Ofterdingen and Kropotkin

Several ships, arriving from India to load fresh water on Saint Helena, upon departure marooned as punishment a sailor who was deemed to have forfeited his life. When this sailor watched the flotilla depart under full sail and then found himself all alone on this island, he began to lament his misfortune and appealed pitifully to God in Heaven. In his terror he remembers that two days earlier an officer had died and been buried in a coffin on this island. Not wasting any time, with hands and feet he scrapes and scratches open the grave, takes out the corpse, takes the coffin and rushes toward the sea. A sail is made out of a shirt; a part of the coffin lid is used as a rudder. He embarks and in the name of God pursues the ships which were ahead a considerable distance. Meanwhile, the winds had abated all around the ships by heaven-sent command, and they had made such bad progress that the sailor in the coffin reached the flotilla after some hours, driven by the propitious offshore wind.
When the ships' crews spotted him they very seriously considered him a ghost or sea-monster. As he approaches more closely he commences to plea abjectly that they should take pity on him and for heaven's sake take him back to his fatherland. Whereupon the entire crew was moved to pity and and entreated that he should be taken back aboard.

Das eigentliche China ist überbevölkert. An den beiden Strömen Hoangho und Yangtsekiang halten sich mehrere Millionen Menschen auf, die auf Flößen ganz nach ihrer Bequemlichkeit eingerichtet leben. Die Bevölkerung, die durchaus organisierte und bis in die kleinsten Details hineingearbeitete Staatsverwaltung hat die Europäer in Erstaunen gesetzt, und hauptsächlich verwunderte die Genauigkeit, mit der die Geschichswerke ausgeführt waren. In China gehören nämlich die Geschichtsschreiber zu den höchsten Beamten. [Die Geschichte] geht in die ganz alten Zeiten hinauf, wo als Kulturspender Fohi genannt wird, der zuerst eine Zivilisation über China verbreitete. Er soll him 29. Jahrhundert vor Christus gelebt haben, also vor der Zeit, in welcher der Schu-king anfängt; aber das Mythische und Vorgeschichtliche wird von den chinesischen Geschichtsschreibern ganz wie etwas Geschichtliches behandelt.

China itself is overpopulated. On the two rivers Hoangho and Yangtsekiang several million people comfortably have taken abode on rafts. The populace and indeed the organised and minutely refined administration have astonished the Europeans; in the main the exactitude of the body of historical works has surprised. In China historiographers are among the highest state officials. [History] reaches back to the most ancient of times where Fohi is named as the bringer of culture, who first spread civilisation across China. Supposedly he lived in the 29th century before Christ, therefore before the time that the Schu-king commences; but the mythical and prehistorical is treated as history proper by Chinese historians.

On May 18, 1922, Sydney and Violet Schiff gave a dinner party at the Hotel Majestic in Paris. They and some forty guests were celebrating the first night of Igor Stravinsky's ballet Le Renard, performed by the Ballets Russes. Richard Davenport-Hines spends several entertaining pages trying to work out who else was there, pages which give us a compelling portrait of the peculiar Parisian demi-monde in which aristocrats and Modernists rubbed shoulders. Apart from Stravinsky and Serge Diaghilev, the main guests were Pablo Picasso, James Joyce and Marcel Proust. Indeed, a purpose of the dinner was to bring the two novelists together. [...]
Joyce arrived late, at about eleven, visibly drunk. Schiff placed him next to himself, but Joyce remained speechless, his head on his hands, for the next three or four hours. Embarassed by owning no evening dress, he had overfortified himself. Proust, immaculately turned out, appeared at two or three in the morning. Davenport-Hines writes tellingly about Proust's love of making an entrance. A woman who believed he had satirized her left in a huff, and he contrived to quarrel with Stravinsky, but he was set next to Joyce. According to [Clive] Bell, it was then that Joyce started snoring and Bell left. This, the only meeting between Joyce and Proust, has long been a celebrated fiasco. [...] Joyce was probably rude, both because of drink and because he felt that Proust was rising where he was fallin. [...] The Schiffs got into a taxi with Proust, and Joyce joined them. Joyce began smoking and opened a window. "As Proust feared fresh air, and his asthma could not stand smoke, Schiff shut the window immediately after the cigarette was jettisoned or extinguished." The journey was brief; Proust talked continuously while Joyce looked on.

Tatsächlich weist der britische Forscher Rupert Sheldrake darauf hin, daß Menschen stets von morphischen Feldern umgeben sind. Alles was sie tun bzw. leichten Sinnes tun können, folgt diesen Bahnungen, an denen Generationen und Massen subjektiver Geschichtskräfte (also Wünsche, Vorstellungen, Einübungen, Gewohnheiten) gewirkt haben. Am besten stellt man sich dies als eine Gravitation vor, auf die menschlichte Seelenkräfte reagieren.

Indeed, the British researcher Rupert Sheldrake points out that humans are surrounded by morphic fields. Any action a human might easily execute is set in such orbits which have been shaped by generations and masses of subjective historical forces (i.e. desires, imaginings, rehearsals, habits). This is best imagined as a kind of gravity which human psychic forces react to.

But all the Mitfordiana - Decca and Debo and Unity Valkyrie, the runnings away, the schoolroom passions for Hitler or Stalin - tend to come into the reader's mind, and to crowd the only thing that matters: the books. [...] Mitford called a collection of miscellaneous writings The Water Beetle, a title borrowed from Hilaire Belloc; the waterbeetle glides gracefully over the surface of the water, but if she ever stopped to think how she did it, she would sink. I don't believe this self-portrait for a second.

Vast tracts of the world's second-largest rainforest have been obtained by a small group of European and US logging companies in return for minimal taxes and gifts of salt, sugar and tools, a two-year investigation has found.
It was the kind of "social responsibility" agreement encouraged by the World Bank...The [Greenpeace] report claims that industrial logging backed by the World Bank is out of control.
"Most of the ocmpanies have benefited from the World Bank's failure to ensure that the moratorium [on logging contracts] it negotiated with the transitional...government has been enforced," said Greenpeace's Africa forests campaigner, Stephan van Praet.
Greenpeace and other international groups say the forests' fate depends on the World Bank and on other donors rejecting industrial logging...
The World Bank accepts that logging could destroy the forests in a short time...

Guardian Weekly, April 20-26 2007, p. 3

A key figure in the World Bank, said to have links to the Roman Catholic sect Opus Dei, was accused last weekend of undermining its commitment ot the health of women by ordering the deletion of goals, targets and policies relating to family planning.

Guardian Weekly, April 20-26 2007, p. 4

On May Day the entire community turned out, men, women and children, home-made banners proclaiming slogans of the "United Front against Fascism" waving alongside the official ones. The long march to Hyde Park started early in the morning, contingents of the Labour Party, the Co-ops, the Communist Party, the Independent Labour Party marching through the long day to join other thousands from all parts of London in the traditional May Day labour festival.
Everyone took a lunch in a paper bag, and there was much good-natured jostling and shouting of orders, and last-minute rounding up of cildren who had darted away in the crowd. Philip and Roger taught us some new songs to sing on the way -parodies on Communist songs: "Class conscious we are, and class conscious we'll be, And we'll TREAD ON THE NECK of the bourgeoisie!", "Oh, 'tis my delight of a dirty night to bomb the bourgeoisie!", and a sarcastic version of "The People's Flag": "The People's flag is palest pink, It's not as red as you might think."