Feb weather-strange

Strange February. Strange Feb weather. East they have been sunk by snow piles while West, here we are, today anyway, sunny while leaning towards gloves. It has been worryingly mild. Today il fait du soleil.  There have been plentiful and visible stars and a visit from Mars and Venus last Friday evening.

Two women with binoculars strapped to their eyes alerted me to the crescent moon with Mars and Venus on a visible day release. I’m grateful to them. It was bleary though my bi-focals, but Venus seemed pyramid shaped. The two women naturally insisted when complimented “We are only out here because we saw it on the news” but I fear they were too modest given they had binoculars and were easily able to identify the planets.

Sometimes your unknown neighbours can be so very favourable.

The Walk Robert Walser

I am greatly appreciating a reread of Robert Walser’s novel (novella) The Walk (translated by the wunderbar Susan Bernofsky and it really is an extraordinary translation).

Some snips from it:

“An unassuming pedestrian should not remain unrecorded”

The above particularly pertinent for psychotic Vancouver cyclists who refute any notion of stop signs, traffic lights and act like they are in fact operating a version of light transit rail that responds only to and unto themselves. A transit rail that drives only in a straight line to where it is they desire to get to, never mind the humans, cats and dogs that have to nervously go exist with the bicycle barons. Were matters not already intrepid for the plain pedestrian from the threat of the car, now they’ve an additional road runner to join it.

P21 “Often I wandered, to be sure, perplexed in a mist and in a thousand dilemmas, seeing myself vacillating and often wretchedly forsaken. Yet I believe that struggling for life can only be a fine thing. It is not with pleasures and with joys that an honest man might grow proud. Rather in the roots of his soul it can only be through trial bravely undergone, deprivation patiently endured, that he becomes proud and gay.”