An email from Karsten Lieberkind - August 99

Dear Reza,

<SNIP>

Oh, and I can only sympathize so much with what you are writing about your
life-style, the green, non-smoking, non-alcoholic and mentally sane way of
living. Also your final remark about not owning a car I found delightful. We
are really close in many ways it seems in our approaches to this mysterious
thing called life.

One thing that struck me, as it so often does, living in a kind of society
as the Danish one, highly competitive and degrading and with a tremendous
misuse of bodies and minds, is how little fashionable it is becoming to live
a healthy life, how natural and obvious as it otherwise may seem.

People are drinking and smoking, especially the young women (even more
sad!), destroying themselves, and they think it is much more 'trendy', much
less 'boring' than just keeping away from these things. One is actually
ridiculed a bit or almost excommunicated, even in higher educated circles,
if one is not drinking 'socially', and it is far more accepted to drink too
much, or even to be an alcoholic than not drinking at all. At least you will
get a certain amount of understanding from this. But if you don't drink you
have no excuses. You have simply put yourself out of the good company, and
you need to excert yourself quite a bit to regain your position!

This is not the case with smoking. There you are excused, but smoking is
still far too much accepted everywhere. In Denmark it is virtually
impossible to find a restaurant or a cafe without smoke, and that is beyond
my comprehension. I think here in this country we are lagging about 10 to 15
years behind the US in that respect. And people here are almost proud of
their attitude, because they believe it shows they are not so bent down by
rules in their lives as others.

So much for now. I'll get back to you later.

Love.........Karsten
 
 

You know there must be something wild around you, like in Switzerland you
have the mountains, and here the sea. I would not thrive in a place with
limited access to real, genuine nature, which is not the kind of nature you
find in parks or in ordinary rural surroundings with mono-cultural farming,
that is, with long stretches of the same crop and with all weeds and flowers
rooted out by pesticides. This unfortunately is very typical of this country
with its intensive farming.

But then we have the sea as a final resort. Still not tamed, and not likely
to be. I go there as often as I can. The sound of it is tremendous.
Sometimes it seems to get higher with the distance you move away from the
sea, presumably because you hear more of the entire coast line. It grows
until it is like a rolling thunder. But when you approach the sea again the
sound turns into a peaceful whispering.

Karsten