Novembernebel

"The season in which we were born is peculiarly akin to us, and we to it. [...] For really, in my experience, there is a sympathetic relation between ourselves and the season that produced us. Its return brings something that confirms and strengthens, that renews our lives."

— from The Black Swan, by Thomas Mann.

That's how I feel about November.

I have been taking German classes now for eight weeks. I have learned how to count, how to conjugate, and how to conduct a stilted and limited conversation in a very specific, unrealistic scenario.

I have learned also that German is much stranger than I'd ever imagined. For example, the verb takes second position in a sentence. Weiso? So the addition of a sentence adverb therefore changes everything.

I still cannot read Rilke.

The compounding of nouns, however, has its own kind of poetry. Like "der Kugelschreiber" — the pen, a bullet for writing. And "der Fernseher" — the television, for watching at a distance.

I love the fact of Novembernebel, that November has its own kind of fog.

The assignment in lesson 4 was to describe a scenario in a train using the vocabulary learned to date. Here is the story I wrote:

Der Zug
Robert Walser, Stefan Zweig, und Thomas Mann fahren nach Berlin. Sie spielen Karten für kurze Zeit. Robert schläft. Stefan schreibt eine Fabel. Thomas weint. Sie arbeiten zu viel.