#HolyRomanEmpire

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I feel guilty for feeling guilty. That is, if I express this guilt in anything but an apology directed only at the one(s) it concerns.

Two examples come to my mind right now; that one very rainy night where I saw an old man in a wheelchair resting below a tree and considered asking him if I should accompany him on his way and keep him dry with my umbrella but was too shy to do so, and when I once took a nightly walk again out of weakness and ended up accidentally disturbing a swan's sleep with my presence.
Both times I felt genuinely guilty and sorry, and truly wished I would have acted differently. And yet when I was on my ways back home and thought about the incidents, once it got to the point where I considered telling friends about them to vent my regret, there arose a nasty ulterior motive.

I admit that at the same time I started thinking that telling others about could improve my reputation or make me look kind. The reasonable part of my mind (which does not get much attention) was aware that both incidents were minuscule and I didn't really do much wrong, and thus estimated that showing my grief to others...
However, my overly extreme reactions were real and genuine. The emotional part of my self truly did feel miserable, and upon hearing my reason constructing such despicable and disgusting schemes I only felt even more guilty, for seeking my own benefit in harm I had done to others, or help I had denied them.

In both cases I ended up talking about people to it regardless. I do not know whether it was these sickening traits of myself driving me to, or if I simply sought atonement through confession of what I consider to have been sins. However even if the former wasn't the case, this manipulating and egoistic thinking at least could have affected my actions, and the mere possibility was already enough to make me feel even lousier.

I don't know how to face this in the future. I cannot turn off the overly analytical and manipulative parts of my mind, but to act upon them in such situations I find simply intolerable.
Should I simply stay quiet the next time something like this happens? Would it not be more difficult to handle the guilt all by myself without an outlet, making it all the more of a punishment for whatever I might have done wrong? I guess...

(Oh, of course this excludes me apologising to people whom I might have treated incorrectly. No traces of such selfishness can be found here, and it is truly just my most natural reaction barring any ulterior motives or alternatives.)

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The flames of autumn ceased to fall,
Withered away upon the soil,
Leaving the trees a barren sight
Robbed of their feathers, now sinks light
The snow, engulfing all.

It beds a world so tiresome
As it from one year can become
And covers it in its white sheets
Where grey the sky the asphalt meets
To hide them from the eyes of one.

The air which lacks of life the spark
The flakes enrich with motion, hark:
For while the lack of life they curb
The freezing silence do they not disturb
Which took the needles of the lark.

The naked branches pierce the skies
But soon the snow their shapes enshrines,
An ornament upon their frames
So pitiful without green manes,
It them adorns with fine white lines.

Below the pureness, with the grass
Lie memories of months that pass.
They rest conserved, cyclic decease
Of years concealed, one only sees
When winter melts, the blooming mass.

This will probably be the first in a longer series of such illustrations. Can you read it?



Trivia: The hands of the watch rest on the minute I finished drawing their outlines.

Apparently, taking walks in the snow in the morning does things to your sleep. I took a nap today shortly after lunch, and during the more than 2 hours it lasted I had the longest, most vivid, and most defined dream in ages.

There is a first part which I have forgotten, it involved toy(?) Yoshis, Mario, Luigi, and a small colourful toy cannon of sorts. I ended up eating Mario. Luigi, and a third thing on the Yoshis and then used that to fire the cannon. Huh.

My memories of it set in when I devised a plan to play a trick on local authorities and to make it better than last time (referring to earlier dreams possibly) by helping a criminal to escape, of course catching him again afterwards.
I had a small boat with a sail which I used. I stopped at a bit of rock close to the prison island, and then somehow got him out. He wasn't in the boat though as a precaution, and... swam?
When we got to a coastal town with a bay I somehow got afraid and pressured into giving him my boat, which was when I became worried.

The next thing I remember is me being together with my maternal grandparents, we were trying to locate him and chase him down.
I have very vague images of something akin to a Kaufhof floating around, but I lost their context.
Nonetheless, we ended up at a house with 100 storeys (or flats?). We chased down the stairs, whose railings had buttons on them; always in pairs of two red triangles with their points pointing away from each other and them sharing the flat side. These were the buttons for the bells of the apartments. They covered the whole railing, although I remember some of them to be grey and fake for when there were no apartment doors nearby. I also remember seeing down an elevator shaft where normal-looking people, I remember a businessman in a suit, stood on top of the elevator as it was going down. My thoughts were that it must be too full and they don't want to wait.

Eventually I got out and was now with my parents. We passed an open space where a family of thugs hung out, which made me anxious. The two children ran up to us, and for quite a while a boy of perhaps 7 or 8 years of age kept pushing my back quite energically. My father commented on how aggressive, nearly insane his behaviour would be, but since I didn't want to get involved with the other thugs and didn't find it too unpleasant either I just told them to hurry up.

Around here thoughts arose within me if I should continue to chase the prisoner. But since it was I who freed him I bore the responsibility, after all he could injure people during a robbery!

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Yesterday I returned home. My apologises for not updating in time, but I was quite exhausted after the long ride.

I did not to anything in the morning besides spending time in front of the laptop in the apartment. I probably could have gone somewhere close but I did not want to risk missing the train or something like that. After returning the keys at around noon and sending two postcards away to franz and my grandparents we took a taxi back to the Gare du Nord. Along the way we still passed a few things I would have liked to investigate further, but these shall have to wait for my next visit to the city, whenever it may be. Eventually we arrived back were we had started 4 days ago.



After a bit of wait which also gave me a chance to buy the hardcover Astérix 50th anniversary album and to see the richness of the French press when it comes to about everything ranging from architecture over culture to games, comics and anime, we rode back on the Thalys without any major happenings.



It felt good to arrive back in Germany. While up until the time when I first departed from there on Saturday I had never been to the city before, I already felt at home upon descending the train there. To make the return feel all the more homely, the car ride back was truly German as well. In Aachen we were forced to move very slowly because typically for German drivers the people on the street could not manage to just keep the traffic flowing properly, which in Paris about three times as many cars did three times faster. Blasting down the Autobahn at 200 km/h at dusk was more than refreshing though.
The snow here had already molten though, much to my disappointment.

While it feels wonderful to be at home again, I nonetheless hope to be able to return to Paris again someday. My biggest regret however is that I failed to visit an Astérix exhibition in a museum which, as I discovered on the taxi ride back to the Gare du Nord, was just around the corner of where I was housed. :(

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There are a few random things and facts about Paris which I didn't mention yet, but which ought to be pointed out:

In the Metro, you do not have to buy a ticket for each ride. Instead, you acquire one in order to enter a station and afterwards are free to ride around as many times and wherever you like as long as you don't exist the subway system. The air in there is also surprisingly fresh, and for such an immensely busy system in such a large city it's amazing how relatively clean everything is.

In Parisian taxis the front seat next to the driver is not for passengers, usually the drivers dump all sorts of persona things there. This means that even 3 people have to sit on the back row of seats. With four ones, or if parts of the group are a bit more well.fed, riding taxis would thus be impossible.

For Parisians walking on foot, traffic lights are mere decoration. If it's somewhat clear everyone will cross red lights without hesitation. As a TRUE PRUSSIAN I of course wasted until it was green most of the time, although I will admit that it's silly and does not really make any sense.

Also here be the souvenirs I brought with me, as well as a closer look at some Metro tickets:



Tickets of the museum of Les Invalides.

Amusing how unpredictable this city is. My original intention for today had been to visit the Tour Eiffel, take a boat tour on the Seine, and finally watch the sunset from the Basilique du Sacré-Cœur. Instead, I spent half of the day in the Hôtel des Invalides. But it was anything but wasted.

I felt (and still feel) not too well, possibly a cold. Due to that I did not look forward to a lengthy Metro ride. I had by now figured out how to read the map with the different routes though, so despite my rather disorientated mother and my father being absent conducting business (the reason he came here in the first place) I actually managed to sit down in the right train. It was much emptier than yesterday and the one we rode in was more akin to a normal train than to a cramped subway. I didn't feel like riding all the way to the Tour Eiffel yet though, and thus decided to first pay the Hôtel des Invalides a visit, which was reached after a short walk.



Its Baroque garden was outlined by cannons, some of which bore inscriptions possibly in Arabic. It was a very archaic writing though so I am not sure if it was actually something else instead, but since France always had close ties to the Ottoman Empire it's likely.



The courtyard was empty, yet in a corner of the arcade stood an old tank, from WWI I presume by the looks of it.



The ticket machine refused to work, so we had to go to the southern entrance and buy ones the conventional way. My mother was on coffee withdrawal, so she stayed at the caféteria while I went to take a few photos outside of Napoleon's tomb.

Originally I had planned to still climb Montmartre and enjoy the view from the Basilique du Sacré-Cœur, but I found myself too tired to again ride with a taxi or worse so the Metro, so I settled for a small promenade through the Jardin du Luxembourg.



...which, as it turned out, had already closed. Thus we instead decided to walk around it, since the sky was clear and bathed in the setting sun's fading light while the ones of the city were just being lit.



What seemed so cruel the night before started out quite pleasant this evening. Not all fires had yet been ignited and the shine of the city took the hand of the sun's one, chivalrously leading it out of the ballroom of the sky while adorning its exit with a gentle contribution flowing nicely into the fading daylight.



Yet as the sky grew darker and the streets brighter, this feeling of oppression rose up again. The night which followed the day sought to bring peace and calmness, yet the busy pace of Paris kept it from fulfilling its purpose and more and more did the atmosphere clash with the one nature had intended for the time of the day.



I returned to the apartment while the sky was still a dark blue and had not yet become a black colour stained by humanity's dictatorship over the world.