Occasionally in this column I have acknowledged the great tolerance of those of my colleagues who have discovered to their surprise the contents of a casual conversation over coffee reproduced in The Irish Times a few days later. Now, to my great delight, I have a brand new crop of international colleagues, whose collective store of weather anecdotes I can plagiarise for years to come to provide grist for the incessant mill of Weather Eye. Some, of course, will wisely learn to hold their tongues when anywhere in earshot; others actively assist, as did Donald Phillips here in EUMETSAT by drawing attention to a quaint description of a typical northern European August.
Uber dem Atlantik befand sich ein barometrisches Mini- mum, begins a section of Robert von Musil's celebrated novel, The Man Without Qualities. "Above the Atlantic there was a barometric minimum; it was moving eastwards toward an anticyclone over Russia, and gave no indication as yet that it would succeed in weakening the latter on its northern flank."
So far so good; it could be 1998. As the passage continues, however, we begin to see indications of von Musil's nemesis. His weakness was an obsessive and almost neurotic attention to exact detail in his narrative, to the extent that this, his one and only novel, intended to be an ironic account of the decline and fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, never quite made it to the end. As we read on, we begin to see the problem:
"The isotherms and isotheres were behaving exactly as they should. The air temperature was in the usual relationship to the mean annual temperature, to the temperature of the coldest and the warmest months, and in relation to the mean annual temperature variation. The rising and the setting of the sun and moon, the changing light of the moon itself, of Venus, and of Saturn's ring and many other occurrences of note, corresponded exactly to their predictions in the almanacs. Moisture levels in the atmosphere showed a high degree of variability, and the humidity was low." In a word, which describes the reality exactly even if the mode of expression is somewhat out of date: it was a lovely August day of the year 1913.
Reading this, it may seem strange that von Musil, a contemporary of Joyce, derided the latter for the narrative style of Ulysses, maintaining that it obscured rather than reflected reality. Nevertheless, the unfinished Mann ohne Eigen schaften achieved critical success in its day, being variously described as expressionistic, satirical, and the last great work of the classical tradition.
But I wonder what an isothere may be?