Monday 6 February 2017

books that changed our lives



Chi

Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

At 15, I read a book called Into the Wild that changed my life in subtle but ultimately profound ways. It chronicles the true story of a young man who, disillusioned with what he perceived as a hypocritical, materialistic society, burned all his money and walked alone into the wild. When I first read Into the Wild, it sounded like a manual for living. Now, with a few more years of wisdom behind me, I've realised that humans are not that simple. If anything, I think that McCandless' story illuminated the complicated nature of life and living. He was one man searching for the right way to live when there really isn’t any ‘right’ way at all.



Off-hand Things I’ve Said That McCandless Has Actually Lived:
  • Fuck the Man
  • Fuck capitalism
  • Money is evil
  • Live minimally
  • Live off the fatta the lan' (DO IT FOR LENNIE SMALL)
McCandless took personal integrity to its logical extreme, which fascinated me. Just as Holden Caulfield railed against ‘phoniness’, McCandless’ thing was hypocrisy. He couldn’t abide hypocrisy, especially in his own parents, and this was a crime for which they were judged and punished much more harshly than they ever deserved. I think now that McCandless’ definition of hypocrisy is what other people call compromise. McCandless himself was forced to compromise throughout his journey, working at McDonald’s for a while to rustle up some funds before continuing on his great quest. In the most telling moment of the story, he had an epiphany, scribbling ‘Happiness Only Real When Shared’ in the margins of a Tolstoy as he lay alone in an abandoned bus in the backwoods of Alaska. Going solo like McCandless did and rejecting society is romantic, but it’s fiction. It’s romantic fiction because love and companionship are at the core of the human experience. McCandless was a natural at that – he had a big heart and made a lasting impression on those he met on the road – but he pushed away intimacy in search of purity.

McCandless made mistakes. That he was a real person who perished too soon is a tragedy. But in the end, it was his idealism that impressed me (and other fans of the book) the most. In a world where many of our thoughts and actions are driven by unconscious acceptance of the status quo, it’s refreshing when somebody takes a step back, analyses their lifestyle and bravely decides to follow their heart. What I admire about ‘crazy’ Chris McCandless is his drive to live a pure life as closely aligned as possible with his personal values. It was this book that helped me unearth the values I hold, on which I try to base all of actions today as a 21-year-old human bean.


Elena 

Harry Potter by J. K. Rowling

I find it difficult to pinpoint a single book. As a child, I was always so jealous of my older sister because she knew how to read and I didn’t. When I finally learned to read by myself, I began devouring the Aussie Nibbles books at lunch, steadily working my way up to Aussie Bites and finally to Chomps. But I still wasn’t satisfied.

And then, Harry Potter entered my life. I was in Year 1 or 2 when my sister started to read them aloud to me. It was a daily event for which she would prepare in advance, perfecting dramatic pauses and refining character voices. At the time, the Goblet of Fire was the most recent instalment. I still remember the moment it dawned on me that Voldemort was truly back – coldness entered my heart and I had to remind myself that it was just a book.

But it wasn’t just a book. It was an entire world, rich with character and colour. Turning the pages was like stepping into my second home. Rowling’s prose grew to be so familiar to me that it was like listening to an old friend in my head. The first few times I read the series I loved it for the humour, characters and the fantasy. By the time the Deathly Hallows came out, I was 11, and I began to see the connections between Harry Potter and the outside world. The shrill reporting of the Daily Prophet was echoed in the Courier Mail. The ostracisation of Remus Lupin upon the discovery of his werewolf status was linked to real-world bullying and bigotry. As I re-read the series in high school I had great fun linking Voldemort’s aspirations to Hitler’s in my modern history class. Each time I read the series, I’ll notice a new jab at our current political and social welfare systems effortlessly stitched into the seams of its magical world.

These books began my true love of reading, which in turn led me to perform well in English at school and discover other great books. Life without Harry would most definitely have been a lesser one. An honourable mention has to go to Looking For Alibrandi by Melina Marchetta – protagonist Josephine Alibrandi is a 17-year-old Italian-Australian living in Melbourne, and her voice perfectly captured my conflicting pride and angst (oh, so much angst) of growing up as a migrant in Australia. If I were to make a Horcrux out of a book it would be this one.


Haerim

The Bible

When I was going through my roughest time I listened to a song by Taya Smith called Gracious Tempest. Before she started singing, she read out a passage from the Bible – Psalms 116 – which reads,

I love the Lord, for he heard my voice;
    he heard my cry for mercy.
2 Because he turned his ear to me,
    I will call on him as long as I live.
3 The cords of death entangled me,
    the anguish of the grave came over me;
    I was overcome by distress and sorrow.
4 Then I called on the name of the Lord:
    “Lord, save me!”
5 The Lord is gracious and righteous;
    our God is full of compassion.
6 The Lord protects the unwary;
    when I was brought low, he saved me.
7 Return to your rest, my soul,
    for the Lord has been good to you.
8 For you, Lord, have delivered me from death,
    my eyes from tears,
    my feet from stumbling,
9 that I may walk before the Lord
    in the land of the living.

I started crying on the bus – I was so thankful that God had stayed with me the entire time. Even the best of our friends can't understand what we're going through, even when they're right there witnessing all of it. But this doesn't mean that our individual struggles aren’t legitimate. Likewise, faith is incomprehensible, because it's different for everyone. A boy forgiving his drunkard of a father, or a girl forgiving her cheating boyfriend, or a mother forgiving her rapist child – none of it's logical, but love and faith isn't about logic. And yes, there are absolutely horrible things in the Old Testament before Jesus comes; but you can’t pick out how violent the father was to his son, or how badly the boyfriend cheated the girl, or how deceitful the child was to his mother and say that’s the whole story. God allowed the Old Testament to be maintained throughout history to serve as a backdrop of what faith is: salvation through the forgiveness of Christ.

I guess, to be concise, the Bible taught me that God gives to the undeserving. And when you know that you've received forgiveness and the opportunity to start a new life, you just can't live the same way ever again. There have been many verses, but this was the first one that was personal. At first it all sounds like it's about someone else out there in the world … until you realise you've always been and always will be included in the story.

Kobi

Zigzag Street by Nick Earls

I have a very short attention span. If things are going to change my life, they better get to it within the first three pages. That said, Zigzag Street isn’t a particularly fast-moving story. It isn’t even a particularly moving story. There is just something a little too relatable about Richard Derrington, a twenty-something year old corporate lawyer who is feeling crap after being dumped by his long-term girlfriend, and his relentless parade of dysfunction. I first read Zigzag Street in high school when I still had braces and didn’t really know what being dumped felt like. I have since re-read the book a number of times. A particularly poignant re-read occurred when I moved back to Melbourne after being dumped by a long-term partner; I was suddenly Rick. Earls lets us into Rick’s post-relationship head in present tense, first person, which is a huge asset in being able to relate to the lead character. Zigzag Street has been my escape to Brisbane during times of homesickness and self doubt. On my bookshelf, it serves as a neat reminder that I’m not the only sub-par adult out there.

Sunday 29 January 2017

love letter to vienna

by Chi

Vienna has topped the Mercer Quality of Living Survey seven years in a row. That means it’s officially one of the most livable cities in the world, taking into account factors such as the political, social and economic climates, medical care, education, infrastructure and environmental conditions. I was blessed enough to be able to spend a semester abroad there, straddling the divide between 'Western' and 'Eastern' Europe, from January to June 2016. Slowly, over the course of those six months, the majestic old city grew on me. Some nights when I close my eyes I see those imperial snow-white buildings on the back of my eyelids and I realise that, despite my exchange-student loneliness and alienation, I miss Vienna. Where some people found boredom, I found Gemütlichkeit – a sense of cosiness and leisureliness that perfectly defines the city.




Dear Vienna,

You gave me some pretty bad neck cramps during those first few weeks. I couldn’t stop craning to look at all your grand imperial buildings, and when I laid eyes upon the one that was meant to be my host university, I thought you were pulling my leg. I didn’t realise I’d be studying in a palace. I can’t get over the mix of ornateness and warmth that’s present in your Jugendstil architecture and your ubiquitous churches – some Gothic, some baroque, all of them beautiful.

Your citizens fit elegantly into this landscape like pieces in a puzzle. Vienna, I appreciate your old men in their wool vests and old-man hats and your old ladies with canes and big coats. I didn’t see a single pair of thongs for months. When I wore mine out to the supermarket one warm day, they flapped obscenely on the pavement. In a way, it made me feel more conspicuously Australian (or maybe just bogan), though I did feel like a piece of home was on my feet. People here are demure, and the animals too. Unlike in Australia, dogs accompany their humans into restaurants, cafés and banks. They even come along to work because “8 hours at home alone is way too long”, according to my Austrian friend. There is a palpable sense of serenity and contentment in the way people stroll companionably beside their pets along riverbanks and through parks.

People who prefer the chaos of Berlin (graffiti-splattered, techno-music-pumping, full of counterculture types) might be put off by you. Vienna, to me you’re calming. I love the dignified charm with which people do things and I love the way Viennese couples will get up and start waltzing or jiving to live music, which is the happy result of compulsory ballroom dancing classes in high school. You’re a city “lavish with civilities”, in the words of Leon Trotsky, who lived a life of “beautiful uselessness” in Vienna from 1907 to 1914.




Vienna, I take offence at how everything I wear is bound to absorb the stench of cigarette smoke. But Vienna, I appreciate how like a black-and-white film your coffeehouses look when people are huddled around circular tables, sipping on a Wiener Melange in between drags or hands of cards. I love the languid coffeehouse culture and the old-timey Heuriger (wine taverns). I love being surrounded by art and music, art that was considered avant garde at the turn of the century. Vienna, you taught me what Expressionist art was when you introduced me to that twisted young genius Egon Schiele, whose visceral self-portraits kept me holed up in the Leopold Museum for hours.




Vienna, I love how friendly you are to me late at night. There’s nothing more soothing than walking your clean, quiet streets after dark where the only thing I’m likely to be assaulted by is a squirrel leaping across the sidewalk, or phantom catcallers that my memory conjures up from walks past bus stops in Brisbane. Never real ones, though.

Vienna, I love it when you give me the D (Vitamin). The sunlight is like a shot to my veins sending fizzy thrills through my body. The first breath of summer draws me outside, envelopes every Austrian in a blanket of languor. People attribute the stereotypical grumpiness and pessimism of Austrians to the weather, particularly the bleakness of winter. It's true that when I arrived in March, sunny days were the exception rather than the rule. Rain in the city is this constant drizzle, neither like the sweet summer rain that we get at home nor the thundering deluge that pours down and leaves the world sparkling and renewed. No. Viennese rain greyscales everything and leaves the city soggy.

But, oh, when the sun comes out, there is a smile on everyone’s mind. It feels almost like a crime to stay indoors. We are little animals waking up again after a long hibernation, crawling out of our burrows and into the Eisdiele at Schwedenplatz (which remains closed during winter) for ice cream. We congregate along the Donaukanal on balmy summer nights, a sweating beer in hand, to watch the lights on the water, the graffiti on the belly of the footbridge and whatever broadcasted football game is playing behind the bar (Austria always loses, so the fans’ enthusiasm is instead channelled into hating Germany and supporting whatever team is playing Germany).

We freeze half to death trying to go swimming in the Dechantlacke (Dechant Lake) in early spring, because public pools aren’t open until May. It’s full of half melted ice that the sun hasn’t yet penetrated. We're also surprised by a nude man rollerblading casually down the path and discover that the Dechantlacke is one of the homes of Freikörperkultur (Free Body Culture). Mere weeks later, the sun’s fully come into her own and we get sunburnt doing yoga by the Danube. I feel a queer sense of joy when I look out my window one late spring day to see a blanket of vines draping the wall of the building next to my dorm – greenly, jungly. They were dead and withered when I first moved in.

To escape the confines of my shared room, I take walks around the neighbourhood and that always lifts my spirits. I’ll take my journal or history readings to a patch of grass in one of the cosy parks dotted throughout Vienna – to the quiet stateliness of the Stadtpark, with its gilded statue of Johann Strauss, or perhaps to the mind-boggling grandeur of Schloss Schönbrunn, which is fiery in autumn and absolutely beautiful in summer when the hedge mazes burst into greenery and the flowerbeds bloom. I love sitting on the hill that overlooks Schönbrunn. I could sit there for hours with a bottle of wine and be rewarded with the setting of the sun over the spread of the city at nine, ten pm.




Vienna, from the mouth of an Australian, I bloody love ya. But don’t take it personally because I think I would have loved any place that took me in, a clueless little exchange student who’s never known complete independence in her whole life, and spat me out much the same but different somehow. Vienna, you just happened to be my chosen city and you will always hold a special place in meinem Herz.

Postscripts:

Vienna is considered the epicentre of ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ Europe*. It benefited enormously from the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, becoming the gateway to ‘Eastern’ European countries that have historic ties to the former Austro-Hungarian empire.

For an interesting portrait of Habsburg-era Vienna on the eve of World War I, check out Thunder At Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914 by Frederic Morton – a social history that lavishly narrates the lives of characters such as Hitler, Stalin, Trotsky, Lenin, Freud, Jung, Tito and members of the Viennese court.

For way more magical pictures of Vienna than mine, stalk @natalie_wien on Instagram. Feeding my nostalgia one square at a time ...

* I put ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ in quotation marks because, despite being a useful geopolitical marker, there is some academic argument that the dichotomy is an artificial cultural construct that glorifies Western Europe. I love the professor who told me that, though I haven’t had time to read more about it.