Oh! Life is terrible. It rules us, we do not rule it. We went to see Lady Windermere's Fan by Oscar Wilde at the English Theater in Frankfurt (website not really up-to-date) last night. They had some financial problems recently which is not surprising considering that they solely live on sponsors and entrance fees and do not receive any public funding. Like Holzmann, the tumbling Frankfurt construction giant they somehow raised the funds but unlike Holzmann they used the money for something that pleased me a lot. A great performance of a great piece on a woman who succeeds in preventing her daughter from sharing the same unlucky fate as herself without telling her the truth.

The Best Meals of My Life (Joseph Duemer) "When I crack an egg I usually think of the French girl who lived downstairs in the boarding house where I endured the winter following my first marriage. She would never go to bed with me but showed me instead in her generosity how to slip my finger in a circle inside the two halves of a freshly broken egg shell to extract the last slick white to dribble it into the skillet. Her parents had lived through Nazi poverty & she lectured me—profligate & depraved—on thrift & virtue. Out of kindness she gave me instead of what I wanted meals of potatoes & eggs & that is the way, isn’t it, of virtue— to give not pleasure but what is necessary to sustain life: eggs & potatoes & salt over which it becomes possible to talk & even to think. Life of the body, life of the mind."

[Spud Songs, Helicon 9 Editions, 1999]

Joseph Duemer is also responsible for the excellent reflective weblog reading & writing and blogs about reading the Philosophical Investigations by Wittgenstein together with Christopher Robinson (via douze lunes). P.S. I feel a little guilty of posting a long poem which is not by myself but it could have been. Or to be less presumptuous it spoke of things I can relate to. About the preciousness of small things. I do the same with the white of the egg but I don't exactly remember from whom I learnt this. Probably from my parents I guess.