Interrailing from above

Crossing the Apennines, snow is still visible on the higher peaks. Europe truly is our playground and, just like last night, I get that feeling of open-ended adventure: that somehow the story is far from over.

Yet, finishing the last pages of David Szalay’s Flesh, I am struck by an acute sense of physical vulnerability, a reminder of how quickly things can change, like when Anna fell on that cliff back in 2023. Though his life is so different from my own, following István around Europe has meant coming back to many places that I know, and to all their contingencies and memories. As much as I keep telling myself that I have more agency in my own life, the tiny and seemingly insignificant circumstances do have a tendency to add up over time. Looking down as we enter German airspace, I can almost see the trains criss-crossing below, like an Interrail pass holder still not knowing if the night will end in Brussels, Cologne or somewhere else entirely.

Arancia rossa

Waking up to another day of Italian sunshine, a slight hangover from last night made me trade my planned morning run for an early bus ride out to the airport. After a couple of coffees and some blood orange juice in the lounge, life is slowly returning to normal, and I can finally sum up the last few days.

Contrary to my fears on the flight down, everything went well in the end, and I have made a number of new acquaintances. Inspired by the success of the workshop, we are now planning a special issue that seeks to bring perspectives based on sufficiency and abundance into productive conversation. We are also hoping to organize another workshop in Ravenna sometime next year.

Meanwhile, back in Sweden, I have been asked to plan a new course on AI and public administration, something that I suspect could be of interest to many these days. With two more weeks of work remaining before the summer, I should be able to submit the article I have been writing on the transition to higher education and make sure that all my EU lectures for the autumn are planned and ready before August rolls around.

Friareielli

To reveal my absolute ignorance, “friarielli” has been the biggest culinary discovery of this trip. While I may well have encountered rapini in China in the past, this was the first time I tried the Neapolitan classic salsiccia e friarielli. Always weak for cabbage-like greens – for which I fully blame Gabriel and his Polish cooking – I found it an absolute treat: bold, bitter, and deeply savoury.

Sharing a bottle of Campanian red wine with my newfound Serbian friend and historian Damjan, I had one of those evenings that remind me why I would never want another job, and why I still find the world endlessly fascinating.

The abstract and the concrete

One criticism of my environmental philosophy work, to which I am largely sympathetic, is that it is too much about grand theory and too little about real lived experiences.

Wrapping up our two-day workshop at the Scuola Superiore Meridionale, the contrast could not have been sharper as my talk followed directly after a German PhD student had presented her work on “Fast Techno-Fixes, Slow Repair: Reparative Abundance Beyond the Labour–Climate Divide in Sicily’s Petrochemical Corridor”. Being a site of obvious environmental trauma, Sicily's petrochemical corridor seemed a long way from my vision of a bright ecomodern future (echoing the piece I wrote on conflicting temporalities back in 2020).

While it is easy to see the value of bottom-up approaches, one still has to recognize that they are inherently conservative. Imagine someone going to 19th century Sweden studying smallhold farmers. The intuition of most present-day social scientists would have been to find ways of making poverty slightly more bearable. In reality, mass migration to the United States and large-scale urbanization followed, paving the way for the industrial society that has allowed me to start this morning with a lovely run and a swim in the Mediterranean, completely emancipated from the serf-like conditions that existed back then. 

I guess what I am trying to say is that, sometimes, it is also important to remember the bigger perspectives, and recognize that change – which is often painful in the present – may be absolutely essential in the long run.

Sprada

Lungomare

From Bali to Beirut, few things beat a morning run and having the city to yourself before everyone else wakes up. Flying along the waterfront in my Hoka Bondis that I managed to pick up from Sellpy for close to nothing, I stop for coffee and a chocolate croissant that would make any Starbucks breakfast blush.

Now back at the hotel, I look through my pictures as I down a 1.5 litre bottle of water. With the temperature expected to climb up to 30 degrees today, I am both looking forward to and not looking forward to spending the day indoors at the Scuola Superiore Meridionale.

Most authentic

Turning pages in the book by Szalay (damn, how good it is!) as our Airbus 320neo climbs out of Copenhagen, I start to get slightly nervous for the workshop that awaits me tomorrow. Though nominally about abundance versus sufficiency, it is pretty clear that I am the only one representing Team Abundance and one of the few non-Italians attending. As much as I am used to being the Star Trek mascot, all those midsummers spent at the Breakthrough Dialogue have reminded me that other roles are possible, and that I much prefer being the cautious voice rather than the techno-evangelist.

Regardless of how it goes, Italy is somehow always memorable, like that night I spent in a shared flat in Florence back in December of 2009, listening to Italians arguing for hours about whose mother cooked the best food and whose regional cuisine was the most “autentico”.

Still, approaching the Alps, I order a tapas box with that lovable koala-shiraz to calm my thoughts. Taking a picture of my food, I was reminded once again why Karen Blixen did not have Instagram: to avoid commodifying her own aesthetic and to maintain the impression that nothing was curated.

Clearly, everything does not have to be a “varudeklaration”, and like Ester Blenda Nordström, I have already done my fair share of aura farming. Being meta-conscious of it all makes me briefly question why I keep writing this blog in the first place: is it simply a testimony to a world that is being lost, both on a personal and a political level?

Asked anew about how I think we should save the world, I shrugged at the prospect of even opening up that box. But maybe some things remain true. That more equality is better than less? That what matters is not so much that Sweden cuts its emissions as that it does it in ways that can inspire others, even those who do not believe in climate change? Or that humility and pluralism are always preferable to the kind of absolutism and social purity sought by parts of the environmental movement?

Carlsberg Aviator

The calm of my astronaut-early morning run was abruptly interrupted by a wild boar crossing the trail ahead of me at full speed. Taken aback by its explosive movement, I stopped for a second and appreciated the fact that it was only one and not dozens.

A few hours later, Anna was on a train up to Gothenburg to be with the kids and I was at Landvetter, taking part in the last BioClaims meeting of the spring semester. Then, after a quick hop in the air aboard Torborg Viking, I was back at Kastrup and the Carlsberg Aviator lounge, which I last checked out on my way to Portugal in December. Six short months ago, but already sort of a lifetime, the past year has truly been one of accelerating space-time compression.

Having spent the last few days writing like there was no tomorrow, I am now reading up on the work of the other workshop participants. Landing at seven, I expect an early evening in Naples, perhaps over some pasta and a glass of Montepulciano, before exploring more of the city at dawn in my running shoes.

Volume

When I first signed up for the 132-kilometre Essex Way Ultra, I decided to keep my running volume low in order to minimize the risk of injury. Over the last few weeks, though, I have felt that my body is able to absorb higher mileage, so I have returned to what used to be my normal training schedule for many years. With 26 days remaining until the race, I am now planning to maintain 80 kilometres per week for another three weeks before starting to taper.

Of all the things I could write on my blog, running may be the least interesting. Still, it is a big part of my life and something that keeps me focused through all these big shifts. While some may think of me as impulsive or changeable, it is more that the dynamics of all this are very powerful and that it is genuinely difficult to figure out the best course of action.

In a recent interview, David Szalay – the author of Flesh, which I am now halfway through – said that “the more we know people, the harder they become to define”, and that is a very encouraging thought in this age of solitary identities. Be it Paris in the early aughts or Hong Kong a decade later, we accumulate these layers and memories that give depth to who we are, but also fragmentation, as the discontinuities keep adding up.

Pink Punk

While Rawls & Me has given my mother plenty of reason to worry about my alcohol consumption over the years, a fair bit of it has been props too, and being alone with the kids, so is this bottle of Serbian rosé. Seeing the label on the temporary selection shelf, it was such an irresistible throwback to the club scene of Belgrade two decades ago that I simply had to buy it.

Beyond vacuuming and throwing away things in preparation for the big move, today's great accomplishment has been taking both kids to Parkrun for the first time in a long while. Though it took some bribing in the form of Nutella waffles, both kids thanked me afterwards, and I was reminded once again how much resistance there can be to doing the things that are ultimately good for us. Without going all-out theological with Bjørn Eidsvåg's Floden, the last few weeks of procrastination have been a hard lesson, and as such, it was a relief to finally start making progress on my co-authored article about the transition to higher education.

Otherwise, my plans of going to the library with the kids fell through when I realized that today is the National Day of Sweden and that the country has been taken over by syttende-mai-wannabes. Do not get me wrong, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with being proud of Sweden, especially considering all the great things this country represents, something that becomes even clearer with a bit of distance when living abroad. Still, it felt almost like a dream when someone wrote that she “wanted her kids to be world citizens”, as if I had almost given up on the possibility that there could be other people out there still aspiring to something larger.