Personality of the year 2015

In the Spanish fiction novel, Soldiers of Salamis, during his search for the details of an old incident from the times of the Spanish Civil War, the narrator tries to define what a hero is. He reached different definitions, according to all of them, and pretty much any other definition I ever heard or thought of, Khaled Al-Asaad, the 83-year-old Syrian archaeologist who first refused to flee the ancient city of Palmyra after it was lost to ISIS, then refused to reveal to ISIS militants the whereabouts of ancient artefacts that had been moved for safekeeping, and was tortured then beheaded publicly for that, is a true hero, and is the personality of the year 2015 for me.

In a world where people everywhere increasingly tend to sell their arses for a meager payrise or promotion, this man didn't find that even his life was big enough a prize for selling himself and what he believed in. He's dead anyway now; no award or accolade would do him any good, but it might make our world a little bit better by showing us all, particularly the younger ones among us who might still be able to change, that there might be something in life worth living and fighting for, and worth dying for.

You'd normally expect more media coverage; something to set an example to look up to, but it seems that there's a much bigger interest in headlines that sell and get web traffic than anything else, even from the highbrow media outlets, and the news about an 83 years old history professor hardly sells. Where a story takes place probably plays a part as well; an exact story happening somewhere like in France could've made a much bigger impact.

Personally, I find two particularly sad thoughts about this. The first is that even if his heroics got the recognition they deserve, it will make absolutely no difference whatsoever to him now that he ceases to exist and has no idea what happened later on. The second is whether his sacrifice was even worth it at all in today's increasingly idiotic world where a picture of a celebrity's bare ass breaks the Internet. It seems to me that his sacrifice in the grand scheme of things only helps Asian tourists take better selfies with authentic artefacts in the background. I honestly don't suppose Palmyra's history and culture play that big role in as many peoples' lives as we'd like to think, and in any case if somebody else knows where the artefacts are hidden, they will probably, under enough pressure and torture, give them away to be destroyed like the rest of the city or sell them at a high price, otherwise no one will be able to find them anytime soon. They'll most probably end up eventually in a museum somewhere shown to bored schoolboys and selfie-takers, glancing for a second at the plaques, completely unaware of the price paid for what's before their eyes.

Review: Down Under

Down Under by Bill Bryson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An enjoyable and informative read. Admittedly, I had known very little about Australia before I started reading this book so the book served as a good introduction and hence my 4-stars rating rather than 3. In comparison with "Notes From a Small Island" that I read some years back, I think it's much better. Possibly because of my prior ignorance. Despite my initial predisposition, there were some interesting historical events from many perspectives; Burke and Wills disastrous yet celebrated expeditions in the desert, celebrated bushrangers like Ned Kelly, the outrageous atrocities committed against the natives and how it had never been a concern for a long time, the Stolen Generations, the Gold Rush, Lambing Flat riots and White Australia Policy, the unappreciated tales of the aviator Kingsford Smith, Whitlam's Labor government of 1972 and how it was dissolved. I'll let my favorite highlights speak for themselves. They range between facts and jokes, and I hope they can tell you something you didn't know or raise an eyebrow (in case you're not that knowledgeable about this part of the world), or at least put a smile on your face:

- Eighty per cent of all that lives in Australia, plant and animal, exists nowhere else. 

- Of the sites that qualify for World Heritage status, only thirteen satisfy all four of UNESCO’s criteria for listing, and of these thirteen special places, four – almost a third – are to be found in Australia. 

- The country has less than 1 per cent of the world’s population but more than 20 per cent of its slot machines. 

- In the early days a commercial flight from London involved, in addition to nerves of steel, forty-two refuelling stops, up to five changes of aircraft and a train journey through Italy because Mussolini wouldn’t allow flights through Italian air space. It took twelve days. 

- No other nation lost more men as a proportion of population in the First World War than Australia ... The casualty rate for its soldiers was 65 per cent. And all were volunteers.’ 

- The Simpson Desert, an area bigger than some European countries, was named in 19321 after a manufacturer of washing machines. 

- Until 1949 there was no such thing as Australian citizenship. People born in Australia were not in any technical sense Australians at all but Britons – as British as if they were from Cornwall or Scotland. 

- The historian Alan Moorehead once wrote: ‘Australians of my generation grew up in a world apart. Until we went abroad we had never seen a beautiful building, hardly ever heard a foreign language spoken, or been to a well-acted play, or eaten a reasonably sophisticated meal, or listened to a good orchestra.’ 

- One thing you won’t find much in Australian second-hand bookshops are 1950s or earlier editions of lots of books – The Catcher in the Rye, A Farewell to Arms, Animal Farm, Peyton Place, Another Country, Brave New World and hundreds and hundreds of others. The reason for this is simple: they were banned. Altogether, at its peak, 5,000 titles were forbidden to be imported into the country.

- I should just note that in an Australian context ‘hotel’ can signify many things: a hotel, a pub, a hotel and pub – that stand on nearly every corner.(Something I personally found strange on my first few days in Australia)

- You do rather come away with two interlinked impressions – that Australians love to argue for argument’s sake and that basically they would rather just leave everything as it is. 

- During national referendums the citizens of the Northern Territory are also required to vote, but the votes don’t actually count towards anything. (I still need to check if that's still the case) 

- Had La Pérouse [the commander of a French expedition journey that reached Australia] been just a little faster, he could have claimed Australia for France and saved the country 200 years of English cooking. 

- In 1859 ... Thomas Austin... made a big mistake. He imported twenty-four wild rabbits from England and released them into the bush for sport. Within a couple of years they had entirely overrun Austin’s property and were spreading into neighbouring districts. Fifty million years of isolation had left Australia without a single predator or parasite able even to recognize rabbits, much less dine off them, and so they proliferated amazingly. 

On Convict Transportation: 

By the late eighteenth century Britain’s statute books were plump with capital offences; you could be hanged for any of 200 acts, including, notably, ‘impersonating an Egyptian’. In such circumstances, transportation was quite a merciful alternative. When they couldn’t fool their masters the prisoners could often fool their fellows. For years there existed an illicit commerce in which newly arrived convicts were sold maps showing them how to walk to China. 

On Sydney: 

- As late as 1953, there were just 800 hotel rooms in Syndey, barely enough for one medium-sized convention, and not a thing to do in the evenings; even the bars closed at 6 p.m. 

- In 1923, when the city burghers decided to throw a bridge across the harbour, they determined to build not just any bridge, but the longest single-arch span ever constructed... It took longer to construct than expected – almost ten years. Just before it was completed, in 1932, the Bayonne Bridge in New York quietly opened and was found to be 25 inches – 0.121 per cent – longer. 

- Lachlan Macquarie, a Scotsman who was governor of the colony in the first part of the nineteenth century, and whose principal achievements were the building of the Great Western Highway through the Blue Mountains, the popularizing of Australia as a name (before him the whole country was indifferently referred to as either New South Wales or Botany Bay) and the world’s first nearly successful attempt to name every object on a continent after himself. 

On Sydney Opera House: 

- The whole project had been intended to last no more than six years and construction in the end dragged on for almost a decade and a half. The final cost came in at a weighty $ 102 million, fourteen times the original estimate. 

On Canberra: 

- ‘I reckon if you were going to rank things for how much pleasure they give – you know? – Canberra would come somewhere below breaking your arm.’ 

- Lake Burley Griffin contains an engineering wonder (the wonder being why they bothered) called the Captain Cook Memorial Jet. 

On Cricket: - It is not true that the English invented cricket as a way of making all other human endeavours look interesting and lively; that was merely an unintended side effect... It is the only sport that incorporates meal breaks. It is the only sport that shares its name with an insect. It is the only sport in which spectators burn as many calories as players (more if they are moderately restless). It is the only competitive activity of any type, other than perhaps baking, in which you can dress in white from head to toe and be as clean at the end of the day as you were at the beginning. 

- I am quite certain that if the rest of the world vanished overnight and the development of cricket was left in Australian hands, within a generation the players would be wearing shorts and using the bats to hit each other. 

On Aborigines: 

- As recently as the early 1960s, as John Pilger notes, Queensland schools were using a textbook that likened Aborigines to ‘feral jungle creatures’. - In 1805, the acting judge-advocate for New South Wales... declared that Aborigines had not the discipline or mental capacity for courtroom proceedings; rather than plague the courts with their grievances, settlers were instructed to track down the offending natives and ‘inflict such punishment as they may merit’. 

On Alice Springs: 

- In 1954, when Alan Moorehead passed through, Alice’s only regular connection to the outside world was a weekly train from Adelaide. - Its arrival on Saturday evening was the biggest event in the life of the town. It brought mail, newspapers, new pictures for the cinema, long-awaited spare parts and whatever else couldn’t be acquired locally. Nearly the whole town turned out to see who got off and what was unloaded. 

On White Cliffs 

- ‘So when did you get electricity in White Cliffs?’ He thought for an instant. ‘Nineteen ninety-three.’ I thought I had misheard him. ‘When?’ ‘Just about five years ago. We have telly now, too,’ he added suddenly and enthusiastically. ‘Got that two years ago.’

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Review: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



The Unbearable Lightness of Being can serve as a perfect argument in making the case for why reading literature is worthwhile. With its immense richness, it can open one's understanding and appreciation of life to other dimensions. Heavy on philosophy and inner thoughts, interjections of characters' lives with side historical stories, old legends, and even classical music, the book is a profoundly absorbing and encompassing reading experience. A book about metaphors, burdens, lightness, vertigo, decisions, es muss sein's. About grand marches, bulrush baskets, bowler hats, half-buried crows, tombstones, misunderstanding, and whether or not the fifth repetition of human history would be less bloody.


Following the stories of four main characters against the backdrop of despotic Communist regime and the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, that heavily influenced even the events that took place elsewhere, the narration jumps back and forth in time from the different perspectives of characters using the voice of an omniscient narrator who repeatedly broke the fourth wall and directly addressed the reader. The story progress is slow as the main emphasis and attraction here is on the characters' depth and the reflections and philosophy surrounding each turning point, driving the main story calmly towards an ending where weightless and acceptance conquered lightness and rebellion, and even though Kundera gives away the ending of the main story less than halfway through (if it can be called an ending, as every single human eventually dies), the book never fails to impress in any way afterwards.


Naturally, a reader can relate to one character and storyline more than the rest, but all of them were thoroughly convincing. And while the inner thoughts of characters were all intriguing, the disillusion of many characters against communism as well as the endless revolutionaries was remarkable for me. At some point, one of characters, Sabina, expresses an important idea:

She would have liked to tell them that behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching by with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison. But she knew she would never be able to make them understand.

The narrator express a similar thought:

But the people who struggle against what we call totalitarian regimes cannot function with queries and doubts. They, too, need certainties and simple truths to make the multitudes understand, to provoke collective tears.

And I can't find in my recent memory a sadder, more poignant passage than this one, where peoples' lives after death are boiled down to a single statement or inscription that not just fails to describe them, but also misrepresents them altogether:

What remains of the dying population of Cambodia?
One large photograph of an American actress holding an Asian child in her arms.
What remains of Tomas?
An inscription reading: HE WANTED THE KINGDOM OF GOD ON EARTH.
What remains of Beethoven? A frown, an improbable mane, and a somber voice intoning "Es muss sein!"
What remains of Franz?
An inscription reading: A RETURN AFTER LONG WANDERINGS.
And so on and so forth.

A much recommended read, and for the first time I will be looking forward to the film adaptation. Adaptations of such huge works of literature are often disappointing, and the characters and sets are invariably different, even slightly, from what the reader pictured in mind, but I am interested in finding out how the filmmakers relayed the characters' inner thoughts, and looking forwards to the beautiful film locations in Prague and Geneva as well as the integration of Beethoven's symphony that weighed heavily over the entire book:
Beethoven- Op. 135 IV



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