam.

Chirbes thought about nationalism a lot and deeply. He explains, for example, the differences between the Basque and the Catalonian nationalisms. The former, he explains, was a nationalism from below. Basque patriotism is that of regular people, peasants, workers. The Catalonian nationalism is the nationalism from above. It’s a favorite toy of the fancy people. The regional nationalisms of regular people, such as, for example, Chirbes’s native valenciano, were stamped out by the Catalonian nationalism of the wealthy bourgeoisie. 

In her book Little Soldiers, journalist Lenora Chu tells about a university professor in China who asks his students to put a paper bag over their heads and then gives them a minute to take off one object that they don’t need. The students take off all sorts of objects: eyeglasses, jewelry, shoes, etc. Almost none of them do the very first thing that occurred to me when I read about the experiment: take off the paper bag.

After conducting this experiment on thousands of students, the professor says that only three out of a hundred Chinese students respond to the prompt by removing the paper bag.

IQ is important, but other things vastly outweigh its importance.

I very sincerely don’t get this:

In the year 1900, the world population was 1.6 billion. This was during the industrial era, long before robots and AI did away with an enormous number of jobs. There was culture, civilization, people lived and loved, and everything was fine.

Why can’t we accept that the population going to 8 billion was a fluke, and now things are peacefully evening out to the actual norm?

In the 1870s, the population of the United States was about 40 million people. If the TFR remains exactly the same as it is today and there is zero immigration in 300 years, the population numbers will revert to what they were in the 1870s. That’s assuming that nothing changes, which is unlikely, but simply for the sake of the experiment, let’s accept these numbers. What is catastrophic about them? This is not people dying out because of famine or genocide. It’s a simple population correction. Completely natural, no violence involved. Where is the catastrophe? I think it’s harder to argue that the population should always be growing. In what concerns long-term trends, why isn’t it rather that the population explosion of the last century and a half was due to the unprecedented need for manual labor brought about by the Industrial Revolution? Now that the industrial revolution is long over and we are experiencing the digital revolution, why not assume that the population trends are simply correcting themselves back to normalcy?

I was a few years old yesterday when I found out that some people who are chronically late everywhere claim that they’re suffering from a disorder called “time blindness.”

Of all the snowflake-y behaviors, this is probably the worst one. Blind people have a serious physical disability that they cannot help. Being constantly late everywhere, on the other hand, is not a disability. It’s a character flaw.

I’m one of those people who are notoriously and hilariously early everywhere. My kid ribs me over this all the time. I never inflict myself early on people who invited me. I take walks until the agreed upon time.

It’s not that hard to avoid being a pest. All that is needed is a little bit of respect and concern for others.

I’m going around whispering under my breath, “Not my problem anymore, not my problem anymore. It’s nothing to me.” It’s very difficult to disconnect after six years of being in charge. I want to go away. It’s the right decision to go away. Intellectually and rationally, I’m extremely willing to go away, but the brain loves stasis.

I’m making enormous efforts of willpower to snap out of it.

I truly thought I’ve seen everything, but here is an article from the New York Times criticizing women for going out in public while pregnant and not trying to conceal their pregnancies. The article suggests that pregnant women should wear “the maternity muumuu.”

I vaguely remember reading that back in the 18th century, it was considered unfashionable to appear outside when you were pregnant because many people thought that was indecent. It’s… curious that we’ve gone a full circle and they’re now reverting to bashing women for daring not to make a huge secret of their pregnancies.

Coupled with yesterday’s win in the NYC Democrat primaries of a Haitian woman who recently converted to Islam and is wearing a burqa-type outfit, these developments point in a bad direction.

It will never quit being entertaining that women hiding in burqas and muumuus are the next frontier of women’s liberation.