Timing is Everything

The bad thing about not wanting to take the train, and also not having a bike, is that I have to walk everywhere.

The great thing about not having a bike, and also not taking the trains, is that I walk. Everywhere.
Even though it is always with an extra jacket—which I always realize I don’t need, thanks to global warming gracing the city with yet another unbelievable sunclear autumn day (until night when the temperature plunges ten degrees in ten minutes)—and extra books (German dictionary?)—which I already know I won’t take out because I won’t be sitting long enough to want to read—I get off the train early and walk the rest of the way to the university. Afternoons, after lying a moment on the university's grassy square, I wind my way back home, each time taking a slightly different path (translation: I get distracted and then slightly lost every time). It takes a long time to walk around even just the middle of this city. But if there is anyone who has enough time and inclination to walk distractedly around Berlin, I do.
Today I got distracted by….BONBONS. Ok, really, I wandered into a hinterhof and found steps down to a bonbon shop-cave where you get to see the bonbons being made. It was magnificent. The bonbon maker had to knead this enormous mass of sugar, the bonbons-to-be, which was so hot he had to wear gloves and then use a huge leather blanket to knead in the flavoring (in this case anise oil). The leather was also to keep the bonbons-to-be mass from cooling too quickly. You see, if you are kneading bonbons-to-be and stop working (because, perhaps you have to answer the doorbell) you can quickly end up with one..big..bonbon. Fun as that might be, how would you give it to kids? I imagine you’d have to set it up somewhere and let kids have their chance to lick it, one by one. Or it would be your personal lifelong bonbon, which you took out when you had the yen for a sweet, and then put back into (clean) storage. Or you give the bonbon to a dinosour?
Have you ever tried a sticky-warm anise bonbon?
Have you ever tried to say ‘bonbon’ twenty times in a row?

Still somewhat sugared, I happened to pass Denkraum, an exhibit on, or themed around, Hannah Arendt. I had meant to go see it but hadn’t known where it was. Well, there it was. And there happened to be a lecture in just half an hour about Hannah Arendt’s language. Timing is everything.
I had actually heard the woman giving the lecture (which was a beautiful lecture) at Bard last year, giving a different lecture on Hannah and Heidegger. Coincidences.
The exhibit was many rooms; recordings of Hannah in interviews, large clear plastic sheets hanging from a ceiling with extracts of her writings in German and English, clay figures, film, a reading room…I needed more time to go through the exhibit. More time to get frightened at Arendt’s description of the States, er, I mean, of a state becoming totalitarian.
There is so much returning-to that I intend to do here, and never get back around to, but I hope I do go back to this.