This morning I bought a ticket to Greece. Things are supposed to be quiet on this island. A small room in a spacious house will be our home for an entire week. The house was built in an olive orchard that overlooks the sea. Breakfast is served in the garden.
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The hope I had harbored until the very last minute that I would able to fly to Tel Aviv, after all, and stay there for a month, gave way to pragmatism. I don't expect Israel's borders to open until 2021. My hope had turned into sober realism, as you can probably tell.
What I see and notice from my safe German couch makes me tired and a bit impatient. This is a weird feeling, in which I cannot be in Israel when it devolves into chaos.
Over the past 10 years, I have always been there. In 2011, during the social justice protests, in 2014, during Operation Protective Edge, and also in 2019, when I had the glimmer of hope that a political change was in the offing.
But my impatience has nothing to do with some bizarre war tourism hobby or voyeurism; it just that I can't quite understand anything if you are not physically present there. I always believed in this phrase and today I see things through that prism.
I know that this principle that has wired me in such loyalty has been met with total dismissal by others and that anyone can say anything about anyone, and everyone has their own opinion on any stupid thing, rather than abide by what Socrates said: "I know that I know nothing"
During our modern era, people believe they know everything, but that is rarely the case. They read somewhere on Twitter, they saw a video on YouTube, they saw some half-sentence in a newspaper, and based on those snippets of information they have declared themselves to be experts.
This takes place in America, in China, and in Botswana, it doesn't really matter where. The modest declaration, "I don't know," has become disdained, just like playing Tetris. But if we had only kept this phrase in our lexicon, it would have provided great relief to all of us, both online, and in our discourse in general.
The thought that I would be in my getaway in just a week's time, perhaps even to the point that I would be turning off my phone and playing on the beach with my daughter while bathing in water and playing water games, or just sitting in a fine village restaurant and drinking Retsina Greek wine gives me a great deal of joy even now, in part because of the intellectual stress that I have had to endure over the past several weeks. I am looking forward with delight for the crickets chirping and the fragrance of fresh citrus, to the scorching heat and the ancient olive trees, as well as the friendliness of the Greek.
When I decided I would go on this getaway, there was no question in my mind that I would do what my daughter wanted. Ever since we visited Cephalonia, she keeps telling me she wants to go back. Ever since discovering, thanks to My Heritage, that she has 40% Greek ancestry, I have tried to accommodate her requests and passions on this matter. We are definitely going to listen a lot to Aris San singing – she has already memorized her favorite song Dam Dam – and we will act as if life is so easy to live as if we are in a summer night in an olive orchard.
When we get back to Berlin, fall will have already started. Life will once again pick up pace, in part because Germany has managed to put the coronavirus pandemic on the back burner, to everyone's astonishment. In September, the first copies of my new novel will reach the journalists. This is a complete horror show for someone whose self-confidence hangs by a thread – that is, what will the reviewers say. The answer to that is to just give up and move on, and do more.
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