Bill Watterson: Calvin & Hobbes

To ursa,

Meet Calvin, one half of my way the most favorite toons. I know, you know him already, but could you try and forget all about him now, and get to know him ... again? Fall in love all over again!



The other half is Hobbes, a tiger, for whom we aren't sure whether he is stuffed or alive. We like to believe the latter, and you know what, we can, for that dilemma really doesn't count much. It's like in the Life of Pi where reality is the one to follow imagination.

Calvin and Hobbes are the best friends under the sun. Whenever Calvin is down, Hobbes can put him even a bit lower, but usually he doesn't do that, for he loves him and wants to be there for him. It can get very emotional when Hobbes takes Calvin in his arms and gives him the biggest and softest hug you can imagine. You have to have a tiger for that.

Nobody besides Hobbes really understands Calvin. His parents give him a hard time, especially mum nagging all the time about him taking the bath, and dad constantly giving smart-assy remarks. But it can get even more frustrated for Calvin. School is such a waste of time for him, for he is way too intelligent to spend even the tiniest bit of time there. He shares the belief with perhaps the sanest of Slovene models of all time, Manca Zver, who said: "I never liked school. I always wrestled with the system which is so stupid that force one to learning and sitting even when one doesn't feel like it."



So it's just the two of them, Calvin & Hobbes, and that's great, for it feels like a true love. It would always be, had only they gained some sort of a fellowship (for being so lovely for example) or maybe won a lottery, for their expenses aren't exactly small and they both hate the terms: job and work.

But, as I said, it's all imagination here, so let's imagine they won that lottery. I would like to see their love never ends. I can't get enough of them. I think I am in love (with a comic!)

Philosophy of Calvin & Hobbes is deep and their deeds speak for themselves:
- being artistic [2 - very funny],
- not being able to do nothing,
- praising teve,
- having packed days,
- not caring for math,
- knowing where their place is,
- really wanting to read,
- looking for shortcuts,
- setting out priorities [2, 3],
- being economical (or just avoiding work? Now Calvin ...),
- being i-m-a-g-i-n-a-t-i-v-e,
- hating growing up,
- being smart-assed by dad (this one is my favorite, it's great - oh like others are not?),
- being smart-assed by dad again.

Notes:
- You must note that Bill Watterson ended doing the Calvin comics in 1995. This doesn't sound so bad, when you come to realize that the spirit of the comics endured and will probably live to see us leaving the solar system. The first comic came out in 1985. See also the last one, and one particular in between.
- Comics were being published in newspapers around US on the fly, and later compiled into neat books: see the complete list with picture covers (- white border ones are still waiting for me to ...)
- See my favorite of them aquarelles.
- There is a huge PDF file, compiling all of the comics, on eMule. You might want to check it out, but then you can always ask me for it. I could upload it somewhere, you know. However, reading them on paper feels much more real, does it not? I myself feel like Calvin almost becomes me, or at least that he walks into my room, and we start to chat, go on an adventure together, take Hobbes with us of course, and our friendship is growing ever stronger. It's lovely and so much fun.

10/10

... how many times a year?

I don't have much data to operate with, and all I have is this:

- Manca Košir said that perhaps 10% of Slovene read more than 20 books a year,
- while Janez Rugelj is positive that around 50% don't read anything.



How about you?
I also guess that our national reading distribution is normal. I don't guess that on shaky grounds. So I fit the gaussian distribution to these points: (0.1, 20), (0.5, Epsilon), (Infinity, 0), and see where I fall. - The orange dot, that's me among the 7%, or 140,000, of highly literate Slovene, here here! I also suppose that nobody sane tops 100 books a year. But this upper limit isn't that significant to the overall picture, for such is the nature of the normal distribution.

Under some thought plus a comment from master ill-advised I started to believe that the normal distribution idea was not a good idea, the power law should be more to the mark. Please note that as the image above is not right.

Notes:
- Every year I read about 40 books. I don't think I could read more. I could read less, although what I really want is to read better books. But listen to this: every year I also write down the list of the books I read and make bold the titles that I really enjoyed. Those are the books I would like to read again as quickly as possible (Goethe's Faust for example), and the ratio of the great titles to all is growing: 22% in 2004 and 25% in 2005.
- I found this interesting US-book Statistics, e.g. see section "Who is Reading Books (and who is not)", e.g.: "80% of US families did not buy or read a book last year" - this serves as a very contrast picture to the asymmetry of our world, where reading books in quiet (how else?) has become a commodity of the greatest rarity.

Richard Feynman: Letters

"You can't develop a personality with physics alone, the rest of your life must be worked in."


Richard Feynman was a physicist from that extremely tiny, almost singular set of physicists who equally well lay women and exams.

Who would read the letters of some guy named Feynman? It seems indeed rather weird in general to read letters that weren't written for you nor by you. But the story of Feynman and myself is different. He was an admirable chap, a man to be truly reckoned with, a first class and famous physicist, he was. I love him, I dig everything about him, it is like I can't get enough of him, his work excites my imagination, and he has always been funnier than me and even though I will be studying mathematics and physics for the rest of my life, I will never understand it half as much as he did. But that's ok, because he understood a great lot, however he was modest at that:

"I was born not knowing and have only had a little time to change that here and there."

So if I understand half of what he did, that would still mean a lot, because you know: infinity halved is still infinity.
Feynman is my idol, he could be my only idol. I think that makes sense my reading this book.

The book comes with a longer title:
Perfectly Reasonable Deviations From The Beaten Track: The Letters Of Richard P. Feynman. 486 pp. Basic Books (April 5, 2005). ISBN: 0738206369


Richard Feynman. Known for:
- helping develop the atomic bomb,
- inventing the bit of scientific notation later known as the Feynman diagram,
- winning the Nobel Prize in physics (1965) for a discovery he made in his late twenties (1949),
- solving the mystery of the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion.

So he worked on the Manhattan project of building the atomic bomb that was latter dropped twice on Japan. First, I consider the atomic bomb as one of the greatest utilizations of human knowledge. Regretfully it was eventually used to most harmful means. But we must also try to imagine what would've happened, had the Nazi's made the bomb first; conquered the world? The bomb wasn't dropped on Germany, true, but its development was initiated and at all times ignited by that race, who would build it first.
Years after the WW2 Feynman got very depressed about all that science serving destruction. He stopped believing in anything. He got better only slowly. It's interesting to note how some people are much affected by such things while some may worry only a little. What drives our human touch?

It's an ultimate treat reading about Feynmans endeavors and mischiefs, and also about him meeting other main actors in science, for example Watson the DNA explainer, Einstein the relativist, or Cooper the explainer of super-conductivity, and others. He also met Stephen Wolfram who moved from Oxford to Caltech, and who is not of such good looking posture as Feynman, but of equally sharp mind, I can tell you that. Feynman supervised his PhD. Wolfram was a prodigy in theoretical physics. For the past many years he has been leading Wolfram Research, a highly successful scientific programming company that is best known for Mathematica which is a remarkable thing on its own. I have been smitten by it ever since I put my fingers on it on the rainy day in secondary school in 1995 ... I can still remember. I have used it all the time since and I am still learning it just like on the first day. I have never met anything like it, I don't believe I ever will. It is the "personification" of transcendence for me. The only sad bit it has is namely that it's just a computational platform and not some girl I could hang up with and socialize in a more natural way. But the world is changing and we are changing along.

Weirdnesses. Feynman was a practical joker, a painter, a bongo player, and always a showman. He liked to work out his equations while sitting in strip clubs. He was direct and sincere, but also loved sarcasm:

"Simple questions with complicated answers are always asked by dull students. Only intelligent students have been trained to ask complicated questions with simple answers - as any teacher knows (and only teachers think there are any simple questions with simple answers)."

Feynman spared no words for those who tried to picture him as normal just because beside having done physics he also liked to fool around, for example having played the bongo drums. Here is an example-letter:

TO TORD PRAMBERG, JANUARY 4, 1967
The fact that I beat a drum has nothing to do with the fact that I do theoretical physics. Theoretical physics is a human endeavor, one of the higher developments of human beings, and this perpetual desire to prove that people who do it are human by showing that they do other things that a few other humans do (like playing bongo drums) is insulting to me. I am human enough to tell you to go to hell.

Fans, he had many, experts and laymen alike, and he made science sing for them, so his "poems" made them understand even the most complex theories. But they also often felt like "tourists" that visit exotic lands and leave their litter. They would've gleefully followed him anywhere: had he moved on to biology, they would've wished being there and a part of it as well. That is how it is with fans and exceptional individuals who are just plain awesome to be around with.
So I am sure it was nice living by his side. His optimism and great lust for finding things out made moments exciting, and perhaps dull only when he slept. Good news was his constant, and good news is like a good medicine. Life was dear to him and almost dear to anyone around him.
However, one could say this didn't hold for just anybody. Life was dear to those who chose to follow him, or at least not compete against him. But some tried that, and they soon realized they'd been in a wrong field because it was clear that they were not in the same class of intellectual ability as him. They were very troubled by that, and even developed depressions. Feynman performed so much better.
Some fans sent him silly love letters, like this one:

Dear Richard
I've fallen in love with you
From seeing you on "Nova"
I'm so glad you're alive
I appreciate your: wit
wisdom
brilliance
looks
You are a feyn-man
Are there lots of physicists with fans?
You have one!

I think I could be silly like this. ("Nova" concerns the one hour long TV interview with Feynman in 1981, titled The Pleasure Of Finding Things Out.)

Physics is a difficult subject requiring objective thinking and staying on the subject without distraction by minor subsidiary things. This is why I hate such things as Google Mail Notifier. Those beeps beeps and subsequent detouring of my mind to new mail will drive me nuts someday. I am all mess already. But why did I install it in the first place? I know I will uninstall it. But Google then released the Sidebar which is a cool tool. I had to install it. God how I hate this!

Picture below: Wov, won't you just look at him, that posture of orgasmic intellect! There is nothing more physically appealing that a sharp intellect. It cuts through heart many times. (But it must be really sharp, for a nicely curved muscly buttock and hooters are hard to meet.)



When his life ended in 1988, many people showed up at his funeral, but aside nothing else come to and end, his spirit endured.

- Professor Feynman, if you could do anything different in your career, what would it be?
- "I would try to forget how I had solved a problem."

Now who should I thank for Feynman's spirit "got" me. I know, it was prof. Podgornik at my university who infected me with that pleasure (of finding things out /for myself/). Thank you n-times!

10/10

Svetlana Makarovič: S krempljem podčrtano

Ker večino časa večine ljudi ne razumem; ker si ves čas ponavljam, da sem nenavaden; ker mi je kdaj hudo, da so nenavadne punce tako redke ... deluje uvodno razmišljanje Svetlane Makarovič k njeni zbirki zadnjih časopisnih kolumen name prav pomirjajoče:

"Ravno stavek, da ima večina prav, najbolje ponazarja duhovno mizerijo človeštva, katerega večina je večinoma zlepljena iz brezobličnih osebkov, ki o ničemer nimajo svojega lastnega mnenja in zato slepo ponavljajo besede tistih posameznikov, za katere verjamejo, da zastopajo mnenje večine. Zato je kakršnokoli osebno mnenje enega samega dvomljivca neprimerno dragocenenjše od hrumenja množic, ki zaradi lastne topoglavnosti uničujejo svoj svet."

Svetlana Makarovič. S krempljem podčrtano. Aleph, Ljubljana 2004, 3.850 SIT. Zbirka časopisnih kolumen iz Naših Razgledov (1992-93), Jane (1994) in Sobotne priloge (2004).

Nikjer drugje še nisem videl takšnega udrihanja, kot udriha Svetlana. Jeza, ilustracije, prilike, vse se zdi izživeto, vse dodobra premišljeno. Nasprotje brezveznega čtiva. In ko boš nekoč naletel na to knjigo, nikar ne prezri kolumne O Žgajnarjevi Angelci, - to je namreč tista satira o ljudstvu, ki ne bere.

Pa še to:
- "Noben klerik nima pravice pričakovati spoštovanja do svoje vere, če sam ni pripravljen spoštovati drugače mislečih, drugovercev in ateistov. In prav nobene pravice nima obsojati kogar koli za kar koli, dokler hinavsko brani duhovnike pedofile." Intervju v Mladini, 1. januarja 2006.
- Svetlana Makarovič. Tista prva dama slovenske poezije, ki rada šokira. Mladinin Kdo je kdo, 17. januarja 2005.
- Od januarja 2006 je Mladina zaljša (grozljivejša?) za kolumne Svetlane Makarovič. Vidi recimo tisto o našem predsedniku, ki se zdi, kot da leta iz cveta na cvet - in nobenega ne položi (kot pravi master ill-advised, čeprav si sam lahko predstavljam tudi obratno). Vendar vsaj leta! Že to je nekaj.
- In kdo je Svetlana? Nekje se ji zapiše: "Sama živim s tremi starimi, čemernimi mačkoni in zmeraj bolj sem jim podobna."

10/10

... teve no, books yes please

Some people are telling me that their life without TV is different. Usually they move in a new flat, or house, and don't bother to take their old TV with them. It's wonderful if one can afford buying new home equipment, when moving into a new home, hence - new. Then they spend some time without TV, and when it comes to buying a new one they realize they don't miss it that much. Instead they start to fancy all that time of quiet whit their minds off anything extroverted, set only on their thoughts, problems and solving them. A renewed amour is in the air, and it has nothing to do with masturbation, in a way.They decide not to buy a new TV.
This sounds so cool that I envy them so much, that when I am moving into my new apartment, there is no way I am taking my TV with me, but of course I will take my filled bookshelf, and I will install some more of them shelves, and I will fill them too, oh double yes I will.

Notes:
- Seriously, with TV there is more loss than gain, you must give credit to that fact. Damage is much bigger when children are concerned. According to Manfred Spitzer, that German researcher of human brain who has five kids and no teve, TV does a great deal of damage to a child. For the brain of a child build structures out of experience. But a little kid can't really connect all those audio-video things on the screen with the real world. So he develop kind of fuzzy brain structures. There is no way back. Everybody is a child only once, his brain structures are developed only once. One quote from Super Size Me put this nicely: "If you look at the menu at a fast-food restaurant, they use all of the addicting components. They'll take a slab of meat, cover it with cheese, of course, which is filled with the casomorphins, the opiates that are found in the cheese protein and then they serve it with a sugary soda, which has the addictive powers of sugar with plenty of added caffeine. Now, you might be a 12-year-old kid. Your brain is no match for that combination.
- All this reminds me of Roald Dahl the novelist, most famous for his children stories, BFG and Matilda for example. I adore him because he is smart funny, full of morbidity and creativity. All of these is coupled with illustrations by Quentin Blake into irresistible books, - I know that, for I bought many.
Here are his thoughts on TV : books as they appear as the last poem in The Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Richard Dawkins: Unweaving the Rainbow

"No Newton, no Einstein.
No Einstein, no ... eat me: world could've been as beautiful as it is, or perhaps it would've been even more beautiful, right? - But where would've we been?" -- Bo


Dawkins Richard: Unweaving the Rainbow. Mariner Books, April 2000. 352 pp. ISBN: 0618056734.

It was Lilit the biologist once more who initiated me into publishing this post. She was mentioning Richard Dawkins, the notorious biologist (English, theoretical, - Note 1) and popularizer (one who popularizes, or makes something seem popular, or cool, - so the cooler?) of science, on her blog, as I remembered having been reading one of his very books, Unweaving the Rainbow, which I gulped in a most hasty way, and with which I developed a deep relationship. There is no way I am letting this book off my bookshelf. It's one of the ultimate books on understanding the sexual tension between a man, or woman, and the nature, and observing the nature, so the science. I wrote the following back then and I am revisiting it here, now, and for us. (The picture on the right shows Mr. Dawkins. Isn't he handsome, a bit old /born 1941/, true, but cute.)

The book starts with Keats (the poet), who once said something like: "Hey Newton (the physicist), my friend, you destroyed the poetry of the rainbow by having dissected it into light of different wavelengths! Why did you do that, why did you dispel its mystery?"
Perhaps Keats was right, perhaps Newton really shouldn't've done so, you might say. Well then, I don't agree with you, and so doesn't Richard. I don't think Keats could've been more mistaken. Let me try and explain that in more bits.

"To live at all is miracle enough" - is a sweet line by Mervyn Peake (which sounds even sweeter in our humble Slovene: "Živeti sploh je že čudež"), and which sounds, all sweetness apart, very true to me. My big life fantasy, my deepest wish, is to follow Keats:

Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!

This is precisely why I decided not to stay stupid. I want to make something big out of my tiny part, before I lay myself down with a will. I want to ease my stupidity a bit. For I am pretty stupid. For a human is overwhelmingly stupid by default. Paraphrasing Douglas Adams, you just won't believe how hugely mind-bogglingly stupid he is. You may think it is stupid enough to steal in grocery and get caught, but that's just peanuts to it all.
But stupidity is bearable. We don't die because of it. Instead we attend school, try not to quit it prior to getting a degree and eventually remedy some of our retardation. However when ignorance is put on top of stupidity, the mixture gets unbearable. And people actually die of that. People are ignorant of many things. Keats for example, who was a true master of the word lore, was dead certain that the rainbow, after Newton had reduced it to the prismatic colors, would never been as beautiful as before. I agree with the last two words, people nowadays look upon the rainbow differently - as before. But as for the first part, I highly doubt Keats could've been more wrong. For unweaving the rainbow is a scholarly example of what science do best to: help us, and illuminate the poetic beauty of us living.
As for the first part, helping humanity, I can just hear you strongly disagreeing with me. But I guess you should first wake up from your dream. And try to see there are no unicorn forests around nor that there had ever been some. Civilization is the best and the only thing we know how to build. Civilization does not live in forests. It requires cities, transportation, wind, animal and fish farms so that as few as possible can produce the most. Factories produce goods and women give birth to children. And there is nothing more to it than that ... (is there?) ... goods and children that are frequently getting on our way, - whether us being slaves to the goods or children getting on our nerves. Civilization is namely the production of things nobody actually needs. But we produce them anyway, because we don't have an alternative. Just imagine some creative people who want to work, create and produce, and are really dying to do that. I wonder how many of them would actually die, had you come to them and say: "no no, no more work." I guess few would survive, if any. So a man must choose: to work or perish. This is the true reason, I believe, that the world is such as it is, and not what is wrongly believed that we don't know any better.
We know better and this is exactly what we are doing. We utilize our ever greater knowledge to make better tools, to get more out of them, to see farther and clearer, to prolong life and make everything more beautiful. Imagine a world without poetry. Could it exist? I don't think it could. We are making the world a better place, and science is helping us. It is our guide, slave and friend.
Ok, but where is the usefulness and beauty in dissecting the rainbow? Similarly as Newton humbly confessed to have been standing on the shoulders of the giants, the science has been carried on from previous achievements ever since. There is no quantum without Newton's momentum as there would be no Newton without Euclid. Science is always developing gradually, even though growth can be exponential and that sometimes breakthroughs like Newton or Einstein occur - which are exactly that, break-throughs, since they push the level of understanding a bit over the threshold of expected familiarity. And so from Newton to the science of today: quantum mechanics, electro-dynamics and technology of semi-transistors and transporting mediums, leads a contiguous chain of scientific discoveries. The chain is far from being straight but it is continuous nevertheless. Without the unweaving of the rainbow there would be no understanding of light and ultimately no optical switches either (3).
I see, and where is the beauty? You could see it by now.
I can't help myself not to say it one more time: Science makes the world a better place. It prolongs life. What reason could be better? Whether it is your personal believing that - life, true, is ever longer, but then, the list of things we get from life is also ever shorter - or just your plain inertness, which is stupidity and ignorance approximately combined, I can't really say. All I can do is express my grief, but also hope that some day you may wake up from that - anaesthetic of familiarity.


Notes:

(1) As far as I understand, Richard Dawkins is an ethologist, a biologist who studies the animal behavior.

(2) As for Richard Dawkins and his writing, he denies any poetic talent for himself. Now isn't he modest, and I didn't buy that for a minute. For how can then his prose shine so brightly? It's literary crafted. And what just adds to it is that it's not fiction, but non-fiction: he doesn't talk about his thoughts but of things that are our world.

(3) What are these? Optical switches are only one of the most vital parts in the physical layer of the next generation communication networks, being woven around the globe right now. So? So, being connected to the net feels good, doesn't it? Comfortable with your ADSL connection? Just you wait for the fibre-to-the-home.

(4) The picture below shows a Caribbean Reef Squid. It can blend with their surroundings to avoid predators. It can do that with the help of chromatophores embedded in the skin, which are color changing cells (used a bit differently by chameleons also). That cell is like a tiny bag filled with ink. Thousands of such bags cover the skin of a squid. Each of these ink bags has miniature private muscles to squeeze it. In such a way the squid's nervous system can control the shape, and hence the visibility, of each ink sac. That is impressive, that should be impressive even to a chameleon, which is an amateur at the game. But hey, I've already seen that somewhere else! True, LED hoardings and LCD's display images in a similar fashion. We mimic the nature. Clumsily but with some success, and we are becoming ever better.


(5) I can not but finish these Notes with an immortal poem by William Blake from his Auguries of Innocence (c. 1803), which startled me first as all about science, but then I read that Blake wrote the poem out of his aesthetic and religious beliefs. I must say I was a bit disappointed having read that. But the poem is grand anyway. I even gave it a try and translated it in Slovene.

To see a world in a grain of sand And a heaven in a wild flower Hold infinity in the palm of your hand And eternity in an hour.

Uzreti svet v zrnu peska in nebo v divji roži. Ujeti neskončnost z dolžino korak. in večnost v kratki uri.

10/10

Drago Jančar: Klementov padec

Drama kot življenjepisna igra o Klemenetu Jugu, doktorju filozofije in planincu.

Uvod Kakšen bit o Klementu Jugu sem vedel že prej. Četudi je živel v dveh stoletjih, je umrl kot mladenič: 1898 - 1924. Tone Svetina ga postavi kot stranski lik ob bok Jožu Čopu v romanu Stena (- o romanu sem pisal 7.5.2006). Tam je Jug upodobljen kot ambiciozen mlad gospod, vitalen in hkrati racioanlen - Gassetov raciovitalist. O gorništvu veliko modruje: predvsem o vlogi v izoblikovanju mlade osebnosti. Vendar ne ostaja le pri besedah v dolini, temveč se goram tudi telesno izdatno posveča. Veliko hodi in pleza ter si za svoja rosna leta (okrog 20) nabere veliko prvenstvenih vzponov. Do drugih ljudi je olikan, vendar bi težko rekel, da tudi požrtvovalen. Drugi zanj onstran površne prijaznosti in tovarištva daj-dam ne obstajajo, Jug je kot egoist odločno usmerjen k samouresničitvi in elitizmu. Vendar mu tega - da je od drugih ljudi pričakoval brezpogojno tovarištvo, če je bil tovariški tudi sam - zares ne morem očitati. Treba ga je pohvaliti, da je rad storil prvi korak in pomolil prst.
Tako Jančar kot Svetina zapišeta, da ne prikazujeta Klementa Juga in dogodkov točno tako, kot so se zgodili. Tega navsezadnje ne bi mogla, "popolna točnost" je šla z Jugom v grob pred obema. Pa saj to ni važno. Važno je, da so bili obema na voljo izčrpni viri o Jugu, njegovih dosežkih, prijateljih ..., da sta lik Klementa Juga predstavila tako verodostjno, kot je bilo mogoče, za nameček še v privlačni štoriji.

Klement Jug v Jančarjevi drami je uspešen študent filozofije, govori lepo in pametno ter čeden je. Posmehuje se lenobnim ljudem, ki so za vekomaj potopljeni v povprečnost. Prezira meščansko življenje, vselej inertno in pod meglo, megleno tudi, ko sije sonce. Nikoli ni skusil usodne najstniške ljubezni, vendar se zaradi tega ne sekira - kot druge povprečnosti, tudi spolni nagon prezira. Tako živi samostno, a je kot človek dejanj cenjen, vendar nikoli tudi docela razumljen. Pravijo mu čudak. Da je drugačen, tega se zaveda in kani drugačen tudi ostati. Ve za pasti življenja, za zakon z žensko, za državno službo ..., ki človeka naredijo mlahavega. Če kaj, si želi, da bi ostal pokončen do smrti.
To mu prav dobro uspeva, dokler ne sreča mile Milke, ki mu zmeša glavo. Ona mu ljubezen vrača. Ta občutek vzajemne ljubezenske naklonjenosti in erotične navezanosti je zanj nov. Zelo mu je všeč, a v svoji neizkušenosti gre predaleč in želi ljubljeno osebo podrediti svojim prepričanjem. Želi preoblikovati izoblikovano osebo. Punca se mu postavi po robu. S tem ga razočara. Ni si mogel misliti, da je tudi ona kot vsi drugi zgolj navadna. Sam se ima namreč za nenavadnega človeka in noče imeti nobene drugačne ljubezni kot nenavadne. Ljubezenska izkušnja je trpka. Kot svetla misel žge močno in ga noče zapustiti.
Klementa Juga dojemam kot človeka s trdnim značajem, dokler mu temeljev usodno ne zamaje nesrečna ljubezen. Pravega partnerskega odnosa ni zmožen. Zaide v začaran krog obtoževanj in oproščanj: sebi, punci in človeški povprečnosti nasploh. Vse to se dogaja v njegovih zadnjih dneh. Kmalu po tem namreč njegovo življenje ugasne v Triglavski severni steni. V drznem vzponu želi spiti čašo nadmoči in odplakniti pekoč spomin na nesrečno ljubezen. A sreča ni na njegovi strani. Je preveč predrzen in zato ga Stena zavrne. V izpostavljenem delu Jug omahne in požre ga globina.

Gledališče Koper februarja 2006 na odrske deske še enkrat (prvič MGL in Janez Škof leta 1988) postavi Jančarjevo dramo Klementov padec v režiji Jaka Ivanca, v glavni vlogi Rok Vihar. Leta 1988 sem bil star 9 let in sem jo zamudil. Zdaj imam 26 let in avto. Šel bom v Koper in si predstavo ogledal.

Popravek 20. junija: Nisem šel v Koper, temveč je Gledališče Koper prišlo v Ljubljano. Oziroma bi bilo moralo priti 31. maja, ko bi bilo gostovalo v ljubljanski Drami, pa ni, ker je nekdo od igralcev zbolel, tako da so predstavo prestavili na 21. junij. Predstavo si bom seveda ogledal, poročilo sledi.