#85: What makes such a place eerie?
Happy Friday!
And greetings from Athens. As you can see from the photo, a 5k run, even at 9am, leaves me looking distinctly warm. It's been 35 degrees in the afternoons. Not that I'd know it - I've been buried in air-conditioned work mode since I got here.
Too many things have happened in the last week, so I can only keep this short and refer you to further reading, should you desire.
I wrote a very practical piece about travelling from London to Greece via Paris, Milan and Brindisi with (but not by) a bike. Forthcoming is a slightly less practical piece about cycling the length of the Corinthian Gulf, and across the Saronic Gulf, to Athens.
Since being in Athens, I've been enjoying daily dérives to explore the local area. A dérive is an old Situationist trick to jolt us out of our usual habits of consumption in the urban environment.
Daily Dérive #1: Agios Panteleimonas ~ Exarcheia
Daily Dérive #2: The Museum of Parkaeology
Today's Dérive didn't result in any documentation, aside from the record of its existence on Strava. Mostly they terminate in a stop at the local falafel joint.
Work more or less dealt with for the time being, I'm looking forward to exploring more of the city this weekend...
Don't cycle over these.
>> INPUT
Anna Karenina, finished! I wrote something about the Meaning of Life as revealed in the last book.
Four swims in the Corinthian Gulf, punctuating an 85km cycling day.
Fresh fruit: apricots, grapes, taste like they're straight from the fields.
Daily choice of kalamakia or falafel.
A wheel-to-wheel and illuminatingly brief conversation with Ali, a Pakistani cycling to work in an oil refinery.
OUTPUT >> See above!
...COMING UP...
Hopefully some Greek lessons next week. It's very confusing being in a country where I can barely begin to communicate.
Frisbee with some refugees on the streets of Athens.
A World Cup final.
Cycle here.
Now On: The Victor Frankl 5-a-day Book Club!
Membership Criteria: Read 5 pages a day of Man's Search for Meaning to complete the whole darn text in only 28 days. I'll be tootling through the text at just 5 pages a week, so you've got plenty of time to catch up.
Day 11, p60-64
Today's pages start with the observation that, in the desperate fight for survival, the inmates could easily lose the feeling of being an individual with 'inner freedom and personal value'.
'He thought of himself then as only a part of an enormous mass of people; his existence descended to the level of animal life.'
Victor Frankl notices that the inmates started to behave like sheep, when herded from one place to another by the guards.
'[W]e, the sheep, thought of two things only - how to evade the bad dogs and how to get a little food. Just like sheep that crowd timidly into the centre of a herd, each of us tried to get into the middle of our formations.'
The crowd was protection. But constant submersion in the crowd is claustrophobic, and the prisoner also 'yearned for privacy and solitude'.
Frankl was lucky enough to be transported to a so-called 'rest camp', where he acted as doctor to a hutful of dying invalids. Here he could find solitude for five minutes at a time, squatting on the wooden lid to a shaft outside his hut.
'I just sat and looked out at the green flowering slopes and the distant blue hills of the Bavarian landscape, framed by the meshes of barbed wire.'
Perched on this lid, Frankl was able to help conceal three fellow prisoners in the shaft below, saving them from transportation to the death camp of Dachau.
The process of dehumanisation was complete. Prisoners had no documentation, only their barely living bodies and their identification number.
'One literally became a number: dead or alive - that was unimportant; the life of a "number" was completely irrelevant.'
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Share your thoughts by replying to this email. We will continue next week...
Much love,
- dc
CREDITS
David Charles wrote this. David is currently gallivanting around Europe and will be talking to refugees in Greece. He is also co-writer of BBC Radio sitcom Foiled, does copywriting for The Bike Project and is almost always available for work. davidcharles.info // @dcisbusy
Luminescent fruit. Via Kottke.org.