Let's talk books for a moment. I've been reading like a maniac recently, in a frantic attempt to repair the damage done by a half year's worth of book deprivation. Last week it was Vol de Nuit, which clumsily translates to something like Night Flight, by the late Antoine de St.-Exupéry. It's about the pioneers of the aerial post service in Argentina (no crying, if you please), attempting to co-ordinate nocturnal flights with propellor-planes before the invention of the radar and similar technologies which just might be crucial when flying over a rugged country through utter darkness, at least every night. It's a book about madness (or courage, I'll leave that to personal judgement) and sacrifice. The main character, surprisingly, does not spend even a heartbeat in a plane, but still manages to be a very heroical person, showing that you can be courageous and inspirational even without risking your life in the utter blackness that is stubborn stupidity (i.e. flying at night with literally no way of detecting a mountain apart from hitting it). The book is short, unsettling, dramatic and absolutely recommendable. If you can, try reading it in French. It's quite ridiculously easy reading for a French book.
I'd like to make a sidestep. In Vol de Nuit I believe to have detected a reference or just a similarity to the Weberian notion of Verwaltung; bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is, according to Weber, the ultimate expression of rationality in human affairs. It expands itself to cover all aspects of life in an attempt to rationalize and organize everything we humans do. In the Vol there is a scene in which the worried wife of a missing pilot goes to the office of the flight company to find out why her dearest husband, whom she had expected home four hours earlier (I can guess what she hoped to be doing at that time instead of showing up, distraught, at the office). She quickly finds herself in a hostile environment, especially because the boss man is a hard-liner who refuses to bow for her irrational and female nonsense. (One might say it's a real Christopher Nolan theme.) Having dragged myself through Marcuse (by which I mean that I've read a number of his essays) for some time I concluded that the bureaucratization-theme in De St.-Exupéry was about the conflict between Weberian rationality and, well... being human, being real, being small. The aforementioned Mr. Boss Man person puts it as a contrast between greatness and love.
Of course I'm taking the thought the wrong way, and a long way along that wrong way too. It's all Marcuses fault. His hyper-critisism got me back in my structuralist thinking. It's probably going to take weeks to get over this. And then again, since I'm in my 'sensitive period' it might just find a permanent spot in my heart. I can see myself being a cynical structuralist in thirty years, actually. Current book is a goat-buster by the Dutch Thomas Rosenboom. Probably done before June, although I might just switch to something less dreary.
That's all from me for today. Happy reading, or whatever.
Hugo Maat
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