The Metropolis

If during the touch down at Trude I hadn't read the name of the city written in nice big letters I would have thought that I'd arrived at the very same airport from which I'd taken off. The suburbs they made me cross were no different from those other ones: the same houses, yellowish and slightly green. I followed the same arrows, I drove round the same flowerbeds in the very same piazzas. On display in the streets in the centre were goods, packages, signs that didn't change, not even slightly. This was the first time I had come to Trude, but already I knew the hotel in which I happened to be staying; I'd already gone through my dialogue with the ironmongers; other days, exactly the same as this one, had ended with me looking through the same tumblers at the very same undulating navels.

Why come here to Trude? I asked myself. And already I wanted to leave.

You can resume your flight whenever you please, they told me. But you'll arrive at another Trude, exactly similar to this one in all its particulars. The world has been covered over by a single Trude that neither starts nor stops. The name that's shown at the airport is the only thing that will change.

(Italo Calvino: Trude, from Le città invisibili)

Driving II

On the motorway what matters isn't being but moving. At a reasonable distance you can talk about being at Pescara even if you're not there, because that's where you're going. For a body in continuous motion direction is more important than any particular point that won't be there moments later [...] On the motorway life is motion: continuous, constant, without interruption.

[...]

When driving along the motorway you can still do lots of things. Listen to music, speak on the phone, think, sing, drink. You can give yourself a scratch. [...] What you can't do is raise your legs onto the seat and knot them into the lotus position. You can't read a book or watch television. Or sleep. You can't maintain your gaze in another direction that isn't straight ahead.

(Carlo Lucarelli: Un giorno dopo l'altro)

Power and Opposition

The consecration of power must not carry greater weight for us than the halo of irreducible opposition.

(Cornelius Castoriadis)

Lenin on Social Constructivism, according to Dunayevskaya

‘Man's cognition not only reflects the objective world but creates it.’

(Lenin on Hegel’s Science of Logic, according to Raya Dunayevskaya, 1987)

Safe as the Bank of England

'The owners of capital will incite the working class to buy more and more costly goods, more houses and items of technology, pushing them to take out more and more lines of credit until the burden of debt becomes unsustainable. The outstanding debt will lead to the bankruptcy of the banks, which will then have to be nationalised, and the State will be forced to undertake a journey that will lead, eventually, to Communism.'

(Karl Marx, supposedly in 1867, though it's probably an urban myth, as quoted by Marco Niada, retiring correspondent of Sole 24 ore, at a farewell dinner held in his honour in the City, presided over by the Italian Ambassador to London and attended by a number of Italian bankers, 3 February 2009)

Secrets

David Miliband, the UK Foreign Secretary, is of course perfectly right. Friendship requires confidence, trust. Lots of cuddles and warmth. And little bits of torture here and there.

When we were at school together, I and another friend brought Carol Thatcher to see David Miliband. She had been a friend too until she'd offended him in some way. Anyway, we held her down whilst David stamped on her hands. Naturally we felt badly about this afterwards, although our consciences were clear since only David had done the stamping.

And so time passed, as it always does...

One year at the school reunion I said to him, 'David, don't you think you behaved rather badly, stamping on Carol's hands?'

'What do you mean?' he replied. 'I only held her down along with you. It was Hassan who stamped on her hands.' And, of course, he was right. I remembered that after he said it.

A short time later, we were all sitting together in the green room of a well known TV company when we overheard Carol Thatcher saying in her inimitably loud and rather vulgar way, 'You know three of them attacked me after school and took turns to stamp on my hands.' And, obviously, after a breach of trust like that, no friendship can survive. So we dropped her. And, in addition, we sued her for defamation.

Well eventually the case did get to Court where it was heard before Jonathan Ross LJ, a Law Lord of some note. In his rather testy summing up, Ross stated:

'I am unable to try this case. The plaintiffs have hidden the evidence. I find it intolerable that any Court should be put under this kind of pressure.'

Tonight David and I are going round to Ross's house. We are going to stamp on his hands.

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The Soviet agent and Keeper of the Queen's Pictures, Anthony Blunt, famously defended himself with E M Forster's observation that it was better to betray one's country than to betray one's friends.

David Miliband has adapted this principle. It is, in his view, better first to go along with torture in secret and then to go against international law than to go against whichever friendly country carries out these acts.

Technology

'Technology is a way of so arranging the world that we do not have to experience it.' (Max Frisch)

'The lift is a machine for ignoring one's co-tenants. The car for ignoring people who go by tram. The telephone for not looking people in the face or going into their houses.' (Don Lorenzo Malini: Lettera ad una professoressa)