Books Do Furnish A Room

In just two seconds ...

I enjoyed my first book by Malcolm Gladwell (What the Dog Saw) so much, that I had no hesitation in embarking on Blink, a book length study of the work of the sub-conscious mind, especially its ability to undertake analysis and make decisions long before the conscious mind is even aware of the issue.  He speaks of what happens in the first two seconds, or in a blink – and this book is about how powerful that can be, how it can be a force for understanding and effective action, and how, sometimes, it can be dangerous and must be tamed.

He starts with the purchase of a Greek statue from the 6^th century BC, a kouros, for a cool $10 million.  Naturally, antique statues of great beauty from ancient Greece being rather rare, they were cautious.  They examined its provenance with great care, undertook exhaustive comparative analyses with other statues of technical and aesthetic points, and even commissioned chemical analysis of the marble’s surface.  All was well, and, after 14 months’ investigation, they agreed to buy it.  But then the trouble started – and it didn’t start with some obscure point of detail, either to do with the statue or where it came from: it started with three experts who, within seconds of seeing it for the first time, said “it’s a fake” or “don’t pay the money”.  A chorus of dismay then grew, and indeed a careful fake was uncovered, with many errors of technique, handling and style, and provenance.  But what started the story was the unconscious mind of three individuals telling them – and often they could not provide evidence – that this was not what it seemed.

When [three experts] looked at the kouros and felt an "intuitive repulsion", they were absolutely right.  In the first two seconds of looking - in a single glance - they were able to understand more about the essence of the statue than the team at the Getty was able to understand after fourteen months.  Blink is a book about those first two seconds.

In a famous gambling experiment, subjects are invited to bet on red or blue cards; the blue are generally the better choice, and the red, in the long term, would be very bad for your wealth.  After about 50 cards, most people have a hunch that something’s wrong with red, and after about 80 they’re sure, and are able to articulate it and provide evidence.  But after only 10 cards, respondents were not only showing stress responses (sweaty palms, for example) to the red cards, but they altered their behaviour as well, picking fewer and fewer red cards.  In other words, the subconscious was not only telling them what the problem was, it was altering their behaviour, long before they were even conscious that there was issue.

There are many more examples, from face reading in thin slices of time the uncontrollable reactions we make when we lie for example, or when we say something nice to our partner but are actually contemptuous, to fire-fighters taking “irrational” but accurate decisions to leave a building that was about to collapse, or policemen who relied on their instincts and shot an innocent man (who, moreover, was exhibiting absolutely standard submissive, innocent behaviour). It turns out that your subconscious mind is awesomely good at some things, and you should trust it – you get some really good feedback in the first two seconds of an interview, for example, and after two seconds your judgement will often be indistinguishable from the results of detailed study.  But when you are stressed and in danger, you limit your information gathering and cut out quality evidence or stay focused on one thing – and you can make bad mistakes.  So police and army personnel need to practice being stressed and managing it, so that when the real deal happens, they don’t get stressed and can handle all the information available, taking better decisions.

The case of Abbie Conant, trombonist, illustrates one of the dangers of relying on the first two seconds’ of information: you're programmed to reject certain evidence according to rules and associations – eg, on skin colour, race, or gender. Conant auditioned for the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra, behind a screen, so the audition was “blind”.  Not only did she win, but she won by acclaim, and the music director sent everyone else home, without even hearing them.  Everyone trusted their musical judgement, in the first few seconds, and no one had any countervailing information because of the screen.  But when they found they had selected a woman, they spent years trying to get rid of her, trying to prove she wasn’t strong enough to blow the big notes, they demoted her, they criticised on grounds that are patently laughable, then when forced to accept her, they paid her less.  If the audition hadn’t been blind, the subconscious mind would have seen her, decided against her, and refused to hear her music for what it was.  A different two seconds – an aural experience – gave a diametrically different result.

This is a wonderful book, closely argued, full of examples and evidence, and in no way a soft invitation to trust your instinct or arguing for any kind of para-intellectual approach: but explaining the workings of the subconscious mind, pointing out its strengths, and warning of its weakness.  It's full of human interest, but it’s fascinating if you have any interest in how you make decisions, and why sometimes they go staggeringly right or wrong. Blink!

Incest: a pillar of the Victorian professional classes?

In the TLS, just read a review of Adam Kuper's Incest and Influence, a study of family relationships in Victorian middle class England.  His contention is that many, many families - think Darwins, Wedgwoods, Rothschilds, Barclays - kept their wealth and influence "in the family" by encouraging marriage between cousins.  At the same time, marrying your deceased wife's sister was for long illegal, on the grounds that the man and wife were one, so your wife's sister was your sister - and that's incest, even though the blood tie is non-existent.  Kuper argues that effectively, many Victorian marriages were incestuous, through cousinly marriage oft repeated - very much to the alarm of public health experts and eugenicists later in the century. 

It's a fascinating, if slightly disturbing thesis - and family trees become complex to the point of mania, with, for example, brothers-in-law also being fathers-in-law; Timothy Bevan married a Barclay, then a Gurney widow (the Gurneys and Barclays married much between themselves and with each other), and was known as "his wife's husband's wife's sister's widower"!

If you're interested, you can read the full review by Norma Clarke.

Gladwell two

More examples from the Gladwell essays, What the Dog Saw, to illustrate his range and the interest of his arguments - and in this post and the last, I'm only mentioning perhaps a third of the stimulating topics in this book. 

The first three essays are brilliant social observations of a changing America.  In The Pitchman, Gladwell traces the rise and decline of the door to door salesman, and his transformation into the salesman on the shopping channels – a decent product, brilliantly sold, making middle America envious then happy and a few men very rich.  The two different approaches to marketing women’s hair dye in True Colors in a world in which hair colour meant “Tart!”,  then gradually came to be a right – “because you’re worth it”.  And finally, a brilliant piece of writing in The Ketchup Conundrum in which Gladwell asks why there are a thousand mustards (and tells you how this happened) and only one ketchup, in spite of massive efforts to invent and sell more.  You may not think you’re interested in any of these issues, but you are!

On a more serious and significant note, three essays – Connecting the Dots, The Picture Problem, and Blowup – deal with well known problems in information analysis and military intelligence, with application to everything we do and don’t do, including going to war, avoiding terrosrist attack, and diagnosing breast cancer. We see what we are looking for, so the US Air Force in the first Iraq war knew, by direct observation, that it had destroyed 400 mobile missile launchers; in fact, it was wrong about the number – it had destroyed none at all!  And after the event, the pattern that led to disaster is obvious, so why didn’t we prevent the Challenger disaster, see Pearl Harbour coming, and avoid the destruction of the Twin Towers?  Because what are now the salient facts were then hidden in hundreds or thousands of very similar, sometimes identical facts, with no convenient labels saying “this one is true”, “this is not a false alarm”.  So, the men who decided to go ahead with the Challenger launch in spite of contractors’ advice to the contrary had some good reasons - they hadn’t objected to cold launches before, and O ring damage had not been associated with the cold before; the Israelis taken by surprise when Egypt and Syria invaded in 1973 had a warning, but they’d had many other warnings, by the same man, which had proved false; the US Navy had investigated several warnings of Japanese submarines off Pearl Harbour in the week prior to the infamous attack, and found nothing; and the FBI and the CIA didn’t heed the alleged telltale warning about the Twin Towers, perhaps because it was hidden in a morass of 68,000 other leads.

And finally, in Dangerous Minds, Gladwell destroys criminal profiling.  He starts with several entertaining pages in which he builds up the myth, quoting the famous “he’ll be wearing a double breasted suit buttoned.  And he was” story from the doyen of American profilers, James Brussel, and dealing with the techniques of the personality profilers.  Then he picks up research from Liverpool academics and the UK government, which demonstrates that personality profiling helped in just 2.7% of cases, and that under experimental conditions that police thought that - the profiling forecasts were amply substantiated by two utterly different and contradictory criminals.  He then exposes the techniques which make this hoax possible – exactly those used in astrological forecasts – and concludes that profiling “is not a triumph of forensic analysis.  It’s a party trick.”

In this post and the previous one, I have only touched on a few of the striking issues Malcolm Gladwell deals with in a single book.  I've not mentioned Enron, the inevitability of disaster (Taleb and his black swans), the history of the Pill, or the problems of identifying talent in a brief interview.  There’s much more – and there are other books.  He is well worth a read – intelligent, sceptical, enlightening, and beautifully written to at once amuse and educate.

 

Read, then, if you think you're hard enough

My eye recently caught George Steiner’s On Difficulty and other essays on the shelf recently, and I have had it out to remind myself of some of his ideas.  He is a wonderfully stimulating essayist and speaker but I have not picked up the Steiner at all readily, mainly because he is – in an irony he would both have appreciated and protested about – very “difficult”.

We often say that modern music, modern poetry, modern painting is “difficult”, and it’s not always easy to grasp what we mean.  Often, we may mean no more than that they make us think, rather than taking us on an automatic, semi-anaesthetised journey.  Nick Jenkins’ father famously objected to books which made him think, a precept from which his son, and his son’s creator, can have taken little comfort.  Sometimes, we mean that they touch on complex questions which have no clear answers, and are ambiguous or incomplete – or that we do not like facing certain morally or judicially ambiguous challenges.  Sometimes, we mean that we do not have the intellectual equipment to understand – that we are not clever enough, or more likely, that we do not speak the language well enough, or cannot understand all the author’s references – a common concern for the young reader, or for any modern reader, of books which demand a working knowledge of a certain (admittedly restricted) canon of western thought and literature, including most obviously the Bible, Shakespeare and the classical authors.

But some difficulty is temperamental: we find it difficult to accept that a poem or a painting operates abstractly, merely because we are used to them acting literally and descriptively.  We do not complain that music or architecture or textile design or a piece of ceramic is abstract, that there is no narrative or no representation of the world.  So why cannot a painting or a poem be like that too?

Steiner distinguishes several types of difficulty, some flowing from the world, some from the author, and some from the reader.  I was particularly interested in his suggestion that difficulty may arise because the writer is forging a new language, or forcing words to mean things they have not meant before.  I think this is frequent in modern authors, but if they are successful, it may become easier to later audiences.  Contrariwise, some concepts which are easy to one generation may be hard for another: can we really understand the chivalric code of love, for example, or the exaggerated sense of personal honour of the insult and the duel?

Eliot says somewhere that in the modern age, all poetry must be difficult.  This is clearly not true at one level -  easy poetry can still be written – but I think he meant that poetry ought to be tackling the hardest, most difficult questions, and that (as he thought) language and culture were being debased and near collapse: so the challenge is to capture ever more demanding ideas with language the writer finds increasingly inadequate.  He captured this, in his own writing, about his own writing, in East Coker:

Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion.

This is a long way from Steiner. But I do recommend the essays, especially On Difficulty itself, The Distribution of Discourse, and After the Book?  This last is particularly fascinating: written in 1972, it is worried not about the rise of digital media, as we would expect the same title to be now, but about a decline in the social and intellectual status of the book.  But he is always realistic:

... it is worth stressing that the book has been a significant phenomenon only in certain areas and cultures, and during a relatively short span of history.  Being bookmen, we tend to forget the extremely special locale and circumstances of our addiction.

Read Steiner: enjoy, be amazed, and wonder at his expertise and his insight.  But don’t expect it to be easy!

What the Dog Saw

A colleague at the London Wildlife Trust - the same man who recommended Neil Shubin's Your Inner Fish  - also recommended Malcolm Gladwell.  By one of those odd coincidences, only two days later I saw his new book, What the Dog Saw - and other adventures, on the London Library's new acquisition shelves and immediately borrowed it.  This is gold, pure and easily mined.  Malcolm Gladwell is a journalist with an eclectic range of interests, a thorough approach to research, and a lively prose style which makes all his essays dynamic and exciting, as well as interesting and provoking. 

These essays – they were first published in New Yorker magazine – are long, serious pieces of discursive journalism, each looking at an issue with great freshness, originality and humour.  His style is immediately accessible, and he writes many of the essays with what in other circumstances you would call a strong plot, with a clear sense of climax and a nice feel for a punch line.  This may make them sound too trivial, too attention seeking, but that would be very unfair .. he just writes about (mainly) serious things without pomposity or fuss.

And what a range he writes about.  This collection – and he has published several others, including Outliers – covers the marketing of women’s hair dye in America, the impossibility of avoiding accidents in complex systems (like Challenger), dog behaviour, why we consistently prefer bad solutions to problems when good solutions are available, the misleading excellence of hindsight in pattern recognition (two telling military intelligence essays), the difficulty of spotting talent, the physiological difference between panicking and choking (in the sporting sense), and the uselessness of criminal profiling.

In each case, he takes a story from a slightly unusual angle, builds a case, and seeks appropriate evidence, sometimes knocking the case over as confidently as he had originally seemed to construct it, and sometimes building it into something new, fine and inspirational.  An example will illustrate the point.

In Million Dollar Murray, he looks at several different problems, the solving of which pose another quite different problem for society.  One is homelessness, and another is car exhaust pollution.  In both cases, there is a large population – of homeless people, or of all the cars in an area – of which a very small subset is responsible for the overwhelming bulk of the resultant problems.  In the case of homelessness, "only" 2500 of New Yorks' population is chronically homeless, out of 250,000 who were occasionally homeless, and in the case of cars, 5% of vehicles provide 55% of the pollution.  These are not normal distributions, they are power law distributions (similar to the so-called 80-20 rule), so perhaps our approach should recognise that?  So we try and deal with the big, vague problems, but as a society we are hamstrung; first, by lack of knowledge – originally, we may not have realised how much of the problem was caused by so few people / cars; then by inertia – the original solution, however inadequate, is in place; finally by perceptions of fairness and universality.  So we try – without success and without even the hope of success – to provide shelters for all the homeless, and programmes to get them back to work, into housing, or perhaps back with families; we may also need to deal with alcohol or other dependency, and crime to fund these addictions or resulting from them.  This doesn’t work, and we know it doesn’t work.  So maybe the answer is to do more?  But we just can’t, there aren’t the resources, and anyway there is nothing to make us think that more would actually be better. 

So perhaps we should focus on those small percentages of really hard, desperate cases, and let the rest fend for themselves?  We could give them an apartment and intense counselling and support, and have a chance of taking them off the street and out of prison cells and emergency hospital wards.  It’s expensive, but it costs less than continually rescuing them from the street, and, where its being tried in Denver, it seems to work.  But it seems unfair – we reward poor behaviour, and we reward some people massively while others get nothing.  But it works.  Similarly, rather than test every car for exhaust emissions – expensive, time consuming, and an ineffective bureaucratic nightmare, diluting all the effort across all the cars, excellent, OK, and bad, and stimulating avoidance – we could roadside test just the bad ones, and take them off the road – removing, one expert estimates, 25,000 vehicles a year in a town like Denver, reducing smog by 40% in 5 years.  We may have to be unfair to be effective, we may have to accept that we can’t test every car, so some may get away with it, but we make a big impact on emissions.

... More Gladwell soon.

Books in the dark

Alberto Manguel’s The Library at Night is one of those books which looks as if it will be really interesting when you get around to reading it – bit it looks quite serious, and in the meantime, there’s a tense thriller or a weepy novelette to tempt you away.  While, after several months, I ceased to be tempted away recently, and opened the Manguel in earnest, starting with a description of his own library in a medieval barn in the Loire valley.

It’s clearly a book to read in instalments, and I shall pick it up from time to time when in Dorset, where I have left it.  But the first essay – The Library at Night – has an interesting observation: that during the day, Manguel is in charge, is orderly, productive, sequacious of learning and successful in finding the books and references he needs.  But at night, the library is in charge – Manguel is lead astray, ideas coming from the books themselves, producing a chaos and litter of meaning only half understood, of books in the wrong places, of time expended without progress.  Maybe this is why Montaigne famously did not venture in his library after dark, though I find any experience I have in a library always combines the two states, whether my visit is diurnal or nocturnal.

Each successive chapter of the book is called The Library as ...; the first three are The Library as Myth, Order, and Space ...  These are delightful exercises – full of wit, insight and instruction – with comments that every collector of books will recognise:

The existence of every library, even mine, allows readers a sense of what their craft is truly about, a craft that struggles against the stringencies of time by bringing fragments of the past into their present.  It grants them a glimpse, however secret or distant, into the minds of other human beings, and allows them a certain knowledge of their own condition through the stories stored here.

And everywhere there are discussions of the key problems of the library – what to keep when space is limited, whether to discard (No, never!), in what order to keep the books.   Again and again, the tendency of the books to govern the reader or librarian, rather than vice versa, raises its head.  We learn about the library of Alexandria, about the ordering of the earliest Chinese catalogues, and about the life of digital media.  For the book lover, there is delight on every page.

I have arranged, in homage to Manguel's vision of the library at night, that this post will appear at 13 minutes after midnight - a suitable dark time of the soul, although I might well still be reading.

A History of God

No, not the History of God, of course, but a history of attitudes to God in the Abrahamaic traditions – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.  Karen Armstrong is as well known for her studies of religion and belief as for her brief experience as a nun; she is on a religious journey of her own, but has not thrown her lot in with any of the major established religions (yet, she says), though clearly far from being without religious belief.  This is a well written book, instantly accessible for those of us – like me – without significant knowledge of the history or theology of which she speaks.  But it is a serious, thoughtful book, acclaimed by authors like A N Wilson (biographer of Jesus), Robert Runcie (former Archbishop of Canterbury) and Rabbi Julia Neuburger.  I am finding it full of interest, even though I am without a shred of belief in any of these religions.

In the chapter One God, she lays out the historical context of the rise of mono-theistic Judaism, explaining that the worship of Yahweh was a minority practice, and then as part of a pluralistic worship of many gods, all remarkably human in their desires and attitudes – rather like the Greek gods of the Iliad, say.  Yahweh emerged as dominant through a series of historical accidents, and many of the texts which are now read as monotheistic were originally meant to be interpreted quite differently: from Yahweh demanding that you ignore all other gods, and worship only him, Judaism moved to Yahweh claiming that he was the only God.

I am taking a long time to read this – although beautifully written, it demands my full attention, especially as I am so ill-versed in the underlying material.  But I have read the opening chapters on Judaism, and now the emergence of Christianity and its gradual separation from Judaism, and also the emergence of the Nicene creed, the doctrine of the Trinity and even in the fourth century, the tensions between the Eastern and Western churches.  This is marvellous stuff – clear, humane and lucidly intelligent, not taking sides, appreciating every difficulty and making all clear to the ignorant or non-technical reader.

The aim of the book is important: it is not a history of religion, or a history of the Christian church(es); rather, it is a history of how people thought about God – what they expected of their gods, whether they were experienced through reason or revelation, whether they claimed exclusivity, whether they were remote and unknowable or engaged in the daily life of men.  On this basis, Armstrong gives us more than a glimpse into the expectations and aspirations of both the common man and of the spiritually sophisticated, relating beliefs in and about God to the intellectual backgrounds of Hellenism and the warring empires of the early Middle East, and also to the political events of the time.

She uses comparisons of beliefs and practices in different religions most illuminatingly – seeing Jesus for example as a Hindu avatar, a form or expression of God who can reveal himself to and lead men on earth;  or as a bodhisattva in Buddhism, one who puts off his assumption of the divine or paradisiacal state of Nirvana to help others find the true way.  This kind of linking telling informs her introduction to the chapter about the beginnings of Islam – just as Christianity was originally part of mainstream Judaism, the Muslim prophet received his revelation from the same God, and in the same tradition, as Jewish or Christian prophets – but with a dramatic effect:

Christians, [ ] like Jews, were scandalised when a prophet arose in Arabia who claimed to have received a direct revelation from their God and to have brought a new scripture to his people.  Yet the new version of monotheism [Islam] spread with astonishing rapidity throughout the Middle East and North Africa.  Many of its enthusiasts in these lands (where hellenism was not on home ground) turned with relief from Greek trinitarianism, which expressed the idiom of God in an idiom which was alien to them, and adopted a more Semitic notion of the divine reality.

I look forward immensely to the rest of this book – and will probably post again on so large a subject.

 

Your Inner Fish

I read Neil Shubin's Your Inner Fish on the advice of a colleague who said it had, among other things, a wonderful description of why you hiccough - and it does!  But it is really much more than that, being a comprehensive, but very readable - account of the physical features and the genetic traits we owe to evolution.  And although he hangs his book on fish, his survey goes much wider than that.

The main idea of the book's title, though, is to follow the formation of the gill arches in fish, and through evolution, to see their effect in humans - the jaw and the ear, with all its delicate complexity.  But, for all evolution's ingenuity, it works with the tools it has - so we can trace genes back to fish and well before, and it is clear that our bodies are still shaped by the developmental origins of a fish's breathing mechanisms.  But this does not mean we are perfect - snoring and hiccoughs are two of the prices we pay for having fish faces, not our own!

This is an interesting read for a lot of reasons - an account of fossil hunting, interesting evolutionary history, and fascinating human biology.  Learn how we smell, how we balance - and why alcohol makes us forget that - and where our ears come from.  And learn some wonderful words - can you really believe (I assure you its true) that the muscle which moves the corner of our mouths down is called the depressor anguli oris, and that which furrows our brow is the corrugator supercilli!

Selfish Genius

Fern Elsdon-Baker has written The Selfish Genius (How Richard Dawkins Rewrote Darwin’s Legacy) to challenge Dawkins’ fiercely atheistic and intolerant version of Darwin’s evolutionary theories.  I approached this book with some mixed feelings: Darwin is a hero of mine, one of the very few thinkers who have genuinely reshaped our perceptions and understanding of our world (with Newton, Einstein, Adam Smith), and an engagingly nervous and hesitant one.  Dawkins, too, I have immensely admired for books like The Blind Watchmaker and The Selfish Gene (spot the pun in the title of Elsdon-Baker’s book), but I have felt uncomfortable at the violence and exclusion of his atheism (though I too am an atheist), and I have found his interpretations of evolutionary adaptation too severe, too unlikely to be acceptable, much preferring the more measured, richer approach of Stephen Jay Gould (an even better writer and, if the Nobel judges are to be believed, a better biologist too).

So I approached this book with interest, and with mixed feelings.  On some points, I was quickly reassured – the author is not favouring any half-cocked evolution theory, and she is not trying to merge evolution and religion in any way.  She staunchly defends evolution through natural selection, and declares herself without religious belief.  So what is the book about, in that case?  Well, she wants to make it clear that Dawkins’ view of evolution is just one view, and that others – eg, that of Gould – are perfectly credible, and the existence of differences do not threaten the fundamental validity of the theory, just raise questions over its details. 

Specifically, Dawkins believes that selection takes place at the level of the gene, whereas others wonder if it might be at the group level, or even the species level;  Dawkins believes in a broadly continuous process, whereas Gould supports a view called “punctuated equilibrium”, a term which is pretty much self-explanatory; and Dawkins tends to believe that all attributes of the phenotype must have been positively selected for (including your ginger hair and the ability to wiggle your ears), whereas Gould and others allow for some to arise by chance or as a by-product of some more useful attribute.  Well, this is all good and true, but we knew it already, and you can read many other books to find it much more fully explored and generally better expressed.

She is also concerned that Dawkins' violence with language is unnecessary, gives the impression that scientists know more than we do, gives fuel to opponents of evolution like the utterly discredited creationism and intelligent design, and can also alienate those who have religious belief, but are still sensible supporters of evolution, Christian and Muslim alike (the two religions she talks about mainly).  Well, I agree with her there – I find Dawkins' ideas wonderfully stimulating and brilliantly expressed, but I increasingly recoil from his violence of view and his bullying partisanship. 

So the book serves a useful purpose, and is worth reading; an annoying omission is any form of index, which would really be useful.  But the organisation is a little odd, with discursions into the theory of knowledge, for example, and not enough on evolution itself, and the prose is a little wooden.  She tries to skewer Dawkins for crimes against the philosophy of science, which is slightly tedious, and I suspect Dawkins wouldn't care - but she does roundly rebuke him for misleading some of us, and antagonishing others. If you are at all familiar with the state of current thinking on evolution, even at a non-technical level, you will learn little and might find other texts more valuable  - Dawkins himself (The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker), or any number of Gould essays (try a collection like The Flamingo's Smile) or a range of general reader books such as Steve Jones’ Almost Like A Whale (a lovely, easy, entertaining book) or The Language of the Genes.

Der verbranntem Bucher

A chilling article in Tuesday's The Times, a review of a book about the infamous burning of the books under Hitler in 1933, good writers and bad, Jewish and gentile, men of the left and of the right.  And all, complained Stefan Zweig, without writers protestsing.  Volker Weidermann, the young journalist who has written Das Buch der verbranntem Bücher (The Book of the Burning Books), has read many of the banned list, and found some real gems - but lost for a generation, or for two, or for ever.

George Smiley was undercover in Germany in this period and saw the burning of the books, and rejoiced that he knew his enemy.  Mann was among many who faced a new humiliation:

And for those who did survive till 1945, there was one last, bitter pill to swallow: “Many of the famous authors returning to Germany after the war were devastated to find that there was no audience for them,” Weidermann says. “The public that had burnt their books in 1933 still didn't want them! That was utterly humiliating for someone like Thomas Mann, who thought that there was a ‘better Germany' that would welcome him back.”

This is only just published in German, but I hope it is translated soon: it contains a lesson we cannot forget, a lesson which will bear endless retelling.

Fadiman U

Anne Fadiman has written two lovely books of essays, Ex Libris (1998) and At Large And At Small (2007).  The first is basically about books, though books approached from slightly quirky angles; the second is more general – and, I think, slightly less successful.  But in the art of essay writing (which has been dying ever since it was invented, so much so that Fadiman wryly observes that the essay mourning the passing of the essay is an important and vigorous sub-genre!) she is clearly very accomplished, and extremely witty.

In Ex Libris, in Marrying Libraries for example, she deals with the trauma of merging her husband’s and her own libraries, a mere eleven years after they started living together.  Now that is something I can understand; certain books are old friends, and someone else’s copy is just not the same, and other people have such contrary views on classification.  They do merge their books, but it involves long and tortuous negotiations, concessions and reluctant agreements, and it actually begins to unravel in some respects soon afterwards.  And in another essay, Sir, You Must Never Do That To A Book, her brother is rebuked by a note left by the chambermaid in a hotel for leaving a book face down (a crime I acknowledge I very occasionally commit myself), and she uses this as a starting point for discussing how different people treat books.  Some treat their books as sacred objects and insist on cleanliness and purity, while others regard the physical book as nothing, using torn out pages for notes, some even tearing out parts of a book they had read while travelling in order to reduce weight.  I am a man of the middle ground myself, but passions run high.

In The Joy of Sesquipedelians she looks at the joys of precise but unloved and unused words – and finds no less than 22 that she didn’t know in a single book.  O, alright then, they are: monophysite, mephitic, calineries, diapason, grimoire, adapertile, retromingent, perllan, cupellation, adytum, sepoy, subadar, paludal, apozemical, camorra, ithyphallic, alcade, aspergill, agathodemon, kakodeman, goetic, opopanax.  One friend knew no less than nine of these, I managed 4 that I really knew, and another 3 that I’d have recognised in context.  And how I've managed all these years without retromingent - "urinating backwards", I really can't say!  This is only fun, but anyone following me in reading C P Snow will know his predilection for such words, hebephrenia being the most recent example I can recall - "the insanity of pubescence".  My personal favourites are heteroclite and myristicivorous - do have fun with those!

Overall, I’d recommend Ex Libris to any booklover, they’re a joy; the essays in At Large And At Small, however, are of more general interest (coffee, collecting, working at night) but sometimes lack the brilliant spark of the other essays.

The title of this post, incidentally, is the name her family gave to themselves when competing against the television in an American quiz show, the equivalent of the British University Challenge.  They almost always "won"!

Darwin in rhyme

Why does every gentleman not

            become an ornithologist?

Gulls and cormorants take their way home

            at evening on a wild, irregular course.

This question is posed by a childhood vist to the seasisde by the young Darwin (and seems sensible to me, birdwatcher that I am).  Ruth Padel is Charles Darwin’s great-granddaughter, and a very good poet.  In Darwin: A Life In Poems (2009) she has brought together her family history and her muse in the most engaging way.  The whole book is a poetic account of his life, from childhood to death, touching on snall incidents to illustrate major themes - apart from evolution and his natural history studies, there is much on his relationship with his wife Emma (one of the mighty Wedgwood clan), and his views on religion.  But there are also charming and distressing incidents from childhood, seeing slavery at first hand, making his first dscoveries, playing with his children, and the tragic loss of many of them, and so on and so on.  Here is the wonder of the ocean deep on H M S Beagle, after a bout of sea sickness:

 

The deck is dazzle, fish-stink, gauze-covered buckets.

            Gelatinous ingots, rainbows of wet flinching amethyst

            and flubbed, iridescent cream.  All this

mean’s he’s better; and working on a load of lumpen light.

Padel's poems have a vary varied form, but all - or maybe just the mass of them taken together - have a slightly breathless quality which I found enjoyable: no need here to feel guilty about charging on, letting the meaning and the music of the words wash over you.  Indeed, I read it all, enjoying the poems, but reading the whole as if it was a sort of novel.  For those who don't know the detail of Charles darwin's life, there are simple explanatory marginalia, but you can easily ignore these if you wish.  Here Emma sees Down House for the first time:

“Ugly”, she says. “ A desolate air”.  The garden, though,

Makes up for it.  Old trees - purple magnolia, a quince,

a medlar, Spanish chestnut.  A goodish hay-meadow.

In September they’ll move in.  A child will be born,

And buried in the family plot he’ll pick at the west door

of this flint church.  Through briar rose haws, twisting petioles

of clematis will scribble these hedges like the pencil

of a ferocious toddler with glowing, ochre coloured wire.

I loved these poems.  I have always been keen on Darwin, and I feared these poems might be trivial or flubsy, but not a bit of it.  They illuminate, amuse, and tell of a very distrubed and worried man, beset by personal tragedies and religious doubts, as he quietly changed our understanding of the world for all time.

Two cultures: Jacob Bronowski

I posted recently on C P Snow's Two Cultures essay from 1959, and promised to return to the masterful treatment of the issue by Jacob Bronowski.  He is most famous for the wonderful BBC series, The Ascent of Man, and there are two clips here, on the dangers of absolute knowledge and on how knowledge is gained in the same way in painting and physics.  Watch them if you can - Bronowski is a compelling presenter - but be warned the first one may make you weep (in memoriam GHJ).  But also well worth reading - and not at all technical or intimidating - are two books of essays or lectures - The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination and The Visionary Eye.

In The Visionary Eye, Bronowski argues passionately that reasoning and science are not different activites from imagining and creating:

Reasoning is constructed with moveable images just as certainly as poetry is ... We do great harm to children when we accustom them to separate reason from the imagination ... For imagination is not confined to wild bursts of fantasy.  Imagination is the manipulation inside the mind of absent things, by using in their place images or words or symbols.

In The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination, Bronowski takes two sentences, one from the arts and one from the sciences, and compares them, so that we can see what the differences really are.  One is from Blake:

A Robin Red breast in a Cage

Puts all Heaven in a Rage

And the other is a statement of Newton’s law of gravitation, that the gravity between any two objects is proportional to their masses divided by the distance between them squared – one of the fundamental propositions of the universe:

G = kmm’ / r²

What is the difference, what are the similarities between them?  Bronowski argues that the differences are threefold, but the similarities still very great.  They are both general statements of wide application, telling us something important and widely applicable, and they are both bold statements which required imagination and creativity to forge.  But, he says, everyone knows what the Blake means, and knows exactly – your exactly may be different from my exactly, but we are each assured of understanding the real meaning completely; but although it is apparently more precise, more  definite, the gravity equation is taken on trust by most of us (stand fast Dark Puss).  Second, the Blake is only an affirmation and a conviction, it is not, even in principle, susceptible of proof as the equation is.  But the third difference is the key one: the grammar of the Blake allows other similar sentences, such as

A Robin Red breast in a Box

Puts all Heaven in a Rage

or

A Robin Red breast in a Cage

Puts all Mankind in a Rage.

 

The first doesn’t rhyme, and the second is distinctly different in meaning, as well as scanning less well; but they mean something, and they mean something quite close to the original.  But

G = kmm’ / r³   or  S = kmm’ / r²

just don’t mean anything at all – they’re not true – they’re just not allowed.

For anyone who is not a scientist (or, indeed, for anyone who is) who is interested in the passionate humanism of a man who loved the arts and the sciences, thought them one facet of a human whole, and thought them - and all knowledge - forces for good if humbly considered, I cannot recommend Bronowski too highly.

American π

3.142 .. and so on, forever - the ratio of the diameter of a circle to it's circumference, or π (pi).  We were plagued by this little chap at school, or we revelled in it, in the strange inexplicable precision of a number which never has an end.

These musings are inspired by Marcus du Sautoy's Sexy Maths article in a recent edition of The Times.  He talks about a whole range of pi things, noting that today is pi day, when mathematicians eat lots of pies to celebrate!  The article is quite fun, talking about the importance of pi in mathematics, but also about odd ways to calculate pi - including throwing a needle on to a sheet of paper where the lines are separated by the length of the needle (the proportion of times the needle ends lying across a line is 2 divided by pi).  But he also tells you that we (you? me?) know the value of pi to a trillion digits - and what use is that exactly, when a mere 39 digits is enough to calculate the circumference of the visible universe to the accuracy of a single hydrogen atom?

And why "American" pi in my title?  Well apart from the bad cinematic reference, the day for celebrating pi is taken from the first three digits of the number itself, so March 14.  In England, it would have been the third of the fourteenth month (oops), or the 31 April (oops again).  Curiously, mathematicians use this day to celebrate, but engineers - who du Sautoy says don't care about accuracy so much (?) use 22 July, after the fraction 22/7, a workaday substitute for pi in basic calculations.

Two cultures - Snow

As a talk on Radio 3 reminded me recently, it is now just fifty years since C P Snow gave the Rede lecture, The Two Cultures, and a phrase entered the language; more than just a phrase, actually, it is still a powerful meme. I am reading Snow's major novel series at the moment, and it is fascinating to see the physicist and the writer in one image, in one incarnation. Snow's basic argument, which he admitted was not an original one, was that the arts and the sciences had drifted apart to the point where the adherents of the two muses could not communicate with each other, often saw no value in the other, and were unable to cooperate and reinforce each other.  I shall let him explain in his own words, starting with why the issue interested him:

It was a problem I could not avoid just because of the circumstances of my life. The only credentials I had to ruminate on the subject at all came through those circumstances, through nothing more than a set of chances. Anyone with similar experience would have seen much the same things and I think made very much the same comments about them. It just happened to be an unusual experience. By training I was a scientist: by vocation I was a writer. That was all. It was a piece of luck, if you like, that arose through coming from a poor home.

Then the standard demonstration of incomprehension:

A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's? I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question — such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? — not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.

And a failure to understand, on the part of the arts men, that the first half of the twentieth century was a unique flowering of science and physics, unique in all recorded history:

Literary intellectuals at one pole - at the other scientists, and as the most representative, the physical scientists. Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension - sometimes (particularly among the young) hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding. ... Non-scientists tend to think of scientists as brash and boastful. They hear Mr T. S. Eliot … the tone, restricted and constrained, with which literary intellectuals are at home: it is the subdued voice of their culture. Then they hear a much louder voice, that of another archetypal figure, Rutherford, trumpeting: 'This is the heroic age of science! This is the Elizabethan age!' Many of us heard that … and we weren't left in any doubt whom Rutherford was casting for the role of Shakespeare. What is hard for the literary intellectuals to understand, imaginatively or intellectually, is that he was absolutely right.

And finally, a comment about the frequent (then, perhaps not now) accusation that scientists are ridiculously optimistic - they can solve the world's problems, they even sometimes think they will have a theory of everything, that there will be nothing more to be discovered.  Snow has a more measured approach, and the novelist in him reminds us of some deep truths:

This is an accusation which has been made so often that it has become a platitude. ... Most of the scientists I have known well have felt - just as deeply as the non-scientists I have known well - that the individual condition of each of us is tragic. Each of us is alone: sometimes we escape from solitariness, through love or affection or perhaps creative moments, but those triumphs of life are pools of light we make for ourselves while the edge of the road is black: each of us dies alone.

Of course, it is easy to forget that for many people, neither culture is of any significance at all.  But for those of us who care about either Austen or Galileo, either music or relativity, it is always worth trying to care about both.  In reading Snow's essay, I was reminded of Jacob Bronowski's writings.  Bronowski was one of the great bridges across this arts-science divide, and you can read him on computing and physics and painting and music.  In his Origins of Knowledge and Imagination and The Visionary Eye, he deals with some of the exciting similarities, the need for creativity and imagination in both.  I would speak of his ideas more, but space forbids - but I will return to this subject in another post.

And here and there a Grayling

The philosopher A C Grayling has many claims to fame; for me, he is known as a Trustee of the London Library and a columnist in New Scientist, although you can regulalry find him on the BBC or in the papers.  This is, of course, to leave out the main and primary cause of his fame - his distinguished academic career, with which I am not philosopher enough to engage.  But I was therefore delighted to come across The Form of Things, a collection of short, non-technical writings on a bewildering variety of subjects  - a miscellany, indeed, on the arts, life, civil liberties and much else.  It is a collection of the reactions and views  of a torch bearer for the intelligent defence of Enlightment values, civilised, cultured and liberal. 

The writing is pithy, witty, often engaging you with an out of the way fact or a an intellectual challenge, and while I did not agree with everything he said, by a long way, I was always entertained and stimulated.  There are over 50 varied pieces in just over 200 pages, so its a very varied, accessible read - highly browsable before "lights out".  Subjects vary - here's a small selection: Beauty, Funerals, Montreux, Voyaging, Long life, Perfect numbers, Fox-hunting, Science and faith before Darwin, Rochester and the libertines, Vermeer, Free speech, and Identity cards - so something for everyone.

Here he is on funerals, a piece written on his return from a funeral marked by the smells, bells and Latin of the Tridentine mass:

Most of the congregation were treated to what was assuredly the habitual experience of medieval peasants: not understanding a word of what was going on ...

Societies in which alcohol is seen as the proper fuel for transporting the dead into the new phases of their existence .. have great advantages over those that merely serve tea and monosyllables.

[After discussing funerals in Africa and China] ... whatever its form, a funeral is an absolute parting, and the more clearly that hard fact is seen, the sooner heals the wound it makes; and the prompt for mourning is universal, however individual cultures understand it: for although not all call it love or need, the grief feels just the same.

This is a book well worth reading; whatever you interests or your philosophic views, you will find food for thought and amusement.

And my post title - utterly frivolous, this is of course a quotation from Tennyson's The Brook.

Preparing for "such a journey"

In 1620, Lancelot Andrewes (1555 - 1625), some time chaplain to Queen Elizabeth, prebendary of St Paul's, and Bishop of Winchester, gave one of a series of Christmas Day sermons in front of the king, James I.  His text was from the Gospel according to St. Matthew (ii, 1-2):

Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea, in the days of Herod the King, behold there came wise men from the East to Jerusalem, Saying, Where is He That is born King of  the Jews? For we have seen His star in the East, and are come to worship Him.

Cum ergo natus esset Jesus in Bethlehem Judae, in diebus Herodis Regis, ecce magi ab Oriente venerunt Jerosolymam, dicentes, Ubi est Qui natus est Rex Judaeorum? Vidimus enim stellam Ejus in Orientes, et venimus  adorare Eum.

I have given the Latin, too, because Andrewes refers to it in his text a lot.  Andrewes' prose, and his preaching, were highly esteemed in his own time and afterwards, although the prose is not the gorgeous, living thing that Donne makes it, but a more workaday tool full of care and precision, and very plain and easy to understand.  When you get into it a little, it becomes very attractive, and can be almost conversational with the occasional very short, simple sentences, and the emphatic inversions - though "Behold, come they did" does sound a little bit like Yoda in Star Wars!

T S Eliot read widely in the seventeeth century authors - Andrewes, Donne, and Hobbes among them - and in this sermon found inspiration for Journey of the Magi; he was particularly taken by Andrewes' "ordonnance", and his biographer Peter Ackroyd, has this to say about the poem: "The directness of statement and lucidity of structure derive at least in part from his recognition of the "ordonnance" of Andrewes' own writing - an internal agreement of words which encourages precision, relevance and intensity."  Andrewes was, rightly, as a scholar and a writer, one of the authors of the King James bible, described fascinatingly in Adam Nicolson's Power and Glory.

Here is a bit of Andrewes' great sermon.  Ecce venerunt simply means "Behold they came", with ecce carrying a load of emphasis and wonder and even amazement.  I wouldn't necessarily suggest everyone should go and read Andrews nowadays, though he is essential for the history of Anglican practice and doctrine, but he is one of the early masters who created English as such a formidable tool; he wrought well, and many after built on his foundations, though they knew it not! 

We shall go in the company of wise men ... And if the shepherds were too homely to sort with, these are company for the best; they were company for Cyrus and Darius, and all the great Monarchs of Persia.

Ecce venerunt it is in the text; and indeed, not only the persons, ecce magi, but their very coming deserved an ecce.  It is an ecce venerunt, theirs indeed, if we weigh it well, whence they came and whither.  Whence? from the East, their own country.  Whither? to Jerusalem, that was to them a strange land: that was somewhat.  They came a long journey, no less than twelve days together.  They came an uneasy journey, for their way lay through Arabia Petraea, and the craggy rock of it.  And they came a dangerous journey, through Arabia Deserta too, and the black tents of Kedar there, then famous for their robberies, and even to this day.  And they came now, at the worst season of the year.  And all but to do worship at Christ's birth.  So great account they made; so highly did they esteem their being at it, as they took all this great travel, and came all this long journey, and came it at this time.  Stayed not their coming till the opening of the year, till they might have better weather and way, and longer days, and so more seasonable and fit to travel in.  So desirous were they to come with the first, and to be there as soon as possibly they might; broke through all these difficulties, Et ecce venerunt, And behold, come they did.

Francis Bacon

A couple of weeks ago, I went to see Francis Bacon at the Tate: this link will show the Tate's introduction to this exhibition, but here is my favourite painting, a study after Velasquez' Portrait of Innocent X.

 

Actually, I didn't care for much of the exhibition.  A lot was angry without being constructive, and some was just revolting.  But it was tremendously powerful, and some of the portraits will haunt me for a long time.  I'd urge you to see it, but don't expect to be entertained or amused - it's much tougher than that.  But it did make me think about the other Francis Bacon, who wrote like an angel.  Here is the sixteenth century master of prose talking about deformity, something which comes naturally to mind while looking at the Tate exhibition, exhibiting both his grace and his wisdom:

DEFORMED persons are commonly even with nature; for as nature hath done ill by them, so do they by nature; being for the most part (as the Scripture saith) void of natural affection; and so they have their revenge of nature. Certainly there is a consent, between the body and the mind; and where nature erreth in the one, she ventureth in the other. But because there is, in man, an election touching the frame of his mind, and a necessity in the frame of his body, the stars of natural inclination are sometimes obscured, by the sun of discipline and virtue. Therefore it is good to consider of deformity, not as a sign, which is more deceivable; but as a cause, which seldom faileth of the effect.

 

Whosoever hath anything fixed in his person, that doth induce contempt, hath also a perpetual spur in himself, to rescue and deliver himself from scorn. Therefore all deformed persons, are extreme bold. First, as in their own defence, as being ex posed to scorn; but in process of time, by a general habit. Also it stirreth in them industry, and especially of this kind, to watch and observe the weak ness of others, that they may have somewhat to repay. Again, in their superiors, it quencheth jealousy towards them, as persons that they think they may, at pleasure, despise: and it layeth their competitors and emulators asleep; as never believing they should be in possibility of advancement, till they see them in possession. So that upon the matter, in a great wit, deformity is an advantage to rising.

Gaia

I was glad to read James Lovelock’s latest Gaia book, The Revenge of Gaia.  In it, he pursues his now familiar theme that all life and all other processes on earth are interlinked to a degree which makes them act like an organism, which he calls Gaia.  He is careful to make it clear that it is not in fact a living thing, but he steadfastly refuses to stop using the parallel or analogy, as many scientific colleagues think he should.  He wants us to see earth as one, he wants us to believe that Gaia is capable of death with us, or survival without us (and, we all hope, survival with us, though he is not wildly optimistic on this point.)  He does believe that Gaia is capable of adjusting to our excesses – pollution, over-development and over-population in his view – but that if it does adjust, it will be well after Homo sapiens is extinct.

Lovelock’s writing style is distinctly old fashioned, and can appear a little de haut en bas, though I suspect this is more the result of long didactic practice than any intellectual snobbery.  The whole book is about the most important global issues, but frequently descends to the personal, as he talks about stocking densities in the farms around his country home, his own visits to other scientists, and other such domesticities.  He is perhaps no longer in the forefront of the environmental movement, but it is always worth reading someone who has been and who still is so inspirational to many around the world. Two themes occur in this book with great importance, underpinning his views of the environmental problem and of its solution.

Although there are many different issues causing problems, he passionately believes that the human population has grown too big, and will deplete our resources in a way which is not only unsustainable, but which will prove to be so very quickly. He believes that the governments of the world should try and reduce the population to 1 or 1.5 billion (from a current level of some 6 billion), and hold it there.  This would not only reduce the consumption of scarce resources -  food, fuel, and building materials – but would also free up a lot of land for restoration and the preservation of threatened habitats and species.  I feel this argument is completely unsustainable; regrets about the population are vain – the rapid increase in populations stems from technological successes such as growing food ever more efficiently, and keeping people alive increasingly successfully.  Given these, no society on earth will be willing to restrain its population, and we should not ask it to, especially as we become aware of the social and financial problems associated with declining populations.  These problems for sure have solutions, but we have not worked them out yet.  But the first limit on population that is effective is education, especially female education, which generates much smaller families, and we should encourage this in every way we can.  In the meantime, we must strain all our ingenuity to managing the population with less resource, something which is still visibly within our competence.

But on his other great theme, I am completely at one within him.  He believes passionately that only nuclear power can provide even his wished for limited population with the energy it needs; nuclear power is capable of meeting the demand, which so called green energies are not.  In addition, he contends – with a great deal of evidence – that nuclear is available now, which many alternatives are not (or only in a grossly inefficient form), and that it is demonstrably safer than any alternative.  These truths, so sadly lost over the past couple of decades, are now entering the mainstream again, and it is likely that his desires for nuclear will be increasingly realised, and not just in the west.

Is the best book to read about global environmental problems?  No.  But it is still an accessible and interesting read, covering a lot of ground, and making the linkages between the different issues clear, by one of the forerunners and leaders of our environmental consciousness.

Rural idyll in urbia

Jeremy Paxman’s The English is a tremendously enjoyable book, pithily and amusingly written, with all Paxman’s verve and energy but without descending into polemic or hectoring, as you might fear from the presenter of Newsnight.  He tries to get at an understanding of what Englishness is, and who the English are.  He looks at the subject with engaging lightness and directness, but with a great deal of sense and absolutely no sentimentality; he is not so focused on Britishness, except as it is distinct from being English.

His basic thoughts, though it is a difficult book to sum up, are that the English, until recently, were dominated by both their relative isolation, and their sense of superiority.  While both of these have passed away, there are myths in plenty still – the stiff upper lip may have been buried with Diana, but there is still a warm beer-cricket-parish church rural idyll which stands for England, and which has stood for England for many centuries.  The point about it, of course, is that it is complete rubbish:  it was never an idyll for the majority of people working in the countryside – exactly the opposite – and the Miss Marple rural way of life has gone for ever, under the pressures of population, agricultural modernisation, and encroaching suburbia.  And, a rural ideal seems odd for the first, and one of the most intensely, urbanised countries in the world.  Paxman concludes that we are still extremely bad at living in cities, and that we try and re-create the village in our gardens and parks even when we are in the city, which we all wish to escape from as soon as possible.  Our (I am one of the English, but I do realise that not all my readers are!) desire for privacy means that we socialise badly in cites, rarely invite people into our homes, and retreat to the back garden rather than advance to the public square or the main street.  Of course, the weather may have something to do with it.

I won’t try and recapitulate all his discussions, but he covers all aspects you could desire – the home, married life and sex, travel, political and intellectual life, and the relationship with Scotland, Wales and Ireland especially.  It’s well worth a read, and here are a few choice selections:

‘Home’ is what the English have instead of a Fatherland.  The notion of a Vaterland or Patrie is to hedged around with a sense of the importance of the state and ideas of race and breeding.  ‘Home’ is where the individual lives, but it is also something imagined, a spiritual resting place.  But, curiously, it can also mean that the idea of ‘England’ that the English carry in their minds is different to the reality around them.

Not all Englishmen can live in a castle.  But they all want moats and drawbridges.

In a marvellous section on women’s education, and the deplorable tardiness with which men admitted women to full membership of intellectual society, he complains that much women’s education still aims at a different world.  After all, Diana was a “perfectly intelligent woman [who] emerged from school with scarcely more than a certificate for the best-kept hamster”.

One of Paxman’s principal conclusions is that we English are never happier when fearing that everything’s going to the dogs – but that actually, the old place has a lot going for it still, including tolerance, a pretty well functioning society at many levels, great energy and creativity, and – which is crucial for readers of this blog – an unparalleled obsession with and tradition in the written word.  “And yet they remain convinced they’re finished.  That is their charm.”

Hellebore

Hellebore and borage were reputedly sovereign remedies for madness, melancholy, accidie.  In  Borage recently, I shared some of my excitement in reading Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, a book which is at once overwhelming and enticing.  And I finished that post with a sentence which I think will become a theme for all the rest of my saying and writing:

If through weakness, folly, passion, discontent,  ignorance, I have said amiss, let it be forgiven and forgotten.

But now I have got through the introductions, and the exploratory material on melancholy, and in this post I am exploring some his solutions for melancholy - leaving the the wilder channels of his thought, and the remoter backwaters, such as werewolves, witches, excessive study, and the decline in academic standards for your own exploration!  It is worth exploring, but be prepared for anything, and be undisciplined in your reading, just browse at random, not trying to make sense of the whole - or you'll surely fall prey to some form of madness, and Boots is fresh out of borage and hellebore!

Burton covers a lot of things which might ameliorate, control or cure melancholy, and I quote some of them now, partly for the sake of his views, but also for his wonderful prose.  Let's look at tobacco, hellebore, alcohol, and coffee.

He starts by praising tobacco as a valuable remedy, but abruptly changes tack, reporting that:

... as it is commonly abused by most men, which take it as tinkers do ale, 'tis a plague, a mischief, a violent purger of goods, land, health, hellish, devilish and damned tobacco, the ruin and overthrow of body and soul.

As for hellebore itself,

Black hellebore, that most renowned plant, and famous purger of melancholy, which all antiquity so much used and admired, was first found out by Melanpodius a shepherd ... who, seeing it to purge his goats when they raved, practised it upon Elige and Calene, King Praetus' daughters, that ruled in Arcadia, near the fountain Clitorius, and restored them to their former health ... and it was generally so much esteemed of the ancients for this disease amongst the rest, that they sent all such as were crazed, or that doted, to be purged, where this plant was in abundance to be had. ... Lilius Geraldus saith, that Hercules, after all his mad pranks upon his wife and children, was perfectly cured by a purge of hellebore, which an Anticyrian administered unto him. They that were sound commonly took it to quicken their wits, [and] Cameades the academic, when he was to write against Zeno the stoic, purged himself with hellebore first.  In such esteem it continued for many ages, till at length Mesue and some other Arabians began to reject and reprehend it, upon whose authority for many following lustres, it was much debased and quite out of request, held to be poison and no medicine; and is still oppugned to this day by Crato and some junior physicians. [Quotes various "modern" objections].. and Nicholas Leonicus hath a story of Solon, that besieging, I know not what city, steeped hellebore in a spring of water, which by pipes was conveyed into the middle of the town, and so either poisoned, or else made them so feeble and weak by purging, that they were not able to bear arms. Notwithstanding all these cavils and objections, most of our late writers do much approve of it.

As for alcohol, why not pop down to the Bull and Bush for a couple of pints to provoke your urine or expel wind and cold poisons?  No more ridiculous than some of the nonsense talked about nowadays by the snake oil fringe of alternative medicine!

Amongst this number of cordials and alteratives, I do not find a more present remedy, than a cup of wine or strong drink, if it be soberly and opportunely used. It makes a man bold, hardy, courageous, "whetteth the wit," if moderately taken, (and as Plutarch saith) "it makes those which are otherwise dull, to exhale and evaporate like frankincense, or quicken" (Xenophon adds) as oil doth fire. "A famous cordial" Matthiolus in Dioscoridum calls it, "an excellent nutriment to refresh the body, it makes a good colour, a flourishing age, helps concoction, fortifies the stomach, takes away obstructions, provokes urine, drives out excrements, procures sleep, clears the blood, expels wind and cold poisons, attenuates, concocts, dissipates all thick vapours, and fuliginous humours."  And that which is all in all to my purpose, it takes away fear and sorrow.

But if you don't drink, have a cup of coffee instead, described by Burton as a wondrous strange habit of the Turks (he is writing in 1621, remember):

The Turks have a drink called coffa (for they use no wine), so named of a berry as black as soot and as bitter... which they sip still of, and sup as warm as they can suffer; they spend much time in those coffa-houses, which are somewhat like our ale houses or taverns, and there they sit chatting and drinking to drive away the time, and to be merry together, because they find by experience, that kind of drink, so used, helpeth digestion and procureth alacrity.

All in all, I've enjoyed my excursions into Burton, and I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys the language and has a taste for the quirky in language or opinion.  But I wouldn't invest in the whole thing, but buy some intelligently edited selection such as Kevin Jackson's.  Happy reading, in all senses.

Borage

I have been browsing through Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy recently.  It’s a very odd book, utterly overwhelming to a modern taste, and extremely long – three substantial volumes in most editions – and full of undisciplined torrents of prose, example building on example until the mind reels.  It’s as if Burton, who knows a lot, cannot bear to leave out anything he has ever noted down or remembered, and piles up prose beyond any measure of pleasure or utility.

But what prose it is!  What a fine writer, and a dramatic writer Burton is; and what an excellent psychologist and philosopher.  I read this in two ways: looking through the first complete volume, to get a feel for the full scale of the work, complete with innumerable quotations from the classics, sometimes even writing in Latin because his subject matter is temporarily delicate – seeking what Gibbon calls the “decent obscurity of a learned language”.  And also in an anthology edited by Kevin Jackson, helpfully sub-sectioned and shortened dramatically, and translated fully.  In either event, it’s an interesting experience and enormous fun, as well as being full of insight and empathy.

Burton’s masterwork was published in 1621, when melancholy was a modish upper class preoccupation, perhaps as angst was in certain parts of the twentieth century, though Burton -a lifelong bachelor, academic and cleric – clearly suffered greatly from Black Dog as Churchill called it, or accidie in medieval terminology (a very good read on this is Churchill: Four Faces and the Man, with its excellent essay on Churchill's depression by Anthony Storr).  But the Anatomy is not just about melancholy – indeed, it is hard to think of anything which is foreign to its all-encompassing grasp.  I feel two posts coming on, since quotation needs to be at some length to convey his inimitable style, and I want to discuss some of his views as well as quote them.

Some of the material I most enjoyed came in his lengthy introduction, including the famous description of the style he intends to use:

I neglect phrases, and labour wholly to inform my reader’s understanding, not to please his ear; ‘tis not my intent or study to compose neatly ... but to express myself readily and plainly as it happens. So that as a river runs sometimes precipitate and swift, then dull and slow; now direct, then per ambages; now deep, then shallow; now muddy, then clear; now broad, then narrow; doth my style flow: now serious, then light; now comical, then satirical; now more elaborate, then remiss, as the present subject required, or as at that time I was affected. ... I shall lead thee ... through variety of objects, that which thou shalt like and surely dislike.

Like Nick Jenkins, I particularly appreciate the licence to be “remiss” if I am so affected, and I admire his willingness to (as he affects) not consult the readers’ tastes, though this did not impede the commercial success of the book.  But there are occasions where you can be wearied by his sheer voluminousness, when drinking from a fire hydrant is pulverising not refreshing;  but there are lots of occasions where he builds up torrential images which sweep you up and make you laugh, cry or exult as the paragraphs carry you unresisting along.  And here he is on the main subject of his writing:

... being a kind of dotage, it cannot be otherwise but that the brain must be affected ... and from thence it is communicated to the heart and other inferior parts, which sympathise and are much troubled ... Such as live in over-cold or over-hot climes; such as are born of melancholy parents; as offend in those six non-natural things, are black, or of a high sanguine complexion, that have little heads, that have a hot heart, moist brain, hot liver and cold stomach, have been long sick; such as are solitary by nature, great students, given to much contemplation, lead a life out of action, are most subject to melancholy.  Of sexes both, but men more often; yet women misaffected are far more violent, and grievously troubled.  Of seasons of the year, the autumn is the most melancholy.

Finally (in this first Burton post at least), let me finish with a wonderful sentence which could be at the head of all my writing and saying:

If through weakness, folly, passion, discontent,  ignorance, I have said amiss, let it be forgiven and forgotten.

Borage, by the way, is one of the two sovereign remedies which Burton recommends for melancholy.  But you may want also to read Matthew Johnstone's wonderful Living With A Black Dog and I had a Black Dog, cartoons by a serious sufferer which can really lift your spirits.

Eco of greatness

I have been browsing Umberto Eco's on literature (the lower case letters are deliberate, as this is how it appears on the cover).  This is a collection of incidental writings, some very short, some longer, on a whole variety of subjects.  The common theme, he says in his introduction,is that "they are concerned with the problem of literature". This is not a formulation I find sympathetic - I do not think there is such a thing - but I have so enjoyed Eco's novels, particularly The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum, and some of his critical writings, including the auto-reflective Reflections on "The Name of the Rose", that I pushed on regardless.

The essays are so different, both in quality, weight and content, that I shall read them over a long period, just noting one or two here if I feel moved.  The first is On Some Functions of Literature, which is a title to fall short of.  And although my respect for Eco is unbounded, I feel several of these essays do fall short, that they are unanchored, that they might have been wonderful essays or lectures in a particular context, but seem weaker standing naked in a book.  For example, I found this first essay interesting, but it didn't begin to live up to the title: indeed, he admits as much, ending with "... one of the principal functions of literature lies in ... lessons about fate and death.  Perhaps there are others, but for the moment none springs to mind" !

On Some Functions of Literature is more a discussion about how widely we can interpret a text; Eco (like every other reader) is interested in two things: how wide an interpretation is permissible or valuable - and how much of the detail in or implicit in the text is useful or relevant.  I have a fairly narrow view on the first, and rather a wide one on the second, and I think (though it is not easy to be sure) that I take the opposite view to Eco in both cases!  He gives us some wonderful examples - summed up in this paragraph:

"Literary works encourage freedom of interpretation, because they offer us a discourse that has many layers of reading and place before us the ambiguities of language and of real life.  But in order to play this game, which allows every generation to read literary works in a different way, we must be moved by a profound respect for the intention of the text."

So you can read Shakespeare as anti-colonial, or anti-Fascist, or analytically psychological - but you cannot say that Hamlet marries Ophelia.  So you can worry about some detail which the author makes the crux of the story - like the position of the letter rack in Poe's Purloined Letter, but you can't build theses on things which the author clearly regards as irrelevant - like the date on which d'Artagnan joins the other three musketeers.  Personally, I have always been fascinated by the minutiae of novels and stories - so I read with interest Sutherland's essays, such as who betrays Elizabeth Bennet?  How do the Cratchits cook Scrooge's turkey? What sex is Lady Bertram's pug?  Why are there no public toilets in Casterbridge? But I fear that Eco would regard this as all rather irrelevant!  But we share a horror of novels being rewritten so that Anna Karenina does not commit suicide - it might be fun, but it's not beautiful, it's not true, and it's not the text.  He quotes Victor Hugo tellingly:

"Was it possible for Napoleon to win at Waterloo?  We reply no.  Why?  Because of Wellington?  Because of Blucher?  No.  Because of God."

Samuel Johnson and Edmund Burke

Samuel Johnson once remarked that "you could not stand five minutes beneath a shed while it rained with [Edmund Burke] without thinking him the greatest man that ever lived" - quoted variously by Boswell and Mrs Piozzi.  This occurred to me this afternoon when I sought shelter under a tree in a torrential downpour by the Thames.  Admittedly, I was sharing the exiguous shelter with an attractive young lady who lacked both umbrella and conversation, but the thought still came to me.  Johnson is often not read nowadays directly, but only through the medium of Boswell, either the Life of Johnson or Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides. But some things of Johnson's are indeed well worth reading.

Rasselas, for example, is a striking aphoristic work, describing the philosophic travels of Rasselas, a prince of Abyssinia, and is full of common sense, striking writing and humour - and ends with a "Conclusion in Which Nothing is Concluded" - there is much to think about, but, surprisingly for those who only know Johnson from his retorts to the dim and the slow, no one view is pushed down your throat, unless it be the proposition that action is superior to reflection.  Just a few lines from the story may show you what I mean:

"Marriage has many pains, but celibacy no pleasures."

"Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful."

Rasselas was published in the same year, 1759, as Voltaire's Candide, which it resembles although it is less savage in tone - but neither author had read the other's book.  And he wrote stimulatingly on the Lives of the English Poets, and penned a notable introduction to the plays of Shakespeare, which set the tone for our modern view of him as the greatest and most humane and understanding of all playwrights.  And the Dictionary is full of instruction, prejudice and fun: fopdoodle is an insignisicant wretch, and salmagundi is a mixture of chopped meat and pickled herrings!

And to come full circle, we should not forget Burke, subject of Johnson's pluvial encomium!  The greatest orator of his age - an age blessed with wonderful speakers - he moved out of tune with modern times when he opposed the French revolution; at the end of his life, young MPs cruelly called him "the dinner bell" and crept away when he rose to speak. Admittedly, the Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful is heavy going and just for the specialist.  But On the Present Discontents is still worth reading:

"It is an undertaking of some degree of delicacy to examine into the cause of public disorders. If a man happens not to succeed in such an enquiry, he will be thought weak and visionary; if he touches the true grievance, there is a danger that he may come near to

persons of weight and consequence, who will rather be exasperated at the discovery of their errors, than thankful for the occasion of correcting them. If he should be obliged to blame the favourites of the people, he will be considered as the tool of power; if he censures those in power, he will be looked on as an instrument of faction. But in all exertions of duty something is to be hazarded."

And Reflections on the Revolution in France, a European bestseller at the time, ought to be required reading for every thinking person.  Yes, its a conservative view of the world, though Burke was a Whig, but it's also a wonderfully modern liberal, parliamentary view, and written with an angel on the quill:

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the Queen of France, then the Dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in, glittering like the morning star full of life and splendour and joy. . . . Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded."

Johnson, incidentally, in spite of his own genius and his admiration of Burke, thought that "Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison".