"On the Beach"

My early morning "on the beach" and the swim was sublime. As you can see on todays photo the sea was almost as flat as a mirror. No surf, only a last soft curling over of the rising tide on the sandbars: a whisper. In the water I felt a slight rocking. Over me the incoming clouds, gulls, silence. What a blessing experience. I do not understand why I forgot to go for a swim at an early hour. Things to Do? High Tide? So what, as soon as I heard from Mischa how enthusiast she was about her early morning swimming, I changed my “agenda”. We’ll see tomorrow morning…

“On the Beach” is also quite a different matter. Here I hold in my hand one of the many books Willemien and I are moving from old to new shelves. And I try to remember any beach-scene in the novel or in the movie I saw in the early sixties. No image, no dialogue, no word.. Strange or not, it doesn’t really matter. I have my memory on that story told with great indignation - by whom? - about the first spontaneous sit-down by a group of The Hague School students (one of them being the playful anarcho-rebel Van Duyn).

That was the start of the Dutch “Ban the Bomb”-protest. And Bertrand Russell’s Committee of 100 being the great example. That famous philosopher - 89 years old - was leading public sit downs around 1960-1961 and arrested, send to jail. (Already during WWI he had been dismissed from Trinity due to his pacifist activities). Where are the “great philosophers” of today, organizing and leading public consciousness on the dangers of modern warfare and the risks of nowadays weapons of mass destruction?

Though public and reflective amnesia seems to reign on a global scale, I do see some light. For the interested reader I may recommend today’s commentary of Noam Chomsky in The Guardian. Or you can download Edward Demenchonok’s reader on “Philosophy after Hiroshima” (2010). And from a victim's perpective there is that old collection (1951) by Arata Osada of surviving children’s memories of that early morning of the 6th of august 1945 in Hiroshima. In an impossible effort to feel some form of compassionate respect for the victims of that horrendous morning, let me pray in total silence.