April 2019 - Los Cuadernos de Julia

A Retired Easy-Rider

The English pensioners sometimes drive these motorised wheelchairs. They are quite expensive, so are more rarely seen compared to a usual wheelchair. This photo was taken in Stockport, England, but I recall narrowly avoiding a collision in Salford. I was slowly walking to a shop when suddenly I thought something was moving behind me. You know, a kind of a thriller movie scene when you feel someone breathing you in the neck. I looked across my shoulder and barely managed to jump to the left, to a fence of someone’s house. A typical English lady, complete with a pastel fleece zip jacket and permed lilac hair, confidently drove past me at a pretty high speed, without any warning. It took me time to come to terms with the fact that she nearly ran me over…

On the Eve of Easter

Repost @rujournalist #Пожар в Соборе Парижской Богоматери. #NotreDamedeParis

A Roman Bath Morning

Encircled by four-legged friends, it’s so tempting to stay in bed longer. But you still have to get up. Now, just about every visitor to this hall in the Louvre stops at this bath to admire it. I and a few tourists from Australia decided that we would happily accommodate this one at our houses. And so, the question: if indeed this bath were yours and you knew it was waiting for you, would it make you more eager to get up in the morning?

A Roman Hall at the Louvre Museum, Paris, France

Georgy Beregovoy – Spacе Begins on Earth

Extracts from the book by the Russian cosmonaut, the Hero of the Soviet Union Georgy Beregovoy “Space Begins on Earth” (translated from Russian by Julia Shuvalova).

“Aldrin is wrong, perhaps, on one point: the feeling of unity with mankind has nothing mystical about it. It is a natural consequence of man’s going out into Space where he has acutely realised that he innately belongs to Earth. The alien nature of Space makes people understand more deeply and clearly what these are – the Earth and its human inhabitants. Today mankind is no longer a mere mass of people who lived once or are living now; mankind is something that exists nowhere in the entire universe – except on Earth.

It has long been noted that a parasite consumes far more than someone who lives an active life, who is passionate about his work, interesting work. The parasite strives to fill the void of his existence with objects; they are the only things that preoccupy him. The one who leads an active life creates objects rather than consumes them. For him, things are not the end of it all; they are just the interior of life, and their sense lies in a man’s self-expression, in making use of whatever capabilities and opportunities he has got. These people usually give more to the world than take away from it.

The creative mind is great because it aims at what can be achieved and created, not what has been done. It strives to the future instead of sinking into the present.

The life of a man is but a particle of time; the life of mankind is an uninterrupted chain of these particles that to us is the image of Time itself. And just as it is impossible to either stop the time or to turn it back, so the mankind can only move forward. This is why the Space exploration is inevitable unless we want the mankind to disappear along with our, sadly, mortal planet. Earth is but a humanity’s cradle, in the words of Tsiolkovsky, and its real home is an infinite universe, not bound by either time, or space.

We simply have no choice… We may only choose the means to the goal, not the goal itself. And the goal of delving into Space and its exploration has been set by the very nature of rational life.

Each of us follows his own path to reach the goals of his epoch… I have always strived to do as much as I am capable of, and not less – and I hope to continue to do so! Yet even this skill is rather usual, in that anyone may acquire it, given the desire.

Of course, I didn’t want to waste my life on nonsense, I wanted to serve people. And for that, I knew well, I had to give my all, to live so that I had no energy left of what had been given to me.

In physics they say that when a system energy reaches its critical level, a threshold, it inevitably acquires a new, previously inexistant quality. So I, too, have eventually reached my critical threshold beyond which there lay the road to Space”.

Marc Chagall Fridge Magnet Arrives from Vitebsk

My students have recently been to Belarus, and before they left, I had asked them to bring me a souvenir: a fridge magnet from Vitebsk, possibly featuring Marc Chagall, one of the city’s best-known sons. So last week I received this truly wonderful present: it is an easel with Chagall’s portrait. The artist is posing with his own painting in the background. Needless to say, it is one of the unique fridge magnets in my collection.