“Wenn ich Zeuge werde, wie der Bundespräsident seinen geprüften Ernst den getauften Kameras anvertraut, spüre ich, dass mein Innenleben ungetauft heissen muss. Verglichen mit den Pflegern der Sagbarkeit komme ich mir unvorzeigbar vor. Mein Selbstgespräch macht mich auch mir selbst verdächtig. Das verdanke ich den edlen Bemühungen derer, die jeweils wissen, was das Richtige ist.”
Martin Walser, NZZ Nr. 300/2000

REFLECTIONS, COMMENTS, NOTES

Internet Related
The Internet, in a nutshell, is one big cry for company. Lonely scrapbooks, ancient pics, stale memories, embellished resumés. A frantic attempt to be heard and seen. To fight temporality. To get warmth and love.

The Internet has a lot to offer. But, sadly, it is also a place where people hide from the real world. Some cybernauts out there are perfectly happy as long as they don’t have to communicate face to face with their email pals. It’s a hard word, but to me they are cyber trash: too old, too fat, too ugly; damaged, desolate, dejected; frigid, autistic or otherwise unfit for a real and durable relationship.
A sorry zoo of losers.

Emailing is a very deficient and incomplete form of communication; the facial expressions, the eye contact, the body language, the chemistry – everything important is missing.
“One doesn’t see the sad face.” (Mary)

With the help of the Internet one can feel lonelier in one’s own four walls than on a mountain top.

Are there only damaged people out there? Am I like them? Am I cyber trash?
Maybe the “normal” people are the ones who don’t use the Internet. Like some of my friends.
But, let’s face it, the Unabomber wasn’t so normal either.

Using chat forums seems crazy to me – one is talking to people who choose to be invisible. They must have lots to hide.

Homepages are like books in the bookstore: Enormous effort goes into them, but one loses interest after reading the cover text.

Cops who post fake ads on flirt sites and surf the net all day long on my tax money to find God knows what annoy me. As if there weren’t enough thugs and thieves at large out there. People who beat you up and steal your purse when you take a walk in your home town.

Some say the Internet is outrageously prurient. I think it is unbelievably puritanical. Pubescent, so to speak.
The very fact that it is teeming with sexually explicit content is a sign of this. It shows what a frustrated and frigid world we live in today. To what extent genuine sensuality has gotten lost in our lives. How subdued we are.

Quotations
She: “If I was your wife, I would put poison in your coffee.” He: “If I was your husband, I would drink it.”

“Es ist das Bedürfnis zu glauben, das den Menschen immer wieder zur Gewalt verführt, doch ohne Glaube geht es auch nicht.”
Andreas Breitenstein (Rezension von Gustaw Herlings Gulag-Bericht [NZZ Nr. 34/2001])

“Pain and boredom are the two polarities between which our life oscillates; the better we manage to avoid the former, the closer we get to the latter, and vice versa.”
Arthur Schopenhauer, Aphorismen zur Lebensweisheit

“Someone who feels that he has hurt us will never forgive us.”
Paul Rée

“Does your husband have a girl friend?” “No. But it would do him good to have one.”
Irish women! (The best.)

“Every man should get rid of his woman when she is old and no good anymore.”
An Irish woman ...

“The ideal age difference in my view is 40+ years; so my ideal mate is currently about 8 years old ... What the hell do I do in the meantime?”
P. O.

USA / Europe
The EU is an artificial, anti-democratic, statist and ephemeral construct. It is doomed to failure in my view, like the Soviet Union, like Yugoslavia, because the will to form one nation is missing among its member states. (But plenty of historical resentment is there.)
That will – the collective desire of the immigrants to create a nation (and a better one at that than the one they had left behind) – has made America big. One language, one spirit, one people. And the absence of that will is going to crush the illusion of a unified Europe before long. (And if that will disappears in the United States, for whatever reasons, it will go down too.)
America adopts all the wrong things from Europe; we Europeans rave about all the wrong things from America. This way we will eventually reach the worst of both worlds.
The EU is nearly there already ...

Switzerland has had 700 years of independence, peace and prosperity. One has to be a giant size moron to opt out of this in order to join that disparate club of ex-enemies called “EU”.