Georg Lentze: Physics and More
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Short story
Racism in Britain and beyond
On the art of communicating with each other
I wrote a few short stories while I was a student at Manchester University in the late eighties.
Some friends who read them mistook them for fact rather than fiction, so let me make it clear that the story below is just that: a story, fiction, fantasy.
A fact-based story, to be precise.
A sun tan from the rain city
My story begins on the top deck of a boat which carried me home from a three-day trip to a city known for its beauty. I had been gazing at the endless sea for the last hour or so and occasionally my mind was drifting home to my mates and their inevitable question whether I had enjoyed the trip. Should I tell them how I had walked alongside the river through the city centre, marvelling at quaint little bridges and at the sparkling of the water in the sun? How I had spent much of my time sitting in a cosy little café on the river bank, watching cars, buses and people move industriously about? How I had lain in blazing sunshine on a gently sloping lawn, observing, with my eyes half closed, the movements of distant cricket players? How I had wandered through the buzzing and bustling of the pedestrian zone, where the clamour of street vendors grew loud and faint again as I was passing by. How, on a hired byicycle, I had worked my way up a hill south of the city, where sweet scents in the air had suddenly reminded me that it was early spring, and how just at that moment the clouds had broken and waves of light had flooded the countryside and had warmed my freezing limbs?
'Alas, if it had only been like that!' I thought, and left the top deck to go to the loo. When I sat comfortably on the toilet I recalled how, in reality, I had stared sadly at the river from those bridges, trying in vain to understand the indistinct murmur that rose from the water; how I had gazed at my mugs of coffee till they were lukewarm in that café because I didn't know where to go and what to do in a city where I knew nobody; how I had envied the spectators at that cricket ground, who chatted cheerily of familiar things and rubbed each others' hands and cheeks; how I had become a drop in an indifferent ocean of people in that pedestrian zone, where I had vowed never ever to travel on my own again; how the solitude of my soul was eventually matched by that of my body on the peak of that hill, where no hollow voices were vexing me any longer; and how finally I had tried to drown this solitude in a breakneck race downhill, which left me gasping for breath when I arrived back in the city.
I flushed the toilet. When I looked into the mirror it struck me that my skin showed a gentle but distinct sun tan. All of a sudden I knew what I was going to talk about back home. Before I left everybody had told me that my most important piece of luggage would have to be a raincoat. My tan, adorned with stories of sunshine and blue skies, would prove them wrong. What need should there be to tell them any more? What desire should they have to hear any more? Reassured, I went out into the open again. Dark rain clouds were drifting in from the east. Beneath them the coastline of north Wales had come into view. My mind was at ease now. I returned to the top deck and started gazing at the endless sea again.
A few years later, I completed a thesis on racial thinking in the British Labour Party. For readers interested in racial thinking and racism in Britain and beyond, the thesis is available here in PDF format.
Since my teens I have been drawn to and repelled by philosophy. The reason for this ambivalence is that, to quote Ludwig Wittgenstein, "it is only by thinking even more crazily than philosophers do that you can solve their problems". Much of my thinking on philosophy and the foundations of physics is foreshadowed in an article I wrote for my high school magazine back in 1982: On the art of communicating with each other (PDF).