The House

In two days, we will be moving to our new house.
The feeling of excitement didn't emerge until this month after we started attending details such as choices of curtains, furniture and lighting. It has been a long and tedious search, yet as the list of to-do's is getting short, the more colorful the image of the home becomes.

A couple of months ago when the house was still under construction, I did 3 sketches for the parking space outside the garden. The original plan that came with the project was rather plain and uninteresting: the entire space would be simply covered up underneath a thick layer of cement. I understand the convenience that a cement space would promise: much time would be saved from the labors of, perhaps, weeding, cleaning, watering, etc. However, I quite reisit the idea of living next to a lifeless space of cement for the future 30 years. My obstinacy then invited a challenge to visualize what I wanted.

Giving colors and shapes to ideas on paper was certainly much more affordable than making them real in reality. In the end, a fourth choice was made after budget and practicality were considered. When we visited the house last week, it was pleasant to see a bit of nature between plates of cement that we could afford to preserve.

None of the sketches was in use in the end, but it was from that moment my imagination about the home was set free.

Photo: National Geographic

Ball Lightning

News about natural disasters has been flooding in since the beginning of the summer (or much earlier). I have just seen some pictures of a wildfire in Russian, which ravaged the landscape before anyone could possibly react.

I suddenly recalled a natural phenomenon that I learnt from my Russian colleague: ball lightning. We were talking about weathers in the countries which we had visited. Her preference to minus 30 degree Celsius in Siberia than 30 degree Celsius in Japan was quite unbelievable to me. She then went on talking about a natural phenomenon, ball lightning, that is exclusively Russian. The cause and the formation of a ball lightning remain enigmatic to most scientists even today. It looks like a fire ball, basically. Its appearance, itinerary and explosion are never predictable, but dire consequences can easily be imagined. She once witnessed a ball lightning flashing into and exploding in a chimney, and the iron chimney immediately melted into a small solid chunk.

I then remembered a film that I saw with my brother about 10 to 12 years ago, Burnt by the Sun, a Russian film. Throughout the film there is a mysterious fire ball floating around in the air; no explanation is provided and no function is specifically depicted. I remember my brother simply ignored my attempt at understanding the fire ball from a psychoanalytical viewpoint. We were fairly puzzled, or perhaps just me.

When I brought up this experience, the colleague confirmed my speculation: the fire ball in the film is a ball lightning. She then suggested that the unpredictability of the ball's presence and its trajectory seems to serve as a metaphor for the surveillance of the Soviet Union under Stalin's dictatorship. No one knows what is going to happen, and everyone is watched closely.

It really made my day to have a long-term mystery solved. I can't wait to go back to the film to see how this new piece of information would shape a new understanding of the story for me.

The Cement Garden

by Ian McEwan
Vintage, 1997.