“Slow shifting of realities and the distortion of the initial situation.” Janka Oertel

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“What is a deception when it becomes real?” Helena Janeczek

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“Before the killing begins, the riot looks like a party.” Stephen Marche

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The Naval Air Base on Tornado Island in Maryland’s Pearl Sound is not just a military airport in an Atlantic fjord. As long as the Cold War dominated world affairs, the shielded site served primarily as a listening post. Hydrophones (according to Wikipedia, “a device for converting water sound into an electrical voltage corresponding to sound pressure”) were used to track down Soviet submarines and analyze the audio signatures of their activities. The Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS) is subject to a high level of secrecy. The specialists eavesdropping in the ocean even work to the exclusion of the limited base public.

“The Sound Surveillance System is an American eavesdropping system that was installed in the oceans in the 1950s to monitor Soviet submarine movements.” Wikipedia

The specialists are isolated; the men and women responsible for analyzing the audio data are not allowed to interact with the unsuspecting rest of the crew.

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“Neurophysiological studies of macaques and humans suggest that the use of tools expands the internal representation of the actor’s extremities (hand, foot, beak, etc.).” A research team led by Christian Rutz at the University of St Andrews in Scotland is investigating the manual dexterity of straight-billed aka New Caledonian crows. The birds are characterised by serial hook production. They don’t get bogged down in experiments, but act like specialists who have mastered their craft in their sleep. “Hooks were a key invention of Stone Age people around ninety thousand years ago, as they enabled them to fish much more efficiently and thus considerably expand their range of prey.”

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Erasmus of Rotterdam (ca. 1466 in Rotterdam - 1536 in Basel) gave himself the Lombard royal name Desiderius, a derivation of desiderare - to desire. He grew up in Gouda. As the illegitimate son of a priest and his housekeeper, he lacked the respectability befitting a guild in a Burgundian corner of the Holy Roman Empire. The future prince’s social prospects are initially lousy. His father is characterised by good handwriting. Roger Gerard is one of the worldly clergymen. A devotee of Erasmus of Antioch, who was canonised as a martyr, he can look back on a career in Italy. Commissioned by the abbot of Monastero di San Benedetto (now St Benedict’s), a monastery near Fabriano, he copied ‘two key texts of Christianity’, namely Augustine’s ‘On the State of God’ and Thomas Aquinas’ “Summa theologica”.

The abbey stands on the “Apennine summit of Monte Fano”. In 1276, the first paper mill on European soil was put into operation in Fabriano. During Gerard’s lifetime, the paper industry flourished. Sandra Langereis speaks of a “highly efficient recycling process”, in which linen rags and scraps of sail are “converted back into their raw material”. She describes a hotspot of Renaissance efficiency. Monastery boards ran the mills with tenants. In the scriptoria as well as in other ecclesiastical offices, a battle rages between the restorative parchment faction and the new-fangled friends of paper.

Between the pages of a thick tome lay a pressed violet.
“Who forgot this here?” you asked.
“Or left it behind,” I said.

We looked at each other and knew that we, too, would leave something behind.

We woke to a fairytale morning of fog. At once we were on our feet and outside. Our urge to explore was so strong that we even postponed our lovemaking—though that went against the rules, and the order of our love was sacred to us.

It took time for the first rays of sun to make the dew sparkle. I stood barefoot in the grass behind the hunchbacked cottage, the coffee cup warm in my hands.

We walked along a narrow road where we met only cyclists. Hollyhocks bloomed everywhere; wild fennel nested in the cracks of the stone walls. A sign pointed to the small jail: two cells, scarcely larger than a garden shed. The smallest prison in Europe. Sometimes people had themselves locked in voluntarily, just to have some peace and quiet.

We came to a mill. A sign explained that since the time of Elizabeth I, Dúnmara had no longer been subject to the Gaelic law of the surrounding clans. In the 1560s the land had been granted to a grand seigneur with English ambitions, on the condition that forty armed men be settled within calling distance of his residence. They were to keep the Gaelic clans in check, secure the coast, and enforce the new law against the old customs.

Elizabeth I (1533–1603) was born of a union with Anne Boleyn that had been condemned by the Pope, while a rival existed whose claim was sanctioned by Rome—Mary Stuart. Elizabeth consolidated her power not only through the expansion of the Anglican Church, that confessional madhouse shaped by Henry’s pleasures. She also imprisoned her own relatives.

Before Elizabeth, Mary Grey (1545–1578) had stood in the line of succession: great-niece of the last king, granddaughter of a French queen, and sister of England’s short-lived Queen Jane Grey. In secret she married the unsuitable Thomas Keyes. Elizabeth feared the prospect of offspring—and so she had Mary confined.

For Mary, too, power was irrevocably a matter of lineage. Curtailed by freedom and kept small by nature, the would-be claimant propagated the madness of her age. Mary’s correspondence mirrored the Elizabethan Gomorrah. Once one had been seized by the beat of blasted limbs, filthy bedfellows, confessed pederasts, and other sewers, by the rhythm of plague and pox, the reading slid along like a spiral chute in an amusement park. Every lady was a Macbeth, speaking through the Tudor rose. The age pinched its nose to avoid being sneezed upon by fleas. Where blood flowed and rats leapt, the difference between affective and affected shrank to nothing. People belched after meals that arrived too cold, too fatty, too opulent—or poisoned. They spat on Persian carpets and hawked phlegm into ermine collars. Bad weather made an epoch. In 1588 Spain failed in its attempt to take the island. The Armada succumbed to English weather. The Spanish disaster propelled England into great-power status.