Gråpäronträd

After all the grey, the world turned white again yesterday. With Anna spending two nights at a hotel downtown working on her PhD, I am playing board games with the kids and finishing the last pages in Peter Hultsberg’s Saknaden av ett gråpäronträd over a cup of mulled apple wine.

Nietzsche, in Jenseits von Gut und Böse, once wrote that “the struggle of maturity is to recover the seriousness of the child at play”. One of the many quotes in Hultsberg’s book that somehow resonates with me. Other times, I am struck by simple determinism, how hard it is to not remain captive to one’s own generation and time.

Half-jokingly, I sometimes wonder where I would be without StarTrek, as in without an emancipatory corrective to my own prejudices. Sadly, too many people today seem to have lost track of that greater narrative and have instead come to think that the future will be one of Sharia or that “feminazis” are about to take over the world (two things that do not seem to be entirely mutually compatible). I really wonder what it will take to bring back a sense of collective optimism and curiosity with regard to the future?