Start with the basic building block of all narrative, Dummkopf

My father had been a lawyer in the Old Country but worked now at the Vulcan Can Factory. He was passionately interested in philosophy, and the Professor was his only companion on those breathless flights that were, alon with the music of Beethoven and Mahler, his sole consolation on the raw and desolate shore where he was marooned. Seeing me come wobbling towards them with the Pils – which I had slopped a little – held breast-high before me, all golden in the sun, [he would look startled, as if I were a spirit of the place he had failed to allow for]. It was the Professor who recogniized the nature of my errand. ‘Ah, how kind,’ he would say. ‘Thank you my dear, and thank the good mama too. Anton, you are a lucky man.’ And my father, reconciled to the earth again, would smile and lay his hand very gently on the nape of my neck while I blushed and squirmed.

The Professor had no family – or not in Australia. He lived alone in a house he had built to his own design. It was of pine wood, as in the Old Country, and in defiance of local custom was surrounded by trees – natives. …

So there he was all through my childhood, an intimidating presence, and a heavy reminder of the previous world, where his family owned a castle, and where he had been, my mother insisted, a real scholar. …

‘I wish, when the Professor comes,’ my mother would complain, that you try to speak better. The vowels! For my sake, darling, but also for your father, because we want to be proud of you,’ and she would try to detain me as, barefoot, in khaki shorts and an old T-shirt, already thirteen, I wriggled from her embrace. ‘And put shoes on, or sandals at least, and a nice clean shirt. I don’t want that the Professor think we got an Arab for a son. And your Scout belt! And comb your hair a little, my darling – please!

TEAM

The explainer is that this excerpt of David Malouf’s Antipodes was going nowhere for me as a useful psycho-spiritual educative lit piece so I abandoned it.

However, putting it in full 1934 Piagetian (rather than wooden mechanomorpic micro 1934 Popperian) Formal-operations or ‘critical thinking’ terms with that ⤴ groovy document titling has however relatively saved the proverbial day – and the ink not,

John Mon 5 Jan 1:45
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