Forum 2000 Conference

Today Nobel laureates and distinguished civil leaders from around the globe convened at the Prague Crossroads - a deconsecrated church that now hosts a variety of cultural events - and discussed issues of human rights and democracy in Asia. Panelists included the Dalai Lama, three Nobel laureates, two former presidents, and a boatload of academics, dissidents, and dignitaries.

Due to a confluence of events (including an alarm clock failure and the twenty-minute boot-up of a Dell POS) my roommate and I were about an hour and a half late to the conference, so we missed the opening remarks. By the time we got there the Dalai Lama was making his last few comments before the moderator, my professor Jan Urban, brought the first panel to a close. Wine and cheese followed, during which I received an enthusiastic low-five from His Holiness (which made my semester/life).

The parts of the discussion that I did catch stressed, among other things, that education is a necessity (its absence is "a form of genocide"), that an active civil society is essential in a democracy (elections mean little on their own), and that continued dialogue especially with perceived enemies is key.

The conference was especially refreshing after reading the Communist Manifesto (I am now officially in college), which presses that the whole of enlightenment thinking is merely a "social and political constitution adapted to [the free market]," along with many other such ideas that feed and stimulate the mind's natural tendency toward cynicism. This conference relaxed that primitive and paranoid animal, and gave me hope and a will to participate at some point in "civil society," though I know that seems out of character.

Hot Murakami: Climb on in

Below is a passage from a Murakami book I read this spring. I picked it up and read this passage today in Anagram, an English language bookstore here in Prague, and resolved to share it.

---

I lifted my left hand and pressed on the light of my digital wristwatch. Two twenty-one. It was midnight when we headed underground, so only a little over two hours had passed. We continued walking down, down the narrow trench, mouths clamped tight.

I could no longer tell if my eyes were open or shut. The only thing impinging on my senses at this point was the echo of footsteps. The freakish terrain and air and darkness distorted what reached my ears. I tried to impose a verbal meaning on the sounds, bit they would not conform to any words I knew. It was an unfamiliar language, a string of tones and inflections that cold not be accommodated within the range of Japanese syllables. In French or German--or English perhaps--it might approximate this:

Even--through--be--shopped--degreed--well

Still, when I actually pronounced the words, they were far from the sounds of those footsteps. A more accurate transcription would have been:

Efgven--gthouv--bge--shpevg--egvele--wgevl

Finnish? Yet another gap in my linguistic abilities. If pressed to give meaning, I might have said something like, "A Farmer met the aged Devil on the road." Just my impression, of course.

I kept trying to puzzle together various words and phrases as I walked. I pictured her pink jogging shoes, right heel onto ground, center of gravity shifting to tiptoe, then just before lifting away, left heel onto ground. An endless repetition. Time was getting slower, the clock spring running down, the hands hardly advancing.

Efgven--gthouv--bge--shpevg--egvele--wgevl Efgven--gthouv--bge--shpevg--egvele--wgevl Efgven--gthouv--bge--

The aged Devil sat on a rock by the side of a Finnish country road. the Devil was ten thousand, maybe twenty thousand years old, and very tired. He was covered in dust. His whiskers were wilting. Whither be ye gang in sich 'aste? the Devil called out to a Farmer. Done broke me ploughshare and must to fixe it, the Farmer replied. Not to hurrie, said the Devil, the sunne still playes o'er head on highe, whyfore be ye scurrying? Sit ye down and 'eare m' tale. The Farmer knew no good could come of passing time with the Devil, but seeing him so utterly haggard, the Farmer--

Something struck my cheek. Something flat, fleshy, not too hard. But what? I tried to think, and it struck my cheek again. I raised my hand to brush it away, to no avail. An unpleasant glare was swimming in my face. I opened my eyes, which until then I hadn't even noticed were closed. It was her flashlight on me, her hand slapping me.

"Stop it," I shouted. "It's too bright. It hurts."

"You can't fall asleep here like this! Get up! Get up!" she screamed back.

"Get up? What are you talking about?"

I switched on my flashlight and shone it around me. I was on the ground, back against a wall, dripping wet. I had dozed off without knowing it.

I slowly raised myself to my feet.

"What happened? One minute I'm keeping pace, the next I'm asleep. I have no recollection of sitting down or going to sleep."

"That's the trap," she said. "They'll do anything to make us fall asleep."

"They?"

"Whoever or whatever it is that lives in this mountain. Gods, evil spirits, I don't know--them. They set up interference."

I shook my head.

"Everything got so hazy. Your shoes were making those sounds and..."

"My shoes?"

I told her about Finnish footsteps. The old Devil. The Farmer--

"That was all a trick," she broke in. "Hypnosis. If I hadn't looked back, you probably would have slept there for... for ages."

"Ages?"

"Yes, that's right. You'd have been a goner," she intoned. Too far gone for what, she didn't say. "You have rope in the knapsack, don't you?"

--From Haruki Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World