Areopagus Volume XCII
Seven short lessons every someday.
Welcome one and all to the ninety second volume of the Areopagus, and the first of 2025. Much demands to be said of such an occasion, auspicious or otherwise.
Well, this much I say — that you may have noticed I am now offering a paid subscription to the Areopagus. Each new volume still goes out for free, because the value of education is surely in its reach. So what a paid subscription will get you is access to the full archives of the Areopagus, which are approaching one hundred volumes and nearly half a million words. You’ll also receive additional material — essays of the sort that don’t neatly fit the format of this newsletter, ones that I long have longed to write. But, above all, you’ll be supporting me to do this work — to do more of it, and more often. All this being the case, it is to the 16th century playwright Stephen Gosson I turn for needful words:
Bookes are but poore gifts, yet Kings receive them: upon which I presume, you will not turne This out of doores. Yet cannot for shame but bid it welcome, because it bringes to you a great quantitie of my love: which, if it be worth litle, yet I hope you will not say you have a hard bargaine.
I might have changed Gosson’s “bookes” for my newsletters. As he said then, I say now, that they bring you a great quantity of my love. Onwards, then, and toward another seven short lessons…
I - Classical Music
“O beau pays de la Touraine”, from Les Huguenots
Giacomo Meyerbeer (1849)
Performed by Joan Sutherland
The Château de Chenonceau, where this scene takes place
If I were writing about a century and a half ago then Giacomo Meyerbeer (a German, born Jakob, whose name was Italianised) would not need any introduction. To passionate fans of classical music he will likely be known; to most, however, his name will not ring any bells. Strange to think, then, that for a time during the 19th century his operas were the most widely performed in Europe.
But Meyerbeer’s unsustained reputation can perhaps be explained by his very success. Because what Meyerbeer did so well was to capture the mood of the day. His large-scale operas, melodramatic in substance and gloriously lavish in production, sprinkled with the grotesque, were exactly what the audiences of the early-to-mid 19th century wanted. He essentially created the model for “grand opera” — a kind of opera, as the name suggests, defined by sumptuous productions with a big cast, a full orchestra, a lofty historical subject, and plentiful stage spectacle. To give one example of how far Meyerbeer’s work pushed the limits of staging, the 1846 debut of his opera Le prophète involved the first ever use of electrical lighting on stage: an arc light, serving as an artificial sunbeam.
But, as fashions fade, works of art attuned to those specific fashions must inevitably fade in keeping. Such has been Meyerbeer’s fate. Though, it must be said, the very scale of his operas and the consequent cost of staging them has also played a role. In any case, the result of his eventual decline is that, to more general fans of classical music, Meyerbeer sounds both familiar and unfamiliar at once. Familiar because it is evidently part of the western musical tradition; unfamiliar because it occupies a peculiar place in that tradition. Squeezed as he is between two vastly influential and presently far more popular generations of musicians (Beethoven et al before, Wagner et al afterward), we seem to recognise Meyerbeer’s music without really knowing it.
What we hear now is O beau pays de la Touraine, from Act II Les Huguenots. It was written by Meyerbeer in 1836 and took as its subject the French Wars of Religion during the 16th century. An appropriately dramatic historical subject, then. This particular scenes takes place while Queen Marguerite, at peace in a rural castle, indulges in the beauty of her surroundings, dreaming of an escape from the civil strife engulfing her country. We can hear her dreaming, I think, even hopelessly, and indulge ourselves in some of that yearning for tranquillity.
II - Historical Figure
Sophie Scholl
To explain the basic facts of Sophie Scholl’s life is simple enough, for hers was only brief. She was born in the German state of Württemberg in 1921, one of five children to a liberal mayor and later opponent of the Nazi regime. A seemingly ideal childhood passed soon enough. In 1933 Scholl joined the female equivalent of the Hitler Youth; an organisation for which, to her parents’ despair, she seemed to show enthusiasm. But thereafter began a slow and certain disillusionment with the new system, culminating in one of history’s most minor but most moving acts of resistance: the White Rose.
This is a dramatic name which makes what was really just a small group of brave people sound like a grand movement. There were only six members. Five students — Sophie Scholl, Hans Scholl (her brother), Christoph Probst, Willi Graft, Alexander Schmorell — and a professor at the University of Munich, where they were studying, called Kurt Huber. Their work was simple but courageous; they wrote a series of leaflets decrying the Nazis and urging resistance. These were highly literary tracts aimed specifically at rousing the educated middle classes of Germany. Among their contents were bold repudiations such as:
Our current ‘state’ is the dictatorship of evil. We know that already, I hear you object, and we don’t need you to reproach us for it yet again. But, I ask you, if you know that, then why don’t you act? Why do you tolerate these rulers gradually robbing you, in public and in private, of one right after another, until one day nothing, absolutely nothing, remains but the machinery of the state, under the command of criminals and drunkards.
And:
We won’t be silenced, we are your bad conscience, the White Rose won’t leave you in peace.
They started writing and distributing these leaflets in July 1942. Thousands of copies were printed, in secret, and then spread around Germany. The members of the White Rose distributed them personally — by slipping into classrooms and leaving them under desks, or in phone booths, or by direct mail to fellow students and professors. But during one such occasion, on 18th February 1943, things went wrong. While leaving copies of their sixth and final leaflet around the University of Munich, Sophie Scholl threw some down into the atrium of the university’s main building. She was spotted by a janitor who called the Gestapo; Sophie and Hans Scholl were both arrested. Christoph Probst was arrested two days later — because of a draft seventh leaflet, containing his name, found on Hans Scholl — and the three were then put on trial.
Sophie, Hans, and Probst did not betray the other members of the White Rose, although they were tracked down and executed in the weeks and months that followed. On 22nd February the three students were found guilty of treason and sentenced to death by guillotine. Sophie Scholl was offered freedom — and, therefore, life — if she recanted and swore allegiance to the regime. She refused.
Scholl’s last words are disputed; contemporaries and historians both disagree on what they were, and it seems we will never know for certain. But this is, variously translated from the German otherwise (as reported in a letter by one of her friends), the most commonly accepted version of the last recorded thing Scholl ever said:
Such a fine, sunny day, and I have to go... What does my death matter, if through us, thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action?
Colossally moving words that demand of us the sincerest solicitude. And even if this was not, as a matter of fact, the last thing she said, it hardly matters. The real Sophie Scholl, by her actions and elsewhere in her written or spoken words, is clearly somebody who would have said such a thing. After all, this is what Scholl wrote in one of her last letters to her boyfriend:
When will the time finally come when we won’t have to focus all our strength and all our attention on things that aren’t worth lifting a finger for? Every word is scrutinized before it’s even spoken in case there’s even a hint of ambiguity about it. Our trust in other people has to give way to mistrust and caution. Oh, how tiring and sometimes disheartening it is. But no. I won’t let anything take away my courage. These trivial things will not get the better of me when I know there are other joys that surpass them. When I think of this, my strength returns and I want to cry out a word of encouragement to everyone else who is oppressed.
For a person so young — she was just 21 when she was executed — to have such resolve is startling, and perhaps ought to startle us out of our own complacencies. I do not mean to say we should go hunting for a mortal cause. Scholl did not do that. She was instead ready, when the times demanded of her a sacrifice, to make it. And not only Sophie Scholl; also her brother Hans, Christoph Probst, Willi Graft, Alexander Schmorell, and Kurt Huber.
Some words of Esther, from her eponymous book in the Old Testament, come to mind whenever I think of Sophie Scholl. They are given in response to Mordecai, saying to her in the midst of a great crisis:
…who knoweth whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a time as this?
To which Esther replies, magnificently:
…and if I perish, I perish.
Scholl’s words often come back to me during these deepest winter weeks, with briefest hours of clear daylight crowded in on either side by darkness. Could we, enjoying the peace and sunlight, find the strength to accept that it is time to go?
III - Art
Nocturne in Black and Gold – The Falling Rocket
James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1875)
This, though it pales in comparison to the art scandals of recent decades, is one of history’s most controversial paintings. Why? Well, let us begin (briefly) at the beginning. James Abbott McNeill Whistler was an American artist who (via a stint in Paris) made his career in London. There, restlessly painting various views of the River Thames, Whistler came to think of his art as music. Hence his habit of giving his paintings musical titles such as Nocturne, Variation, Symphony, or Harmony.
It was the peculiar but brilliant critic Walter Pater who said in 1873 that “all art aspires to the condition of music”, usually condensed to the popular aphorism all art aspires to music. That was only Pater’s opinion, of course, and I am inclined to disagree. But it was a convincing opinion, well-stated, and captured the emerging spirit of the late 19th century. It felt like art was, snakelike, beginning to shed its old skin; Whistler was a driving force in this process of transformation. His goal was to create pure and contextless art — “art for art’s sake”, to use the phrase that has since become associated with him, Pater, Oscar Wilde, and the whole “Decadent Movement” of that era. Just as music lacks any narrative meaning, and as a sound has no intrinsic context, Whistler wanted to free his paintings from any boundaries and enter a realm of absolute art, purposeless and free, to be taken on its own terms as a sort of pure, sensorial experience.
Do you think he was successful? Can there ever be such a thing as “art for art’s sake”? Not everybody thought so. Britain’s most influential art critic, John Ruskin, wrote this about Nocturne in Black and Gold:
For Mr. Whistler’s own sake, no less than for the protection of the purchaser, Sir Coutts Lindsay ought not to have admitted works into the gallery in which the ill-educated conceit of the artist so nearly approached the aspect of willful imposture. I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s.
Such was Ruskin’s influence and the resulting impact of his words on Whistler’s perception that Whistler sued him for libel. Thus ensued a bitter legal battle. Whistler won the case, but Ruskin was only asked to pay a single farthing in nominal damages. Neither came out well. Ruskin, already unwell, never wholly recovered psychologically; Whistler, bankrupted, sold his house and his paintings and left London. A miserable affair, but one that seems now like something of an opening act for the endless conflicts that would define art for the next century or so — and, perhaps, still do.
The most interesting part of the trial (as reported by Whistler himself in his own account of it, playfully entitled The Gentle Art of Making Enemies) was this. The two speakers are the Attorney-General, first, and Whistler, replying:
“But artists always give good value for their money, don’t they?”
“I am glad to hear that so well established. (A laugh.) I do not know Mr. Ruskin, or that he holds the view that a picture should only be exhibited when it is finished, when nothing can be done to improve it, but that is a correct view; the arrangement in black and gold was a finished picture, I did not intend to do anything more to it.”
“Now, Mr. Whistler. Can you tell me how long it took you to knock off that nocturne?”
... “I beg your pardon?” (Laughter.)
“Oh! I am afraid that I am using a term that applies rather perhaps to my own work. I should have said, How long did you take to paint that picture?”
“Oh, no! permit me, I am too greatly flattered to think that you apply, to work of mine, any term that you are in the habit of using with reference to your own. Let us say then how long did I take to—‘knock off,’ I think that is it—to knock off that nocturne; well, as well as I remember, about a day.”
“Only a day?”
“Well, I won't be quite positive; I may have still put a few more touches to it the next day if the painting were not dry. I had better say then, that I was two days at work on it.”
“Oh, two days! The labour of two days, then, is that for which you ask two hundred guineas!”
“No;—I ask it for the knowledge of a lifetime.” (Applause.)
Whistler’s contention that, though his painting took only a day or so to make, was nonetheless worth a high price because of a lifetime spent learning the skill and perception to make it, is a contention that has been made since in relation to various works of conceptual art that have, to one degree or another, divided public opinion. We needn’t tread such ground for now. Only, this was a fascinating moment in the history of art, involving two of its major figures at the outset of its most major evolution. Which side would you have taken? I, though a devoted reader of Ruskin, am always engrossed by Whistler’s Nocturnes and their moody, dreamlike atmosphere, always pulled in by the evocative and (as he hoped) highly sensorial worlds they seem to let us glimpse. You may disagree — in which case Whistler would no doubt welcome you, gently, as another of his enemies.
IV - Architecture
A Note on Japanese Pavements
It has often been said, and rightly so, that Japanese streets seem to possess a special charm. I do not quite think we can call it unique, but they are certainly the most famous example of a particular kind of urban design. So, included here are some images of typical Tokyo streets. What stands out to you as special, or at least different from the streets of your own town or city?
Perhaps most striking is the lack of on-street parking; excepting those in transit there is not a car in sight. Only in their absence do we suddenly realise what a feature of our streets stationary cars have become! And, though cars can be wonderfully designed, it seems to me that an urban environment looks better without them. After all, when parked they are essentially just obstacles, ill-attuned to their surroundings (because they have not been designed to be in that specific locale) and taking up otherwise valuable space that could have been given over to trees, buildings, or the humble pedestrian.
But there’s something else, just as important — there are no pavements (or sidewalks). Like the lack of parked cars, it is something you feel without really noticing about these Tokyo streets; but, once noticed, it cannot be unseen. Why does this matter? Because the very existence of a pavement says to us that a street has been divided into different parts, meant for different things — one part, always smaller, for pedestrians; another, always larger, for vehicles.
A lack of pavements gives a street intimacy. It invites the pedestrian to treat the street as a cohesive and available part of the city, thus knitting both sides of it together. A sanctioned tract for vehicles, meanwhile, throws a forbidden zone down the middle of a road and cordons off the urban environment. It sounds strange, but to build pavements immediately and unavoidably broadcasts the message to pedestrians that there are parts of that street where they are not supposed to be. It is a subtle form of hostile design.
Why are Japanese streets like this? Partly because removing them is a more efficient use of space. If cars are driving down narrow streets slowly there is no reason they cannot peacefully coexist with pedestrians — as in Japan, and elsewhere, they do. Over a square mile it is remarkable how much space can be gained by forgoing pavements. This also makes streets narrower in general, and thus further contributes to their charm; it seems to be a universal law of aesthetics that we find narrow streets charming. No doubt there is a deep-rooted, biological reason for that. In any case, it much explains why similar lanes, all around the world, appeal to us. Wherever we find a narrow street, lined perhaps by high walls or little gardens, and without pavements, we feel a greater sense of intimacy and comfort.
Anyway, this wonderful fact of Japanese urban design speaks to a broader fact (and, potentially, problem) with how we build our cities. Often shared online is this comparison between a painting of Oxford, England (by Turner, no less) and a photograph of the same street in the 21st century:
“Nothing has changed,” is usually attached as a comment, or “beauty is eternal” and suchlike. That isn’t true; much has changed. Though the buildings are more or less as they were two centuries ago, the street itself has since been filled with traffic islands, road markings, and signposts. These are all examples of street furniture — the stuff that necessarily comes with an urban environment, including everything else from bins to bus stops. Much street furniture is delightful, or at least can be. But the trouble with street furniture designed for cars is that, as a matter of purpose, it is made to stand out rather than look nice. Hence their reflective surfaces and bright markings. This is vital for road safety, but it is catastrophic for the aesthetic coherence of a given street.
I do not mean to say the past was better than the present — after all, 19th century streets were, among other relative demerits, surely much filthier and smellier. My point is simply to observe that a serious change has occurred, that the tornado of things which have descended on our streets represent a colossal shift in how the world looks — and, therefore, most importantly, how it makes us feel and behave. Could they have been designed more sympathetically, or at least with more humane values in mind? Perhaps! But that is for another day. For now I only urge you to notice street furniture next time you are walking about town; there may just be more of it than you have ever realised.
V - Rhetoric
The Oratory of Roy Batty
For those who have not seen the 1984 film Blade Runner (or read Philip K. Dick’s novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, on which it was based) then I must present a spoiler alert — read no further if you have not watched that film or read that book and do not wish its ending to be spoiled.
Otherwise, onwards! The culminating speech of Blade Runner, delivered by the late Rutger Hauer in the role of the android Roy Batty, is rightly legendary. It was one of those special moments in cinematic history — brief, elusive, magnitudinous, meditative — where everything came together just right. Here is what he says, facing down Harrison Ford’s Rick Deckard on the dark rooftops of a futuristic metropolis, with rain pouring:
I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
Rhetoric is not just for politicians; it is also for emails, YouTube videos, newsletters, public house pontifications, and (of course) cinema. So here, I think, we should perform a little rhetorical analysis of this great speech and see what makes it work.
The first and most obvious ploy here is ethos. This is one of Aristotle’s three rhetorical appeals, alongside pathos and logos. They are three different methods of persuading the audience, each appealing to a different quality: pathos is emotion, logos is reason, and ethos is character or experience. By informing us of the extraordinary events he has witnessed, which even if we cannot quite understand them certainly sound like things most of us would not see in a lifetime, we come to believe he must have wisdom to impart. Nobody, having been exposed to high drama, danger, and adventure, could have failed to learn something worth knowing. In short, it makes his conclusion more convincing.
Second, we have apostrophe. This is a rhetorical device whereby the speaker addresses somebody not present, imaginary or otherwise. Batty is alone with Deckard; who, then, are “you people”? Batty means all humankind. He is an android, a human-like robot, fighting to stay alive, but in dying imagines that he is addressing his final words to an entire species. This elevates his words — even gives us a sense that, close to death, he is entering a sort of visionary moment, not really present with Deckard — and casts a grandeur on what he says.
Another subtle but monumental detail is that Roy Batty simply says “rain” rather than “the rain”. By dropping the definite article he seems to universalise his words; it is not just the rain falling in that moment of which he speaks, but of rain as time itself, eternally washing away the many moments of our lives. And, from a cinematic point of view, since it is raining in the scene, and we cannot quite know whether Roy Batty is crying, his words adds a whole new layer of meaning.
The last sentence, three words long, must be remarked on. It is the opposite of auxesis, a rhetorical ploy whereby the speak amps up the magnitude of what they are saying, building to bold and rousing conclusion. Rather, Batty begins with grandeur and then diminishes it. But this is not quite bathos, which refers to the contrast between grand and ridiculous for comic effect. It is something much more meaningful, a kind of profound anticlimax. We expect a grand pronouncement, perhaps because Batty seems to be boasting of his exploits. Not so. It will all be lost in rain, he says, and then… time to die. In some sense it is a kind of paraprosdokian. This is a sentence or short speech in which the latter part departs unexpectedly from the opening, thus changing how we feel about it. The paraprosdokian, usually played for humour, is sublime here — a perfect apotheosis for Roy Batty, reconciling himself to the unavoidable facts his strange life right at its end.
We must also mention delivery. This is how Rutger Hauer gave his brief speech in Blade Runner:
One of the five canons of rhetoric, per Cicero and Quintilian and all the rest, is pronuntiatio — delivery. This is the last of the stages after inventio (deciding your arguments), dispositio (arranging them), elocutio (adding style to them), and memoria (committing the speech to memory). And though it may be the last, the great tutor Quintilian says in his Institutio Oratoria (the best rhetorical guidebook ever written) that delivery is where the rest of the work falls flat or flies:
For the nature of the speech that we have composed within our minds is not so important as the manner in which we produce it, since the emotion of each member of our audience will depend on the impression made upon his hearing. Consequently, no proof, at least if it be one devised by the orator himself, will ever be so secure as not to lose its force if the speaker fails to produce it in tones that drive it home. All emotional appeals will inevitably fall flat, unless they are given the fire that voice, look, and the whole carriage of the body can give them.
Convincing. And, above all, Quintilian says that our glance — meaning our expression — is the most important part of delivery. Strange to think that such an authority of rhetoric, which is the art of speaking and writing, should say that something not involving words was its most influential aspect:
By far the greatest influence is exercised by the glance. For it is by this that we express supplication, threats, flattery, sorrow, joy, pride or submission. It is on this that our audience hang, on this that they rivet their attention and their gaze, even before we begin to speak. It is this that inspires the hearer with affection or dislike, this that conveys a world of meaning and is often more eloquent than all our words.
Hauer achieved a perfect delivery, both of spoken word and expression, did he not? So much more seems to be said by his eyes, by the smile he gives to Deckard at the very end, even than by his words.
Still, a speech can only be unthreaded and analysed so much; its magic eventually disperses and we lose sight of what was good about it in the first place. No formula can lead to a perfect speech, and Quintilian himself said as much. Rules and guides and devices are always the beginnings, but never the ends.
The final thing we should observe is that the speech given here was adapted, on the day, by Hauer himself. “Tears in rain” was his own, sublime addition, but just as important was his decision to cull several words from the script. Here is what he was supposed to say:
I’ve seen things... seen things you little people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion bright as magnesium... I rode on the back decks of a blinker and watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments... they’ll be gone.
A little too much; Hauer’s concising of these lines, scraping away the superfluage of imagery, makes them far more powerful. Less, as they say, so often does seem to be more.
VI - Writing
What are critics for?
I offer you three lines written by William Shakespeare, from Measure for Measure. They are part of a longer speech given by the Duke of Vienna and directed at Claudio, in an attempt to console him — for he has been sentenced to death:
Thou hast nor youth, nor age,
But as it were an after-dinner’s sleep
Dreaming on both.
What do you suppose these three little lines, or really two and a half, mean? Here is what the 18th century critic Dr Samuel Johnson said of them in his commentaries on Shakespeare:
This is exquisitely imagined. When we are young we busy ourselves in forming schemes for succeeding time, and miss the gratifications that are before us; when we are old we assume the languor of age with the recollection of youthful pleasures or performances; so that our life, of which no part is filled with the business of the present time, resembles our dreams after dinner, when the events of the morning are mingled with the designs of the evening.
A colossitude of meaning in just seventeen words; a deep meditation on the human condition; a reflection, succinctly expressed, of how we are all so often tempted to think about our lives. The wonder of Shakespeare is that he really is as good as everybody says — and, in truth, even better. These are just two and a half lines that offer us a book’s worth of wisdom and feeling; all Shakespeare’s poetry and prose, in his greatest plays, is filled with this same, almost impossible richness. Read Shakespeare closely and he rewards every moment of attention you can afford to pay him.
But my reason for including Johnson’s analysis is not really to exemplify Shakespeare’s brilliance. Rather, it is about the role of the critic. Because, hearing those words, given (as said) in a broad and brilliant speech filled otherwise with lines of the supremest power, it would be easy to miss them. Critics (a category in which I include critics of books, films, TV, or games, plus sport pundits and all the like) are low-hanging fruit, easily mocked for their pedantry and what seems like a needless habit of passing contrarian judgment on things we love, always counter to popular opinion and always trying to sound too clever. But I think this little example also proves that, from time to time, critics really are useful. Because they don’t exist only or even primarily to say whether a given work of art is good or bad; the right role of the critic, in truth, is to help us better understand a work of art, that we may then judge it ourselves. Dr Johnson, having read Shakespeare closely, helps us more clearly grasp when he meant, and thus helps us get more from Shakespeare’s work.
Though, of course, we do not want a critic who blindly worships a given author or work of art, and therefore stretches credulity to find greatness where there isn’t any. Rather, we want a critic who admits when they cannot understand something, is always ready to criticise their favourites, and thus makes no pretence of trying to impress us. Dr Johnson was just such a critic. For if we take another excerpt from Measure for Measure, again spoken by the Duke:
Pattern in himself to know,
Grace to stand, and virtue go.
Of them Johnson says:
These lines I cannot understand.
VII - The Seventh Plinth
A Petrifying Magician
Leigh Hunt (1784-1859) is generally known now for the company he kept rather than for anything he wrote himself. It was Hunt who helped establish the reputations of Keats, Shelley, and Tennyson, and among his friends were the likes of Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt. I don’t think we can quite call him a literary eminence grise, but suffice to say he has come to be regarded as a gravitational pull, around which various stars orbited, than a star himself.
Still, Leigh Hunt did write plenty. On his poetry I pass no judgment; from his essays, gentle and witty and humane, I want to share something. Because the power of Hunt’s essays is that he observed the world around him and wrote down, faithfully, what he saw. This sounds easy enough; easily said, difficultly done. Actually noticing anything in the first place is already a challenge — to then record what you have noticed, accurately and without warping it by prejudice or folly, is even more challenging. Leigh Hunt managed to do so in his essays. One in particular, called Some Thoughts on Sleep, I find charming. Here he describes the best kind of nap you can have:
The most complete and healthy sleep that can be taken in the day, is in summer-time, out in a field. There is perhaps no solitary sensation so exquisite as that of slumbering on the grass or hay, shaded from the hot sun by a tree, with the consciousness of a fresh but light air running through the wide atmosphere, and the sky stretching far overhead upon all sides. Earth, and heaven, and a placid humanity, seem to have the creation to themselves. There is nothing between the slumberer and the naked and glad innocence of nature.
For those who have experienced such a nap they will know that Hunt is absolutely correct. One struggles to imagine a purer peace.
It rather stings me that Hunt goes on to warn without qualification against sleeping and rising late. No matter; I cannot find a writer (save for Byron, who probably cannot be trusted) who says otherwise. In any case, Hunt then describes the second-best kind of nap — falling asleep just before we intend to go to bed:
Next to this, but at a long interval, the most relishing snatch of slumber out of bed, is the one which a tired person takes, before he retires for the night, while lingering in his sitting-room. The consciousness of being very sleepy and of having the power to go to bed immediately, gives great zest to the unwillingness to move. Sometimes he sits nodding in his chair; but the sudden and leaden jerks of the head to which a state of great sleepiness renders him liable, are generally too painful for so luxurious a moment; and he gets into a more legitimate posture, sitting sideways with his head on the chair-back, or throwing his legs up at once on another chair, and half reclining. It is curious, however, to find how long an inconvenient posture will be borne for the sake of this foretaste of repose.
Truly! There is a special delight in falling asleep, feet on the arm of a sofa, just before we know we need to get ready for bed. I think it has something to do with the unexpectedness of such sleep. Whatever we anticipate we too often overanticipate, and ruin by premeditation. An unheralded nap, late at night, is the ideal surprise.
But then Hunt comments on that frustrating and all-too-familiar phenomenon whereby, after accidentally falling asleep on a sofa or chair, we find ourselves wide awake and unable to sleep once we finally do go to bed:
The worst of it is, that on going to bed, the charm sometimes vanishes.
After which we arrive at his remarks on the strange postures we all assume when sleeping:
It is amusing to think of the more fantastic attitudes that so often take place in bed. If we could add anything to the numberless things that have been said about sleep by the poets, it would be upon this point. Sleep never shows himself a greater leveller. A man in his waking moments may look as proud and self-possessed as he pleases. He may walk proudly, sit proudly, he may eat dinner proudly; he may shave himself with an air of infinite superiority... But Sleep plays the petrifying magician. He arrests the proudest lord as well as the humblest clown in the most ridiculous postures: so that if you could draw a grandee from his bed without waking him, no limb-twisting fool in a pantomime should create wilder laughter… Imagine a despot lifted up to the gaze of his valets, with his eyes shut, his mouth open, his left hand under his right ear, his other twisted and hanging helplessly before him like an idiot’s, one knee lifted up, and the other leg stretched out, or both knees huddled up together;— what a scarecrow to lodge majestic power in!
Times change, along with technology and religion and much else, but fundamentals remain the same. We wonder what we might have in common with people who lived two hundred years ago; our delight in a pre-bed nap and the weird postures we assume in sleep are two trifling — and therefore thoroughly familiar, absolutely universal — examples.
And, of course, Hunt makes an important point regarding those we most admire or detest. Nobody, however powerful or intimidating, does not also nod off unwittingly or lay like a scarecrow in their quilts. It reminds us of what Michel de Montaigne, the great essayist of the 16th century, once said:
On the highest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own bottom.
Hunt ends his little essay with another set of wonderfully astute observations that ring true now no less than they did two hundred years ago, and will surely go on ringing true until we humans have somehow conquered our need to sleep:
Sleep is the most graceful in an infant; soundest, in one who has been tired in the open air; completest, to the seaman after a hard voyage; most welcome, to the mind haunted with one idea; most touching to look at, in the parent that has wept; lightest, in the playful child; proudest, in the bride adored.
Question of the Week
Two weeks ago I asked you:
Can music ever be “about” anything?
And here are some of your answers…
Paul B
The question is profound, and I can’t help but answer cheekily : music is about what you are doing or mulling over while you are listening to it.
I’ve heard said that Music paints time like colours paint the canvas, a fleeting aesthetic that colours the unstoppable. Music is about the listener, if they are intently listening for what the author meant while researching the life of the artist, then of course, that will make music about whatever the author is purported to have meant.
Music does allow people living things together to paint them in like colours : a road trip to vacation accompanied by happy tunes, or a funeral’s Te Deum both help to put everyone “in the mood”, don’t they ?
Tom M
Sure … Bach’s Passions are surely about Christ’s Passion. That is by no means all they are, of course. Similarly Program Music, like Strauss’ Don Quixote is about the Don - and more. All music can be listened to without knowing the story and often to the good.
SG
Once music is released, meaning is owned by the listeners. Each of us is able to add meaning to the song, a personal meaning based on the context and feelings we associate with it. We the listener make it about something if we choose.
Consider Born in the USA started as an anti-war song yet its final form and fist pumping chorus has unironically be used by the USA military in promo video productions.
Jill M
After a bout of semantic satiation over the word 'about,’ I considered whether concrete narrative is necessary and sufficient for ‘about’ to apply. If so, then, because music is lacks concrete narrative, the answer to your question is no. However, music can have an emotional narrative, unique to each person, that makes it about something after all. Some composers may try to retain control of the perceived narrative through the title that is selected. For Goldmark, the use of Sappho becomes a cheat sheet for the listener.
Leonardo P
Yes, it can, about anything its author wants it to be but, mostly, what the audience feels it to be.
Sydney U
Music cannot ever be “about anything”. Everything we do, wherever we are, deals with our cultural understanding of our surroundings. For example, Tiny Tim’s ‘Tiptoe through the Tulips’ (1968) used to be considered romantic, based on the lyrics. This song is about something based only on the lyrics. The upbeat tone can be used for some to be kind, soft. However, in recent years, the new association related to the song comes from horror movies using that song to represent a scene that scares, races the heart. The then upbeat and soft music is turned to be associated with horror, terror. Yes, it also has to do with the voice of Tiny Tim being so original and being an older recording, something often used in horror, but the underlying music has its own associations based on the culture surrounding it.
Keith K
I believe it can and there's plenty of examples. Mahler's 5th symphony was almost certainly expressing his love for his wife & you can hear it. At the other end of the music spectrum Bob Dylan's Hurricane was about the injustice suffered by the boxer Rubin 'Hurricane' Carter. I listen to Lark Ascending by Ralph Vaughan Williams and remember days in my youth laying in a field and watching and listening to larks doing what Williams expressed through his music.
Bogdan V
I don’t think music contains intrinsic meaning. A particular note (which is, of course, nothing but an arbitrary value we give to a certain frequency of vibrating air) followed by another and then another cannot, in my view, tell a story by itself. We, as creatures who, by our very nature, absorb information that we weave into this huge web that is our personal, contextual understanding of the world, cannot access any information without passing it through our own filters of understanding. If you were to ask this question some centuries ago, I’m sure the learned of the time would tell you (by virtue of still living in the shadow of Aristotle) that some forms of music instill good morals (through cultivating harmony, beauty, order etc.), while others spoil. They thought that there is something transcendent within music. And maybe there is, I’m not trying to say there is no intrinsic reason to why dissonant chords sound “bad” to us or why some pieces sound triumphal or morose or serene.
I’m trying to say that “sounding bad” is not understood the same way across cultures or eras. Dissonance has in the last two centuries been used in media from western classical (from Webern and Stravinsky to Branca and Zappa) to metal (if we take the first Black Sabbath album to be the inception of that, then the title track is built upon a dissonant riff). Its connotations have changed. Its implications have changed with different subcultures redefining its meanings and associations. To get to my point, I think music can be about something, it can tell stories without words, but that meaning is mostly ascribed through the assemblage of common associations that compose what we call a culture. Culture is sociologically speaking something that emanates from communities. Therefore, as long as humans live in collectives, music will derive its meaning through the cultural context of those who experience it.
Now, for this week’s question, inspired by Leigh Hunt’s timeless musings on sleep:
If you could meet somebody from the past (from any time or place — you choose) what would you ask them, and why?
Email me your answers and I’ll share them in the next Areopagus.
And that’s all
2025 is upon us. What may we say of it? Ah! It will say enough for us, and much soon enough, without a prefatory salvo from me. With whom we opened the last Areopagus we conclude this one — William Wordsworth, and a cluster of lines from his quasi-epic poem The Excursion. As a group of travellers admire a summer lake, he ponders thusly:
Soft heath this elevated spot supplied,
With resting-place of mossy stone;—and there
We sat reclined—admiring quietly
The frame and general aspect of the scene;
And each not seldom eager to make known
His own discoveries; or to favourite points
Directing notice, merely from a wish
To impart a joy, imperfect while unshared.
A near-universal habit Wordsworth has expressed. Who does not, when they see something curious or shocking, immediately want to tell somebody else about it? Children do this most of all, but even as we grow we cannot help but exclaim, “how beautiful! how dreadful!” Why? Does sharing our feeling make the feeling — or the fact — truer? That cannot be. But, in the end, this is the substance of my work in writing the Areopagus — directing notice, merely from a wish to impart a joy imperfect while unshared. I hope by sharing my joys with you they may be perfected. Until the next volume… adieu!
Yours,
The Cultural Tutor