Shifting Passions - Prolog

1968 

Raging hormones. I was neither child nor adult and every morning I struggled in front of the bathroom mirror to keep my pimples in check, or at least hide them with Clearasil. I was shy, blushed easily, and my voice tended to crack when I had to speak in front of the class.

I had gotten a Beatles haircut in the summer of sixty-seven, wore Jesus sandals and tight jeans that I had rolled-up over my ankles. On my left shoulder hung a Nikon F. I had given up on the dream of becoming an astronaut and now wanted to become a photographer like Thomas in the movie Blow-Up, a job where you were not only surrounded by beautiful women but could expose the evil in the world. 

This was the year when God had been declared dead, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were murdered, American B-52’s bombed Vietnam, students protested, the Cultural Revolution raged in China, the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia, and the Beatles sang All You Need is Love. 

It was also a year when we talked over the phone. Texting was done with pens or pencils. Every home normally had one phone line and there were no answering machines. Telephones were mobile, but only as far as the wire allowed. There was one television channel, and it broadcast in black and white. We had tape recorders and record players, but not video recorders, so if you missed a show, that was it.    

2018 

Carl waited patiently on the steps of the Dramatic Theater. I was half an hour late since I had landed the day before and still was jet lagged. I had woken up at three o’clock, taken a glass of Jack Daniels and written in my diary before falling back asleep. 

“It takes longer to adjust these days,” I said.

“Yes, it’s the same thing for me. Age takes its toll,” he said.

We crossed Nybroplan by the bus stop and continued along Strandvägen. In the background we could hear seagulls, tourists, and lapping water. Once the sun peaked out, it felt warmer in the air.   

“The last time I was here we had Obama and looked forward to the future. Now we have Trump.”

“Everybody here thought Hillary would win.”

“So did she. After all, it was her turn.”

“It would have been nice to have a female President though.”

“Sure, but the arrogance was a bit too much,” I said.

“As I saw it, she had the knowledge and skills needed,” he said.

“Sure, but the enthusiasm was terribly low. Obama nailed it when he said that Hillary was likeable enough, but the democratic party’s leadership had decided that she was invincible,” I said. 

“She would have won if the electoral system had been fair,” he said.

“Certainly, but all the experts and strategist know how the system works. It was arrogance that led her to bungle the campaign. I remember a giant billboard in Hoboken which said, ‘I’m With Her’ as if voting was a declaration of feminist loyalty. She was tone-deaf as far as ordinary people goes.”

We crossed the bridge to Djurgården and continued east along the northern side of the island. It was leafy and nice and many sun bathers on Lejonslätten. A family had parked their baby carriage near a large oak tree and spread out a blanket in the grass for a pick-nick. 

“It’s fifty years since 1968,” he said. 

”It feels like a very long time ago,” I said.

“That’s my point. It’s as far to 68 as from 68 to the end of World War one,” he said.

“We experience time subjectively but measure it objectively. I began to take interest in politics in the spring, but I wasn’t politically engaged. When I was asked which party I would vote for, I said Folkpartiet (the liberal party) since I hadn’t thought much about it.”

“For me it was a done deal. Capitalism was a rotten system and socialism the solution. I was a Marxist and were planning to vote for Vänsterpartiet kommunisterna in the school election,” he said.

”Do you remember the poster we did?”

“It was Mikael’s idea. He felt we had to act fast,” he said.

“The message was simple — Stop! Think! — written in all caps. I borrowed Dad’s spray paint so that the text would come out looking psychedelic. How on earth could we have thought that two words could save the world?”

“Like, Jesus comes!“

”The next morning, I rolled up the poster and brought it to school. Mikael and I were afraid that some teacher would discover us when we put it up with tape,” I said.

“It was a pretty lame protest, but it was at least a beginning,” Carl said.

”If people just understood the state of the world, they would start protesting.”

“As I saw it, politics was about organizing people. That’s why I joined the student council.” 

“Why didn’t you become chairman? You liked to be a leader, which I never did. Why did you nominate me instead?” 

“It was a tactic from my side. I had opened my mouth too many times, and I was afraid that somebody would nominate a right-winger if I was a candidate. You were radical too, but not as known, and you were more diplomatic. And it worked,” he said.

We had planned to have lunch at Djurgårdsbrunns Wärdshus, but the wait was impossibly long, so we turned back the same way we came. Fortunately, we found a café near Skånska Gruvan where we got beer and sandwiches. 

“Why did we become so radical when we had it pretty well overall?”

“The fifties’ optimism had been punctured by the Vietnam war and left a vacuum behind,” he said.

“To us, this optimism looked really naive. Unlike our parents, we had no clue about what it was to live during war or threat of war. They had lived through a depression and a world war. Collective needs had been prioritized, while private needs had been rationed. Dad told me that he used to trade his liquor coupons for coffee coupons. Then came peace and freedom. They had children, bought a car, and moved to a bigger apartment. It must have been a little bit like China after Mao. God was dead and materialism ruled. Private interests were no longer a vice,” I said.

“It was such a positive time despite the Cold War. Welfare Sweden grew like crazy and life improved. We had enormously good artists and we won silver at the 1958 Soccer World Championship after having lost to Brazil, which was nothing to be ashamed of. People loved the US and everything that came from the US, but then the wind turned. Was it the Cuba crisis, McCarthyism, or the race riots after the murder of Martin Luther King?”

“I don’t think it was a single thing that awoke us, but a kind of mental domino effect that culminated with the Vietnam war protests,” I said.

“The US had been seen as a moral example, but the B52s and the napalm bombs could not be matched with the moralism the US was preaching. It was the same thing with the racism,” he said.

“Our reaction had a lot to do with television. I spent a week with a friend who lived outside Eskilstuna during the summer of 1968. I remember one night when we watched student protests on the TV news. His dad said that it was terrible, but I thought that they did the right thing,” I said.

“The older generation didn’t understand what was going on. They had been taught to shut up and obey, but young people began to talk back and raise questions.”

“We stepped out of our childhood and into a world that had lost its footing,” I said. 

“And the pop musicians who used to be neat and well-dressed let their hair grow and turned up the volume so that it hurt the ears of the adults. That was the real cultural revolution. The music gave us an identity that was entirely separate from the adult world,” he said. 

“We joined Vänsterns Ungdomsförbund (VUF) that autumn,” I said.

“There were a lot of nice people there, but now and then some dude would pop up and declare that everybody else were misinterpreting Marx which led to ideological wars and splintering. We got a lot of new political acronyms,” he said.

“Once we had five different groups peddling their papers outside the Systembolaget in my neighborhood. It was VUF, KAF, KFML, KFML(r) and DFFG. People laughed when they came out with their bags,” I said.

“It wouldn’t surprise me if the Salvation Army was there too,” he said.

“You had to read a lot just to keep up. All groups had their own newspapers and theoretical magazines where people threw quotations at each other,” I said.

“I dropped out when VUF split up. After that I spent a lot of time sitting at home playing on my guitar while you went to your meetings. I didn’t understand it then, but the ship had sailed. The revolution was over. I didn’t like the dogmatic fights over text interpretations and all the talk about the people and the masses. That’s why I joined the Social Democrats who had roots in the real working class. That’s something I have never regretted,” he said.

”My life would have turned out very differently if I too had dropped out at that time instead of ten years later.”

“You wasted a decade that you could have used in a much better way.”

“True, but it was not easy to escape the maelstrom, especially not when you thought you were surfing on the waves of history,” I said.

“Like Jesus comes,” he said.

“We told ourselves that we had the situation under control, and we had excuses for all setbacks.”

The above texts form the prolog to a novel in progress called Shifting Passions.

Shifting Passions - Excerpts

I: My Future Is With the People

Revolution in Ninth Grade

High School Passions

InterRail

II: Love without a Compass

The Cook and the Cannibal

Desiring the Impossible

The Body Remained 

III: Trying to be Normal

A Fool's Confession

Into the Labyrinth

To Betray and to Forgive

IV: Zigzagging in the Middle Kingdom

Change Money! Change Money!

Three Days on the Yangtze River

Filling a Vacuum

When Premier Zhou Enlai Sacrificed His Adopted Daughter Youmei

The New York Review of Books (December 7, 2023) has a very interesting article by Professor Perry Link where he discusses Ha Jin’s The Woman Back from Moscow. The novel tells the tragic story of Premier Zhou Enlai’s adopted daughter Sun Weishi, who called herself Youmei. The book provides insightful into what Link calls “the Communist superelite” under Mao Zedong, who despite professing to serve the people, never forgot about themselves.

“From the dusty caves of Yan’an in the late 1930s to the red-hot ‘class struggle’ of the late 1960s in Beijing, there are always maids to peel pears, orderlies to deliver lunch boxes, and guards to watch doorways, and when a child arrives the family goes out and hires a nanny.”

Life in China under Mao could be extremely brutal and full of hardship, but the elite enjoyed a protected life as long as they were completely loyal to the prevailing power. Link writes:

“They live in a cocoon, but the culture inside is hardly protective. It is tense and bereft of trust. Familial affection is present, but it gives way to politics whenever necessary. President Liu Shaoqi is willing to derail the marriages of two of his children, who have non-Chinese partners, because of ‘revolutionary needs.’ Zhou Enlai clearly cares for his adopted daughter. He coaches her in how to survive: ‘Just be careful about what you say in your letters. Always assume that some other eyes will read your letters before they reach me.’ But during the Cultural Revolution, when Zhou is faced with the dilemma of whether to sacrifice Yomei in order to protect himself from Jiang Qing, he signs a warrant for her detention that leads to her torture and death in prison. An aunt of Yomei’s, observing Zhou’s maintenance of a suave exterior, calls him a ‘smiling snake.’

Zhou is no anomaly. He lives in an environment where, in the end, people can trust only themselves. The distinguished Australian Sinologist Simon Leys once observed that comparisons of the CCP elite to the mafia are in a sense unfair to the mafia, in which a certain loyalty to ‘brothers’ does play a part. Losers of political battles at the top of the CCP generally are not relegated to comfortable retirements—they go to prison or worse. Zhou did not wish to seal Yomei’s fate; he was forced to when it became clear that it was either him or her.”

Living under an authoritarian system leaves little room for moral considerations, and people respond by developing a ‘split consciousness.’

“This distinction between unofficial and official life holds from the bottom of society to the top. The actual life of the red elite that Ha Jin depicts could hardly differ more from its officially projected images of giving speeches, doing inspection tours, and in other ways focusing on ‘service to the people.’ The questions ‘What best fits the system?’ and ‘What best serves my interests?’ are asked in parallel by people at all levels, and they seldom have the same answers. In his memoirs the dissident physicist Fang Lizhi recalls how Teng Teng, vice-chair of China’s State Education Commission in July 1989, summoned American ambassador James Lilley to berate him about how the US was allowing Chinese students who had spoken out against the Tiananmen massacre to remain in the US indefinitely. An hour after returning to the embassy, Lilley got a telephone call from Teng Teng’s secretary asking him to give special attention to Teng’s wife and children, who were seeking that same ‘indefinite residence’ status in the US. There are plenty of other examples like this. The ‘split consciousness’ of Chinese people in recent times has been widely noted.”

Although common in authoritarian systems, the roots of this phenomenon do in China's case go back two thousand years to the era when Shi Huangdi conquered the “warring states” and formed the Qin Dynasty. The French Catholic missionary Abbe Huc who lived and traveled in China and spoke Chinese discussed the impact on the citizens and rulers of this system in his 1855 book, The Chinese Empire.

“The inhabitants of the Celestial Empire, being wanting in religious faith, and living from day to day, without troubling themselves either about the past or the future, profoundly skeptical, and totally indifferent to what touches only the moral nature of man, having no energy for anything but the amassing of sapecks (money), cannot, as may easily be supposed, be well induced to obey the laws from a sentiment of duty. The official worship of China does not in fact possess any of the characteristics of what can properly be called a religion, and is, consequently, unable to communicate to the people those moral ideas that do more for the observance of the laws, than the most terrible penal sanctions. It is, therefore, quite natural that the bamboo should be the necessary and indispensable accessory of every legal prescription, and the Chinese law will consequently always assume a penal character, even when it has in view objects purely civil.

Whenever a legislature is compelled to be lavish of punishments, it may certainly be affirmed that the social system in which it is in force is vicious, and the Penal Code of China is an illustration of the truth. The punishments awarded by it are not graduated according to the moral gravity of the crime, considered in itself, but merely on the amount of damage that may be occasioned by it. Thus the punishment of theft is proportional to the value of the object stolen, according to a scale drawn up expressly to that effect, unless the theft be accompanied by circumstances that bring it under some other head. The penal legislation of China is based on the utilitarian principle, and this need not excite any surprise, for Chinese materialism does not consider the act so much in a moral point of view, as with respect to its consequences.”

Perry Link: A Fallen Artist in Mao’s China (NYRB, December 7, 2023)

Mark Weiser’s Quest for Calm Computing

I never cried before when I read a book about computers and their creators, but this time I did. Mark Weiser's death from cancer in 1996 was both sad and tragic, but he imbued his last few weeks with meaning by making a choice demonstrating what his life's philosophy had been all about, to be present and engaged with his fellow human beings, in particular his family, friends, and colleagues. When he was diagnosed with cancer and told that he had only three weeks to live, his first thought was to isolate himself and write the book he had always dreamt of writing, laying out his philosophy behind ubiquitous computing, an approach to computing that wanted to get them out of the way, so that they didn’t become a distraction from our humanity and human social life, but in the end he decided to spend the time with his ex-wife, daughters and friends. On the brink of death, he chose to be present.

The Philosopher of Palo Alto, written by John Tinnell, director of digital studies and associate professor of English at the University of Colorado at Denver, captures Mark Weiser's long struggle to keep the exploding new information technology from overwhelming us as humans. 

Wherever you look in 2023 it seems that he lost his battle as parents and children, friends and lovers, stare down at the mobile phones to count Facebook likes or laugh at Tik-Tok videos rather than look at each other, talk and listen. But the battle is not over, and Mark Weiser's ideas are still simmering and nurturing many information technology developers, researchers, and critics.

It was at Xerox PARC's legendary research lab that Mark Weiser developed the concept of ubiquitous computing, a radical paradigm for what computers could and should do, as well as what they should not do. He was influenced by philosophers such as Michael Polanyi, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, an influence that made him question the impact on computer research and development of the Cartesian split of mind and body. 

I interviewed Mark Weiser at his Computer Science Lab in early 1992, and he immediately made a strong impression on me, and I would never forget his basic ideas infused with humanity as they were. Half-way into the book Tinnell writes about Mark Weiser's visit to the MIT Media Lab where he was going to challenge the rest of the panel, which included the Lab's founder Nicholas Negroponte who touted software “butlers” that knew what their master’s wanted. It is a dramatic moment as he took on the more well-known and established digiterati. At this point, I found myself quoted in the book. 

"Weiser, meanwhile, sporting a rare tie and his trademark red suspenders, waited for his turn to address the crowd, aware that the other speakers were likely aligned against him. Weiser had picked fights with a few of them in his interview with reporters over the summer. Most pointedly, for example, he told a Swedish technology magazine shortly before the symposium: ‘I feel sick when I hear Alan Kay, Apple's research guru, talk of intimate data processing as the next step. Computers are a part of my life, like paper, pens, and chairs, but I don't want to become 'intimate' with them.’" (A footnote points to my 1992 article in Datateknik. John Tinnell, The Philosopher of Palo Alto, University of Chicago Press, 2023, p 156)

This was a time when the computer world was centered around personal computers or workstations, linked by local area networks, and maybe networks connected to universities, corporations, or government agencies. Lacking such a connection, you relied on CompuServe and America On-Line to get access to their respective and separate online worlds. It was before WWW, laptops, tablets, and smartphones, and a time when many industry players thought television would be the center of the connected and interactive home.

The book continues by exploring how the computer lab tried to move beyond the initial success for the concept of ubiquitous computing by collaborating with Xerox PARC’s inhouse anthropologists. Despite serious attempts on both sides, the two groups never quite connected since they had very different cultures and perspectives. Maybe one could say that it was a collision between anthropological fieldwork and engineers sprouting ideas in their labs. The problem for the engineers was that they must build the prototypes of ubiquitous computing with a technology that had a long way to go before it could be viable. During my visit, I was shown the three key components that illustrated the concept – tabs, pads, and boards, that is small, handheld devices with limited but context-aware functionality, electronic notepads, and finally a large electronic whiteboard. They were all connected through a primitive network that still enabled the user to pick up his work on a pad in another room or an electronic board, provided he had brought his tab with him. A fourth element in this model was a badge, that worked as an electronic ID-card, which could open doors and signal where a person was. The big difference between Mark Weiser’s approach and the rest of the computer world was that he didn’t want the system to spy on the user, not collect data that then could be used to influence or control the user. 

John Tinnell shows how the project lost some of its steam partially due to technological limits and the fact that the industry was heading in another direction. With the birth of the Web, and the explosive growth of both users and content, the world of information technology spun out of control. Mozilla became Netscape and suddenly Yahoo! was on everybody’s lips and screens. The old research labs funded by monopolies like AT&T and Xerox began to fizzle, and money started to flow from venture capitalists that had little patients for ideas like those of Mark Weiser.

All eyes were now on MIT Media Lab which became the shining star of the emerging digital age. On the one hand, projects like Thing That Think reflected some of the ideas behind ubiquitous computing, but the dominating trend was to use the new technology to track and predict what the users would do. Instead of freeing people from being stuck in front of screens, they were about to be sucked into a world where they were staring at screens of all sizes at every waking hour, which was more of a ubiquitous nightmare than anything else. An example of this brave new digital world was wearable computers, which the MIT Media Lab showed off at a big event in October 1997. Both I and Mark Weiser attended the event, but I was not aware of his presence, so I missed a chance to interview him, but later did an email interview with him on wearables.

In chapter 10, A Form of Worship, Tinnell explores the foundational beliefs that led Mark Weiser on his unique path as a computer researcher and the “philosopher of Palo Alto.” He wanted engineers to recognize uncertainty, the bottom of the iceberg. 

“If you were sure that your invention would be for others exactly what it was in your blueprint, then you were thinking only about the visible tip of the iceberg. You were presuming to know more than you did-your knowledge of other people was always incomplete. Even their own self-awareness was largely tacit, as was your own. Better to acknowledge these uncertainties, Weiser advised, than to presume yourself into an illusory state of omniscience. Adhering so doggedly to the pretense of certainty could push you to dismiss variables beyond your control or, worse, warp them to serve your design. Instead, Weiser urged his fellow engineers and technologists to cultivate an attitude of ‘deep humility,’ which ought chiefly to encourage ‘humility toward the role of [our] artifacts in other people's lives.’" (John Tinnell, The Philosopher of Palo Alto, University of Chicago Press, 2023, p 274)

It's a deeply humane and well researched book about a remarkable man who fought to “fit technology to humans.” (p 272)

Hans Sandberg

Mark Weiser on Ubiquitous Computing (Datateknik, February 18, 1992)

Mark Weiser on Wearable Computers (Email interview Oct 17, 1997)

Remembering Mark Weiser who Wanted to Get the Computers Out of the Way (May 26, 1999)

Remembering Mark Weiser who Wanted to Get the Computers Out of the Way (May 26, 1999)

(A brief article for Datateknik, May 26, 1999)

Mark Weiser was just 46 years old when, on April 27, he lost his battle with cancer that was discovered just six weeks earlier. Doctors had first given him a year and a half, then three months, and finally only days to live. He tried to use his remaining time to write a book on Ubiquitous Computing, the concept he introduced ten years ago, and which is now becoming a reality. But there wasn't enough time for even a first draft of the book. 

Mark Weiser's death shook many in Silicon Valley and beyond. Not just because he was the technical director of Xerox's famous lab, PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), but because of his character. Mark Weiser was the "soul and conscience" of Silicon Valley, and "he used his institution to remind anyone who would listen that in the battle between man and machine, we must let man win," wrote MSNBC's Bob Sullivan on May 5, 1999.  

I interviewed him during a visit to PARC in early 1992 and fondly remember his generosity and broad intellect. He and his team were prototyping a new kind of computing environment where computers were everywhere but not allowed to control our behavior. It was a foretaste of the "third wave," which he saw coming after the PC era, just as it replaced the mainframe era. 

"The old kind of computers, the ones that sit on your desk, require you to enter their world," said Mark Weiser, who was inspired by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger.

In an essay for Scientific American (No. 9 1991) on the computer era of the 21st century, he wrote about how writing technology faded into the background so that people stopped thinking of writing as technology. Similarly, he wanted computers to be, but not to be seen. He didn't like the idea of building even more personal, even "intimate" computers.

"It makes me sick when I hear that! Getting intimate with our computers is not the right way. We want to get computers out of the way! They should be part of our lives, like paper, pens and chairs, but we don't want to get intimate with them." (Datateknik, No. 5 1992.)

In the mid-90s, he coined the term Calm Computing, as a necessary complement to ubiquitous computing.

"With computers everywhere, we will want to use them while doing other things and have more time to be purely human. We will then have to radically rethink the goals, context, and technology of the computer and all the other technologies that intrude on our lives. Calmness is a fundamental challenge for all technological design in the next 50 years."

                                                                (Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown, head of PARC, wrote in The coming age of calm technology,, Xerox PARC, October 5, 1996.)

Hans Sandberg

US Correspondent for the Swedish computer weekly Dagens IT (Today’s IT)

Mark Weiser on Ubiquitous Computing (Datateknik, February 18, 1992)

Mark Weiser, Xerox PARC:

Computers Should Be, but Not Be Seen

With ubiquitous computing, Xerox's famous Palo Alto Research Center is trying to turn the way we use computers upside down. Mark Weiser, head of PARC's computer science lab, wants to make computers ubiquitous and anonymous at the same time. Like most innovators, he is dissatisfied with the status quo. 

"The old kind of computers, the ones that sit on your desk, require you to enter their world," he says. 

"It's the computer at the center, instead of the person and their work. In extreme cases, as with 'virtual reality' systems, you must put on a helmet and gloves to use them." 

At PARC, which is a neighbor to Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, they are trying to do just the opposite! 

The goal is an integrated computing environment, where computers are everywhere and always available. Instead of one computer on your desk, you will have dozens, of varied sizes and functions. Each room can accommodate hundreds of computers. We should not have to drag the computer with us when we go from one room to another, because we can just pick up one of the computers in the other room and continue what we were doing in the first one. Computers should know where they are and where you are and be constantly ready to serve you. This will create radically new conditions for collaboration and increased productivity in tomorrow's offices. 

It is, in short, the dream of ubiquitous but never conspicuous computing. 

Against this background, it may be easier to understand why Mark Weiser wrote in the September issue of Scientific American that "the very idea of a 'personal' computer" is misplaced. 

"The old-style computer visionaries are trying to radicalize personal computers and make them even more personal," he said. 

“Alan Kay talks about intimate computing as the next step. It makes me sick when I hear that! Getting intimate with our computers is not the right way. We want to get computers out of the way! They should be part of our life, like paper, pens, and chairs, but we don't want to get intimate with them. It's pushing the personal and individualistic to its extreme," says Mark Weiser and asks pointedly: 

“Are you intimate with your pen?”

(Alan Kay was one of PARC's founders and is today one of the leading researchers in Apple Computer. He coined the term "dynabook," which Apple popularized with the term "knowledge navigator.") 

Paper and pencil are also technologies, but we have stopped seeing them as such. We unthinkingly take them for granted, which for Weiser is a sign of how deeply a technology has taken root in our society.

“Ubiquitous computing is the first attempt to apply in-depth what we have learned about humans over the last 20 years," says Mark Weiser.

“It is often psychological insights that drive changes in computing. For example, screens and computer graphics are responses to input from psychologists.” 

“Ubiquitous computing could only happen in a place like PARC, where you have computer scientists and anthropologists under the same roof. I came up with the concept when I was thinking about how we could respond to what the anthropologists were telling us. They studied how people use technology and talked about 'situations.' They said that we had misunderstood technology; that we had overlooked the myriad details of real situations, real spaces. About relationships between people in a room and the cultures they come from," says Mark Weiser. 

This led to a radical rethink of the way we use computers. Mark Weiser and his colleagues realized that rethinking details such as the graphical user interface (GUI) would not be enough. 

“Since a serious model of ubiquitous computing requires us to consider the details, we had to try to build elements of it and start using them as soon as possible. This was not something you could study theoretically, it had to be studied practically.”

“We eventually came up with some stuff that indicated where we are going. We know they may not be exactly the right things, but they are different enough from the current computers to help us along the way.“

At first glance, PARC's model for ubiquitous computing doesn't look particularly remarkable. We have a large electronic drawing screen ("Liveboard,") which you can draw on with a digital "marker." We have many pen computers ("Pads") and a variety of small pocket-sized digital notebooks ("Tabs.")

“We've created three sizes of computers: a few inches, a foot and a yard ("inch-, foot- and yard-size computers,") which we see as a natural scale, similar to what we have in the office and in the home. (If anyone wonders where to find a yard-sized information screen in a home, Mark Weiser points to the refrigerator door, which in the US is the standard bulletin board.)    

The first thing that makes me raise my eyebrows a bit is a special application of the smallest piece of this puzzle: the "active" ID tag that Mark Weiser wears on his chest, which is  computer with a built-in infrared transmitter. This smart badge, developed in collaboration with Olivetti researchers, is constantly communicating with small antennas on the ceiling of each room. 

Smart badges can be used to both control and serve people. They can be part of a system that selectively opens doors; they can direct telephone calls and electronic mail to a person regardless of which room he is in; they can inform the computers in a room who is there. 

They can also create automatic diaries, with the system continuously recording where you are (unless you put the ID badge in a pocket, which blocks its infrared signals). The system creates an automatic log of where you've been and who else has been in the same place, a list that can be a valuable memory aid. (Mark Weiser is aware that many fear that this is an invasion of privacy – "Big Brother is watching you" – but he believes that this can be avoided through social norms about how the system is used and by allowing individuals to control such private information themselves.)

The smallest computers in the system, let's call them tabs, are intended to function as a very simple writing tool, an electronic scratch paper. One could compare them to simple pocket calculators. Mark Weiser imagines a hundred such tabs in a typical office room.

The next step in the scale is "Pads," electronic notebooks. (I refrain from suggesting a translation of this term!) They are similar to pen computers, but serve a different function, as illustrated by the fact that a room can have 10-20 "Pads." Just like in Windows you can have several programs open at once, you can have several "Pads" active on your desktop. The difference is that the previous window environments are crowded on one and the same screen, while the PARC model can have them lying next to you in full scale. 

Each room will also have one or two "live boards", which can be used for communication (e.g., video conferencing) or presentations. 

The basic elements of "ubiquitous computing" are based on technologies that either already exist or are imminent. Lightweight handheld computers, pen computers and projection screens with a pen input system (an infrared camera records the movement of the digital "pen"), a largely wireless local computer network, and a number of networked computers.

What makes the system as a whole unique is the total integration of such a large number of computers, all communicating with each other in a uniform way and each part knowing where it is. 

While Mark Weiser is drawing on his "big screen," I can give him written comments, directly from my "Pad." They will appear on his screen. I can also take the content of his screen and save it as an icon on a "Tab" to later call up the same image on another "big screen". The system is everywhere, and I can access it no matter where I am in the building. It's completely different from carrying a pen computer from room to room and connecting to a local network.

"Some people think we're going to get there anyway, more or less automatically, but I don't think so," says Mark Weiser. "Instead, we're going to have clusters of networks communicating in different niches, like pagers, mobile phones and personal computers of various kinds. Compare that to the access we have to literature in this room. We have immediate access to all the words in the room, without having to worry about what format they are printed in. As long as we (in the computer world) are dominated by these niches, we will never have "seamless" access to the world of information, where you can pick up a scrap computer and just start working. 

It is important to remember that ubiquitous computing is still only a research project, which may change considerably before Xerox decides to try to bring it to market. First, some of the difficult technical challenges the system faces must be addressed. 

"We're going to need much more wireless communication than any company today can imagine," says Mark Weiser. "We need connections between hundreds of computers in a building, whereas companies in this field think in terms of one person, one computer.

PARC researchers have therefore had to develop their own wireless networks with tiny cells, each covering a room.

Another problem is building a stable system, with so many loosely linked computers. 

“You must make sure that the whole system doesn't collapse if one computer fails, something that current distributed computing systems are poor at. We need a much more robust technology for networked computers," he says. 

Both computer operating systems and window management technology need to undergo major changes to enable ubiquitous computing.

The third challenge is the ability to build small. This is a prerequisite for producing sufficiently small, lightweight, and inexpensive tabs.           

Even if the Xerox researchers in Palo Alto succeed in meeting these and other technological challenges, it remains to be seen how the parent company meets the market challenges. In the 1970s, Xerox managed to fumble a series of brilliant inventions, losing both its geniuses and the markets they created. 

Hopefully, the 90s harvest from PARC will not suffer the same fate.

Hans Sandberg

Xerox: 

Not Only Copiers

But what does Xerox have to do with computers? Quite a lot and for three reasons. 

First, because in 1970, CEO Peter McColough set up a research center to study how complex organizations use information. This center, the Palo Alto Research Center, located in a hilly area near Stanford University, would prove to be extremely creative. For example, the first Alto personal computer/workstation was invented here in 1974. Although a commercial failure, it introduced many concepts that would shape the personal computer revolution and Apple's successful Macintosh: overlapping windows, icons, mouse, bitmap graphics. PARC also led the development of local area networks with its Ethernet and was the birthplace of the first object-oriented programming language, Smalltalk.

The second reason is that Xerox for a long a time had the ambition to become a computer company. In 1987, it gave up on selling its own computer systems and exclusive operating systems in favor of Sun's SPARC computers and the SunOS operating system. Today it focuses on developing and selling applications for office automation and in particular advanced desktop publishing and image processing. 

The third reason is that Xerox digital copiers are computers. They contain networks of microprocessors and advanced software, including expert technical monitoring systems. 

Mark Weiser on Wearable Computers (Email interview Oct 17, 1997)

Email interview with Mark Weiser on Oct 17, 1997:

At 10:48 AM 10/17/97 PDT, you wrote:

Hi Mark,

I am a Swedish journalist based in Princeton, New Jersey, and I visited PARC five years ago or so for a story on Ubiquitous Computing. I just visited MIT Media Lab's symposium on Wearables, and I couldn't help but remembering what you told me about wanting the computers to disappear. What do you think about the wearable concept?

Sincerely,

Hans Sandberg

Mark Weiser's response: 

The wearable idea is terrific: one more way the computers are becoming ubiquitous.

Ubiquitous computing names the third wave of computing, where there are lots of computers in the environment, and they get lots easier to use.  It is ever more clear that the twenty-first century will be the age of ubiquitous computing, as I first said almost ten years ago. 

There are a few things that I think are dangerous in some of the wearable ideas. One insidious one is that idea that wearable means a safer, more private future, because all of my personal information will be on my body instead of trusting a server somewhere. (Ubiquitous computing as a concept is inclusive of either the server or the personal implementation.) What is insidious is thinking that there will *not* be data about you elsewhere, that keeping a computer close to your body makes you safe.  No, we will have to face up to serious new individual data privacy laws, and wearing a computer to solve privacy is a form of playing ostrich with your head in the sand. 

A second thing that I don't like about some of the wearable work is the extent to which it increases the obtrusiveness of the computer.

Translating mime language into English is pretty intrusive and anti-artistic, in my opinion. Having a 1-1 relationship with a special worn computer does not really make it very invisible to you.  As long as there is a special computer in your life, it is still the personal computer paradigm, not the ubiquitous computing paradigm, even if the computer is worn.  Invisibility means not just (and not necessarily) *physical* invisibility -- the most important thing is mental invisibility. 

Recently I have begun to focus on how we will feel as we use these ubiquitous computers.  Today clearly computers make us more frantic and overloaded.  So, I talk about the age of "calm computing", and how to bring it about.  See paper at

http://www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/acmfuture2endnote.htm (Note 2023: The link is dead, but The paper can now be found at https://calmtech.com/papers/coming-age-calm-technology.html)

I hope this helps.

-mark

P.S. Xerox is a sponsor of some of the MIT Media lab wearable work.

Thinking that Goes a Long Way

Having finished Bill Deresiewicz's The Death of the Artist, which tells a sad story for anybody who loves and appreciates the work of artists of all sorts, I dove right into The End of Solitude, a collection of essays and commentary by the same author. The book covers a wide range of topics, from a take-down of Harold Bloom, to reflections on the elite capture of higher education, to the darker aspects of the Internet and unfortunately ubiquitous social media. He writes with honesty and intelligence, making you feel a little bit smarter once you put it down. It's a deeply personal book, written by a true intellectual who left the academic world to pursue his passion for art and humanity. My only quibble would be with the title, that subconsciously made me expect a book about loneliness, which it is not. Solitude is here seen as a foundation for independent thinking, something that makes Deresiewicz's work possible.

InterRail - My Future is with the People (Excerpt 4)

The InterRail pass, which was introduced in 1972, opened Europe to youths under 21. Once you bought the pass, you could travel by train for free in 21 European countries. Since I was in the army, I had to wait until the following year before I could go. Pelle and I had talked about traveling together, but he got a summer job, so I went on my own.

The card was valid for one month, but there was a catch and that was that you could not use it in the country where you had bought it, so I bought my card in Åland so that I could use it in Sweden. As the departure approached, I decided to hitchhike to Denmark on July 14, the day before the pass started. I didn’t want to burn one day by taking a train in Sweden.

Dad drove me from our summer house in northern Öland to an E22 onramp outside Kalmar. It took several hours before I got my first ride, which took me to Ronneby. I was dropped off by a Sibylla kiosk where I bought a hot dog and then wandered out of the town center to a place that looked good. I raised my thumb and there I stood while the afternoon passed. The sun slowly sank and once it had disappeared behind the trees it started to get cold. I sat down by the road wondering if I was going to have to spend the night in the forest when a Saab 96 stopped a hundred yards ahead of me. The driver called out through the open side window asking if I wanted a ride. I jumped up in an instant, grabbed my backpack and yelled YES as I ran towards the car. He was on the way to Copenhagen to meet a girl and asked if it was okay to go via Helsingborg as it was cheaper to take the ferry from there, and I had of course no problem with that.

*

A week later I sat in a train that slowly and noisily rolled in towards Termini, Rome’s central station. It was seven-thirty in the morning. The wagons shook and slammed every time they passed a switch. Tired and stiff after a night in a seating compartment, I took down my backpack and put away my sweater. I left the train and felt the warm exhausts from the humming diesel engines as I walked towards the station building. There were available storage lockers but even the largest were too small for my backpack, so I had to take off the tent and sleeping bag to fit everything in.

Termini was modern and functional but not at all as impressive as Paris’s cathedrals of iron and glass. Right opposite of the entrance I found a café where I sat down to study a city map that I had picked up at the station over a cappuccino and a brioche. My goal was the Coliseum where I hoped to meet Emma and Frida who had suggested that we meet there on July 20.

There wasn’t a lot of traffic on Via Cavour, but the street was lined with lots of  Fiat 500, 600 and 128, plus a few squeezed in Vespas. When I turned into Via degli Annibaldi I could see the Coliseum. I remember that I walked around the north side looking for good shooting angles, but also that it was hard to capture the entirety of it. In front of the entrance there were half a dozen horse buggies and an ice cream vendor’s scooter, but the tourists had not started arriving so the whole thing looked rather sleepy except for three nuns dressed in black who energetically crossed the street with silver crosses dangling from their necks.

I walked into the amphitheater which was empty except for a couple of Japanese tourists. I walked around and took photos but got bored after a while and sat down on a concrete block to figure out what to do. Nobody thought of the time when we decided to meet in Rome on this day.

The wait turned out to be long and as the sun rose, the heat went from stifling to unbearable. I did small excursions and return at the top of every hour. At eleven I walked over to Forum Romanum which I didn’t care for or understand, but where you could at least catch some shade under the pine trees. My next excursion was about buying water, which wasn’t easy since it was now siesta. Most stores had their shutters pulled down, but one had left it half shut. The owner was there and took pity on me, so I could return with a two-liter bottle of aqua minerale.

By five in the afternoon, I had made seven excursions which all ended with me alone at the giant arena. I gave up and walked back to Termini where I bought pears, orange juice and one more bottle of aqua minerale. Also checked when the train to Venice would leave. 

I arrived at Venice’s Central Station Santa Lucia on Saturday morning and went to the bathroom area to brush my teeth and wash up. I leaned my backpack against the wall and took out what I needed. There were three sinks. The left one was clogged. I took the middle one when it was free, but it had no warm water, so I asked the guy to my right if he had any warm water in his tap. His name was Yurik and he belonged to an ethnic minority by the Caspian Sea in Soviet Union. He and two friends had escaped from Soviet to Israel, but didn’t like it there so they hope to continue to the US. When we were done, we packed up our stuff and left the bathroom. I found a storage locker for my backpack, but I couldn’t fit in the sleeping bag, so I took it with me. I asked Yurik if he knew any affordable place to stay in Venice.

“The Hotels are very expensive and there only a couple of youth hostels and they are fully booked, but I’ve heard that you can sleep in railway cars that are parked at the station area,” he said.

“Have you done it?”

“No, but if you think about it, you always see unused cars at the station. I’ve heard that they park them there so that they can be used the next morning.”

“That makes sense,” I said.

We walked to the end of one of the platforms where it was concrete block that he had been using for his daily workout. He was shorter than me, but well-built and muscular. He said that he had practiced Judo half his life and studied in Moscow to become a doctor.

We returned to the station building after his workout and met his friend Stephan and his girlfriend Lena. Stephan was tall and skinny and looked intellectual with his long, black hair and glasses. He dreamed of moving to Los Angeles to work with computational medicine. Lena didn’t say much about her dreams.

We walked through the city and talked while we walked. As we passed by an old church, we could hear classical music through a door that was ajar. Yurik carefully opened it and we walked in and sat down to listen to a small string orchestra that was practicing.

After dinner, Yurik asked if I wanted to join him trying to find a sleeper car for the night. His friends already had a hotel room, but he seemed to be more adventurous. I liked the idea, but I was worried about my camera equipment. Stephan and Lena offered to keep it for me. It was not an easy decision since I had just met them, but to bring it on our adventure was not exactly a safe solution either, so I handed over my camera bag to Stephan.

We split and Yurik and I walked to the end of the same platform where he had done his training pass earlier, and we found a train that looked like it was parked for the night. We opened to door to one of the cars, climbed up and walked through the train until we found a compartment that looked okay. There we rolled out our sleeping bags and climbed into them to sleep. It seemed that the plan worked.

We were soon asleep but awoke when we felt the car shaking and the wheels squeaking against the rails. The train was moving! I looked at Yurik and we both looked out the window. It looked like the train had left the station and was on the railway bridge that connects Venice and the mainland.

“Shit,” I called out.

We were scared, but then the train stopped and started to move back towards the station. It stopped again and it was silent for a few moments until we heard doors being opened and shut. And the sound became louder and louder. We guessed that it must be the conductor inspecting the train before the next trip. We quickly rolled up our sleeping bags and ran away from the sound. What would happen if we were caught? Would we be arrested? Then I got a wicked idea.

“Follow me,” I told Yurik and ran ahead a couple of cars.

We entered a sleeper compartment where I rolled out my sleeping bag and climbed into it. He followed my lead. Then we pretended to sleep.

It didn’t take long before we heard steps outside our compartment and then the door opened. At first it was quiet, but then we heard a metallic knocking on glass.

“Signore! Signore! Mister!”

I pretended to wake up and looked with mock surprise at the intruder. Then Yurik woke up and looked first at me and then at the genial conductor in his rumpled uniform. I smiled at him and said in home-made French Italian.

“Pardonne, treno par Firenze, eh? Destinazione Firenze?”

“No, no, no,” he said and shook his head, followed by a long harangue that ended with a curt request that we “Go stazioni!”

“It seems that this train doesn’t go to Florence after all,” I told Yurik who pretended to be surprised.

“Are we on the wrong train,” he asked the conductor.

“Stazioni,” he said again and pointed towards the station building.

”Si, si, stazioni,” repeated Yurik and smiled his most charming smile.

Where upon we quickly rolled up our sleeping bags and ran towards the door.

”Thank you, mille grazie, mille grazie,” I called out as we jumped down on the tracks and ran towards the station.

”It was a very kind man,” Yurik said once we were back in the station building. “Back in Kazakhstan we would have been arrested and thrown in jail.”

It was now four in the morning and the only thing we could do was to take a stroll in a city that was incredibly quiet and peaceful, except for the pigeons cooing and the seagulls fighting over scraps of food left over by the tourists. It was chilly and damp, so we were happy when we found a café that was open. We sat down and ordered two caffe latte and sat there until the sun began to rise. We wet Stephan and Lena at the eight o’clock meeting time.

“Did you sleep well,” Stephan asked with a smile as he handed me my camera bag.

“Fantastic! It was like a dream,” Yurik said.

We took a vaporetto to Piazza San Marco where Stephan and Lena visited Sant Mark’s Basilica while Yurik and I explored the square. He stopped to talk to three girls and two boys sitting on a step outside a café. One of the girls had a long blond hair and played on a guitar. I sat down next to her and started peeling an orange with my pocketknife. I shared the orange with the company, which came from Norway. We talked and exchanged stories about our InterRail adventures and shared tips about places to eat and inexpensive places to sleep. 

July 23, Monday

I and Therese are sitting on the steps in front of the Central Station. It’s very hot outside. Yesterday we said farewell to Yurik, Stephan, and Lena, who were heading to Rome. My Norwegian friends was also going to the station, so we walked together, but didn’t get far until we were surprised by a storm. Suddenly there were lightning and heavy thunder. The entire sky was lit up. At first, we thought it was fireworks, but then the rain started. We sought shelter in a café and continued when the rain let up but were now met by a hailstorm! And the hails were large, some large as peas, others as sugar cubes! We took shelter under an awning to wait out the worst. Then the storm ended as quickly as it had started. 

A quarter past seven at the same step in front of the station.

I feel happy, secure, and calm. After Yurik and his friends left, I got to share a room with the two Norwegian boys who had found an inexpensive small hotel. We had breakfast together in the hotel’s courtyard where vines grew on a pergola from which hung plenty of green and red grapes. Then we packed up, paid for the rooms, put on our backpacks, and began the long zigzag walk along the canals towards the station. We locked up our backpacks and took a final tour of the city before we returned to take the train to Pescara which left a little before eight in the evening.

We found a hotel not far from the sandy beach and rented a bungalow for 3,600 liras. The girls shared one room and the guys the other. We were dead tired after the train trip, so the first thing we did wat to take a good siesta. In the evening we ended up in a discotheque together with some Italians we had met. I wore my blue jeans and old worn-out t-shirt and danced barefoot. At first, I danced with Hanna and then with a Belgian girl who was there with her Italian boyfriend. She was very good looking, but she said she felt clumsy and insecure when she danced with him since he danced so well. 

Thursday night. I sat in the large double bed in our room talking to Hanna, who clearly was interested in me. Then Linda showed up and sat down at the foot end of the bed. We talked about writers and music and the meaning of life. The conversation became more and more personal. By then Therese woke up and joined the discussion. Linda asked me why I was travelling alone, and I said that my friend had to cancel last minute. She asked if I had a girlfriend at home and I said that I didn’t which unfortunately was also true. Therese asked what I thought of them as persons. It was a tricky question since I had been flirting with all three of them.

I said that she seems to be stubborn and holds on tight to her integrity as if she is trying to keep the world at bay. About Linda, I said that she is a natural, independent, and easy to connect to. About Hanna, I said that she is romantic, but keeps her guard as if she’s been hurt. The room was quiet when I finished, and you could her the waves crash on the beach. Hanna said after a few minutes that she wanted to go to the beach and asked if I wanted to accompany her. Which I did, but at the same time I felt a somewhat split.

We walked along the beach and felt the lukewarm Mediterranean Sea wash over our naked feet. I took her hand and she let me, but I didn’t know what to do with it. I was thinking of Susan and Therese. What was it I wanted?

It was as if love for me was an abstract state with no history or future. Neither marriage, children nor other practicalities featured in my romantic dreams. It was about passion, desire, and lust. Was it Plato’s dream of unifying the two halves? Or simply the thought of holding a girl, kissing her, making love to her? What else could a young man dream of?

 

We were on the way from Pescara to Rome, when we suddenly decided to jump off the train in the little town Carsoli, which is situated 700 meters above the sea level. There was a guest house opposite of the station where we rented three inexpensive rooms. It didn’t take long before we had met half a dozen local youths.

We strolled around town during Friday afternoon while trying to communicate across the language barrier. One of the girls, Angelica, was a true beauty. She had brown eyes and a long wavy golden hair. She had tight beige jeans and a tight-fitting white sweater that accentuated her breasts. If I had been back in Stockholm, I would probably not have dared to even look at her, but here I flirted freely, and she answered my flirt.

At five Angelica and her friends went home but promised to return. We Nordics sat down at the guest house’s restaurant to have dinner. We ordered pasta and wine, which didn’t cost more than 500 lira per person. The owner joined us and treated us to more wine. Later his wife came out and joined us too, followed by her two sons who were eight and twelve. I used the little French I knew to make myself understood and filled in the blanks with sign language. When I pointed at knives and forks, glasses, plates and colors, the boys enthusiastically answered. Thanks to the wine I was soon convinced that I spoke Italian well.

We had just paid for the dinner and thanked our hosts when our new friends returned. Angelica had changed into a black sweater. She asked if I wanted to take a walk up to the old castle and I had of course nothing against that. We walked along a paved street that ran in a spiral towards the top. Now and then we stopped to admire the view and she posed for pictures, but when I tried to take her hand, she withdrew it and pointed towards her eyes. This was a small town, and the walls had both eyes and ears.

Angelica and I took farewell once we were back at the guest house and I returned to my room where Hanne sat in front of the mirror in her blue night shirt, slowly combine her long hair. She didn’t say anything, but I understood that she was upset.

“It was just a crazy flirt and nothing serious,” I said as an excuse as I undressed and climbed in under the thick comforter.

Darkness fell and the room turned cold as we were up in the mountains and there were no radiators in the room. Hanna started to shiver and said that she was cold. She came to bed and asked me to warm her. I felt her body against mine and her breasts against my chest. Then we kissed and it was clear that she wanted to make love and I was ready, but when I started to remove her panties, she asked me if I loved her. I could have lied, but it made me uncomfortable. We obviously played different games, so I stopped, and the interrupted act was replaced by a conversation. I said that I liked them all three.

“But there must be some difference,” she suggested.

“Of course, there are differences,” I said but she wanted a more specific answer.

She wanted to hear that I loved her, only her, but if I had told her that, it would not only have been a white lie, but a rotten lie. The truth was that it was Therese that first attracted me when we met in Venice, but she seemed hard to win over, so I turned my interest towards Linda, who was intelligent, funny, and down to earth. There was something about Hanna that turned me off, maybe her underlying sadness and hunger for love, as well as the fact that she was the one who wanted me, and I allowed her to try to catch me. I kept a certain distance, but it had the opposite effect.

When I woke up on Saturday morning I found on my night table a handwritten copy of a poem by Arne Paasche-Aasen called The Things Nearby. “To Johan from Hanna” it said at the top of the paper. I read it and the message was clear enough. I was a dreamer who didn’t understood to value what I had right in front of me. 

Go into your cottage, which, as small as it is

Contains something your heart holds dear

Calling out in the forest gets no answer

Find the way back to what you have

 

The happiness you seek behind mountains blue

Maybe you have always owned it yourself

You should not chase in a restless circle

But learn to love those nearby things

It was a fine poem, but I wasn’t ready to enter that small cottage.

We checked out from the guest house at noon and took a hike as they say in Norway. We walked a couple of kilometers up in the mountain until we found a little brook where we set up our tents. I helped the girls wash their hair in the brook’s cold water and then we ate from the packed lunch that the guest house had provided us with. We sat on a slope admiring the view. When the sun had set, we returned to our tents. I slept alone but could not avoid hearing Hanna and Lars laughing in the tent next to mine. Was it her revenge or her need of consolation? I assumed that she was proud and wanted to show me that she didn’t need me. 

I felt distress. Had I done right or wrong? Obviously wrong, but in what way? At least, not completely wrong. I wanted to turn my soul inside out and wash it clean. Does my philosophy of life hold up?

The night was heavy. I had treated her bad and then I didn’t want to pay the bill.

I was thinking of continuing my trip alone. Better to spare the feelings until after the journey. 

We returned to town the next morning and had lunch at the guest house. Signora came out and waved to us as we walked to the train station with our backpacks on. My friends had decided to travel east and take a boat to Corfu while I continued west. 

I arrived in Rome on Sunday afternoon, had a lousy pizza at a restaurant not far from Termini. By then I had walked around for three hours searching for a place to eat. I was too picky for the simple places and too cheap for the fine ones. While I walked and walked inspecting menus one restaurant after the other started to pull down their metal curtains and suddenly there were nowhere to eat. That’s why I ended up at a pizzeria near the station. I was tired and in a bad mood and had little patience for the city’s chaos and dirt. 

A bit later, I took a walk with no other plan than that I wanted to visit Saint Peter's Basilica, and eventually I was at Saint Peter’s Square. The line was short, so I entered and soon found myself standing on the shining marble floor in front of Bernini’s high altar which is surrounded by four dark corkscrew shaped columns. When I stood in front of Michelangelo’s Pietà, which was glassed-in, I heard somebody asking me in Swedish if I was a Swede.

It was a priest that asked. He was dressed in black and had a white collar around his neck. He was shorter than me, maybe fifty years old and had a receding hairline.

“Why is Michelangelo’s sculpture behind glass,” I asked.  

“Oh, that was a terrible thing that happened last year. A mad geologist attacked the sculpture with a hammer and damaged it badly,” he said.

“It’s a fantastic sculpture, but isn’t it strange that she looks so young, too young to have a 33-year-old son,” I said.

“That’s a good observation. Too many tourists just rush by to check off the items on the list in the guidebook,” he said.

“Are you too a tourist,” I asked.

“No, I work with the Vatican’s secret archive, which unfortunately isn’t as exciting as it sounds. It’s simply His Holiness’ personal archive.”

“Is that where the Vatican keeps its pornographic collections?”

“Ha, ha. You’re not the first to ask that, but it’s a myth, a very old myth. The Vatican does of course have a large art collection and there are some paintings and sculptures that depicts nude bodies, but there is no pornographic collection here.”

I looked skeptically at him.

“If you have time, maybe we could continue our conversation over a cup of coffee,” he said.

“I’d love to. I was on my way out anyhow,” I said.

He took me to a café on Via della Conciliazone, a street that leads to Saint Peter’s Square. He ordered two espresso and introduced himself as Mikael Sten and said that he had been a Jesuit for ten years.

“What do you think of Saint Peter’s Basilica? To me it’s an antechamber to Heaven,” he said.

“I must admit that it leaves me with mixed feelings. It’s hard to deny it’s beauty, but it’s also hard to deny that it represents the feudal system. When I stood in there, I tried to see it as a poor 16th century farmer would have seen if he for some reason had been allowed in. What would he have thought of all the splendor? Did he get a sense of Heaven or just another evidence that the rich controlled both the power and the glory?”

“Now I can hear that you really are a Swede,” he said. “The Lutherans never liked the Vatican and that makes sense since it was built to stave off the reformation that at the time was sweeping across Europe.”

“How come you live in Rome – I mean in the Vatican State?”

“That’s a long and complicated story. I grew up during the war and Sweden had already become a secular place where the Lutheran church didn’t have much to offer when it came to moral guidance. Terrible things were going on outside our little country, but people didn’t react. They left it to the government. And if anything was wrong, all that was needed was to make a new law. There was no need to take a stand and we had no values to tell us what was right or wrong. That was at least how I felt it as a young man searching for the meaning of life,” he said.

“It was also my parents’ divorce which in my eyes was wrong, but in that time, nobody could say that it was wrong. Everything was relative. My father was a businessman who wasn’t much interested in religion and moral dilemmas. I think that’s why I was looking for something to hold onto in a troubled world. And if you asked people about the truth they only shrugged. I was upset about the world, and I wanted to change it. I wanted to go against the grain and one of the worst things you could do in Sweden was to become a catholic. Despite the war, I was lucky to get a chance to live in both London and New York. I didn’t care for the Anglican Church, but in the US I met catholic students who seemed to know what they wanted. I realized that I had been indoctrinated against the catholic church during my entire childhood and gradually opened-up to new ideas. Another thing was the music, which was a big part of what attracted me to the catholic church,” he said.

“But the catholic church has been a deeply reactionary force in history,” I interjected. “I’m thinking of things like the inquisition. And then we have the sale of indulgencies and the corruption. It must have been hard to swallow, even if you believe in God.”

“Yes, there were many difficult issues I had to work through, but I read a lot and had many discussions before I decided to  become a Jesuit. To understand the inquisition, you must study it in its historic context. It was an era when it was rare to show tolerance for dissenters. It was also an era when Europe was under pressure both from internal schisms and external threats like the Mongols and the Ottomans,” he said.

“The question of the indulgencies was the one I found hardest to understand. I struggled with the issue for over a year begore I found an answer I could live with, but I have never felt that I must defend everything the church says or have done.”

“What did it mean for you to become a catholic during the war? If I had lived then I would have joined the resistance,” I burst out.

“That was something I thought of a lot and that’s why I didn’t want to return to Sweden. I joined the British army in 1943 to fight against Hitler even though I was a pacifist in my heart and soul. They sent me to the Netherlands where I worked with the resistance and later helped to track down Nazi officers trying to escape. Not exactly what you might have expected from a young priest,” he said.

“No, not at all,” I said after a pause. “My generation is fighting imperialism and injustice without religion and churches.”

“As I see it, religion can be both a positive and negative factor, but I believe that it is very important that it stands for something and dare to tell its members that they have a choice to make. In Sweden religion had become very weak. In my eyes it functioned like a bank where the government gave you a moral account at birth which you could deposit to or withdraw from at will during your life. But nobody cared about the balance! And that was nothing for me,” he said.

My next destination was Île de Ré on the Atlantic Coast. Susan had said that she was going to be there in the beginning of August and would love to meet me there, but she didn’t say where.

The trip from Rome to La Rochelle too over twenty-four hours. I had to switch trains in Genoa, Marseilles, Bordeaux, and La Rochelle, where I caught a ferry to the island. Then I hitchhiked to the campground where I pitched my tent and crawled in to get some rest. When I woke up, I first thought that it was the next morning, but soon realized that it was still Thursday. The clouds were gone, and the sun was shining. I took a walk from the campground to the village Le Bois Plage where I bought camembert and bread that I tucked into my already stuffed shoulder bag. Then I followed the road towards La Couarde-sur-Mer which was 4 kilometers away. It was now nine-thirty and it was getting dark, so I started to hitchhike. I was lucky and immediately got a ride with a violinist who played in the Bamberg Orchestra. His name was Paul and he told me that it was the second-best orchestra in Western Germany after the Berliner Philharmonics.

He was out to put up posters for the orchestra’s performances on the island and I offered to help. We drove all the way to Ars en Ré where we met other members of the orchestra. We continued to a couple of other cities before we were done with the posters. In Saint Clement he stopped and had med continue with Bertrand, who was short, had a receding hairline and looked to be about thirty-five. He let me follow him to his parents’ home which was nearby.

The sun had set, and it was dark outside when we walked through a blue gate in a tall, whitewashed wall. We entered a small courtyard with beautiful vines and flowers that were invisible from the street. In the kitchen a pastel blue window frame contrasted with the white wall. The ceiling in the living room consisted of planks held in place by thick cross beams. All the wood was dark and exposed. The whitewashed walls were here and there interrupted by small alcoves that housed plants or lamps. Fishing nets and glass balls decorated one side of the room together with large potted plants.

Bertrand and I were immediately invited to take a seat at the dinner table which already seated seven persons. The others had almost finished, but that didn’t matter. A new set of plates were set up and we were served soup with wine and bread. Then crab that they had caught themselves. It was hard for me to figure out how to eat crab, but Bertrand’s mom showed me what to do and then it went well. The crab was followed by camembert cheese and finally a sweet desert.

After dinner, Bertrand and his German girlfriend withdrew to the living room where they started to play flute. Having finished my dinner, I followed them to just sit and digest the food. The mother accompanied us, sat down in an armchair, and began knitting. My night ended with Bernard giving me a ride back to my campground. 

When I followed Paul around on Wednesday night, I got the impression that Ars en Ré was a popular hangout for tourists, so I thought it might be a place where I could find Susan. Once I had packed up, I hit the road hitchhiking, but it didn’t go well, so I took a break. Leaned my backpack against one side of a tree and myself against the other. My lunch consisted of a liter of pasteurized milk and two buns that I had bought in Bois Plage. It must have looked idyllic, because a girl called out “Bon appétit!” from a passing car, but the idyll was broken when I suddenly discovered that I sat on an anthill. 

It was equally hard to get a ride when I started again, but suddenly a car stopped. I didn’t think they stopped for me since it was a small Renault, but a young and perky girl stepped out of the car and helped me get my backpack into the luggage compartment. There were already two women, two teenagers and a small child in the car, but somehow, I managed to find space in the backseat. The oldest girl had studied English for seven years in school but could hardly utter a word, so I had to converse in my limited French. They dropped me off at a campground outside Ars, where le patron was friendly and mighty impressed when he heard about my long journey. He showed his wife my InterRail pass with all its stamps.

I walked over to Bar de Commerce together with two Frenchmen that stayed in a tent next to mine. They live and work in Paris. One plays the piano, and the other is interested in music technology. They said that there are three places on the island for youth that are not into variety entertainment a la Julien Clerc: Bar Commerce, Café des Colonnes, and the night club Bastion in Saint Martin. This gave me hope that I would be able to find Susan. 

Friday, August 3. 

I dreamt that I had received a lot of letters from Susan at home in Sweden. They were addressed to various campgrounds and Poste Restante in different cities. All had been forwarded to me. 

I got a ride almost instantly that took me to Sant Martin de Ré. I had breakfast at the citadel. The egg yolks were blue on the surface, the milk had started to turn, and the grapefruit was dry. I went around searching for Colonnes for an hour not realizing that I had passed it by several times. For some stupid reason I had gotten the impression that the place was called Joker after the name on the sun umbrellas, so I kept searching while taking photos and looking around. Eventually I found Café des Colonnes and her I am. It’s two o’clock and the place is almost empty. I am trying to stretch my second cup of tea, but the bottom is starting to show.

I have begun to give up on finding Susan. She had given me the impression that this was a small island where we easily could find each other, but it turned out that it was a rather large island which during the high season accommodates a couple of hundred thousand tourists, and I happened to be there during that season.

It annoyed me that she had enticed me to come here if she didn’t have any intention to meet me, but I didn’t regret visiting Île de Ré. The island is beautiful, almost idyllic. I have visited seven small towns and had a chance to see how ordinary people are living. Now, I’m going to try to catch the 10:35 pm train to Paris and from there I’ll continue to London. If everything goes well, I’ll arrive there on Saturday evening or night.

 

There is a stench of vomit on the London train. I’m traveling with four Swedes that I met at the station. We fought hard to reserve a compartment, but all were taken. Once on the train we found a luggage room where we sat down on the floor and started to eat breakfast. But it didn’t take more than five minutes before an employee kicked us out, so now we are sitting on the floor in the corridor. 

It rained and the youth hostels were full, so we decided to take a night train to Edinburgh instead of paying for a hotel room in London. 

We were on the way to the post office to buy stamps when I saw a crowd on the square in front of the Academy. The first was a born-again Christian. He was dressed in a grey coat that was buttoned all the way up. He held his Bible in his left hand while gesticulating vividly with his right hand. He was a natural speaker and had no problem in handling interruptions and questions from skeptical listeners. The audience was a mixed crown, old men, bums picking up cigarette butts, long haired youths, middle aged men in suits and old women. The next speaker was a tall, bearded man around thirty who had a red buff of hair. He was dressed in a Manchester suit with a white napkin in his jacket. He stood on a chair against which he had leaned a placard that read Socialist Party of Great Britain. On the ground in front of him lay small brochures. Then there was a girl with large curly reddish hair and a thick hand-stitched sweater. She spoke passionately about Guru Maharaj Ji who according to her was “a perfect master of love” despite being only fifteen years old. Speaker number four also stood on a chair and gesticulated lively with his right hand while holding a Bible in his left. He was dressed in shirt and tie, had a thin jacket and sideburns that ran along his cheek bones. On his sign it said Protestant Action. He tried energetically to convince the listeners that 95 percent of the population in Northern Ireland were protestants. The fifth speaker was a young man representing the Edinburgh Indo-China Solidarity Committee. He was dressed in a stitched sweater and his brown hair almost reached down to his shoulders. It was hard to stop listening to the speakers, so I came late to my meeting with my friends, but it turned out okay. 

I had breakfast at Tommy’s restaurant in Manchester. Sausage, chips & eggs. 25 np. It was good and sufficient. It was hard to get an impression of the city from the little I had seen, but it looked like there was a lot of poverty her. It’s after all an industrial city. Like in Edinburgh, you see grown-ups begging and many bums. 

NO PERSON

WEARING JEANS,

OVERALLS OR

SOILED CLOTHES

WILL BE SERVED

IN THIS LOCAL.

(TIE and SHIRT, PLEASE!) 

I saw this sign outside a restaurant in Manchester, not far from Town Hall. 

It’s nine fifteen and I have wandered around in Manchester since two in the afternoon. I saw a couple of posters at Piccadilly Garden about a meeting with Guru Maharaj Ji near Town Hall, and began walking in that direction. On the opposite sidewalk I saw two black men and two girls that looked like prostitutes. The men were excited. I followed them with my eyes until I heard somebody talking on my left. I looked in that direction and saw a short old man who walked muttering something. I thought he was talking to himself, but he continued and looked at me. So, I listened. He talked about immigrants, about that the two girls were not English, but Irish. Many Irish, Scottish, and Welsh girls went with black men and that was something he didn’t like.

I asked for directions to the Town Hall. Then he turned around and accompanied me there. I assumed that he was homeless. Dressed in a worn-out hobo jacket with a pullover under, old gray pants and worn-out shoes. His hair was tousled, no upper teeth, and a week-old stubble. Once at the square we split, but then he came back, and we sat down at a bench. He complained bitterly that there were no longer any pure Englishmen because of all the immigrants.

“Manchester is run by the Scots and Irish,” he said.

Besides immigrants he hated communism.

“Stay away from the university. Only anarchists and communists there. The students don’t understand that there must be authority. They are stupid,” he said.

“Manchester is not a god city. It’s run by Labour. The people in Manchester are bad. You see the man over there? He is spying on us. Everybody spies in Manchester.”

“You must be careful here in Manchester. There are a lot of terrible things happening here. It’s so bad that I hardly dare to be outside some nights. It’s dangerous. Look out for troublemakers and hold on to your bags!”

Town Hall is the center of the city, but it was almost empty when I got there.

“That’s the way it is. People don’t go outside. They stay indoors and that’s better,” he said.

Two years ago, he had been to Sweden which he liked since there wasn’t as much race mixing there. Despite his bitter and racist ideas, I couldn’t but feel some empathy for him as a person. I thought I could guess how he had become that way. He spoke French and German besides English. Maybe he had an intellectual job at some point in his life. Maybe he had had an intellectual job at some point. He took me to an international restaurant, an Esperanto club. On the way there he stopped in front of an Armenian restaurant and pointed out the Russian wines on display in the window.

“Only communists. A bad place,” he said and shook his head.

Then he pointed at the Labour Party’s office.

”You see, just near Town Hall.”

The Esperanto restaurant was closed, so we continued towards Piccadilly Garden. During the entire walk, he kept pointing despairingly at Italian, Chinese, Japanese and Indian restaurants. Finally, we reached The Golden Egg, where I’m now sitting. We pressed each other’s hands. He tested my strength a bit.

“You’ll be all right. Maybe we’ll meet again around here sometime.”

“Bye!”

Before we went our own ways, he had declined my invitation to join me inside. He pointed to his raged clothes.

At the Golden Egg I had two cups of tea, two tea sandwiches and two pancakes with whipped cream and peaches. It came to 39 pennies. Everything was good and the atmosphere was nice.

 

In Piccadilly Garden there are destitute old men and women. Along the back streets you see ill-dressed men wandering aimlessly. Unemployed? At the bus terminal next to the park, I walked by a poor old man with a beard that made him look like Karl Marx. He was trying to sleep standing up, leaning towards a railing, but he failed over and over. Some of the homeless look miserable indeed. On a park bench, an old man lies sleeping in the rain. His cap is covering his face, so I only see his beard. Poor man.

 

Oxford looks pleasant. The university provides a medieval impression with its stone buildings and heavy wood doors. The lawns are trimmed, but you see almost no students around since the autumn semester has not started yet. Half a dozen swans are swimming in a brook where an old man who looks like he could be a professor is fishing from a stone bridge.

Other ways there are a lot of people out and about in the town. Everybody seems to be on the way somewhere. I can’t sense any distinct center where one could sit down and chat.

I feel depressed. The loneliness is starting to irk me.

If you’re not in, then you are out. Completely out.

They aren't even ripe yet, said the fox of the grapes. That’s contempt for the world in a nutshell. There's half of my bitterness, but I’m not bitter now. Just tired, dirty, sweaty, and a bit sad. The other half belongs to the world.

 

This morning I happened to get into a discussion with some guys selling newspapers outside a department store. I asked a bald guy in a black leather jacket and worn-out jeans what his group stood for.

“Revolutionary action,” was his fast and confident answer. “We’re not going to wait for capitalism to dig its own grave. Marx showed how capitalism will collapse and that the victory of the proletariat is inevitable, and Lenin showed that capitalism will not go way by itself but must be helped to the dustbin of history!”

“But what about the role of the people? Marx and Engels wrote in the Manifesto that proletarians all over the world must unify in battle, not that a small clique should take over the job of grave digger,” I said.

“No, no, the working class is so oppressed that it must be led by an avant-garde who knows how to smash the system,” he said.

“Well, it’s obvious that you unlike both Marx and Mao have no faith in the masses,” I countered. “We will never reach socialism if we don’t follow the mass line!”

“You are really naïve! Only by hitting hard against the core of the system can we move forward,” he said.

“Don’t listen to him! He’s a Stalinist,” a guy from the second group called out.

He had a burly blond hair and looked a bit like Trotsky with his goatee and round glasses.

“I don’t know what he stands for, but I can’t imagine that Marx would have wanted to have anything to do with him had he been alive today,” I said.

“Are you a socialist,” he asked.

“Of course! I'm fighting for a socialist Sweden,” I said.

“But there can’t be a socialist Sweden and not any other socialist country,” he said. “Trotsky realized early that the Russian revolution only was the first step in a world revolution. The revolution cannot stay within the borders of a nation. The nation is a bourgeois concept. Haven’t you read The Permanent Revolution?”

“No, but I’m familiar with Trotsky’s theory, and I do understand why the Russian people didn’t want to enter another war after having won the civil war and the war against the imperialist invaders,” I said.

“If Soviet had followed Trotsky’s line instead of Stalin’s reactionary opportunism, we would have a socialist Europe by now,” he said. “And the soviet worker state would not have degenerated into a bureaucratic dictatorship in the transitional stage between capitalism and socialism. The dream of socialism in one country is reactionary, objectively speaking! It doesn’t surprise me that this tendency is so strong in Sweden where the working class is still dominated by the social democratic bureaucracy.”

I tried to argue with him but gave up after half an hour and he returned to selling Workers of the World.

 

Sitting in a café licking my chops after this morning’s political battles. A girl in my age sat two tables away from me a little while ago. She looked friendly and we exchanged a couple of shy looks, but I felt insecure and pulled back.

A skinny man around thirty-five took a seat diagonally from her at her table which had four chairs. At first, I didn’t think about it, but after a couple of minutes he moved to the seat opposite of hers, whereupon she put out her cigarette and left.

The man then moved to another table where he still sits, and he is eating a hot dog with French fries. He splits each fry on the middle before he inserts them in his mouth. He has tired, starved eyes and a nervous half open mouth. I don’t know if he is a pervert, but the thought came to me.

At the table next to mine sits a gentleman in a jacket, shirt, and tie. He holds his hands under the table in front of his groin. He had spasms and his body jerked now and then. His head and eyes are shifting here and there, and he has hooked his feet behind the front chair legs. 

London, August 9

Is there any reasonable reason why police cars should drive through the parks with the spotlights on to chase away those poor devils who are only trying to sleep? It made me think of Jack London’s The People of the Abyss where he told of his time as a drifter in London’s East End the summer of 1902. He wrote that those in power had decided that homeless people should not be allowed to sleep at night, which is why the beautiful parks are surrounded by tall fences with sharp ends that make it hard to climb over them. Even then homeless were hunted through the night. 

As for me, I had a good night and a good day. I’m lying in Hyde Park. The sun is shining. I’m tired, dirty and such, but other ways everything is great. Three Italian girls are laying three yards from me. One of them is very pretty and she flirts with me, but she does it in the safety of being with her friends.

 

Sitting in the restaurant on the boat to Ostende. My new Swedish friends are (I hope) on the other boat on the way to the same harbor. 

Last night I planned to sleep at the Victoria Station. Klaus (whom I had met in Cardiff), and a couple of other Germans had said that they were going to hang at the station until it was time to sleep. I took a stroll through Soho and came back half an hour past midnight. Klaus and his friends were not there. I walked around searching for them. I noticed a black man around 25 following me, so I stopped and turned around. He then came up to me and asked if I was Danish. He said his name was Barry, and he was trying to help a Danish guy find his friend. We started to chat, and I told him that I planned to sleep here at the station, but that I couldn’t find my German friends. Barry thought he had seen my German friends being kicked out of the station and suspected that they had gone to a place run by the Salvation Army where they let you sleep on the floor. After a while he said that I could follow him home and sleep there. I said okay, relieved that I wouldn’t need to sleep alone, but worrying at the same time if I may jump from the ashes into the fire. But he looked friendly, so I followed him to the garage where he had his car parked, a Japanese car. It took a while to get to his place, which was in an apartment complex in southeast London. He said that he worked at an insurance company.

“It’s not that exciting, but it’s a good job,” he said.

He seemed content with his life overall and his ideas matched his way of life well, or as Marx would say, his social existence. He was a bit conservative in an unpolitical way.

“Poor people don’t need to be poor or go unemployed, but that’s the way they want it,” he said.

Once we had arrived in his apartment, he asked me if I cared for some tea, but I declined since it was so late. Then he offered me a whiskey as a nightcap before I laid down in the couch and fell asleep.

In the morning he made med a breakfast with tea, toast, and an egg before driving me to a bus stop where we said goodbye and exchanged addresses. He continued to his job and I to the City.

 

When I strolled around in Soho, I had locked up all my stuff except the sleeping bag in a locker. On the way to The Mall that runs through a park towards Buckingham Palace, I reached a broad stairway that led up to a square with a statue on a pillar. I walked alone on Regent Street from Piccadilly Circus to Waterloo Place. The dark street was desolate, why I held my pocketknife half opened in my right hand, for safety’s sake. Suddenly a man came running across the street and stopped in front of me. He was about fifty and his shirt was untucked.

“Ye see, I gotta have some fix, ye see?”

He pointed at his arm och asked if he could get some money for drugs. He looked more miserable than desperate and didn’t seem to be violent. I showed him my sleeping bag and told him that I was going to sleep at the station because I didn’t have any money. He understood and kept on chasing money for his fix.

 

During Thursday I tried to find a Marxist-Leninist bookstore in London. I took the subway to Elephant & Castle and walked 4-500 numbers along first New, then Old Kent Road, where I had heard that CPB(m-l) had a bookstore. Once there a Japanese guy opened, and I stepped in. There were a few things that made me skeptical. For example, there were only pictures of Mao and books by Mao in the window display. It was the same thing in the bookstore. I asked him what they are doing, and he mentioned “large actions” with over two hundred participants, which didn’t sound like a lot in a city with over ten million people. After a while I understood that it wasn’t CPB(m-l) but CPE(m-l), that is not Communist Party of Britain, but Communist Party of England. 

The only benefit of the visit was that he gave me the address to the Bellman Bookshop, which is run by CPB(m-l). The supply of literature there was much more varied, and it wasn’t just their own publications. I talked with the guy there for an hour. He said that the other group was a CIA-supported sect. I bought a copy of CPB(m-l)’s paper The Worker, a couple of programmatic brochures and some other stuff. Then I took the Underground to Oxford Circus where I took lots of photos while I plowed through the mass of humanity along Oxford Street on the way to Hyde Park.

 

Despite everything I had heard about Amsterdam, I was on the one hand surprised at its many potheads, and on the other of how beautiful and nice its parks are. During my first day I walked and walked until hunger forced me to stop for something to eat. By then it was six in the evening. There was an organ grinder outside the restaurant, but his music was drowned out by hundreds of sparrows in a tree next to him. The man lacked a front tooth, but his eyes glittered. 

On Sunday afternoon I took a walk through the Vondelpark, taking photos of people taking it easy, sunbathing, smoking weed, or simply sleeping off their hangovers. Here and there you noticed the sweet smell of hashish. After a while I found myself in front of a group of hippies. My gaze locked onto an incredibly beautiful black girl with an afro a la Angela Davis. She was one of several beautiful young girls who gathered around a bearded hippie who must have been at least 60. He had a scarf around his head and long necklaces hanging down in front of his psychedelic shirt.

He had a pair of congas in his lap and shook a tambourine with his manicured hands that had painted nails. I noticed that he kept looking around as if to check his flock, which besides the beautiful young girls included a pair of twin boys looking to be about eight years old. The hippie family was surrounded by a group of spectators. Some were curious kids looking as if they wanted to join the party, but there were also conservatively dressed older ladies and gentlemen who observed the spectacle with a mix of surprise and disgust.

I moved around taking photos of the hippie and his harem. When the film was finished, I sat down on a park bench to put in a new roll. There was already a man sitting there. He had curly hair, round glasses and looked to be around thirty.

“Excuse me for asking, but where are you from,” he asked.

“Sweden, Stockholm,” I said.

“What are you doing in Amsterdam? Are you a photographer?”

“No, not if you mean by trade. I’ve been interrailing in Europe for a month and I’m now on my way home.”

“So, it wasn't the pot that attracted you,” he said laughing.

“No, no. It sounds like you’re from the states. Where from in the US?”

“D.C. I’m a professor at Georgetown University, and I’m studying today’s European youth culture.”

“I wouldn’t call this youth culture. It’s a drug culture,” I said. “Hippies are passive. They smoke their weed and don’t care about the world. We have hippies in Sweden too. If they ever tried to do anything, they have given up by now.”

“The drugs do play a role, but I think it’s about more than that,” the professor said. “Why do you think we have all these young people who are floating around and don’t know what to do with their lives? It’s not the first time in history we’ve seen young people adrift, but it was usually after a big war or catastrophe. Now we have middle class kids, young people who have grown up in comfort and studied at university. It’s like they can’t find a way into society. Their parents were happy to settle in the suburbs, at least in the U.S., but to their children this steady middle class life seems bored and meaningless.”

“Well, maybe it’s because the society is fundamentally unfair. All that the young are seeing is how the capital owners exploit the poor and conduct imperialist wars around the world. Why would they want to be part of that society? We must change the society and you don’t do that with hashish.”

“I agree with you that it’s not easy to find a place in the world we live in. It was probably easier before. If your parents were farmers, you would if you were lucky go to school for a couple of years and then start working next to your dad if you were a boy and helping your mom around the house if you were a girl. The step between childhood and adulthood was very short,” he said.

“But it was still the same system. It was capitalism, even if the technology made it necessary to provide the laborers with education.”

“One could say that the young became alienated and are unable to see themselves filling a role in either production or society in general,” he said.

“That’s right. Are you a Marxist?”

“Ha, ha! We are all Keynesians as Nixon said, but we are not all Marxists, at least not yet.”

“All Keynes did was to try to save capitalism. His theories could not stop the Vietnam war.”

“One could say that the war was just what the doctor prescribed. The war both fed and employed people at the same time. You don’t need to be a Marxist to see the dark logic behind this, but I am neither an economist nor political scientist, but a psychologist, so I don’t want to say too much about things I don’t know much about. But there are psychologists who are trying to understand the society and social trends in a broader perspective. Have you heard of Kenneth Kenniston?

“No, I have not. What is he doing?”

“He believes that we have reached a new stage in human life, a stage that lies in between childhood and adult life. We do of course talk about youth all the time, but he wants to expand the concept of youth in a way that allows us to understand the great changes that have occurred in the US and Western Europe after the war. In the 1950s and 60s many experts assumed that young people were well integrated into society, except for minor protests here and there, and marginal groups like the beatniks. However, in the 1960s something happened that resulted in today’s society and its youth culture. It’s like a whole generation pulled out of the society emotionally and psychologically.”

“On the other hand, we have the antiwar movement, the struggle against racism and police brutality and the Black Panthers. And the stagflation shows that the Keynesian model doesn’t work anymore. I don’t think psychological models explains much here,” I said.

“Maybe not, but I don’t think economic factors can explain why the youth rebellion grew for more than a decade. Kenniston is sympathetic to the youth protesters, but he is looking for an explanation to the fact that the protests came from youths that in a historic perspective are relatively rich. Why was the society not able to integrate them? He is looking at real social changes, like the fact that young people go to school for much longer periods than ever before. People used to be able to land a job after a few years of schooling and be able to start a family and have children at 22, but now we have millions of youths who have left childhood behind and gone through puberty, but still feel lost and reject the entire model for how to live. During the second world war, many young people found meaning in fighting Hitler, and during the Cold War it was Stalin and communism that was the enemy. Since then, it’s like the lines between good and evil have become ever more blurred.”

“I would say that the lines have cleared considerably. The Vietnamese have shown us where evil comes from,” I said.

“Maybe so, but this is also a result of a whole generation of youths taking seriously the Cold War propaganda saying that it was freedom of choice that separated the free world from the Soviet Union. The revolt may have been caused by young people adopting ideas that originally was not intended for domestic consumption, which would be rather ironic.”

“So, they should not have assumed that freedom was for use at home?”

“No, what I mean is that there are different dimensions of freedom. The Cold War was about freedom of the press, free elections, and free markets, but in the 1960s the concept of freedom was extended to include personal freedom, clothes, haircuts, drugs, and rock and roll. And then we got the pill, which launched the sexual revolution. The meaning of freedom exploded, and society didn’t know what to do.”

“But that was maybe just bread and circuses? The war continued and 1968 faded out.”

“You could say that 1968 faded out if you by that means the threat from an immediate revolution, but society kept changing even though the older generation didn’t understand what was happening. Few parents understood it and that was also true for many teachers and politicians. Remember that all this happened at the same time as television became common and TV news brought the world into people’s living rooms. You could see Kenney murdered and civil rights leaders beaten bloody by racists. And the Vietnam war also entered the living room every day. It would have been strange if we did not have a youth revolt, if young people had not protested the war, against society and their parents’ lifestyles. Neither should we underestimate the enormous social and economic changes that happened in the U.S. during the first half of the 20th century. Millions of people were uprooted by war and conflicts, the economic and technological development. The peasant society became the industrial society and then the service society.”

“The white middle class in the U.S. moved after the war out to new suburbs where everybody was white, people dressed in the same way, and drove the same cars, had the same jobs, dreams, and watched the same TV-shows. When their children became teenagers, they borrowed their dad’s car and made out in the backseat, but over time it became obvious that they didn’t know that to do with their new freedoms and comfortable life in the suburbs. What was the meaning with life? The grownups were proud over their material wealth and compared to their parents’ life and maybe with the depression years, but their kids wanted something different and new.”

“Life must have been about more than sitting home watching TV,” I said.

“Have you heard of Ozzie and Harriet?”

“Aussie and what?”

“The TV-show.”

“No, I have no idea about that. We watched the Lucy Show, Dick van Dyke, and Bonanza when I was a kid.”

“Well, Ozzie and Harriet was a TV-show about a typical American family, a white middle class family. Their kids would never have protested for or against anything. Everything was fine and got better every year. But then the Vietnam war entered the picture and then Kent State where four students were shot to death. To me, that event was enough to burst the bubble that Ozzie and Harriet lived in, because it was in a way as if it was their kids that were shot to death on that neat lawn in Ohio.”

“And that’s why you have all these hippies, like here in Vondelpark?”

“I think it’s part of the explanation, but we also have all these youths that went out and protested the war and injustices.”

“And we are changing the world.”

“I hope you will get a chance to visit America one day. It can be hard to see now, but America is so much more than what you see on TV. Remember that the four students who got killed and the four who got wounded were Americans.”

 “I agree totally with that. We’re not anti-American. It’s a bitter irony that the U.S. which had to fight for its independence against the British imperialism is now bombing Vietnam who is fighting for the same thing.”

“I’m with you to 100 percent there. It’s terrible and a huge moral failure,” he said and looked at his watch. “But I just remembered that I have a meeting in half an hour, so I have to run, but it was very interesting to talk to you. If you ever come to D.C. in the future, I hope you get in touch. See you!“

 

August 13

Back in Sandtorp. Dad is frying flounders that he has rinsed and dipped in egg and breadcrumbs. We eat them with fresh potatoes and dill that Mom had grown. I helped her set the table and open a bottle of red wine. She had taken the bus from Stockholm last Friday so that she could be here to celebrate Dad’s birthday and help him pack up before they drive back home.

We eat in the living room as usual. It used to be Dad’s studio before he had a new one build next to the main building. When they bought the house fifteen years ago, it was just a small red cottage with two small rooms, an old wood stove and a hand pump in the kitchen for the water. The toilet was a tall and narrow outhouse that we kids were scared to visit once darkness fell. From the dining room table, you could see all the way to the Baltic Sea. You could see the pastures with their stone walls and behind them the headland where the fisherman Sten docked every morning with his catch. That’s where Dad bought the flounders he had just fried. Sten was the oldest son of Sture, the farmer who we bought the cottage from.

I have spent almost every summer here since I was small, so it's a familiar place. During the peak season we played with children of summer guests who stayed at the guest house next door. We played cowboys and Indians and hide and seek. Once Per and I climbed up on the roof over the pig pen, but the roof was only resting on two sides and suddenly we slid right down into the thick black mud where two enormous sows lived. We landed on all four and were scared to death, but we managed somehow to get out of our predicament.

Sandtorp is full of memories. I remember how we brothers once caught a frog and rushed into the bedroom to show Dad, who had just taken a nap, but the frog slipped out of my grip and landed on Dad’s pillow. And he wasn’t as fond of the frog as we were.

On another occasion Dad suggested that we should build a pirate ship and began to sketch it out. I really loved the idea and began to dig a big whole in the ground right in front of the living room. I figured that it was best to start with the cargo room and with time it became a large and ugly pit that we never managed to undo.

During a rainy day when I and my brothers complained more than usual about having nothing to do, Dad declared that we were going to have an adventure.

“But Dad, it’s raining outside,” we called out in horror.

“Don’t tell me that you can’t have an adventure just because it’s raining,” he said. “What kind of adventure would that be? Put on your raincoats and rubber boots and let’s go.”

Half an hour later we wandered along the gravel road passed the guest house and into a forest where Dad stopped, looked around a told us to be completely quiet.

”I think we’ve found a good place for our camp,” he said and pointed at the forest on the right side of the road.

He climbed over the stone wall, and we traipsed behind in a state of shock. Were you even allowed to do this? What if somebody saw us? A hundred yards or so into the forest Dad cut down a small tree with the ax he had brought with him. The rain was increasing, but that didn’t matter because we were now part of the adventure and eager to help setting up camp. Dad trimmed the branches and twigs from the small tree he had cut down and tied it between two other trees that stood close to each other and then attached a tarp over the contraption and fastened the loose ends in the ground with the twigs he had cut. Then he placed another tarp on the ground under the first and told us to crawl in under the rain cover. There we sat listening to the raindrops hitting the tarp above us.

“Are you hungry, boys,” he asked and took out the sandwiches he had made, three Coca Cola and a thermos flask with coffee.

“Dad, why can’t we always have adventures,” Per asked once he finished his sandwich.

“Well, if it’s going to be a true adventure you can do it too often,” he answered.

When the rain stopped, we packed up and traipsed home.

During dinner, I told my parents about my trip. Later mom disappeared into the kitchen and when she came back it was with coffee and a birthday cake that she had baked herself. It was a sponge cake covered with whipping cream and strawberries from the guest house’s strawberry field.

This was in the middle of August when the long summer days were not as long anymore, but it was only seven o’clock, so we took a walk along the pastures as we often did during the summer evenings.

I remember when he during one of those walks pointed a cluster of trees a couple of miles away.

“What color is that” he asked.

“Green,” I said.

“Look again! What kind of green are you seeing? How many green colors can you detect?”

I took a second look and realized that there were many nuances of the same color and that some trees could be described as brown, dark blue or blackish green.

“If all you see is green, blue, and yellow, then you haven’t looked that closely. You must be open to impressions as you face them,” he said.

That was a lesson he had learned from impressionists when he studied in Paris twenty-five years ago. 

August 14

I’m sitting outside in a sun lounger. Dad is painting and Mom is looking after the garden she created five years ago. The sun is shining and its warm and nice. I enjoy sitting here looking at the clouds, but I also know that I must continue my journey through life. 

I’m needed in the world.

My Future is with the People is the first part of  novel with the working title Shifting Passions.