Areopagus Volume LXXXVIII
Seven short lessons every someday.
Welcome one and all to the eighty eighth volume of the Areopagus. By way of prelude this week, I offer you but four lines of verse. They were written by the great Elizabeth Barrett Browning in the 42nd of her so-called Sonnets from the Portuguese:
I seek no copy now of life's first half:
Leave here the pages with long musing curled,
And write me new my future's epigraph,
New angel mine, unhoped for in the world!
To add more words, or even commentary, would be folly. So, the tone thus being set, and not wishing to "exceed the measure of a Preface", as those forty seven translators of the King James Bible said... onward!
I - Classical Music
Hamburger Ebb und Fluth I: Overture
Georg-Philipp Telemann (1723)
Performed by the Bremer Barockorchester
Fireworks in Hamburg by Christian Fritzsch (1745)
This is an almost indisputably lovely piece; like so much Baroque music it has an air of pomp and occasion, an atmosphere of celebration and delight. Georg-Philipp Telemann wrote it, specifically, for his native city of Hamburg. Its name means "Hamburg Ebb and Flow", although it is usually known simply as Wassermusik, or Water Music, like the piece of the same name by George-Frederick Handel.
Telemann's Water Music is a ten movement orchestral suite, with each of the movements named after and inspired by a figure from Classical mythology somehow related to water — for Hamburg was, and remains, a booming port town. This sort of classicising mindset was also typical of the 18th century, and one cannot but read a poem or polemic from that era without finding it infested by references to or peculiar transmutations of Classical mythology. Who was Telemann? One of the leading composers of 18th century Europe and a friend of both Bach and Handel. He was supposed to be a lawyer — at least, that is what his parents wanted — but he became a musician and the world was much the better for his boldness.
This music is, as said, lovely in and of itself, but I think it is also useful to hear something adjacent to those other two great and perhaps more popular composers. Because no artist, however great, ever stands alone. Handel's Water Music, Zadok the Priest and Music for the Royal Fireworks feel like the definitive works of a certain sort of celebratory Baroque music. No doubt they are, but Telemann was equally gifted at crafting such music, and by listening to Telemann's Hamburger Ebb und Fluth alongside that of Handel it enriches our sense of their relative musical personalities, of their interdependence as composers of the same age, and of our broader feeling for the Baroque.
II - Historical Figure
Nabonidus
Last King of Babylon
Mesopotamia, in modern-day Iraq, was the original cradle of human civilisation. Cities and writing — and so much else — were invented there first, between the banks of the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. There was no precise moment when this civilisation emerged, but safe to say that by the end of the 4th millennium BC Mesopotamian society was flourishing. First were the Sumerians, after whom rose the Akkadians, and in their place the Babylonians.
This long and essentially uninterrupted line of Mesopotamian kingdoms finally came to an end in 539 BC. What happened? A man called Cyrus, from Persis in modern Iran, had arisen from obscurity and, after establishing an empire that stretched from India to the Aegean, conquered Mesopotamia. Thus the last of the native Mesopotamian kings, Nabonidus, takes his place alongside the likes of Romulus Augustulus, Constantine XIV, and Mehmed VI as the final ruler of a centuries-old and storied dynasty.
But Nabonidus is not only interesting because he was the last king of humanity's oldest civilisation; he was, in himself, a fascinating figure. See, Nabonidus has sometimes been called history's first archaeologist. A bold claim, but justifiable on the whole. For example, Nabonidus revived
a number of ancient religious and political roles during his reign, alongside excavating, studying, and restoring old statues. Such statues, alongside inscriptions and tablets, he used to try and date the various reigns of his predecessors and key events in Mesopotamian history, especially those relating to Sargon of Akkad, who ruled in about 2,300 BC. As a later chronicle records:
He saw in this sacred enclosure a statue of Sargon, the father of Naram-Sin: half of its head was missing, and it had deteriorated so as to make its face hardly recognizable. Given his reverence for the gods and his respect for kingship, he summoned expert artisans, restored the head of this statue, and put back its face.
He also ordered the restoration of several ruined temples, but rather than going at it willy-nilly he had them excavated and analysed so they could be rebuilt as they had originally looked. The best example is the Great Ziggurat of Ur. This was a large temple in the city of Ur in the south of modern-day Iraq (and the purported home of Abraham!) dedicated to the Sumerian moon god Nanna, or Sin to the Babylonians. It had been built in about 2100 BC but thereafter fell into decline. Under Nabonidus it was studied and restored on a grand scale, and it is largely the work carried out under his rule that was rediscovered by Sir Leonard Woolley in the 1920s. This was itself partly restored in the 1980s.
Otherwise he seems to have been something of a religious reformer, and his persistent attempts to promote Sin as the major Babylonian god — instead of the traditional primary god, Marduk — saw his priests rebel and make his son Belshazzar co-ruler. But no amount of reform could save the Neo-Babylonian Kingdom from the rising tide of Cyrus, who was beyond doubt one of history's greatest and most important leaders. His Achaemenid (or Persian) Empire was history's first true empire, and when he set his sights on Babylon its fall was only a matter of time. This phase of history also overlaps significantly with the Bible; it was Cyrus who ended the captivity of the Judeans and it was Belshazzar who featured in the eponymous story from the Book of Daniel.
After Cyrus' conquest there was also an account written of Nabonidus' rule. And, as ever, this particular history was very much written by the victors. Thus Nabonidus was portrayed as an evil king:
...he made perish the common people through want, the nobles he killed in war, for the trader he blocked the road... the harvester does not sing the alalu-song any more, he does not fence in any more the arable territory.
And then we are told how Cyrus was the liberator of Babylon:
Nabonidus' deeds Cyrus effaced and everything Nabonidus constructed, all the sanctuaries of his royal rule Cyrus has eradicated, the ashes of the burned buildings the wind carried away. Nabonidus' picture he effaced, in all the sanctuaries the inscriptions of that name are erased. Whatever Nabonidus had created, Cyrus fed to the flames! To the inhabitants of Babylon a joyful heart is now given. They are like prisoners when the prisons are opened. Liberty is restored to those who were surrounded by oppression. All rejoice to look upon him as king.
Perhaps all of this is true, but we shall never know for certain. Still, and either way, the end of Nabonidus' reign at the hands of Cyrus marks one of those striking and strange historical fulcrums — a genuine turning point in the narrative of humankind. Here it was that the oldest civilisation in our history (notwithstanding a handful of later rebellions and without forgetting their immense cultural legacy) was finally and formally extinguished.
III - Painting
The Many Faces of Rembrandt van Rijn
You may have heard of Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, almost always known by the mononym Rembrandt. He is regarded as one of the greatest artists who ever lived and remains, as he was during his lifetime, fabulously popular. But why? What made Rembrandt so great, if at all he was? A question that might be answered in one of several ways, of course, all of them reasonable — but there is one above all that fascinates me. See, I think it is correct to say that we know the face of no pre-modern historical figure, from anywhere in the world and at any point in time, better than that of Rembrandt. Why? Because he painted, drew, and etched his own face almost one hundred times:
It wasn't that Rembrandt "invented" the self-portrait as a genre, and there was already a fashion in the 17th century Netherlands for purchasing the self-portraits of famous artists. But he was the first — perhaps with the exception of self-portraits in earlier Chinese and Japanese art — to paint self-portraits as we think of them today: intimate, expressive works of art in their own right, as genuine visual autobiographies.
We have neither time nor space to investigate all of Rembrandt's portraits, but even a small selection reveals much. Looking through them you can see the changing expressions of a precocious youth who became a world-weary, though still witty, old man, right up to the year of his death in 1669. His early self-portraits, like this one from 1630 (at the age of twenty four) are bursting with creative ecstasy:
Then, at the outset of his career and once his star had already risen, we find self-portraits full of confidence and swagger, with self-fascination that would verge on hubris if it weren't for a certain sense of detached, critical curiosity:
Throughout we see a steady maturing, both of the man himself and the artist. In this self-portrait from 1640 you can see that the youthful excess has started to melt away, replaced by something like a calm, self-conscious melancholy — although, as ever, the confidence is there.
Rembrandt's life became increasingly difficult in the 1650s; recession hit Amsterdam and after selling all his paintings for a fraction of their real value he was bankrupted. This, along with earlier personal tragedy — including the death of his wife Saskia — and a gentle fading of his local popularity, took its toll. Here, in 1665, we can surely see all that in his eyes.
His self-portrait drawings and etchings, meanwhile, are particularly expressive — some of them funny and some remarkably modern:
It seems that Rembrandt looked at himself with a rare composure, and in an age now when we look at our own faces more than ever, what with smart phones and selfies, there is much we could learn from how he did so. Rembrandt was eternally and shamelessly inquisitive about himself, introspective in what we might call a Shakespearean way, akin that old adage written upon the Temple of Apollo at Delphi: KNOW THYSELF.
It is incredibly moving to place two of Rembrandt's self-portraits, separated by about forty years, alongside one another. And it is those words of Matthew Arnold, from his poem Dover Beach, that come to mind upon doing so:
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Few artists are comparable in this way — the likes of Vincent van Gogh, Zinaida Serebriakova, and Frida Kahlo come to mind as painters who have crafted the total vision of a human being across their life. There is more to Rembrandt than his self-portraits, and more that makes him worthy of the praise with which he has always been apprehended, but it is this striking, confident, contemplative, unusual personality — as revealed in those self-portraits — that defines all the rest of his work. Where to start with Rembrandt? With the man himself.
IV - Architecture
"From off the battlements of yonder tower..."
The rest of this Areopagus has become a somewhat wordish affair, and so the Architecture section I shall keep brief. Rather than telling you about a single building, or about a specific architectural element or general movement, I am willing to go out on a limb and offer (should I be so bold; should you be so gracious to think it worthy!) some advice: LOOK UP.
This could mean many things, but in this instance I am referring to roofs. Every building must have one, but rarely are two roofs alike, especially when you have buildings of different eras and different purposes clustered together. I had considered hunting for the most interesting rooftops I could find, but far better I thought to simply photograph a somewhat typical London street and show you what I mean. So here we have four consecutive rooftops, each of different heights and of totally different forms, together looking rather like the wildflowers and grasses of a meadow:
First: it is simply interesting to spend a few minutes picking out the various features of such a roofline — the various ornamentation, the inventiveness of the architects in fitting such fabulous shapes into such narrow spaces, the contrast between the plain white cornice of a Georgian roof with the flowing parapet of something rather more Victorian, the different materials, and so on.
And, second, it is a rewarding endeavour to try and understand exactly why and how a building's roof has been designed in its way. Take the roofline of this next building, which has a most unusual arrangement. We find a row of windows on the penultimate storey, separated by arches — quite ordinary so far. Now, one would expect these arches to open onto a balcony or terrace, but here they open directly onto the slates of the roof pitch itself! I can't say this is particularly effective or pretty, for in truth it looks quite strange, but it is certainly interesting and one wonders how this happened.
And all of this can come before we even know anything about roofs, about the East Asian hip-and-gable, the mansard, the Rhenish helm, onion domes, tented roofs, gambrels, open gables, closed gables, Dutch gables, crow-stepped gables... it is a long list, and one of infinite variation within each model, not to forget their infinite varieties of cross-pollination. Yes, roofs are a world of delight — and that is without addressing their related features like chimneys, windows, balustrades, parapets, cornices, corbels, towers, and suchlike. Knowing the terminology and workings of architecture is important, useful, and enriching, but knowing them is useless without the necessary first step of looking. The easiest thing in the world — and yet a thing we do so rarely. Look up! It is, I have found, almost always more fun than looking at one's phone.
V - Rhetoric
An Untameable Fire
You may remember, from previous instalments of the Areopagus, that whether or not rhetoric is an intrinsically moral thing has been debated for thousands of years. Plato said it wasn't, and alleged that Socrates agreed with him. For them rhetoric was simply the art of persuasion, a thing that could be used for good or bad. For Quintilian, meanwhile, rhetoric was fundamentally a moral force. Only a good person could be a good speaker, so he reasoned. This old argument was on my mind when I stumbled across this passage from the Epistle of James:
Behold also the ships, which though they be so great, and are driven of fierce winds, yet are they turned about with a very small helm, whithersoever the governor listeth. Even so the tongue is a little member, and boasteth great things.
Behold, how great a matter a little fire kindleth! And the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity: so is the tongue among our members, that it defileth the whole body, and setteth on fire the course of nature... But the tongue can no man tame; it is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison.
Strong words, but not without justification — and there are comparable passages in wisdom literature from all around the world, whether the Norse Hávamál or the Hindu Upanishads. How much trouble in the world, whether in daily life or geopolitics, has been caused by a needlessly loose tongue? How much trouble could have been avoided by bridling that tongue? Yes, with the art of speaking comes a duty to not say certain things, for the good of ourselves as much as the good of others. And I think this is the right way — or, at least, the Quintilianesque way — to think of rhetoric. Not as a neutral skill, but as one that demands of us a standard of behaviour. By recognising that the tongue is indeed an untameable fire (a fact always worth remembering) we prepare ourselves for the necessary job of watching what we say and working hard to say it prudently.
VI - Writing
Fiat Lux!
How to write? A question that has many answers, and one best answered with another question: in what sense? So-called "style" — word choice, grammar, syntax — is only one element of writing, and I daresay overrated. Just as important, if not more so, is what we choose to write about. After all, if Hemingway was nothing more than clipped prose then everybody would be just as good as him. William Shakespeare is another example. He did not "create" the stories he told in his plays; he took them from others. Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, Henry IV, Coriolanus — all these he loaned from the likes of Raphael Holinshed and Plutarch (via Thomas North). Does this make Shakespeare any less great? Not so. The very skill, the ultimate skill, lies in deciding what to write about rather than how to write about it. Thomas Carlyle, a 19th century historian, wrote about this with typical vigour:
The very perfection of the house, as if Nature herself had made it, hides the builder's merit. Perfect, more perfect than any other man, we may call Shakspeare in this: he discerns, knows as by instinct, what condition he works under, what his materials are, what his own force and its relation to them is. It is not a transitory glance of insight that will suffice; it is deliberate illumination of the whole matter; it is a calmly seeing eye; a great intellect, in short. How a man, of some wide thing that he has witnessed, will construct a narrative, what kind of picture and delineation he will give of it,—is the best measure you could get of what intellect is in the man. Which circumstance is vital and shall stand prominent; which unessential, fit to be suppressed; where is the true beginning, the true sequence and ending? To find out this, you task the whole force of insight that is in the man. He must understand the thing; according to the depth of his understanding, will the fitness of his answer be. You will try him so. Does like join itself to like; does the spirit of method stir in that confusion, so that its embroilment becomes order? Can the man say, Fiat lux, Let there be light; and out of chaos make a world? Precisely as there is light in himself, will he accomplish this.
This passage struck me, in part, because I have had similar thoughts. I had known that Shakespeare drew on Plutarch for his plays, but when I read Plutarch I realised that arranging his original narratives into such compelling dramas was a miracle. Not that Plutarch wasn't a good storyteller — in truth, he is one of the greatest biographers who ever lived! Rather, Shakespeare had the job of turning his biographies into stage plays. Insodoing he was able to look into the narrative and perceive what was of most import, what needed to be left behind, in what order things ought to be arranged, the exact balance of the characters and the precise moments or actions that reveal them best.
But this does not only apply to drama; it is true of all forms of writing. Because you can write about anything, but not everything — and therein we find the strange and eternal tension of all writing and speaking. Even on a narrow subject we must choose precisely what to mention and what not to mention. Even the question, "how was your day?" could be answered in an essentially infinite multitude of ways. This being the case, there is one line of Carlyle's passage I would have us remember, above all:
Can the [writer] say, Fiat lux, Let there be light; and out of chaos make a world?
That is the ultimate test for any writer — what must be mentioned, what must be set aside, and in what order must you say these things? Can you take chaos and out of it make a world?
VII - The Seventh Plinth
Dogs Then & Now
The modern world is, I think it fair to say, pet crazy. Never before have household animals been so popular or revered, and with the rise of the internet — of cute animal videos and suchlike — this trend is only rising. Perhaps for this reason we have a tendency to imagine that people in the past were less affectionate toward animals. Well, not so many days ago I was wandering around the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and in its courtyard I came across this curious duet of plaques, hidden away in a corner to which nobody was paying attention:
It made me smile — how it could not?! — and also reminded me of that fabulous painting by Sir Edwin Landseer, of whom I have written recently, called A Distinguished Member of the Humane Society.
It was painted in 1831 and it depicts a dog called Bob who was washed ashore after a shipwreck and then, while living on the riverbanks of London, saved upwards of twenty people from drowning. For this noble service he was awarded membership of Royal Humane Society (normally reserved for humans, I should add), given a medal for it, and granted a lifetime's worth of food. The crowning achievement of Bob's canine career was a portrait by Landseer. This is simultaneously moving and funny, and reveals an historical conception of animals that might surprise us.
In any case, the story does not end there. The dog mentioned on the right-hand plaque, called Jim, belonged to Sir Henry Cole. Cole was an interesting man who, among other things, helped set up the Victoria & Albert Museum. In his diary for the year 1879 he recorded this entry:
49 Wilton Place: Jimmy our little dog died of Asthma & Cold. nearly 16 years old. He died very quietly with Rose at 5.30 AM. He is portrayed in Punch with me, & was a character in the Museum. put in a box & sent to Mr Groser.
Touching. And here is the illustration in Punch he was referring to:
Cole even made some sketches of little Jim:
A charming story — and one that inclines us to believe that, had animal videos been around in Victorian Britain, they would have been no less popular than now!
Question of the Week
A fortnight ago I said this:
Tell me about an underappreciated writer — from any era or place, living or dead.
And here were your responses...
Rachel F
Two female travel writers come to mind. The travel writing niche is fairly dominated by male authors so it would be wonderful if their books were more mainstream. Christine Ritter was an Austrian artist and writer who spent a year on Svalbard in 1933. She only wrote one book, 'A Woman in the Polar Night' which detailed her experiences joining her hunter husband in the high Arctic over winter. Her writing is honest and upfront and quite beautiful, especially when she describes the haunting Arctic landscape and the wildlife she shares it with. What I really love about this book is her inclusion of daily routines during the long night; eating cold whale meat and condensed milk, the never ending tidying of the squalid and spartan huts she shares with her husband and his Russian hunter friend, and the ways she keeps herself fastidiously occupied while she spends the darkest days alone with her husband out hunting for days at a time, never knowing if he'll make it back alive. She talks quite frankly about sinking into the long winter night and potentially developing mental illness, which is impressive for a 1930's writer.
Similarly, Joanne Moore writes a memoir about leaving her urban life to spend a year in remote wilderness. Her book 'Nahanni Trailhead' is an account of her and her husband's honeymoon building a cabin beside the Nahanni River in the Canadian Northwest Territories in the 1980's. It is written like a journal with humour about the cabin-building, seasonal rhythms, and daily routines. Her nature writing shines when she describes their experiences hiking and skiing the untouched old-growth forest montane landscape, with the river and a temperamental radio being their only connection to the outside world. I loved her accounts of spending Christmas at the cabin and hosting serendipitous visitors traversing the great river.
Sean G
Frederick Exley was recognized in his lifetime but today he is virtually unknown. A Fan’s Notes, his triumph, is a beautifully twisted book about mid-20th Century America that is as biting of the dominant Western culture today as it was then.
From his davenport, almost as an armchair quarterback, he cheers those of us uncomfortable conforming to keep fighting, to live authentic, individual lives no matter the pain because the alternative is too costly for ourselves and society.
His use of references and Easter eggs is equal to that of James Joyce. His voice so poetic the book demands to be read out loud with enthusiasm.
I close with words from Ex himself “what I am now certain I am beseeching them to consider is that of itself longevity is utterly without redeeming qualities, that one has to live the contributive, the passionate, life and that this can as well be done in twenty-six (hence Keats) as in a hundred and twenty-six years, done in no longer than the time it takes a man to determine whether the answer is yea or nay.”
Tina C
An under appreciated book by an appreciated author, John Berger is And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos. Although it's not exactly your request, so many have overlooked his other works beyond Ways of Seeing, and this one happens to be one of great import for me personally.
VR
Cixin Liu, best known for The Three-Body Problem, the first novel of the Remembrance of the Earth's Past scifitrilogy that was recently adapted into a Netflix series – which, of course, doesn't even come close to the original book's quality. It was included in the reading lists from the likes of Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and George Martin. Barack Obama's statement about the book was: "The scope of it was immense. So that was fun to read, partly because my day-to-day problems with Congress seemed fairly petty — not something to worry about."
Cixin Liu was a computer engineer at a nuclear power plant in China. Similar to how Einstein was a clergyman at a patent office in Bern, one wouldn't expect such a mundane individual to unleash truly mind-bending intellectual bombshells onto the world. But it's exactly his scientific background that makes him so prolific.
His writing is the best form of speculative science fiction; one of my favorite genres, since a good specimen has to be grounded and inspired by history, but also be wildly creative to achieve a (formerly) unimaginable yet realistic vision of the future. The genre has a profound, unnoticed impact on culture: terms like genetic engineering (Williamson), robot (Čapek) or metaverse (Stephenson) were all coined by scifi authors.
In any case, Liu does have the effect of fundamentally changing one's perceptions of society, humanity, and existence in general – not the small "what's my purpose?" kind but the "why is there a universe and what actually happens when it ends?" kind. Or "what the hell is happening in the quantum realm and what does it mean for what I thought is reality?". He's a modern-day philosopher who, unlike the great philosophers of the past, can draw on modern science. Similar to Asimov's Foundation series, Liu brilliantly weaves together the dynamic variables of politics, foundational physics, governance, human (and other possible sentient) nature, technological progression, and, yes, culture!
I believe in centuries to come, he'll be regarded in the same manner as Jules Verne, Arthur C. Clarke, or Isaac Asimov. The latter's musings decades ago are now fundamentally impacting how we approach ethics in AI. Similarly, Liu's musings might influence how we'll deal with potential first contact or which trajectory interstellar space travel will take.
Jay F
I can’t say he was under appreciated during his time, but I feel Gregory Mcdonald, the author of the Fletch series, seems to have been forgotten by many.
Most know the name Fletch from the funny movie in the 80s which starred Chevy Chase. The real genius, lies in the novel. McDonald carries the story with quick and sharp dialogue. I’m talking PAGES of just dialogue driving the story. Not to mention of tons of quotable one liners.
McDonald went on to publish several Fletch novels including a spin off series. I’ve read most of them but the first one is my absolute favorite.
Nothing I write will do it justice so please go on amazon and read the first page preview and see if it doesn’t hook you.
Diogo U
I think the Portuguese writer Eça de Queiroz should be more well known by the English-speaking world. Together with the American writer Harold Brodkey.
Alberto C
I think Thomas De Quincey may fit the bill. He is not totally obscure, but among British writers of the 19th century (intimidating company!) I think his popular reputation is not according to his merits. His prose is wonderfully poetic and imaginative!
Garth H
In answer to your request for underappreciated writers, I offer one of my own favorites, a man named Art Hill, 1920-1988. He wrote a couple of books on baseball, of which he was a great fan, but the one I read and reread with the deepest satisfaction is a small collection of essays entitled Booze, Books and the Big Deuce, self-published in 1978. I had originally found one of the essays in this book, Memoirs of a Professional Killer, Some Sea Stories from The Big Deuce, collected in another anthology published by The Sun magazine, which I found in a barn in the late 80s while living the hippie back-to-the-land life in the mountains of western North Carolina, implausibly enough. The rest of that book was fine, this and that writer whom I've never had any impetus to further explore, but Art Hill stood out, and after many years, with the advent of the internet, I found him, and got a cheap copy on Ebay.
In Memoirs, he writes as a man who served in the Marines in WWII, but who casts his eye across the wider range of observable phenomena, the mundane and the absurd, in military life. The back-theater of a war, quite distinct from the hellishness of the front lines, is a strange world, and this account is a remarkable view of one man's experience of it. What captures me, however, in addition to the fascination of that world, is the way he writes: his language, his diction, his ideolect, as you put it. How words flow from the speaker, entrances me, and this is a man I would give a great deal to have been able to know. Perhaps if I ever stumble upon a door to The Old Phoenix, I might be able to.
Another essay in this book, less amusing but far more useful, called Lowry's Alcoholic Masterpiece, is basically an exploration of what he considers the central theme of Malcolm Lowry's novel Under the Volcano, the inner drives of an alcoholic, that he says no one else focuses on when evaluating it. Hill was a recovering alcoholic himself, dry for many years, so knows the territory and can expound the signs. I found it insightful in the extreme, as even though a lifetime non-drinker, I like what I like entirely too much, and consider myself a potential alcoholic who simply never took the first drink. This intimate view into the interior of an alcoholic's life, with his secret motivations and carefully curated systems of lies and misdirection, so astonishingly well explained in such detail, and in that ideolect I so admire, makes profound sense to me, and always leaves me with a strong feeling of 'There but for the grace....'. Arthur Hill is a writer I would recommend to anyone.
Ha! On consideration, while writing the above, it occurred to me that another writer who has faded into undeserved obscurity is Clarence Day, author of This Simian World, published in 1936. It's a delightful exploration of ourselves as further-evolved monkeys, as he puts it "cousins of the Bandarlog", and posits what worlds might have been created if, say, the great cats, or elephants, had risen to the dominant post. There would certainly have been less chatter! A highly evocative read. Also, though these two writers are different men with necessarily different minds, they are also of differing generations, and the variance in their diction, originating in slightly differing places in history, is endlessly fascinating in its own right.
Harriet W
My favourite and often unappreciated writer is JL Carr who wrote a slim volume called A Month in the Country.
A gentle soul travels to an Oxfordshire village in order to explore and hopefully uncover a rural church fresco. His twitching face disturbs others as he travels there on the train and is the result of his experiences in the WWI trenches. The generosity of the ‘Chapel’ community compared with the church is described, the weather and seasons unroll, the community he engages with are carefully depicted, Tuberculosis and a trip to town to buy an organ and the wall painting slowly emerges telling its own story too.
The summer passes and his work is accompanied by another ex soldier looking for their benefactors coffin and burial site. Ultimately we can visualise the fresco and understand the circumstances of its creation and whitewashing, I am always moved by the opening of the coffin many hundreds of years after it was closed and I regret the finishing of this beautiful and gentle story.
Cindy A
Ken Kesey!
Almost everyone knows One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest starring Jack Nicholson, but surprisingly few people know about Ken Kesey, author of the novel this feature was based on. It’s a fantastic read for any OFOTCN fan (told from chief Bromden’s pov, not McMurphy’s!) yet still not as fantastic as his other masterpiece of a novel: Sometimes a Great Notion. Like all of Kesey’s work, SAGN combines authentic writing with poignant storytelling, radical sinking truths, the striking occurrence of sentences beautiful enough to ponder over, deft and dynamic pov and narration changes, as well as irresistible characterization. I’d also recommend checking out his short stories anthology: Demon Box! As well as Sailor Song… and everything to do with the psychedelic Merry Pranksters and their experiments.
And for this week's question... I set you another challenge, inspired by the Architecture section:
Find an interesting roof and send in a photo — feel free to add your own commentary.
Email me your responses and I'll share them in next week's newsletter.
And that's all
Sir Philip Sidney, that 16th century prince of poets, has been on my mind lately. His Astrophel and Stella was a sequence of 108 sonnets on the theme of love, woven together by an overarching but elusive narrative, much of it tangential and philosophising, all of it delicate and exquisitely poised. The 39th of these begins thusly:
Come Sleep! O Sleep, the certain knot of peace,
The baiting-place of wit, the balm of woe,
The poor man's wealth, the prisoner's release,
Th' indifferent judge between the high and low...
Has sleep ever been so serenely, purely described? To sleep I now go — I bid thee good night, Gentle Reader, and until the Areopagus next!
Yours,
The Cultural Tutor