The Hollowing-Out of Everything
Part of the Earthquake series. Have we gone far too far too quickly? Is it possible to pull back a little without compromising the benefits of the new?
Well, this is a funny one. Funny peculiar, that is. I wanted to see if I could better understand some of the Big Picture. There has, long since, been talk about civilizational decline and, even, planetary doom, and I wanted to do a little nosing around to try to fathom what might be going on.
As ever, I am particularly interested in what is happening to Business. How is it possible, for example, for a business enterprise to claim the following?
We’re in business to save our home planet
This, as you’re probably aware, is the mission statement of Patagonia, a company that makes kit for climbing and other outdoor pursuits.
Many people admire Patagonia’s positioning. Indeed, some people that I admire admire Patagonia’s positioning. But I don’t get it. I really don’t get it. Their statement seems to me to be so broad, so diffuse, so general as to render it meaningless. Plus, it says absolutely nothing about the company’s products.
Any company on our home planet could, if they chose, use the exact same form of words and we’d be none the wiser about how or why any one of them was differentiated from the others.
And it’s based on what I consider to be a highly questionable premise:
At Patagonia, we appreciate that all life on earth is under threat of extinction.
Which is not to say that the statement is untrue. Just that it is neither more nor less true than at any time in the history of our solar system. It all depends upon the considerations that are included and, ultimately, the time horizon that is used.
Anyway, I’m a tad old-fashioned: I want businesses to do Business, and I want them to behave properly, considerately and, yes, sustainably, when so doing. And, insofar as larger political and social issues are concerned they should be managed in the larger Political and Social spheres.
At a minimum, I believe a company’s mission should be linked to what it does as a business. So, for example, I think that Toyota’s statement from 1999 is admirable:
We want to set the tone for the era … green and affordable … that means establishing a new paradigm for harmonizing personal transport with the environment. It means revolutionary cost savings in products and production processes.
In any case, going beyond this kind of direct-business-link horizon creates risks in the general marketplace. It has been proven that …
… socially driven economic policy risks creating asset bubbles. And when those bubbles burst, they end up hurting the very causes and people the original policy was intended to help.1
Okay, let’s come back to the here and now.
Arrival of the Exoskeletal Enterprise
OUTSOURCING! What is it? It kinda sounds … how would you say? … Business-y, if that’s even a word. Just another piece of business-speak. Nothing to bother your head about. Nothing to see here.
But, no. We really do need to take it seriously. Over a period of years, particularly over the final decade of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first, this unremarkable sounding Business-thing figured large behind one of the quietest but most consequential revolutions the world has ever seen.
Consequential because it affected not only Business but also Politics and Society on a global scale.
Come with me, if you will, while we take a brief look at what happened.
Centre Pompidou, Paris - Shutterstock.
First, a metaphor: in 1979, the final veil dropped from Richard Rogers’ and Renzo Piano’s $100 million Centre Pompidou and a startled Paris saw a building apparently still swathed in scaffolding and beset by the undulations of a giant silver and red worm.
The building had externalized its skeleton of supportive girders, together with the pipes, ducts and shafts bearing the services that gave it life. The scarlet-bellied tube carried nothing more sinister than an escalator. Free of essential nuisances, the uncluttered space within could be devoted solely to the building’s raison d’être – the presentation, research and teaching of the arts.
The Centre Pompidou was a physical manifestation of the ‘clear the decks for action’ philosophy that underpinned outsourcing in business.
Just as the exoskeletal building liberated itself to pursue its central purpose, companies, governments and institutions worldwide began to externalize support services because, so the argument went, these activities had historically diffused their focus on core activities. But was this really true?
It started from a logical-enough premise: some peripheral functions of a business might well be better and more cost-efficiently run by separate, specialist suppliers. Catering, cleaning, logistics, for example.
But, events that happened in the three-year period 1989 to 1991 inclusive, actually went way beyond this, redefining what a business is and creating a New World in the process. I know, I know, change is always with us, but I’m talking about Really Big Change, largely enabled by the widespread uptake of outsourcing as we now know it.
Why did this mega change occur?
There were several reasons. The one most often put up front by the Business community for the unchallenged romp that Outsourcing enjoyed is … New Technology … Information Technology … IT. So let’s start there.
New Technology, New World
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s digital technology was making an ever-greater contribution to business life. However, although the personal computer had arrived it was an isolated beast, lacking any significant inter-connectivity. Back then ….
… when personal computers were first becoming popular, they were mostly used as professional tools, or games machines for teenagers.2
Most of the new technology, the big items of kit, were tucked away in air-conditioned cathedrals overseen by a priestly white-coated caste of IT eggheads.
I think it fair to say that, for many, perhaps even most, business people at that time, IT was viewed as some sort of black art.
Not least, many in Marketing chose to regard IT in their specialism as an unwarranted intrusion. I say this with some certainty because, in the late 1980s one of the client companies of the writing & communications agency that I had co-founded in London was a tech development company called CACI. The managing director of CACI UK was Clive Humby and Edwina Dunn was a senior executive.
While at CACI, Clive developed what I think was probably the first ever CRM system, promoted under the name Market*Master. I remember the excitement when the first Market*Master client, a British bank, said ‘Yes!’
Later, Clive and Edwina quit CACI and, in 1989, set up DunnHumby. In 1994 they created and launched the Tesco Clubcard and the rest, as they say, is history.
However, before that, they did some ground-breaking research work which drew attention to the yawning chasm that, at that time, separated Marketing from IT. Here’s a direct quote from a promotional piece that my company created for an event we organized in London in October 1990:
At the beginning of 1990, DunnHumby produced their acclaimed report on Use & Attitudes to Computers in Marketing. The result of extensive research with major marketing companies, the report was hailed as a major contribution to the oft-discussed but rarely analyzed subject of Marketing and IT integration for ‘90s marketing success.
“Use & Attitudes to Computers in Marketing” - the very title sounds a tad bizarre, doesn’t it? But that’s the way things were.
So, what did we have here?
A marketing community that was quite happy the way things were, thank you very much.
BUT … quite separately, a community of astonishingly bright tech people who had a vision of the future, and were creating the tools of that emerging future. This activity was putting the foundations in place for a new function: computer use necessitated a new activity called Interaction Design which progressively led to User Experience (UX) and thence to what became known as Customer Experience (CX).
AND, oh, in 1989, something world-changing happened that few outside the tech community quite comprehended at the time: Tim Berners-Lee invented the internet.
To state the obvious, digitalization was rapidly enabling activities and communications that were fundamentally different from those that had prevailed up until that time.
New Politics, New World
Then there are the politics of the situation. Here, we’re dealing with a different set of triggers and drivers. For instance, in 1989 (Year 1 of our three-year focus window), the Berlin Wall came down. This, too, was a world-changing event within a wider world-changing process. Let’s briefly recap some of the background to that.
This strand of the story really starts just after the Second World War. In fact, with the benefit of hindsight we can now see that the war did not end in 1945. Far from it.
Sir Winston Churchill put the situation beautifully when, on 5 March 1946, he delivered an address at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, the home state of U.S. President Harry S. Truman. Churchill’s theme was the occurrence of unanticipated events in the aftermath of the Second World War. The speech included this:
From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Atlantic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow.
At the end of the Second World War the Soviet victors of the Battle of Berlin occupied the whole of the city before handing over sections to American, British and French forces whose combined territories made up West Berlin.
An uneasy Cold war then ensued and, in 1961, intensified when the Soviets built a wall around their part of the city (East Berlin). This was avowedly done to keep so-called Western ‘fascists’ out, although it actually had more to do with a concern to stop mass defections of their own citizens.
Then, by the time of our three-year focus period, the mood had radically changed. There was a thaw in the Cold War and, in November 1989, the wall was demolished. A Berliner spray-painted on the wall ‘Is the war really over?’ Good question.
The reunification of East and West Germany was officially declared in October 1990. A month later, 19-21 November 1990 to be exact, a summit meeting took place in Paris at which most European governments, together with those of the United States, Canada and Russia adopted The Charter of Paris for a New Europe.
This summit was the peace conference3 that marked the end of the Long War of the 20th century - a war that had actually persisted, in hot and cold forms, from 1914 to 1990. And the Paris Charter was an attempt to leverage the fall of communism and pull eastern bloc countries into the ideological framework of the West.4
Subsequently, in December 1991, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was formally dissolved.
These, obviously, were world-shaping events, their impact impossible to over-state, as was evidenced by the words of American political scientist, Francis Fukuyama, when he posited the likelihood that humanity had reached …
not just ... the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: That is, the end-point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.5
Wow! That’s one hell of a claim ... or should one say, one hell of a hope … or perhaps, even, one hell of a mistake?
Whatever, what matters is the mood at the time. It was clearly one of triumph (“Hurrah! We’ve beaten the bad guys!”), and, as important, one of confidence (“Our way of life is the best and everyone can see that!”).
So, what more natural than the assumption that Fukuyama’s proposition could and should be acted upon? If this truly was “the end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution” then it surely followed that “the universalization of Western liberal democracy” was the right and proper course of action. And Business had a large role to play in this consolidation.
Put that another way: in the minds of many Western leaders and those who would thereafter become known as ‘elites’, Business had been newly legitimized as ‘Global’. This was the future. This was a key strand of the new, peaceful, collaborative world order: and one of the vital means to expedite this glorious future was new, digital-tech-enabled Outsourcing.
The leaders and elites were generally careful not to present this activity as part of a perceived peace dividend for the West, but let’s look a little more closely at some of the specifics of the Business activity.
New Business, New World
From the end of 1990, Western elites believed that the West and liberal democracy had finally won the Long War of the 20th century and that, now, the world was at their feet. Literally. The world.
Therefore, globalizing business was a legitimate way to both support and capitalize upon the post-1990 New World Order.
Here’s a clear expression of that belief expressed just a decade later in a speech given at Johns Hopkins University by U.S. President Bill Clinton, addressing the issue of China joining the World Trade Organization (WTO):
By joining the WTO, China is not simply agreeing to import more of our products; it is agreeing to import one of democracy’s most cherished values: economic freedom. The more China liberalizes its economy, the more fully it will liberate the potential of its people – their initiative, their imagination, their remarkable spirit of enterprise. And when individuals have the power, not just to dream but to realize their dreams, they will demand a greater say.6
There we have it - the spirit of the Peace of Paris interpreted as giving the go-ahead for a global expansion of Western business because it would lead directly to the sales of “more of our products” and the spread of “economic freedom”, resulting in the people of countries beyond the West having “a greater say”.
So, from the end of 1990, major companies racheted up their efforts to divest themselves of more critical functions, organs as well as bones. In very short order, digitalization enabled Outsourcing (corporate exoskeletonization) to shift from its tactical to its strategic uses. IT operations. Customer Relations. Human Resources administration. And, other major functions including, of course, Manufacturing. This was pretty much the entire portfolio of business processes that previously had been undertaken within the siloed confines of individual business enterprises.
This activity proved particularly advantageous for management consultancies - to the extent of being a licence to print money. No surprise, therefore, that they enthusiastically got involved. In fact, Rajat Gupta and Anil Kumar at McKinsey & Company are actually credited with the invention of Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO) and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO).
I have a copy of the BPM (Business Process Management) Professionals’ Handbook7 issued by Andersen Consulting (the forerunner of Accenture). Dated 1995, it is a 300-page employee guide to selling outsourced BPO deals. It was, as the book explains, all about deal shaping:
identify areas of business operations which the prospect may be willing to outsource
understand how the outsourcing of these areas would fit within the prospect’s strategic objectives
identify the prospect’s service, quality and economic objectives
create an arrangement and pricing approach which meets the prospect’s objectives, while also providing a reasonable economic return with reasonable risk for Andersen Consulting
These activities constituted a direct campaign to radically re-engineer business enterprises. It was all pursued with enormous energy. Why? Primarily because it generated vast income and profits for the consultancies.
The outcome, to state it baldly, was that the West de-industrialized.
The image at the top of this post is from Shutterstock and shows derelict Victorian textile mills in Bradford, Yorkshire, UK. Hollowing-out in reality.
New Society, New World
Industrialization is a category of human action (purposeful behavior).8 Humans and human actions are the basis of what we call Society. If a country de-industrializes it follows, as the night the day, that its Society is radically affected.
This is where we frequently come across the term ‘hollowing out’ as, for example, in the following …
The flip side of the changing skylines of China and the Middle East was the rising unemployment and the hollowing out of industrial communities in Europe and the US to create crime-ridden, welfare-dependent, post-industrial wastelands.9
And, specific to the United States …
Dependence on imports has virtually eliminated the nation’s ability to manufacture large flat-screen displays, smartphones, many advanced materials and packaged semiconductors. The U.S. now lacks the capacity to manufacture many next-generation and emerging technologies. This is to say nothing of the human suffering and sociopolitical upheaval that have resulted from the hollowing out of entire regional economies. Once vibrant communities in the so-called Rust Belt have lost population and income as large factories and their many supporting suppliers have closed. The shuttering last March of the GM plant in Lordstown, Ohio—resulting in the loss of some 1,400 high-paying manufacturing jobs—is just the latest example. ... In terms of long-term competitiveness, the biggest strategic consequence of this profound decline in American manufacturing might be the loss of our ability to innovate—that is, to translate inventions into production. We have lost much of our capacity to physically build what results from our world-leading investments in research and development. A study of 150 production-related hardware startups that emerged from research at MIT found that most of them scaled up production offshore to get access to production capabilities, suppliers and lead customers.10
The following refers specifically to France …
Entire areas of production in the West have still collapsed, though, especially in textiles, footwear, household appliances, chemicals, timber, plastics and rubber. Thirty years of political passivity have produced a less rosy outcome than that promised by champions of pain-free deindustrialisation. France has had a trade deficit since 2004; the surplus in services does not compensate for the deficit in manufactured goods. Factory closures have turned whole regions into jobless deserts where technical skills have been lost. Service sector salaries, which were supposed to make up for job losses in industry, are on average 20% lower than those in manufacturing.11
The Old World Bites Back
But the Old World wasn’t going to give up without a fight.
A particularly intriguing take (to my mind, anyway) on the whole situation comes from Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin who suggests the current situation is all part of a centuries-long trend by the West to pursue ‘individualism’.
At risk of over-simplifying, it seems to me that Dugin regards what we might term the Protestant project as the basis of a shift to ‘individualization’ - an ever greater move away from communitarian thinking. First, he addresses that 1989-1991 ‘window’:
By tactically using Soviet Russia, capitalism initially succeeded in dealing with the fascist regimes, and this was the ideological result of World War II. The ensuing Cold War between East and West by the end of the 1980s ended in a liberal victory over the communists.12
He then addresses the new twist:
Thus, the project of liberation of the individual from all forms of collective identity and ‘ideological progress’, as understood by liberals, went through another stage. In the 1990s, liberal theorists began to talk about ‘the end of history’ (Francis Fukuyama) and the ‘unipolar moment’ (Charles Krauthammer). This was a vivid proof of entry of capitalism into its most advanced phase - the stage of globalism.13
Where Dugin then goes with this argument I find absolutely fascinating. He suggests that the next - final? - elements of individualism are gender and posthumanism. So, for example …
On closer inspection, after defeating the external enemy, liberals have discovered two more forms of collective identity. First of all, gender. After all, gender is also something collective@ either masculine or feminine. So the next step was the destruction of gender as something objective, essential, and irreplaceable.14
And the second form of collective identity?
… the last step left for liberals, who have traveled centuries towards their goal, is to replace humans, albeit partially, by cyborgs, artificial intelligence networks, and products of genetic engineering. The optional human logically follows optional gender.15
Well, make of that what you will. Personally, I find Dugin’s analysis interesting … but I certainly do not agree with all of it.
However, what can, I think, be reasonably stated is that, now, in the northern hemisphere’s Summer of 2024, the confident assertions of the 1990s look far less certain than once they did.
Many Western countries are recognizing that their security is now compromised by reliance on global supply chains: energy and defence are particular areas of concern.
Interestingly, three countries in the EU, Austria, Czechia, Hungary) have reasserted their belief in the nation state as the best unit for human flourishing and have signed a new Patriotic Manifesto for a European Future.
What historian Niall Ferguson has called the Axis of Ill Will (China, Russia, Iran, North Korea) and some other states have made it abundantly clear that they do not go along with the idea that liberal democracy and ‘individualism’ won over the world.
So, have I answered the questions that I put in the sub-head to this piece? Probably not. But I do think we owe it to ourselves, not to stop change - that’s impossible, anyway - but to keep things more coherent and better controlled.
Thanks for reading.
Ramaswamy, Vivek. Woke, Inc. (2021)
Moggridge, Bill. Foreword by Crampton Smith, Gillian. Designing Interactions (2007).
The Long War (1914-1990) as defined by Philip Bobbitt in The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History (2002)
Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man (1992)
Fukuyama, Francis. Ibid.
Clinton, Bill. Speech on the China Trade Bill, Johns Hopkins University (March 2000)
Otway, Mark. BPM Professionals’ Handbook (Andersen Consulting 1995)
Mises, Ludwig von. Human Action (1949)
Paterson, Stewart. China, Trade and Power (2018)
Kota, Sridhar and Mahoney, Tom, Reinventing Competitiveness, American Affairs Journal, Fall 2019. Volume III, Number 3. Sridhar Kota is the Herrick Professor of Engineering at the University of Michigan and executive director of MForesight. Tom Mahoney is associate director of MForesight.
Raim, Laura. Le Monde Diplomatique (July 2019)
Dugin, Alexander. The Great Awakening vs The Great Reset (2021)
Dugin, Alexander. Ibid.
Dugin, Alexander. Ibid.
Dugin, Alexander. Ibid.
Dear David,
(now ... that's a distinctly un-norwegian way to begin any text, we just don't go in for that sort of thing, and the formulaic 'Dear Sir' of the letter columns finds us giggling in merry confusion, but I have no better way of addressing you, my friend :-)
Here's a bit of music to bolster your spirits! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dmWAve3Pvk
I've been mostly off-line for a while and am now back playing catch-up. But that is impossible!
This text is so dense -- so full of meaning -- that I reckon it would be half a day's work for me to digest it properly, like a conscientious student would parse his pensum. It's packed with information, assertions and questions, and the topic is genuinely very interesting. Your mind is a wonder of curiosity, conjecture and insights. I am able to digest only a morsel of this knowledge for each eassay of yours that I read; before I started reading your substack, I had not given the subject of marketing a thought in the world. Now I've begun thinking about it, and have made my own first, small discoveries in that landscape. It's a new terrain for me, and this is why I have so little to contribute, whereas you have spent a life thinking and theorizing about this topic. But I understand a little bit more each time :-)
You mention the Centre Pompidou, the post-1990 New World Order, Fukuyama's 'End of History' and all that jazz ... let me contribute with a sleazy anecdote or two from my own life, from round about that time ...
Although I took the 'science-line' at my Gymnasium, we still had to read Norwegian, English, German (or Spanish or French if you fancy making unmanly sounds with your mouth) and I'd also chosen Latin as an elective course. It was the German teacher who took us on an excursion to Berlin in 1989. Night train down through Sweden, ferry crossing to Stettin (?) and the enticing, soft, warm feeling of Martha's body against mine as we spooned on the cold floor of the train compartment. I will never forget when our train had had entered East Germany (Republic of Farmers and Workers!) and a gruff border guard demanded our passports while the indistinct tannoy speakers in the train yard shouted in tinny German what sounded like threats ... " und die Straaafe, und das Bluuud, auf jeden ... !" I had a smoke hanging out of the window while watching the border guards inspect the underside of the train with mirrors attached to long sticks, submachine guns slung over shoulders and German Shepherds on leash. Surreal for a boy from the Norwegian suburbs.
Berlin -- home town on my mother's side -- was not that unlike Oslo, but then again, Oslo is in many ways an unremarkable town; could've been any smaller, North-German Burgh with French pretensions in the posher parts. I vividly remember a 'lecture' we attended at some Institut für ... etwas, etwas ... for two reasons: 1) I was actually able to understand most of what the lecturer was saying ... he was speaking 'langsam, klar und deutlich Hochdeutsch' but still ... and 2) out teacher asked him how he viewed the possibilities of the two Germanies uniting in the future? He answered that he certainly hoped that his country would again find a way to ... yada, yada, yada ... but that he did not see this as any realistic option in the foreseeable future. It only took a year and a bit for history to prove him wrong! In the meantime we naughty schoolboys and -girls! went to jazz clubs, flea markets and restaurants. Children playing grown-ups in a foreign land. I treasure a picture of Christopher, 'Knobby the Elk', my brilliant good friend, and myself in front of the Wall where some local patriot had painted 'Lillestrøm' -- the name of my local, childhood town.
We were of course billeted in West Berlin -- Charlottenburg -- but made an excursion into the East for a day. We had to exchange a certain amount of 'west-mark' into 'ost-mark' -- at the ridiculous, official exchange rate, of course ... 'Zwangsumtauschen' = forced exchange. Our 20 potent West-Mark were exchanged into 20 worthless East Mark -- by fiat, before we could get on the U-Bahn from West to East. Thing is ... there was nothing to spend those commie marks on ... there was nothing worth buying! We walked around East Berlin, it was still dour and derelict, and had dinner at a Gasthaus where we were treated with marked hostility and served slow, slovenly slop with disdain for dessert. The smartest boy among us (he did have a rare talent for knowing which way his toast was buttered!) brazenly went into a pharmacy and bought all the cough syrup his money could buy. Then he spent the rest of the afternoon downing one small, brown bottle after another. For some reason he knew that East-German cough-syrup contained a pleasurable amount of morphine (or similar). He was both happy and content by the time we went back west and we all agreed that it had been an ... interesting day out.
Now ... that was in '89. A year later my mind had wandered from school-work to ... well, anything else, to be honest. I was fed up with being a clever school-boy ... I had been offered a glipse of LIFE and all it might contain ... I had arranged a small flat that I could afford with the small salary from my after-school job at a grocery shop. I took all-too-much pleasure from calmly anouncing at dinner on my eighteenth birthday that "I would be moving out tomorrow". Poor parents! Poor, stupid me! But still: a triumph of MY WILL! There is no individuation without will.
During my last year at gymnasium I had detatched myself from 'school life'. I no longer considered myself as a 'pupil' or a 'schoolboy'. I was a man ... or at least I wanted to be one. I'd been able to save a bit of money from my after-school work at the grocer's ... and I was reading Hemingway, Hamsun, Dostoevsky, Calvino and Kjærstad ... a heady brew, I tell ya! I figured I could live frugally in Portugal for up to a year while I would write the Great Norwegian Novel (TM). Yes ... I too laugh at my young self ...
And then, in the autumn, I got a letter from the Norwegian Military. I was to present myself at a date and place to have my abilities assessed. Well, well ... young Lothario did not foresee that particular spanner disrupting his works ... despite it being mandated by law ... what blustering fools young men are!
At this time, being a conscientious objector was still a real alternative (since then, they've made away with much of the Norwegian armed forces, because they were so sure we would never have to face any armed adversity ever again -- praise be their glorious foresight -- and think of all the money we can spend on grifters instead!
Anyhow ... I seriously spent a month or two contemplating if I were a conscientious objector or not. I'm not. I spent these months in deep introspection. What I found, deep down in my soul, in my 'educated and cultured personality', is an ability and a willingness to use violence to combat evil and vice. This is not a perversion (as the geldings might perceive it), it is an ability. So ... a martial life for me? No, but ...
But first; a holiday of depravity: I spent my savings on three weeks in Paris with a giddy pair of 'lesbians'. I can vaguely remeber the new Centre Pompidou and the Mona Lisa somewhere there in the back of my brain ... to be honest, I had more salinous things on my mind -- no man, except some depraved, Roman emperor was ever so deliciously distracted.
And how long was Adam in paradise? Two and a half weeks. Then I had to take the train back home ... I remember buying 'Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine' by Tom Wolfe at a surprisingly literary kiosk in the middle of the night, at Aachen train station, while waiting for my connecting train back home. And ain't Dutch a mind-fuck of a language if you're half-asleep aboard a train somewhere in the western part of Europe and have a smattering of German, French and English ... it's like they speak to you in a language you did not know you knew -- but of course you do ... we're all family.
... and then I put the Great Norwegain Novel on the shelf, washed my clothes and took the train to the north of Norway to join the Air Force.