Too many books

Yesterday I felt ill. 2 sleepless  nights, pouring rain, upset stomach, and the feeling that the day was meant to be fun and productive, and that I was failing myself by wasting my time. Also, the news from Paris was too much to take in, and yet I felt I should work to take it in and feel something about it.

But today I did feel tearful about Paris, as the sound of young people singing French songs from Trafalgar Square got to me. The victims of the attacks were mainly young people who generally feel no animosity to others on the grounds of their origins, whose creed is that of John Lennon's Imagine. "No religion... the brotherhood of man..." All their suppositions about the world are crawling away after a massacre. (I was reminded of this song because some French guy played it on a piano in Paris as a response to the killings.)

I would like to do something in my lessons this week to mark our feelings at this massacre, and I don't know what.

I have too many books on the go. One of the books is very embarrassing, a collection of Art Spiegelman "comix" drawn after the 9/11 atrocities. I had to pay quite a bit for them (2nd hand of course) and I haven't looked at them properly yet, but ended up hiding them under F's bed as it seemed that they were Old Hat and what's more a luxurious Old Hat. But now it seems to me that this event is part of the same thing as the 9/11 enormity, and the horror of City Terrorism is, maybe, only just starting.

(The trouble with John Lennon's Imagine, is his casual waving away of religion - "no religion too"..."no god above us". If you truly depend on the thought of your God being there for you and your being a part of God's being, then John's dreams, and his words, are horrific. Like saying: "imagine you are only a gorilla, or a pig". You need to be religious to understand why it's not a positive idea. John dreams of one world on his own terms, which are essentially communist. Daesh dreams of one world on terms that are the polar opposite. John's words seem wise to our young people but they are actually incendiary.)