The Welder

This morning I treated myself to a short story in The Paris Review called by The Welder by Ingebord Bachmann (translated from the German by Philip Boehm and Tess Lewis). The story revolves around a utility worker named Andreas Reiter, 35 years old, whose wife has tuberculosis and whose children exist somewhere. Going back home to his home life must feel heavy for him. He hangs around in the cafe where he finds a book that gets him into reading. Books become his addiction, his way of escape almost. What struck me in the story was this section about this man seeking a third space—a liminal existence between work and home—where he can recuperate and transition.
 

The cafe was empty. Reiter had hoped to find someone with whom he could play cards or share a beer; he was looking for someone in his Nowhere, looking for some idle familiarity before heading home. Almost every evening he sought out a kind of floodplain between work and home, like the floodplain between the city and the working-class districts to the east.

Do you have spaces like that where you can read a good book and not be bothered by the cares of the world, at least for the time being?

Bookstores

Bookstores are magnets. (I realize now that the statement makes me the metal!) I gravitate towards them. I enter without planning to buy anything, but I almost end up getting something home. Unlike other people, but perhaps most people I know, I read whatever I fancy. No planned reading list, no check lists to tick off. 

Nathan Heller's profile on James Daunt, the CEO of Barnes & Noble and Waterstones, is just fascinating! Daunt commutes on a train, rides a bicycle, and drives an electric vehicle that needs washing. 

One morning, he met me at the end of the Darsham station’s platform with his car, an electric Polestar that was dark navy and caked in dust. “The filthiest car in Britain!” he announced and put the vehicle in gear. 

Why physical bookstores exist in the age of the Kindle and LCD screens is a mystery. The profile clarifies why bookstores remain. 

The tenor of alarm about new technologies was familiar. When Daunt arrived at Waterstones, bookselling was in a panic about the Kindle, said to be poised to replace paper books. Daunt was doubtful: he’d used the product. And he’d seen the advent of the personal computer during his time as a banker, when the arrival of the I.B.M. XT had carried him and his peers up the ranks. But books were more like rubber bands or bottle openers than like computers: their form was largely unimprovable for their function.

I like my Kindle. I like my printed books. I buy ebooks and actual, physical books made of ink and paper. 

I grew up in a small town with a small bookstore called People's at the Notre Dame Complex. Not a bookstore, actually, but a school supplies store with a two shelves of books. Hardly anything was "literary fiction." But the store introduced me to the works of John Grisham, Sidney Sheldon, and Twisted by Jessica Zafra. 

I don't know if there are bookstores in Marbel, or even in General Santos, other than National Bookstore. Might I suggest that someone put up a bookstore in these cities? 

Daunt holds that a literary culture is something booksellers are well placed to build. “Books aren’t a fixed market,” he told me in his office. “The more bookshops there are, the more people will read. The better bookshops are, the more people discover things. Online is an efficient place, but it’s not a place that can excite in itself.”  

We lament that not a lot of people read these days, that we live in a post-literate age. I'm not sure. We can perhaps start with building, patronizing, and supporting bookstores and writers. 

Liminal

It’s been a quiet October in these parts. I don’t have much to say, except that I have been writing but not publishing. Much of my life consists of work and home, with the roads in between, and it is a life lived because of God’s grace.

During the day, I relish the liminal existence lived inside the car. I like the quiet: it feels like a retreat. I listen to myself or to Ezra Klein or the late Tim Keller, whose words still profoundly affect, instruct, and encourage me. There are moments when I like jazz or any music the Spotify algorithm plays next: classical, opera, worship songs, OPM. Meanwhile I pay attention to the wide, sometimes empty roads, which can be deceiving. The haze from the Indonesia fires makes the sunsets in Allah Valley pop. 

(Yesterday I made a careful turn, a motorcycle interrupted me, and without so much as an apology or an acknowledgement that an error had been done, the driver swooshed away, as if nothing happened. I held my tongue and remembered Tim Keller’s preaching on self-control. I also thought that maybe, maybe, the driver could be rushing to the hospital for an emergency. I used to care for a woman with metastatic neck tumor. Her son was a Food Panda driver. I’ve never looked at motorcycles the same way ever again.) 

Fruits from Tatay's trees

I found a basket full of lanzones (Lansium domesticum) on the coffee table in our front porch.

My mother said, "These are from your Tatay's trees." The ones he had planted in New Antique. 

It felt as if Tatay were still alive on this side of eternity, tending to his farm, and hurrying to come back home to cook our lunch.

Solar

I took a break from rounds and observed, with curious eyes, the delegates to the Ornithology annual convention atop the solar panels of General Santos Doctors Hospital. I took the photo last July. The sky was blue and clear. You could fry an egg using sunshine, but the birds didn't mind.

Scenes from home

Terrible heat today, but it rained in the afternoon. Inside the clinic, I overheard the hard, pouring rain that soaked the streets and refreshed tired souls. When I got out, the rain had stopped. I'd missed out on all the fun.

Vigeland Park on a sunny day

The guide says his name, Jacob Gomez, gets a lot of attention from Filipinos who visit Oslo. He says he’s from Argentina. He has lived and worked in Oslo for five years, working a day job in IT and doing city tours on the side.

 

“How is it living here?” I ask as we make our way around the clean, organized city, her pale-skinned, six-footer, smile-back-at-you residents basking in mild sunshine, something that rarely happens in a land where the usual weather is dark and gloomy, the streets lined with snow. 

He says it’s great. I think he means it. “The first time I got here was in December. You know how Christmas is in the movies? It’s like that. Snow everywhere!” he says. 

I relate well to his feeling of alienation and familiarity. I felt the same way when I was in Montreaux, Switzerland in December 2019. My friendHarold and I presented a paper at an immunotherapy conference in Geneva. We did a side trip after the meeting. Snowy villages, mulled wine, potatoes—always potatoes—dripped in melted cheese and chocolate. The scene looked like a Hallmark movie. The stuff of films. It felt magical for us, people from the tropics. Christmas in the Philippines is loud and happy, colorful and extravagant, with plastic pine trees wrapped in lights that could cause fires any time.

I explain to him, as we walk around Frogner Park, at the heart of the Norwegian capital, that Gomez is a common name in our part of the world. “Richard Gomez is a popular actor,” I say. He pretends he knows Richard out of politeness. 

Frogner Park is the site of the Vigelandsanlegget (Vigeland Park), an art installation by Gustav Vigeland. Jacob mentions his name with awe—the man designed the park but never got to see its completion. 

He says Vigeland was a small man, pointing to a life-sized statue towering over us, but he had big dreams. 

All sculptures and designs were to his specifications. 

The Vigeland Sculpture Park contains 212 bronze and granite sculptures depicting the circle of life. I don’t ask Jacob about the Elton John song in the Lion King, because I'm unsure if El Rey León was a hit in his childhood. I say to him instead, “It’s beautiful, isn't it?” pointing to the sculptures of naked men and women and children doing all sorts of poses, and seeing tourists hold the Angry Child’s hand for photo ops. 

 

He says, “I can’t believe I’m doing this, that I’m here.” He radiates contentment, a happy disbelief that I often aspire to, and which sometimes escapes me. “Oslo is a beautiful city. I’m just so happy to be here.”

I listen to the tone of his voice, and I realize he’s not faking it. Here’s a man who is happy in what he does. He must have done these tours a hundred times, but he is happy. 

The tour ends, and he says goodbye. “I just live nearby,” he says, and walks towards a quiet neighborhood, a few meters from the park, where, I imagine, he will spend the rest of the Saturday afternoon in peace and quiet, knowing he is where he should be.