Fieldnotes on Humanity

I usually don't watch TV or movie, if I do, I would prefer to watch documentary films. Recently, I watched  50 Children: The Rescue Mission of Mr. & Mrs. Kraus, by Steven Pressman, which is the story of Gilbert and Eleanor Kraus, a Jewish couple who, in 1939, decide to travel to Vienna to save the lives of 50 children. The couple are Jewish, but the mission that they take is not out of religious passion, it is rather a benign version of self-sacrifice and humane action, something that we now rarely hear or know. Their journey to the Austria, which is under the control of Nazi is not easy. They encounter numerous government bureaucracy and discouragement from people who afraid to have Jewish in their communities, event Jews - who afraid of increasing anti-semitism - tried to persuade the couple to give up on their plan. The couple eventually travel to Berlin and then to Vienna. There, the Kraus met with hundreds of families who are willing to send off their li...

Earlier in one of my blog pos ts, I translated a poem of Loiq Sher-Ali, one of Tajikistan's famous poets. Today, I was reminded by a Tajik friend that the exact poem that I translated here is adapted into a song by a famous Uzbek female singer,  Yulduz Usmonova . I have listened to this song a few times, the poem sounds simple but contains some powerful imagers. Usmonova's voice has masterly echoed the sentiment that is lurking among the lines. The striking part of this song is the mesmerizing choreography of dance around at a memorial (maybe saint) by the lake. The embodiment of imageries, allegories and overall the concept of the poem into sentimental corporeality is extraordinarily beautiful. A famous female Iranian singer Googoosh has copied the exact song with little alteration in the lyric (it seems to me that the lyric is appropriated which artistically does not sound very ethical), the music is quite the same but the dance choreographed dully - yet still beautiful wi...

So, finally, I finished reading Nabokov's Lolita. The immorality of Humbert Humbert and his actions towards Lolita tell us how far one can get from his or her righteous conscience, the very inner quality of guiding to the rightness. It raises questions about our understanding of ourselves in modern times, such as to what extent the human conscience has lost its moral judgment. This is a chronic affliction that a reader might experience in reading Lolita and this is precisely what Humbert Humbert suffers from. Lolita is a testimony to our pain and suffering in our modern day, which is defeated by an indiscernible joy. We do not understand what Nabokov really says unless we put aside our preconceptions about the moral issues that the book raises. I thought it was relevant to bring in Schopenhauer's input. In his essay on pessimism, Schopenhauer says that in order to understand this world’s suffering and misery, one must be accustomed to the fact that this world is a penitentia...