Spoils of Poynton, Henry James

“How do you do Nothing?” asked Pooh, after he had wondered for a long time.

“Well, it’s when people call out at you just as you’re going of to do it ‘What are you going to do Christopher Robin?’ and you say ‘Oh, nothing,’ and then you go and do it.”

“Oh, I see,” said Pooh.

“This is a nothing sort of a thing that we’re doing now.”

“Oh, I see,” said Pooh again.

“It means just going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear, and not bothering.”

‘Yes, Piglet?’

‘Nothing,’ said Piglet, taking Pooh’s paw. ‘I just wanted to be sure of you.’

‘And he has Brain.’

‘Yes,’ said Piglet, Rabbit has Brain.’

There was a long silence.

‘I suppose,’ said Pooh, ‘that that’s why he never understands anything.’

Later, I remembered one of my favourite diary entries. I came across it years ago. I think it was in some compendium of British diaries I heard serialised on the radio. This particular entry wasn’t written by anyone otherwise remembered. It ran: ‘It rained today. it rained yesterday. I expect it will rain tomorrow.’

And in turn that reminded me of a story told to me once when I was in Wales. An American tourist despairing of the perpetual rain turns to a local lad and says:

‘Tell me young man does it always rain in Wales?’

‘I don’t know,’ the boy replies, ‘I’m only eight.’

I will need to hear a more persuasive argument than that it rains as much in some parts of Africa, to convince me that we don’t have enough water available to us in the UK to serve the needs of the population. I value my anecdotal evidence more highly.

Hockney after Claude

At first sight, the room of paintings inspired by the Sermon on the Mount by Claude seemed out of place. There are no figures in any of the other paintings here. A notice tells us that Hockney was attracted to Claude’s painting because of Claude’s use of space, and not for the New Testament theme. It isn’t a painting I know, even though I must have seen it at the Frick. But as this exhibit serves to remind us, how many of us look at anything as intently as some artists, some scientists do? There was an extraordinary scene in a recent documentary about Lucian Freud in which we were able to witness on film what several of his friends and relations described and had witnessed in life, his eyes suddenly opening wider as if to get in more of reality. A bigger lens is one way of getting in more light and information, a longer exposure is another way. Hockney looks for hours at the same scene until he can draw it from memory. Mostly the paintings in this exhibit are of scenes from nature, many recalled from memory after being intensely looked at by the artist day after day. But the Claude room came out his intense gaze of a single painting night after night at home. Never has he looked at a painting for longer, he says. The Frick original is dark. He loaded a copy onto his computer and lightened the blacks, as if removing layers of varnish. The painting is transformed. (The images at the head of this post show the original dark Claude and one of Hockney’s re-imagined versions.) I now begin to see what he saw and most of us miss in the original. The figures on the summit of Mount Tabor are related to the figures in the foreground and to the figures that wind up the mountain side. Claude collapses 60 miles of terrain into his canvas, getting in the river Jordan and the Dead Sea as well as lake Tiberias, Nazareth, and in the distance, Mount Lebanon. Presumably the painting is an attempt to paint not just nature but the world – nature and mankind unified together. The subject matter is a clue: this is the sermon in which Christ presents the Beatitudes. I don’t believe that Hockney isn’t also interested in this aspect of the painting. He even writes the word LOVE in capital letters above one variant painting. But even this ‘clue’ might have passed me by if this curious collection of paintings hadn’t come near the end of the exhibit. The monumental scale of Hockney’s new work allows him to concentrate on unifying form and colour: the shape the trees make together as if a single tree, the shapes the branches make one with the other as if they are waves in water, the druggy colours that unify sky and earth as if seen in a vision.  The exhibit is crowded, very crowded, and many there had had to queue for a couple of hours in the cold to get in. Others had come down from Yorkshire specially to see their landscape anew. But what was extraordinary was the feeling of happiness that filled the rooms, coming from the paintings, absorbed by the crowd, and radiated back into the room. If it isn’t too soppy to say: there was love in the air. I had been in two minds about going to this exhibit, wondering if the work might not be too much the same and too flat. But the work is transfiguring and so is the experience being in those crowded rooms filled with happy people. That’s why I know that Hockney was drawn to the Claude for reasons beyond its remarkable use of space. It is also a painting about the unifying power of love.

I think I spotted a joke. In several of the  vibrantly coloured paintings of the arrival of Spring in the woods at Woldgate Hockney incorporates a familiar road-sign: a warning sign depicting a horse and rider. In one of the signs the outline of the horse reminds me of the horse in Magritte’s the Blank Check, that famous optical illusion of a woman on horseback riding between trees, the figures cut into impossible strips but the sense that they are riding through the wood preserved nevertheless. I do hope I’m right. It’s a good joke.

Knocking on Heaven’s Door

How physics and scientific thinking illuminate the universe and the modern world

Lisa Randall

£20

Bodley Head

464pp

The Magic of Reality

How we know what’s really true

Richard Dawkins

£20

Bantam Press

272pp

Four hundred years ago this year, the Catholic Church ruled that indirect observation of nature was an acceptable way of gathering evidence of how things are.  This seemingly innocent judgment – coming in response to singular events of the year before – set science on a course from which it has not wavered.  In 1610 Galileo had constructed – out of a verbal description of a modish plaything seen in Holland – what we now call a telescope. Rather than pointing it across the street to spy on neighbours, Galileo swung his crudely made device up into the night sky and described what he saw there. In accepting that whatever fuzzy things he witnessed were evidence of something out there and not something conjured up by a couple of lenses set in an adjustable tube, the Church effectively defined and approved what we now think of as modern science.

Galileo was also one of the first scientists to use a microscope. Since his day, in their various technological re-imaginings, the telescope and microscope have extended our reach into the universe in both directions, to the largest and to the smallest regions of space.

In Knocking on Heaven’s Door – an outstanding survey of the latest developments in physics and cosmology – Lisa Randall describes with dry wit and ice-cool clarity how the feed-back loop of model-building, theory, experiment and technology has written the history of scientific progress.

The telescope has become the space observatory, like the Planck satellite launched in 2009, sent out to look for the faintest evidence of radiation left over from the Big Bang, and which is not due to deliver its best data for several more years yet. The microscope has become the particle collider, most famously the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, which again will not be operating at full power for some time to come, and produces so much data that it may take years before any definite claims can be made.

The LHC experiment is simple in outline. Two beams of protons moving in opposite directions are accelerated around a circular tunnel.  Out of the combined energy of protons colliding head-on, it is hoped that exotic and previously unobserved particles will be brought into fleeting existence. In the strange world of particle physics, the tiniest constituents of the fabric of reality come into view only by injecting and concentrating large amounts of energy into tiny regions of space. Even more curiously, this process conjures up the conditions that existed close to the beginning of the universe. The LHC allows physicists to witness the universe as it would have been about a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. (Bizarrely – and I’m running out of words of astonishment – the Planck satellite, seemingly looking in the opposite direction, further and further into the outer reaches of space, looks further and further back into time, and so it too is leading us back to the origins of the universe.)

It is easy to be overwhelmed by Big Science, but, as Randall points out, scientists don’t usually set out to answer the Big Questions, they more likely become obsessed about some small question that they then worry at tenaciously, sometimes for years. Einstein didn’t set out to re-describe gravity, he was trying to solve specific problems in the then new theory of electromagnetism. But his insights led first to his special theory of relativity, which in turn exposed the need for a new description of gravity. The general theory came after much effort 10 years later.

The irony of the LHC is that although it is enormous – 27 kilometres of tunnel 4 metres wide built deep underground housing 1232 magnets each 30 tonnes and 15 metres long, and though the beams of protons contained and accelerated by the magnets are hugely energetic – what is truly jaw-dropping is the fineness of the measurements being made. Individual proton collisions carry no more kinetic energy than two mosquitoes flying into each other, and even then most of the energy of the collision is carried forward with the rest of the beam as it makes its 11,000 circuits of the tunnel every second.

And every second there are a billion proton collisions to be recorded and then analysed. It was because CERN was generating vast amounts of data in earlier days that Tim Berners-Lee invented a way for scientists around the world to co-operate. This system of electronic co-operation became the world wide web.  The superconducting magnets used in colliders led to the development of magnetic resonance machines now a feature of most major hospitals. It is too early to say what spin-offs the LHC might generate, but at $9 billion, or the cost of a pint of beer for every European citizen for each year of construction, it looks like good value for money.

Out of years of data, evidence from just a handful of collisions of the right sort may be all that is needed to point current theory in a completely new direction. The evidence will certainly be indirect. It will come as complex statistical patterns of energy from cascades of decay products decaying in turn into yet other particles.  The history of physics is one of increasingly subtle and refined measurement of a reality that is captured by increasingly ingenious and indirect means. Fortunately, the game is likely to be never-ending. The universe is subtlest.

Randall, a professor at Harvard, has made and continues to make her own, often significant, contributions to the rarefied world of theoretical physics.  Somehow, she has also found time to write a book that anyone at all interested in science must read, and which everyone ought to read. This is surely the science book of the year.

Richard Dawkins’ latest book is a surprise. The man who is fast becoming the nation’s irascible teddy bear has written a delightful book for children (that may tempt parents, too, after lights out). The Magic of Reality is a charming and free-ranging history of science. Go back through the family photo album and meet your 170,000,000 greats-grandmother, or learn how we come down with flu.  Imaginatively chosen detail – did you know that there’s an Alaskan frog that spends winter frozen into a block of ice? – keeps the narrative lively. I wish there had been such a book when I was a schoolboy.  I would have devoured it, and pored over the beautiful illustrations. I would probably even have enjoyed Dawkins’ re-telling of various ancient myths that he has collected from cultures around the globe and throughout history. As an adult these sections feel like mild propaganda. But that’s OK; as a teenager I loved the Narnia books and they’re propaganda too.

Amazing timelapse filming from Randy Halverson in South Dakota

I had to look up the word eleemosynary, which means supported by charity. I can’t help feeling James thought of the word first and built the story up from there.

‘The doctrine goes as follows: everything in the world is alive, and nothing can be described as ‘dead’; every object thought of as inanimate, or inorganic, is only part of a vast organic whole beyond our comprehension, and it follows that the task of man, as one particle of this great organism, consists in preserving its life and the life of all its living parts. Therefore he considered it a crime to deprive anything of life, and he set himself up in opposition to war, the death penalty, and killing of any kind, of animals as well as human beings.’

Part III, Chapter 4

IV.xxxiv

The doubt hinted by Mr. Vincy whether it were only the general election or the end of the world that was coming on, now that George the Fourth was dead, Parliament dissolved, Wellington and Peel generally depreciated and the new King apologetic, was a feeble type of the uncertainties in provincial opinion at that time.

IV.xxxvii

However slight the terrestrial intercourse between Dante and Beatrice or Petrarch and Laura, time changes the proportion of things, and in later days it is preferable to have fewer sonnets and more conversation.

IV.xxxvii

“I remember them all,” said Will, with the unspeakable content in his soul of feeling that he was in the presence of a creature worthy to be perfectly loved. I think his own feelings at that moment were perfect, for we mortals have our divine moments, when love is satisfied in the completeness of the beloved object.

“I have tried to learn a great deal since we were in Rome,” said Dorothea. “I can read Latin a little, and I am beginning to understand just a little Greek. I can help Mr. Casaubon better now. I can find out references for him and save his eyes in many ways. But it is very difficult to be learned; it seems as if people were worn out on the way to great thoughts, and can never enjoy them because they are too tired.”

IV.xxxvii

Will was not without his intentions to be always generous, but our tongues are little triggers which have usually been pulled before general intentions can be brought to bear.

IV.xxxvii

“…Upon my word, I think the truth is the hardest missile one can be pelted with.”

IV.xxxviii

Will, the moment before, had been low in the depths of boredom, and, obliged to help Mr. Brooke in arranging “documents” about hanging sheep-stealers, was exemplifying the power our minds have of riding several horses at once by inwardly arranging measures towards getting a lodging for himself in Middlemarch and cutting short his constant residence at the Grange; while there flitted through all these steadier images a tickling vision of a sheep-stealing epic written with Homeric particularity. When Mrs. Casaubon was announced he started up as from an electric shock, and felt a tingling at his finger-ends. Any one observing him would have seen a change in his complexion, in the adjustment of his facial muscles, in the vividness of his glance, which might have made them imagine that every molecule in his body had passed the message of a magic touch. And so it had. For effective magic is transcendent nature; and who shall measure the subtlety of those touches which convey the quality of soul as well as body, and make a man’s passion for one woman differ from his passion for another as joy in the morning light over valley and river and white mountain-top differs from joy among Chinese lanterns and glass panels? Will, too, was made of very impressible stuff. The bow of a violin drawn near him cleverly, would at one stroke change the aspect of the world for him, and his point of view shifted—as easily as his mood. Dorothea’s entrance was the freshness of morning.

IV.xxxix

“That is a dreadful imprisonment,” said Will, impetuously.

“No, don’t think that,” said Dorothea. “I have no longings.”

He did not speak, but she replied to some change in his expression. “I mean, for myself. Except that I should like not to have so much more than my share without doing anything for others. But I have a belief of my own, and it comforts me.”

“What is that?” said Will, rather jealous of the belief.

“That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don’t quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil—widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.”

“That is a beautiful mysticism—it is a—”

“Please not to call it by any name,” said Dorothea, putting out her hands entreatingly. “You will say it is Persian, or something else geographical. It is my life. I have found it out, and cannot part with it. I have always been finding out my religion since I was a little girl. I used to pray so much—now I hardly ever pray. I try not to have desires merely for myself, because they may not be good for others, and I have too much already. I only told you, that you might know quite well how my days go at Lowick.”

“God bless you for telling me!” said Will, ardently, and rather wondering at himself. They were looking at each other like two fond children who were talking confidentially of birds.

“What is your religion?” said Dorothea. “I mean—not what you know about religion, but the belief that helps you most?”

“To love what is good and beautiful when I see it,” said Will. “But I am a rebel: I don’t feel bound, as you do, to submit to what I don’t like.”

“But if you like what is good, that comes to the same thing,” said Dorothea, smiling.

“Now you are subtle,” said Will.

IV.xxxix

Instead of wondering at this result of misery in Mr. Casaubon, I think it quite ordinary. Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self.

IV.xlii

50 mysterious photographs

I’ve been reading Jaron Lanier’s excellent book You Are Not a Gadget. He refers to this remarkable footage, which is, of  course, to be found on youtube. An octopus’s camouflage is so extreme that the boundary between body and environment disappears.

Even much stronger mortals than Fred Vincy hold half their rectitude in the mind of the being they love best. “The theatre of all my actions is fallen,” said an antique personage when his chief friend was dead; and they are fortunate who get a theatre where the audience demands their best.

III.xxiv

Looking at the mother, you might hope that the daughter would become like her, which is a prospective advantage equal to a dowry—the mother too often standing behind the daughter like a malignant prophecy—”Such as I am, she will shortly be.”

III.xxiv

“I should be ashamed to say that I loved a man who must always be hanging on others, and reckoning on what they would do for him. What will you be when you are forty? Like Mr. Bowyer, I suppose—just as idle, living in Mrs. Beck’s front parlor—fat and shabby, hoping somebody will invite you to dinner—spending your morning in learning a comic song—oh no! learning a tune on the flute.”

III.xxv

Think no unfair evil of her, pray: she had no wicked plots, nothing sordid or mercenary; in fact, she never thought of money except as something necessary which other people would always provide.

Of Rosamond

III.xxvii

“Only I was afraid you would be getting so learned,” said Celia, regarding Mr. Casaubon’s learning as a kind of damp which might in due time saturate a neighboring body.

III.xxviii

Mr. Casaubon had never had a strong bodily frame, and his soul was sensitive without being enthusiastic: it was too languid to thrill out of self-consciousness into passionate delight; it went on fluttering in the swampy ground where it was hatched, thinking of its wings and never flying.

III.xxix

Doubtless some ancient Greek has observed that behind the big mask and the speaking-trumpet, there must always be our poor little eyes peeping as usual and our timorous lips more or less under anxious control.

III.xxix

Lydgate rose, and Dorothea mechanically rose at the same time? unclasping her cloak and throwing it off as if it stifled her. He was bowing and quitting her, when an impulse which if she had been alone would have turned into a prayer, made her say with a sob in her voice—

“Oh, you are a wise man, are you not? You know all about life and death. Advise me. Think what I can do. He has been laboring all his life and looking forward. He minds about nothing else.— And I mind about nothing else—”

For years after Lydgate remembered the impression produced in him by this involuntary appeal—this cry from soul to soul, without other consciousness than their moving with kindred natures in the same embroiled medium, the same troublous fitfully illuminated life.

III.xxx

The right word is always a power, and communicates its definiteness to our action.

III.xxxi

POET AT WORK.’

From What Colour is the Sacred, Michael Taussig

Mr. Bulstrode had also a deferential bending attitude in listening, and an apparently fixed attentiveness in his eyes which made those persons who thought themselves worth hearing infer that he was seeking the utmost improvement from their discourse. Others, who expected to make no great figure, disliked this kind of moral lantern turned on them. If you are not proud of your cellar, there is no thrill of satisfaction in seeing your guest hold up his wine-glass to the light and look judicial. Such joys are reserved for conscious merit. Hence Mr. Bulstrode’s close attention was not agreeable to the publicans and sinners in Middlemarch…

from Chapter XIII

I at least have so much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe.

XV

Lydgate did not mean to be one of those failures, and there was the better hope of him because his scientific interest soon took the form of a professional enthusiasm: he had a youthful belief in his bread-winning work, not to be stifled by that initiation in makeshift called his ‘prentice days; and he carried to his studies in London, Edinburgh, and Paris, the conviction that the medical profession as it might be was the finest in the world; presenting the most perfect interchange between science and art; offering the most direct alliance between intellectual conquest and the social good. Lydgate’s nature demanded this combination: he was an emotional creature, with a flesh-and-blood sense of fellowship which withstood all the abstractions of special study. He cared not only for “cases,” but for John and Elizabeth, especially Elizabeth.

XV

Also, the high standard held up to the public mind by the College of which which gave its peculiar sanction to the expensive and highly rarefied medical instruction obtained by graduates of Oxford and Cambridge, did not hinder quackery from having an excellent time of it; for since professional practice chiefly consisted in giving a great many drugs, the public inferred that it might be better off with more drugs still, if they could only be got cheaply, and hence swallowed large cubic measures of physic prescribed by unscrupulous ignorance which had taken no degrees.

XV

and it had already occurred to him that books were stuff, and that life was stupid.

Lydgate as a schoolboy, XV

Does it seem incongruous to you that a Middlemarch surgeon should dream of himself as a discoverer? Most of us, indeed, know little of the great originators until they have been lifted up among the constellations and already rule our fates. But that Herschel, for example, who “broke the barriers of the heavens”—did he not once play a provincial church-organ, and give music-lessons to stumbling pianists? Each of those Shining Ones had to walk on the earth among neighbors who perhaps thought much more of his gait and his garments than of anything which was to give him a title to everlasting fame: each of them had his little local personal history sprinkled with small temptations and sordid cares, which made the retarding friction of his course towards final companionship with the immortals.

XV

On one point he may fairly claim approval at this particular stage of his career: he did not mean to imitate those philanthropic models who make a profit out of poisonous pickles to support themselves while they are exposing adulteration, or hold shares in a gambling-hell that they may have leisure to represent the cause of public morality.

[No change there then.]

XV

He had two selves within him apparently, and they must learn to accommodate each other and bear reciprocal impediments. Strange, that some of us, with quick alternate vision, see beyond our infatuations, and even while we rave on the heights, behold the wide plain where our persistent self pauses and awaits us.

XV

“In my opinion,” said Lydgate, “legal training only makes a man more incompetent in questions that require knowledge a of another kind. People talk about evidence as if it could really be weighed in scales by a blind Justice. No man can judge what is good evidence on any particular subject, unless he knows that subject well. A lawyer is no better than an old woman at a post-mortem examination. How is he to know the action of a poison? You might as well say that scanning verse will teach you to scan the potato crops.”

XVI

Nobody can know everything. Most things are ‘visitation of God.’

[Mr Vincy]

XVI

And Rosamond could say the right thing; for she was clever with that sort of cleverness which catches every tone except the humorous. Happily she never attempted to joke, and this perhaps was the most decisive mark of her cleverness.

XVI

Many men have been praised as vividly imaginative on the strength of their profuseness in indifferent drawing or cheap narration:—reports of very poor talk going on in distant orbs; or portraits of Lucifer coming down on his bad errands as a large ugly man with bat’s wings and spurts of phosphorescence; or exaggerations of wantonness that seem to reflect life in a diseased dream. But these kinds of inspiration Lydgate regarded as rather vulgar and vinous compared with the imagination that reveals subtle actions inaccessible by any sort of lens, but tracked in that outer darkness through long pathways of necessary sequence by the inward light which is the last refinement of Energy, capable of bathing even the ethereal atoms in its ideally illuminated space. He for his part had tossed away all cheap inventions where ignorance finds itself able and at ease: he was enamoured of that arduous invention which is the very eye of research, provisionally framing its object and correcting it to more and more exactness of relation; he wanted to pierce the obscurity of those minute processes which prepare human misery and joy, those invisible thoroughfares which are the first lurking-places of anguish, mania, and crime, that delicate poise and transition which determine the growth of happy or unhappy consciousness.

[A curious almost mystical passage.]

XVI

On this ground it was (professionally speaking) fortunate for Dr. Minchin that his religious sympathies were of a general kind, and such as gave a distant medical sanction to all serious sentiment, whether of Church or Dissent, rather than any adhesion to particular tenets. If Mr. Bulstrode insisted, as he was apt to do, on the Lutheran doctrine of justification, as that by which a Church must stand or fall, Dr. Minchin in return was quite sure that man was not a mere machine or a fortuitous conjunction of atoms; if Mrs. Wimple insisted on a particular providence in relation to her stomach complaint, Dr. Minchin for his part liked to keep the mental windows open and objected to fixed limits…

XVIII

That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.

[One of my favourite quote from the whole novel. I gave it to Carol Shields, and she accepted it, as the epigraph to her last novel, Unless.]

XX

To share lodgings with a brilliant dinner-companion, or to see your favorite politician in the Ministry, may bring about changes quite as rapid: in these cases too we begin by knowing little and believing much, and we sometimes end by inverting the quantities.

Still, such comparisons might mislead, for no man was more incapable of flashy make-believe than Mr. Casaubon: he was as genuine a character as any ruminant animal, and he had not actively assisted in creating any illusions about himself. How was it that in the weeks since her marriage, Dorothea had not distinctly observed but felt with a stifling depression, that the large vistas and wide fresh air which she had dreamed of finding in her husband’s mind were replaced by anterooms and winding passages which seemed to lead nowhither? I suppose it was that in courtship everything is regarded as provisional and preliminary, and the smallest sample of virtue or accomplishment is taken to guarantee delightful stores which the broad leisure of marriage will reveal. But the door-sill of marriage once crossed, expectation is concentrated on the present. Having once embarked on your marital voyage, it is impossible not to be aware that you make no way and that the sea is not within sight—that, in fact, you are exploring an enclosed basin.

XX

We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves: Dorothea had early begun to emerge from that stupidity, but yet it had been easier to her to imagine how she would devote herself to Mr. Casaubon, and become wise and strong in his strength and wisdom, than to conceive with that distinctness which is no longer reflection but feeling—an idea wrought back to the directness of sense, like the solidity of objects—that he had an equivalent centre of self, whence the lights and shadows must always fall with a certain difference.

XXI

No nature could be less suspicious than hers: when she was a child she believed in the gratitude of wasps and the honorable susceptibility of sparrows, and was proportionately indignant when their baseness was made manifest.

[of Dorothea]

XXII

“I suppose I am dull about many things,” said Dorothea, simply. “I should like to make life beautiful—I mean everybody’s life. And then all this immense expense of art, that seems somehow to lie outside life and make it no better for the world, pains one. It spoils my enjoyment of anything when I am made to think that most people are shut out from it.”

“I call that the fanaticism of sympathy,” said Will, impetuously. “You might say the same of landscape, of poetry, of all refinement. If you carried it out you ought to be miserable in your own goodness, and turn evil that you might have no advantage over others. The best piety is to enjoy—when you can. You are doing the most then to save the earth’s character as an agreeable planet. And enjoyment radiates. It is of no use to try and take care of all the world; that is being taken care of when you feel delight—in art or in anything else. Would you turn all the youth of the world into a tragic chorus, wailing and moralizing over misery? I suspect that you have some false belief in the virtues of misery, and want to make your life a martyrdom.” Will had gone further than he intended, and checked himself. But Dorothea’s thought was not taking just the same direction as his own, and she answered without any special emotion—

XXII

“Oh dear,” said Dorothea, taking up that thought into the chief current of her anxiety; “I see it must be very difficult to do anything good. I have often felt since I have been in Rome that most of our lives would look much uglier and more bungling than the pictures, if they could be put on the wall.”

XXII

The last sentence was spoken with an almost solemn cadence, and Will did not know what to say, since it would not be useful for him to embrace her slippers, and tell her that he would die for her: it was clear that she required nothing of the sort; and they were both silent for a moment or two…

XXII

I.x

Mrs. Renfrew, the colonel’s widow, was not only unexceptionable in point of breeding, but also interesting on the ground of her complaint, which puzzled the doctors, and seemed clearly a case wherein the fulness of professional knowledge might need the supplement of quackery.

I.x

For my own part, I like a medical man more on a footing with the servants; they are often all the cleverer. I assure you I found poor Hicks’s judgment unfailing; I never knew him wrong. He was coarse and butcher-like, but he knew my constitution.

[Mrs. Cadwallader]

I.x

Mr. Lydgate had the medical accomplishment of looking perfectly grave whatever nonsense was talked to him, and his dark steady eyes gave him impressiveness as a listener.

I.x

He took a wife, as we have seen, to adorn the remaining quadrant of his course, and be a little moon that would cause hardly a calculable perturbation.

[of Mr Casaubon]

I.xi

But we are frightened at much that is not strictly conceivable.

I.xii

There’s one thing I made out pretty clear when I used to go to church—and it’s this: God A’mighty sticks to the land. He promises land, and He gives land, and He makes chaps rich with corn and cattle.

[Mr Featherstone]

I.xii

“Pray do not go into a rage, Mary,” said Rosamond, mildly as ever.

“If your mamma is afraid that Fred will make me an offer, tell her that I would not marry him if he asked me. But he is not going to do so, that I am aware. He certainly never has asked me.”

“Mary, you are always so violent.”

“And you are always so exasperating.”

“I? What can you blame me for?”

“Oh, blameless people are always the most exasperating. There is the bell—I think we must go down.”

“I did not mean to quarrel,” said Rosamond, putting on her hat.

“Quarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarrelled. If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?”

I.xii

[Rosamund contemplating Lydgate:]

And here was Mr. Lydgate suddenly corresponding to her ideal, being altogether foreign to Middlemarch, carrying a certain air of distinction congruous with good family, and possessing connections which offered vistas of that middle-class heaven, rank; a man of talent, also, whom it would be especially delightful to enslave: in fact, a man who had touched her nature quite newly, and brought a vivid interest into her life which was better than any fancied “might-be” such as she was in the habit of opposing to the actual.

I.xii

Genius, he held, is necessarily intolerant of fetters: on the one hand it must have the utmost play for its spontaneity; on the other, it may confidently await those messages from the universe which summon it to its peculiar work, only placing itself in an attitude of receptivity towards all sublime chances. The attitudes of receptivity are various, and Will had sincerely tried many of them. He was not excessively fond of wine, but he had several times taken too much, simply as an experiment in that form of ecstasy; he had fasted till he was faint, and then supped on lobster; he had made himself ill with doses of opium. Nothing greatly original had resulted from these measures; and the effects of the opium had convinced him that there was an entire dissimilarity between his constitution and De Quincey’s. The superadded circumstance which would evolve the genius had not yet come; the universe had not yet beckoned. Even Caesar’s fortune at one time was, but a grand presentiment. We know what a masquerade all development is, and what effective shapes may be disguised in helpless embryos.—In fact, the world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome dubious eggs called possibilities. Will saw clearly enough the pitiable instances of long incubation producing no chick, and but for gratitude would have laughed at Casaubon, whose plodding application, rows of note-books, and small taper of learned theory exploring the tossed ruins of the world, seemed to enforce a moral entirely encouraging to Will’s generous reliance on the intentions of the universe with regard to himself. He held that reliance to be a mark of genius; and certainly it is no mark to the contrary; genius consisting neither in self-conceit nor in humility, but in a power to make or do, not anything in general, but something in particular. Let him start for the Continent, then, without our pronouncing on his future. Among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous.

I.x

[Casaubon on music]

“I never could look on it in the light of a recreation to have my ears teased with measured noises,” said Mr. Casaubon.

I.vii

“He has got no good red blood in his body,” said Sir James.

“No. Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass and it was all semicolons and parentheses,” said Mrs. Cadwallader.

“Why does he not bring out his book, instead of marrying,” said Sir James, with a disgust which he held warranted by the sound feeling of an English layman.

“Oh, he dreams footnotes, and they run away with all his brains. They say, when he was a little boy, he made an abstract of ‘Hop o’ my Thumb,’ and he has been making abstracts ever since. Ugh!

[of Casaubon, of course]

I.viii

Young Ladislaw did not pay that visit to which Mr. Brooke had invited him, and only six days afterwards Mr. Casaubon mentioned that his young relative had started for the Continent, seeming by this cold vagueness to waive inquiry. Indeed, Will had declined to fix on any more precise destination than the entire area of Europe. Genius, he held, is necessarily intolerant of fetters: on the one hand it must have the utmost play for its spontaneity; on the other, it may confidently await those messages from the universe which summon it to its peculiar work, only placing itself in an attitude of receptivity towards all sublime chances. The attitudes of receptivity are various, and Will had sincerely tried many of them. He was not excessively fond of wine, but he had several times taken too much, simply as an experiment in that form of ecstasy; he had fasted till he was faint, and then supped on lobster; he had made himself ill with doses of opium. Nothing greatly original had resulted from these measures; and the effects of the opium had convinced him that there was an entire dissimilarity between his constitution and De Quincey’s. The superadded circumstance which would evolve the genius had not yet come; the universe had not yet beckoned. Even Caesar’s fortune at one time was, but a grand presentiment. We know what a masquerade all development is, and what effective shapes may be disguised in helpless embryos.—In fact, the world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome dubious eggs called possibilities. Will saw clearly enough the pitiable instances of long incubation producing no chick, and but for gratitude would have laughed at Casaubon, whose plodding application, rows of note-books, and small taper of learned theory exploring the tossed ruins of the world, seemed to enforce a moral entirely encouraging to Will’s generous reliance on the intentions of the universe with regard to himself. He held that reliance to be a mark of genius; and certainly it is no mark to the contrary; genius consisting neither in self-conceit nor in humility, but in a power to make or do, not anything in general, but something in particular. Let him start for the Continent, then, without our pronouncing on his future. Among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous.

I.x

Here and there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving heart-beats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances, instead of centring in some long-recognizable deed.

Prelude

Sane people did what their neighbors did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.

I.i

Poor Dorothea! compared with her, the innocent-looking Celia was knowing and worldly-wise; so much subtler is a human mind than the outside tissues which make a sort of blazonry or clock-face for it.

I.i

We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, “Oh, nothing!” Pride helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts—not to hurt others.

I.vi

This last quote makes me think of this from Proust:

‘Anyway – doesn’t matter.’ One may hear this statement, which is analogous to a reflex, spoken by all who have a touch of self-esteem, in circumstances which can vary from the trivial to the tragic, and which reveals, as it did on the present occasion, how much the thing which is said not to matter does matter to the speaker; and in the tragic vein, the first thing to come to the lips of any man who takes a certain pride in himself, if his last hope has just been dashed by someone’s refusal to help him out, may well be the brave, forlorn words: ‘Oh well, it doesn’t matter, not to worry – I’ll think of something else,’ the something else which is the alternative to what ‘does not matter’ being sometimes the last resort of suicide.

Chapter LXXII

A remark made by Dorothea

Robert Frost reading one of his own.

Paul Dirac, quoted in The Book of Universes by John Barrow

Paul Dirac, quoted in The Book of Universes by John Barrow

Amusing perhaps, but Dirac obviously hasn’t read much poetry. His description of science also works as a description of the best poetry; which might explain why his friend (whoever it is) can do physics and write poetry.

Mrs. Cadwallader said, privately, “You will certainly go mad in that house alone, my dear. You will see visions. We have all got to exert ourselves a little to keep sane, and call things by the same names as other people call them by. To be sure, for younger sons and women who have no money, it is a sort of provision to go mad: they are taken care of then. But you must not run into that. I dare say you are a little bored here with our good dowager; but think what a bore you might become yourself to your fellow-creatures if you were always playing tragedy queen and taking things sublimely. Sitting alone in that library at Lowick you may fancy yourself ruling the weather; you must get a few people round you who wouldn’t believe you if you told them. That is a good lowering medicine.”

“I never called everything by the same name that all the people about me did,” said Dorothea, stoutly.

“But I suppose you have found out your mistake, my dear,” said Mrs. Cadwallader, “and that is a proof of sanity.”

Dorothea was aware of the sting, but it did not hurt her. “No,” she said, “I still think that the greater part of the world is mistaken about many things. Surely one may be sane and yet think so, since the greater part of the world has often had to come round from its opinion.”

A transcendent moment from Bach’s St Matthew Passion spotted by Karl Richter but missed by many other conductors.

I don’t know who said it, or where I came across this remark, but I like it. I could claim it as my own.

Philip Roth

Arthur C Clarke

He is worried about climate change he tells us. He is particularly worried that the public is being won over by the climate naysayers. He meets one of the academic naysayers over a cup of tea. They agree that Americans don’t know how to make tea. The academic puts his point of view and Sir Paul listens attentively. It’s all very affable and civilised. For an hour we follow Sir Paul about as he listens to the arguments on both sides, while he muses on the nature of science and the idea of consensus. Even if the evidence for climate change is undeniable, as I must believe it to be, no one would change their mind either way on the basis of this program, which was a curious outcome given that the main point Sir Paul wanted to make was that scientists need to sharpen up their act if they are to compete with nasty bloggers and the press.

We tend to underestimate the sophistication of humans en masse. I think the public does largely understand that the climate has changed because of man-made disruption. I think what really concerns the public is how we deal with this issue. Do we allow scientists to try and fix the problem in any way they think fit? Or do we change the way we live, which may mean re-assessing what latitude we give to scientists? We are grateful for the comfort of our modern lives – it is after all the gift of technology – but overuse of technology has got us into this mess. This is not the fault of science or scientists, I’m not suggesting that, but the success of science has enabled a growing world population to live fuller lives, and that has come at great cost to the planet. To think that technology may get us out of this mess gives many of us serious pause for thought. Scientific articles that put forward solutions that mess with the temperature of the oceans, or require the shooting of chemicals into the atmosphere, send chills up my spine. It’s this kind of scientific arrogance disguised as scientific optimism that the public is mistrustful of. And something of this sinister aspect is what permeated last week’s Horizon documentary. Science may well come up with a solution. An alternative to fossil fuel would be welcome. The divide between science and the public is wide. Sir Paul is right to recognise this as a serious issue. But scientists need to understand that it isn’t only about educating the public. The public may well have much to offer in return.

I was particularly struck by the scene in which Sir Paul meets the journalist James Delingpole (who probably is regretting his decision to take part). Sir Paul asks him at one point what he would do if he had cancer. Would he go against a consensus view if his life was at stake? Delingpole understandable was annoyed and hadn’t a ready response. It did feel like a low trick to bring up cancer. But more than that, by making the issue personal, Sir Paul accidentally strikes at what is outside the scientific method, and he unwittingly undermined his own argument. If I had cancer I might well go against a consensus view if the alternative was to put my trust in an some unconventional and persuasive specialist I might have happened on along the way. When something as personal as mortality is in the air, that’s exactly when the scientific method is most undone. We know that there are laws of averages, but when it is our own life that is at stake we are as likely to draw on all our resources of intuition and human experience.

After death the brain was pulled out of the body via the nose, and discarded. For the Egyptians the brain appeared to serve no purpose. It was all about the heart.

Lewis, Mrs (Louisa), actress, JB to call Louisa in journal, 92; receives JB, 92-93; JB visits, 96; JB’s increased feelings for, 97; JB discusses love with, 103-104; JB anticipates delight with, 105; JB lends two guineas to, 106; disregards opinion of world, 106; discusses religion wth JB, 110; JB entreats to be kind, 110; uneasiness of discourages JB, 113-114; JB declares passion for, 116; promises to make JB blessed, 116; JB sees every day, 119; JB talks freely of love connections, 123; JB promises to support child, should one be born, 123; makes assignation with JB, 125; consummation with JB interrupted, 126; promises to spend night with JB, 128; JB likes better and better, 130; felicity delayed, 136; to stay with JB Wednesday night, 141; agrees to go to Hayward’s with JB, 145; account of her birth, unhappy marriage, and separation, 145; spends night with JB at Hayward’s, 148-151; JB has tea with, 152; JB afraid of a rival, 155; JB feels coolness for, 156; JB resolves to keep affection alive, 160; JB incredulous at infection from, 167-168; JB enraged at perfidy of, 170; JB discusses infection with and takes leave of, 171-172; JB asks for his two guineas back, 188; returns JB’s guineas, 202; mentioned, 14, 107, 125

My other favourite index entry is from Hilary Spurling’s biography of Ivy Compton-Burnett. The very first entry reads:

Abroad, IC-B’s dim view of

I’d love to know in each case who it was prepared these indexes.

from The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas

Is there not just a hint of bitterness here? I think of Schoenberg and i think perhaps she has a point, and then I think of Janacek and Debussy, both of whom could be said to have begun afresh, and I think she is wrong. But I like the way she says it regardless, and that is surely what matters more.

Groucho Marx

But then when I look on Wikipedia, I see that Groucho Marx probably didn’t say it. It’s a sentence used in linguistics to show how syntactically ambiguous sentences can get.

As always when I am in London it is BBC Radio 3 that comes on. This morning at some point Messaien’sThe Palpable Sounds of the Dream stirs my consciousness, the perfect piece to experience in that hinterland between two living worlds. It is the fifth prelude in a set of eight that Messaien wrote when he was 20 years old. He described this fifth prelude as ‘superimposing a blue-orange mode with ostinato and chord cascades on a violet-purple mode treated like a brazen gong…’

Messaien experienced synaesthesia. The music is beautiful and speaks for itself. His description in words, though beautiful, is also obscure, and doesn’t add anything, except to reinforce the distance between the synaesthesiac and the rest of us. Even amongst synaesthesiacs I assume the music would be differently experienced, as different colours. But I wonder. We tend to assume that humans  experience colours much the same way, partly because we can agree by pointing. There are exceptions of course: colour blindness and the heightened response of synaesthesiacs among them. If synaesthesia were merely a heightened sensual experience of amalgamation then there ought to be some concensus of experience, but I don’t believe that that is the case. Do synaesthesiacs get together and compare notes?

Messaien was 20 in 1928, three years before he became organist at the Eglise de la Sainte-Trinité in Paris. He remained organist there until his death in 1992. He was of course a devout Catholic.

Consider that last fact alongside this sentence, which I take from the current edition of the New Scientist: ‘Though it is often joked that no one really understands quantum theory, it delivers a description of our cosmos that eclipses anything religion can provide.’ It’s from the editorial, which makes the remark even more maddening. I have little time for organised religion but I’m not so naive that I don’t see that most of the experience of being human lies outside the scientific method. The scientific method may get to include some of what we are, but the arrogance that supposes we know anything very much is staggering. I get angry when scientists berate the rest of us for our human-centred arrogance. More enlightened scientists don’t do this. Unfortunately the kind that do tend to get the column inches. But then journalism is a crude instrument and doesn’t do subtlety.

I have to be careful. When I say ‘most of the experience of being human,’ I’m already falling into a materialist trap, that there is a  sum total of human experience that can be measured and compared.

I’m passionate about science but I don’t like this kind of scientific arrogance and reductionism.

Science is a mere 400 years old, or a couple of thousand years at most. As a tool for understanding what it is to be human it is still a sledge hammer. Fortunately there is also Messaien, a fine tool.

I like this story too:  Mrs Thatcher’s private secretary was in touch with the Queen’s equivalent, meaning to ensure that these two grand ladies of a certain age, attending that night the same function, should not turn up in the same outfit. The Queen’s equerry (or whatever) wrote back saying that her prime minister need not concern herself since the Queen ‘never notices what other people are wearing’.

And this: The Queen’s car is idling at traffic lights when a police convoy goes by. Who’s that?, the Queen asks her driver. Princess Michael, comes the reply. Ah, says Her Majesty, she’s too grand for us.

This from today’s article: ‘A palace spokesman said: “This is not a snub. It is just that the Queen has not yet felt the need to meet Miss Middleton’s parents.”‘

Priceless. How does she keep a straight face?

And if not funny, then really rather sinister. I feel the same way when I come across almost any remark made on behalf of the Pope by his own; not so much out of touch as evidence of some other reality, where the laws of nature – or at least the laws of human psychology – work quite differently than they do here where the rest of us live.

The Pope and the Queen: two of a pair. The Queen does it better.

Jim Lowe’s zine is called Time is the Problem and can be got hold of  by writing to him at P O Box 152, Elizaville, New York 12523. Unfortunately there are only five of them, produced at a rate of one a year from 2003 to 2007.  I wish there were a thousand pages of his thoughts, illuminating biographical anecdotes and collected quotations, but until he feels moved to produce more, I will have to make do with these few slim offerings.

I like a writer who makes for good company. I’m reading Pepys’ Diary and Middlemarch. Both Pepys and George Eliot are the best of companions. I mean to offer up the compendium of quotations I’m gradually compiling as I work my way through these volumes, but if I don’t start soon, I’ll have left it too late and they’ll stay locked and private in my notebooks. I also mean to get back to A Thousand and One Nights, to which I’d become somewhat addicted, until, that is, I got to a section of tiresome animal stories. There are three huge volumes, each weighing so much the set has to stay put, and so I only read it when I’m in the UK. I’ve still not done with the first volume.

Interviewing Lisa Randall at the Rubin Museum

http://www.guardian.co.uk/crosswords/cryptic/25200

From Chapter X

Genius, he held, is necessarily intolerant of fetters: on the one hand it must have the utmost play for its spontaneity; on the other, it may confidently await those messages from the universe which summon it to its peculiar work, only placing itself in an attitude of receptivity towards all sublime chances. The attitudes of receptivity are various, and Will had sincerely tried many of them. He was not excessively fond of wine, but he had several times taken too much, simply as an experiment in that form of ecstasy; he had fasted till he was faint, and then supped on lobster; he had made himself ill with doses of opium. Nothing greatly original had resulted from these measures; and the effects of the opium had convinced him that there was an entire dissimilarity between his constitution and De Quincey’s. The superadded circumstance which would evolve the genius had not yet come; the universe had not yet beckoned. Even Caesar’s fortune at one time was, but a grand presentiment. We know what a masquerade all development is, and what effective shapes may be disguised in helpless embryos.–In fact, the world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome dubious eggs called possibilities. Will saw clearly enough the pitiable instances of long incubation producing no chick, and but for gratitude would have laughed at Casaubon, whose plodding application, rows of note-books, and small taper of learned theory exploring the tossed ruins of the world, seemed to enforce a moral entirely encouraging to Will’s generous reliance on the intentions of the universe with regard to himself. He held that reliance to be a mark of genius; and certainly it is no mark to the contrary; genius consisting neither in self-conceit nor in humility, but in a power to make or do, not anything in general, but something in particular. Let him start for the Continent, then, without our pronouncing on his future. Among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous.

Even the appendices of this book are fascinating. Though why I say that I don’t know. Appendices are often the best parts of a book. Ancient deposits of buried butter occasionally turn up in Irish bogs. (Well they did then, I don’t know if they still do.) Bog butter is very old butter that has turned to adiopocere. Under the right -damp – conditions animal flesh can turn to adiopocere too. Adiopocere is a kind of fossilised fat. Buckland speculates that bog butter may in fact be the  product over time of some bog-stranded cow. In the appendix, however, he notes that in fact bogs have the opposite effect on flesh. The acidic conditions tend to preserve it. Bog butter turns out to be indeed just butter. The ancient Irish had a pension for rancid butter. They used to bury it, but sometimes must have forgotten where.

I’ve always been interested in science. As an editor at Fourth Estate  I worked with many science writers: Simon Singh, Matt Ridley, Peter Singer, V S Ramachandran, Peter Forbes, Marcus Du Sautoy, Henry Gee, Timothy Taylor, James Gleick, Eric Drexler, and Dava Sobel, among them. Some of these writers are also actual scientists. I am not a scientist of course, and it’s over thirty years since I read mathematics, and then history and philosophy of science at university. I never thought I’d end up writing a science book myself. Not in a million years (or even a billion years now that we know what a really long time looks like). Despite my science-based education, I’ve always felt like an outsider from the world of the arts daring to peek in. I haven’t had a mathematical thought since I left university, and even during those years long gone, I spent most of my time reading novels and going to the opera. (Mathematics is the perfect subject for the lazy student.) I like that thing Auden said about scientists, that whenever he found himself in their company he felt like some shabby curate who had stumbled into a drawing-room full of dukes. There’s something about the way scientists think that can be really intimidating. It’s hard to live in a world in which even one’s most casual remarks are liable to be scrutinised for logical inconsistency.

What really interest me, and interests very few scientists, is what it is that they are doing when they do science, and whether it leaves room for anything else. Scientists are just happy to get on with what it is that they do. And very successful they are at it too. But I’m interested in the philosophy of what that is. On the whole, scientists despise philosophers. As the biologist Steve Jones once remarked: ‘philosophy is to science what pornography is to sex.’ He’s not being complimentary.

Science really got going 401 years ago when Galileo first raised a telescope to the Heavens and described what he saw there. What he saw was a reality made out of things that move. Science tells us what the stuff of reality is made out of, and what we mean by motion. It turns out that it is hard to answer these questions. The material of reality takes us on a voyage down to ‘virtual’ particles that exist (if they can be said to exist) in a so-called vacuum of writhing energy. And what we mean by motion takes us in both directions: out into a possibly infinite universe in which all motion is related to the motion of light in a four-dimensional space-time continuum, and back down to a quantum world in which the motion of even a single atom is unpredictable (and where space and time may exist in 11 dimensions). But for all the subtlety of our current scientific theories, the story of creation can be reduced to a single sentence: The universe is a patch of radiation that expanded. Alternatively, we can say that the universe is a patch of radiation that evolved. The expansion and evolution are equivalent terms. Evolve is merely what radiation does in an expanding universe. Various fields, including the famous Higgs field, explain how radiation becomes matter. As the expanding space cools down, these primeval parts of matter coalesce into atoms, and eventually under the force of gravity into large agglomerations that ignite, and which we call stars. Some of the larger stars explode and spew heavier elements into the universe for the first time. Simple compounds like water and carbon dioxide emerge, and other more complicated molecules like hydrocarbons. And if the conditions are just so on small planets that are not too cold, and not too hot, with just the right sort of gravitational stability, and protected from damaging radiation by a strong enough magnetic field, then just possibly these conditions are fair for life to emerge. These so-called goldilocks conditions have existed at least once in the universe, and perhaps exist prolifically across  it. The jury is still out on that one. An opinion either way has to be a matter of belief at this point.

Science is about separating and naming, and looking and describing. Science isolates phenomena and names them before it attempts to describe them. The world is a world ‘out there’ of separateness. This is very different from, say, a Buddhist description of nature, which tells us that the separation is an illusion. Curiously, the different stances aren’t as far apart as it seems. What science does is relate separate phenomena together into descriptions, or theories. Science advances by relating more and more things together into a unified whole. The methodology is one thing, and what comes out of the methodology something else altogether. If you like, the methodology is the illusion, and the wholeness the reality. Such a philosophical understanding of what it is that science does, also helps to explain why science can make us feels so isolated from nature. The separation is the starting point, but not where the end point. Ultimately, science has to account for us – we human observers -  at the end (as far as we can tell) of a chain of complexity that stretches from the Big Bang to what  we call ‘now,’ the present moment. After four hundred years science has only just begun to understand how to address such complexity as we are.

Science has a methodology that it uses to approach the truth. Observation, measurement, theory and technology feed into each other into a positive feedback loop that we call progress. Finer measurement leads to deeper theorising. Theories come and go, each encompassing the one that precedes it, showing where the previous theory holds and why it breaks down. The current theory is always truer than the one that came before because it has greater explanatory power. Science moves from true to truer. It’s great strength is that it never has to use the demon word ‘truth’. There is no such thing in science as ‘the truth’ only theories that are truer than what has gone before.

In his wonderful The God Delusion Dawkins distinguishes between deists, theists and atheists. For atheists there is nothing other than the evolution of stuff. Theists believe that God created and continues to interfere in his creation. And for deists, God created the universe and stepped back from his creation. Dawkins writes of his youthful attraction to deism, before his later adherence to full-blown atheism. In typical Dawkins fashion he is most scornful of those who claim to be agnostic. He tells us that science has no need of a creator only an explanation of the universe’s starting conditions. Well, I don’t see how this gets us very far. The starting conditions merely get more elusive, as indeed does the universe itself, the more we know about those conditions.

God simply has got nothing to do with a scientific description of the universe, the only real question is whether one believes, or not ,that a scientific description is all that there is.

Well, there’s art. Here’s Peter Campbell writing in the London Review of Books about the current exhibition of Henry Moore at Tate Britain:

‘Yet it is the sense one has when faced with ancient or exotic things that there is something beyond what can be grasped by mere inspection, if only some priest or shaman could give the correct interpretations, that makes the obscure impressive. We don’t necessarily need to know what things mean, but we do like to think they mean something: we want to know what Stonehenge was for.

No modern sculpture is embedded in systems of belief of that sort. With Moore you must look to your own responses for explanations of what you see and feel.’

Agnosticism is the acknowledgement that there things  – most things I would say – that are beyond what can be understood, and always will be.  A certain kind of rationalist will put aside the unknown and be happy to wait for a rational, scientific description later. I say,  if we wait too long we might forget what the questions are that we don’t know the answers to. I’m happy to stand up for agnostics.

‘Yet it is the sense one has when faced with ancient or exotic things that there is something beyond what can be grasped by mere inspection, if only some priest or shaman could give the correct interpretations, that makes the obscure impressive. We don’t necessarily need to know what things mean, but we do like to think they mean something: we want to know what Stonehenge was for.

No modern sculpture is embedded in systems of belief of that sort. With Moore you must look to your own responses for explanations of what you see and feel.’

London Review of Books 25 March 2010 Peter Campbell reviewing an exhibition of Henry Moore at Tate Britain.

‘Drops dripped. Quiet talk went on. Horses neighed and scuffled. Someone snored.’

Wonderful stuff.

The death of Andrei is of course a highlight. I was shocked to hear him say the words Piti, piti, and boom, boom. I immediately heard the Prokofiev music that accompanies these words in the opera, without having been aware what was going on in the opera. I’d assumed they were Prokofiev’s invention and not Tolstoy’s. Such an odd and miraculous passage both in the novel and in the opera.

I’ve got behind. Perhaps I won’t say anything about reading Pnin. Disappointing. There I’ve said something. Too clever by half. There’s something else.

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle was recommended by a friend and all I can say is that I wish I’d written it myself, or that I’d read it as a child. Loved it. Amazing what  writers for children can get away with.

I read all 620 pages of American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld. Didn’t mean to but couldn’t put it down.

And I read a Canadian novel that my paperback publisher Stephanie Sweeney gave to me, and for the life of me I can’t remember what it’s called, which ist errible of me but not untypical. I left my copy with my mother and can’t check just at the moment. It has a really wonderful opening, and again I devoured all 480 pages of it in a day or two.

I read Tolstoy’s last short story Hadji Murat. It could have been written yesterday the style is so fresh and the content so relevant.

And I never got back about finishing Proust again. My memory wasn’t entirely at fault. Marcel does not go back to venice, but I had forgotten that physical travel is not the only kind of travel available to him. He does go back in memory as he steps on the threshold just before the long amazing last scene called le bal de tetes.

‘Oah, thatt is nothing. I am good enough Herbert Spencerian, I trust, to meet little thing like death, which is all in my fate, you know. But – but they may beat me.’

p319 in my old Macmillan edition, which has, incidentally wonderful illustrations by Kipling’s father. And yes, I have the spelling correct in that passage.

And then comes this on the next page:

‘It was process of Evolution, I think, from Primal Necessity, but the fact remains in all its cui bono. I am, oh, awfully fearful!’

Interesting, to me at last, to see how strongly Darwin was in the air even in Edwardian times, just before it went out of favour. There’s something like this in The Water Babies but of course that’s much closer to the time. here’s the bit from the Water Babies:

You must not talk about “ain’t” or “can’t” when you speak of this great wonderful world mind you, of which the wisest man knows only the very smallest corner, and is, as the great Sir Isaac Newton said, only a child picking up pebbles on the shore of a boundless ocean.

You must not say that this cannot be, or that that is contrary to nature. You do not know what Nature is, or what she can do; and nobody knows; not even Sir Roger Murchison, or Professor Owen, or Professor Sedgwick, or Professor Huxley, or Mr Darwin, or Professor faraday, or Mr Grove, or nay other of the great men whom good boys are taught to respect…’ p53/4

‘…Wise men are afraid to say that there is anything contrary to nature, except what is contrary to mathematical truth; for as two and two cannot make five, and two straight join twice, and a part cannot be as great as a whole, and so on (at least, so it seems at present): but the wiser men are, the less they talk about “cannot’. P54

I have to say both these novels are among the most peculiar I’ve ever read. Mind you I’m also reading Selma Lagerlof’s The Saga of  Gosta Berling and that’s pretty odd too.

Here’s another quote from the Water Babies:

p56 ‘Did not learned men, too, hold, till within the last twenty-five years, that a flying dragon was an impossible monster? And do we not now know that there are hundreds of them found fossil up and down the world? People call them Pterodactyles: but that is only because they are ashamed to call them flying dragons, after denying so long that flying dragons could exist.’

‘Wise men know that their business is to examine what is, and not to settle what is not.’

And this amused me too:

‘Being quite comfortable is a very good thing; but it does not make people good. Indeed, it sometimes makes them naughty, as it has made the people in America.’ P157

I met Steve Jones at the Dartington Festival last year, and I have to say I was rather terrified that he’d come to my talk. He didn’t. At breakfast he couldn’t have been more delightful company, but still I was terrified. And now I see he would not approve my interest in things philosophical. It’s amazing how vituperative some scientists are about philosophy. There were a number of such comments in Susan Blackmore’s book of interviews with cognitive scientists. I think I’ll start a collection of them. There’s something important here. Richard Dawkins is critical too in his The God Delusion. I like scientists who just get on and do what they do, but there is room to pause and think about what it is that they do. In fact it has become critical that we do. Just as we are now asking whether economics has to be done differently (the answer may be that it can’t) we are also asking whether scientific progress has to happen differently (maybe it can’t). Both methodologies require growth, and we now realise with a start that the earth is a limited resource.

Dawkins distinguishes between deists, theists and atheists. Atheists, there is nothing other than evolution of stuff. Theists, God created and continues to interfere in his creation. Deists, God created the universe and stepped back from his creation. Dawkins talks of the attraction of Deism, and tells us how close he came to such a view himself. He tells us that science has no need of a creator only an explanation of the universe’s starting conditions. Well, I don’t see how this gets us very far. The starting conditions merely get more elusive, as indeed does the universe itself, the more we know about those conditions. God simply has nothing to do with a scientific description of the universe, the only question is whether one believes or not that a scientific description is all that there is. I never hear such materialists ever come out and actually declare that they don’t believe in anything other than the scientific method but this must be their belief. What I sometimes hear is an argument that science isn’t about belief, but then that begins to sound suspiciously philosophical.

By the way, I feel I don’t have to have a view either way. I feel that makes me truly agnostic, and also makes me a creature on whom Dawkins pours the greatest scorn. Not that that matters, I like what he’s doing and as far as Biblical literalism goes, it is blown out of the water. Their own side ought to have been able to deal with it though. Ironic the job should have been left to a scientist. If I was part of some organised religion I would be open-jawed at anyone who claimed it was possible to take the Bible literally. Christ spoke in parables for God’s sake.

‘Mrs Hopewell had no bad qualities of her own but she was able to use other people’s in such a constructive way that she never felt the lack.’

The use of that ‘but’ is genius.

‘Joy, whose constant outrage had obliterated every expression from her face…’

And how about this for comic timing:

Mrs Hopewell excused this attitude because of the leg (which had been shot off in a hunting accident when Joy was ten). It was hard for Mrs Hopewell to realize that her child was thirty-two now and that for more than twenty years she had had only one leg. She thought of her still as a child because it tore her heart to think of the poor stout girl in her thirties who had never danced a step or had any normal good times. her name was really Joy but as soon as she was twenty-one and away from home, she had had it legally changed. Mrs Hopewell was certain that she had thought  and thought until she had hit upon the ugliest name in any language. Then she had gone and had the beautiful name, Joy, changed without telling her mother until after she had done it. Her legal name was Hulga.’

Joy, we discover, has a PhD in philosophy. Her mother ‘picked up one of the books the girl had just put down and opening it at random, she read, “Science, on the other hand, has to assert its soberness and seriousness afresh and declare that it is concerned solely with what-is. Nothing – how can it be for science anything but a horror and a phantasm? If science is right, then one thing stands firm: science wishes to know nothing of nothing. Such is after all the strictly scientific approach to Nothing. We know it by wishing to know nothing of Nothing.” These words had been underlined with a blue pencil and they worked on Mrs Hopewell like some evil incantation in gibberish. She shut the book quietly and went out of the room as if she were having a chill.’

Wagner failed, however,  to tell us what we might then take to come down from the Bach, and  today I’m stumbling out of O’Connor’s landscape, disoriented and as if trying to remember how to see in colour.

All the way to the last page I had no idea how she was going to pull off an ending. I imagined myself as the novelist, having no idea what to do. She tells us on the first page that Tarwater’s great uncle has been buried, and did not perish in a fire as Tarwater believed. We know that Tarwater will find the burial mound. We know that something else must happen but we cannot imagine what. That O’Connor does manage to pull off what she does (I won’t spoil it by saying how the novel ends, anyway it is  much wrought in the language, and would seem banal said straight out) is a measure of her genius. There’s a life just out which I might take a look at. She died aged only 39 I see.

I wonder if it is because some novels are great – in fact why we claim them as great; not just greater but somehow transcendent of the rest – that we read in them whatever it is that currently interests or exercises us. A hundred pages in and it is beginning to creep into my awareness that this is a novel about among many things freewill, which is what I’ve been reading about elsewhere these last few months. Will Tarwater act freely? Can he, or anyone? Will he fulfill the prophecy of his Great Uncle or will he choose the world as represented by the schoolteacher, his uncle? It’s more complicated than that. There are layers of choosing and not choosing. Is to follow his great uncle also to follow God, or must he wait to hear God’s words himself? Can he follow both uncles, and if he did could he said to be any freer than merely following the one over the other? What would an independently made choice look like?

On page 104  Tarwater has just found his way to his schoolmaster uncle who is deaf and is hung about with machinery to aid his hearing. Tarwater, who is 14, says of his uncle’s device: ‘Do you think in the box…or do you think in your head?’ The whole problem of consciousness summed up in the passing remark of a peculiar boy!

Jane tells me that I would not have had to investigate far to find Proust’s first reference to the Arabian Nights. It comes in the first pages of the first volume. And yet though I have just now looked I cannot find the reference, so perhaps Jane’s memory has played tricks too. (I doubt it, and wait for page numbers.)

Reading the Arabian Nights I see like a penny dropping that Proust’s diversions and digressions are licences given to him out of his love for these stories. Delayed gratification is a strong force, and apparently a strong early indicator in children of later adult mental health. (Those who learn to delay are better off. Often literally so.)

Night at the opera last night: finally got to see Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre, an opera I have loved on CD. Very disappointed when Covent Garden cancelled its production during its years of crisis. Particularly pleasing then to experience a world class performance at an opera house which has been going through its own years of crisis. Perhaps ENO is coming out the other side.

Ligeti says he meant in this opera to abolish time; to turn time into space. The clocks stop. Does everything resonate? Again this seems a propos as I begin to read In Search of Lost Time, a novel which ultimately finds the artist, after thousands of pages of digression, ready to begin writing the very novel that  the reader has just completed. No time passes. Things vibrate sympathetically. My dinner partner and I agree that we regret the modern use of the word empathy, when sympathy must be what is meant. Empathy is not possible, it’s the tragedy of being human. Sympathy is our best consolation.

At dinner afterwards we wondered if there is such a force as unconditional love. In somewhat Socratic fashion we started from the premiss that there is not, but quickly came  – I think it shocked us both – to the opposite conclusion. The conditions we beset around such love are invariably conjured in an attempt to mitigate the despairing realisation that when we do love unconditionally, we really do.

Iain Burnside trailed his next week’s program (the one I’m on) twice today. I learned for the first time that he is calling it ‘Little and Large’. It turned my blood cold hearing my name. I suppose there are people in world who just love to be on the radio live.

It gives you a much better idea of the work as a whole to read from the beginning than to jump around in some selection. A major part of the delight of these stories is how one story is embedded into another, and that into another and so on. I’ve just read the three individual stories of how three one-eyed men all arrived on the same night at the home of three beautiful and bizarre young women, but this is already a story so embedded in other stories that I can no longer remember where the story began or what loose ends are left dangling (if any). There was a moment in the last of these three stories when the protagonist met ten one-eyed men, and I wondered if we might then hear each of their stories. I had thought this boxed set was perhaps going to remain as beautiful wallpaper in my study, but now I think there’s a good chance that in the next couple of years I may read the lot. No chance of taking it on a plane alas. It was reading Proust that first got me (and my friend and Proust-reading partner Jane) interested in the Arabian Nights. They pop up in his great long novel from time to time, though having said that I can’t remember where, and now I wonder if mostly they make an appearance in the last volume, the volume we are about to re-read. Jane and I are making our second go through Proust (and my third). I think we both know now that Proust is for life (well our lives anyway), even given the shocking discovery that the second part of volume five is a drastic falling off. Volume five is made out of the loosely connected parts The Prisoner and The Fugitive. The Prisoner is undoubtedly one of the highlights of the whole cycle, just as The Fugitive is undoubtedly its low point. It really isn’t possible to read a novel this long and get an idea of even its architecture the first time round. Each time I’m enjoying the novel as a whole more, and feeling more confident that I can say where its strengths and weaknesses lie: this does not lessen the pleasure so much as focus it. Now the great passages arrive like jewels hung in ghastly night, or like arias in some great opera (and all operas, even the greatest have their longeurs). Of course, I am not infallible. I was convinced the last time round that there were many more longeurs in the novel than in fact there are. Sometimes a longeur turns out to be this reader’s lack of concentration. I’m pretty confident this isn’t the reason I have it in for The Fugitive. The author doesn’t seem to be in control of his material at this point. I’m sure he would have revised it heavily if he had lived or had the energy. The Fugitive was published posthumously. The chapters here don’t hang together. In fact I’m suspicious that thee are chapters when there have been no such shortish chapters in previous volumes. Despite many references to  his long held desire to be in Venice, and the obstacles that get in the way of fulfilling that desire, suddenly in The Fugitive we finish one chapter only to find ourselves in the next in Venice without a by or leave.  I do hope form returns with the last volume. My memory is that it is one of the finest volumes of all. I’m eager to test my memory, and create new memories to be further tested in the future. (Why is that  Proust trails pretentiousness. To say that I am reading Proust for the third time sounds utterly pretentious. But Proust is hugely entertaining, wise, profound. And long. He has to be read over and again. Apparently Virginia Woolf oncee wrote that Remembrance of Things Past was the greatest novel ever written. Recent scholarship suggests that she cold not have read more than the first couple of volumes. This has been used against her. But really! That’s still over a thousand pages. Surely enough for the pronouncement to hold.)

Keats in a letter to George and Georgiana Keats, 21 December 1817

Friday 2 January 1931:
Here are my resolutions for the next three months…
First to have none. Not to be tied. Second to be free and kindly with myself, not goading it to parties: to sit rather privately reading in the studio…
To care nothing for making money. As for Nelly, to stop irritation by the assurance that nothing is worth irritation: if it comes back, she must go. Then not to slip this time into the emptiness of letting her stay.
[Nelly was the Woolfs' cook and the bane of Virginia Woolf''s existence. It was as if the power relationship had been reversed. Woolf felt herself terrorised by Nelly.]

Despairingly on 17th February 1931 Woolf writes in her diary:
Nelly comfortable installed for life.

Reading James Joyce’s Ulysses (as I was last year) I began to make a list of words unfamiliar to me.

Resile, to return to a former position
Dundrearies, long flowing sideburns
Catamenic, monthly

Then followed:

Baisemoin
Agendath
Inwit
Kalipedia

but I quickly ran out of patience. I can’t be opening the dictionary every two lines: so these words remain as mysteries.

Virginia Woolf in a letter to Roger Fry, on reading Proust and then Joyce:

‘One has to put the book down with a gasp. The pleasure becomes physical – like sun and wine and grapes and perfect serenity and intense vitality combined. Far otherwise is it with Ulysses: to which I bind myself like a martyr to a stake, and have thank God, now finished – My martyrdom is over. I hope to sell it for 4 pounds 10 shillings.’

Quite.

I downloaded all 26 CDs of the uncut spoken books edition of Ulysses. What could I have been thinking? Will I ever listen to it? Actually did listen to a couple of minutes the other day and wonder if this might be the only way to approach this monster (monstrosity?)

A few things I enjoyed in Ulysses (and yes, yes there are many wonderful scenes, but the totality…It’s like higher Irish blarney. A lot of drunk Irish men going on and on. Incomprehensibly. Oh, if only there had been more of the Blooms):

Joyce invents the World’s worst twelve books including: Let’s all chortle (hilaric) and Who’s who in space (astric)

‘It is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be born.’

‘Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eon of the gods.’

‘Ineluctable modality of the visible.’ [Sounds great but what does it mean?]

‘Beaglebaying’

The American country singer Dolly Parton (b1946) may be historically unique for having lent both parts of her name to science. A parton is what Richard Feyman named  a mysterious particle out of which protons and neutrons are made. Murray-Gellmann named the same particle the quark, the name that stuck, a word found in James Joyce’s novel Finnegans Wake that describes the sound a seagull makes. The first cloned mammal was a sheep named Dolly (because cloned out of a breast cell). She was born on July 5th 1996 and died February 14th 2003. Sheep can live 20 years. The average life expectancy is 10 to 12 years.

A music drama performed over three days and a preliminary evening

Running time 14-16 hours (depending on the conductor: Keilbert ultra fast, Goodall ultra slow.

Synopsis

Wotan and Fricka are about to move into their lovely new home, but first they must pay the contractors, the giant builders Fasolt and Fafner (bros.), who are, even now, at the door. Why Wotan thought it would be a good idea to offer payment in the form of Fricka’s sister Freia is unclear. But a contract is a contract and the builders leave with their payment.
You only ever get what you pay for. It might have seemed like a bargain at the time, but the true cost of this contract is becoming apparent. For reason Wotan had forgotten that Freia is the keeper of the magic golden apples, without which the Gods will age and die. With Freia gone the Gods begin to lose their life-force.
Re-negotiating a contract is always tricky, particularly after the fact, but the giants agree to return Freia in exchange for the famed golden hoard of the Nibelungens (a tribe of royal dwarfs who live over Nidelheim way).
The Nibelungens are represented in the Ring by two tiresome brothers, named Alberich and Mime. At the beginning of the cycle we find Alberich in the process of stealing the eponymous ring from the three Rhinemaidens – Woglinde, Wellgunde and Flosshilde – an act that confers on him all the world’s power.
Alberich’s techie brother Mime has made a magic helmet called the Tarnhelm that allows anyone wearing it to change form, or even to become invisible. Wotan teases Alberich, saying that he does not believe the helmet has the powers professed of it. Oh yes it does, says Alberich. Oh no it doesn’t, says Wotan. Oh yes it does, says Alberich, turning himself into a mouse. Too late! Wotan seals the mouse-shaped Alberich into a little box and heads off back to Valhalla with ring, golden hoard and mouse-shaped dwarf. So much for being in possession of all the power of the world. Now Wotan has it.
Alberich does, at least, manage to curse the ring as it is taken from him. It is this curse, rather than the power of the ring itself, that ultimately brings about the downfall of gods, and hence of everything.
Wotan has it in mind that he will hand over the hoard yet hold on to the cursed ring. The giants aren’t so easily fooled, and insist that the ring is part of the Nibelungen hoard and theirs by rights. It’s less than two hours into the cycle and the giants have become the fourth owners of the ring.
The cursed ring spells TROUBLE. It’s not long before the brothers are fighting. One of them kills the other, always hard to remember which. The surviving brother moves into a cave, and turns himself into a dragon. The ring remains here, in the dragon’s protection, until the third opera: Siegfried.

The Ring was written over a period of 26 years from 1848 to 1874. For the first five years Wagner devoted himself to writing the libretto, beginning at the end of the story, then called the Death of Siegfried. He worked his way backwards to Das Rheingold, at which point he began to write the music. (Wagner did not call his operas operas but music dramas.) In 1857 Wagner got to the end of the second act of Siegfried, at which point he put the score to one side while he wrote Tristan and Isolde (the work that set classical music on its modern course) and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg his only comic opera. (Aside: In James Joyces’s Ulysses the author invents the world’s worst twelve books, among them: ‘Let’s all chortle (hilaric) and Who’s who in space (astric)’. Might I suggest, Wagner the comedian (farcical).)
When Wagner returned to the Ring twelve years later, his sound world had changed. The third act of Siegfried is generally taken to be a highlight of the cycle, the first two acts are the least successful parts of the cycle. Though Ring productions invariably sell out, sometimes years in advance, it is always possible to get tickets to Siegfried, except perhaps at Bayreuth where tickets are offered on a lottery basis.

Bayreuth: the wooden opera house that Wagner built as a place of pilgrimage. Situated in the town of Bayreuth, where there is nothing to distract the Wagnerite, or any one else for that matter, which is why Wagner chose it. Only the works of Wagner are performed here. The seats are wooden benches. The audience is locked in (yes, actually locked in) for the duration of each act. Das Rheingold plays for 2 and a half hours without a break. The first act of Gotterdammerung is about 2 hours long. Wagner acknowledged that his music is addictive. He constructed a three-day cold turkey cure consisting entirely of Bach cantatas.

Wagner had initially intended the Ring to end with the redemption of the Gods, but after the twelve-year interregnum/writer’s block he decided to end instead with their annihilation. Optimism is replaced by pessimism. The Death of Siegfried was re-titled Gotterdammerung, somewhat tweely translated into English as the Twilight of the Gods.
Erda’s early gloomy prophecy comes true. The Gods are indeed doomed.
Erda is the goddess of the earth. The nine unruly Valkyrie sisters – breast-plated, horn-helmeted, spear-carrying Brunnhilde, Waltraute, Helmwige, Gerhilde, Siegrune, Schwertleite, Ortlinde, Grimgerde, Rossweisse – are her children by the promiscuous Wotan. Erda is also mother – though not by Wotan – to the Norns, the three sisters who weave the fabric of reality that Erda predicts will soon unravel.
The Ring opens with a famous 136-bar chord of E flat major that sounds for almost 4 minutes, and represents the creation of the universe. Wagner pushed harmony to the limits of lushness but here prefigures minimalism. The last opera of the cycle heralds the demise of the universe by sounding out the chord of E flat minor.
It is generally agreed that the masterpiece of the cycle – along with Act III of Siegfried already mentioned – is the second opera, Die Walkure, the story of twins Siegmund and Sieglinde. Their father is, unknown to them, Wotan, who else? Mother is some mortal or other.
It is a dark and stormy night. Siegmund seeks shelter. Sieglinde takes him in. She is married to Hunding, who as luck would have it is just the person Siegmund is fleeing. Hunding returns and vows to kill Siegmund in the morning, but rules of etiquette dictate that until then he is a guest in the house. (Etymological aside: host and hostile have the same root.) The twins tell their stories, which turn out to be the same story. They recognise themselves, by which time they have fallen in love. By morning Sieglinde is pregnant.
Meanwhile, back at Valhalla, Fricka – one of her goddess duties is protector of the marriage bed – has tuned in to Hunding’s prayer for vengeance. She is disgusted by the incestuousness of the twins.
Wotan is lord of all the Gods but he is also a hen-pecked husband. And yet though the marriage is sexless, Wotan loves Fricka.
The plot of the ring doesn’t hold together, as is clear after even the most cursory reading. The story is ridiculous and riddled with inconsistencies but the marriage of music and words  – as music drama – is so powerful on the symbolic level that it quickly sank deep into the dark creative consciousness of the 20th century.
Wotan had hatched some complicated scheme, begun in the mists of time, to thwart Alberich’s curse, but now his plans have been thwarted by his wife.
Brunnhilde is mortified that her beloved father should be so distressed. She vows to stand in as Siegmund’s defender and as Wotan’s will. Wotan shakes his spear at her. He tells her that his will is that Siegmund must die. She quakes. She agrees to toe the line, even though she knows that Wotan has forfeited his will to Fricka’s.
When it comes to it, Brunnhilde is so moved by the mortal love Siegmund expresses for Sieglinde that she defies Wotan. Siegmund  refuses to accompany Brunnhilde to the halls of dead heroes if that means he can never again be with Sieglinde. Brunnhilde is amazed that anyone might forgo deathlessness for oblivion. She begins to understand that love is more powerful even than death. Wotan intervenes and kills Siegmund (and Hunding). Brunnhilde flees. By the end of the second opera Brunnhilde has been put into a deep sleep as punishment, though she does manage to strike a bargain:  a hero who is willing to cross the threshold of fire will be permitted to wake her and win her heart. Wotan and Brunnhilde declare their deep love for each other, and he sings his famous farewell to her: Lebe wohl.
That hero is, of course, going to be Siegfried, the child swelling in Sieglinde’s belly.

From here on in the Ring cycle begins to fail as drama. Wagner has painted himself into a corner. How could Wagner create a greater hero in Siegfried than Siegmund? He can’t, he couldn’t and he didn’t. Siegfried is meant to be a child of nature – a kind a holy innocent, better characterised as Parsifal in Wagner’s final opera – but here he more often comes across as an ingrate. We even begin to feel sympathy for Mime, who has brought him up. Mime’s motives may not be honorable, but Siegfried doesn’t know that – at least not at first.
Mime is in possession of the fragments of Siegmund’s sword, which he continually tries and fails to re-forge.
The third opera of the cycle plods through the life of the hero. The sword is re-forged by Siegfried from instructions delivered to him by a woodbird. Siegfried kills the dragon, takes the ring. Mime is killed by his brother. Wotan wanders in and out disguised as Der Wanderer. In the third act Brunnhilde is awoken. Siegfried and Brunnhilde declare their love for each other.

In the last opera the plot thickens and darkens. Hagen is introduced: the progeny of Alberich and a mortal woman. He is the dark counterpoint to Siegfried. The Tarnhelm comes to the fore once again. (I hate that Tarnhelm, my companion said to me the last time I saw the cycle. I agreed.)
A love potion is brought into play to trick Siegfried into a love match with Hagen’s half sister Gutrune: a device recapitulated from Tristan and Isolde. Oh it all gets too tedious. Siegfried is killed. He has a weak spot it turns out. Funny no one mentioned it before. It is his back. He is not protected there because, as a hero, he would never flee an enemy. Brunnhilde tortured by his apparent love for Gutrune reveals this secret.
The body of the hero is carried down the Rhine in a famous sequence of music. Brunnhilde takes back the ring that her former lover had once placed on her finger. In a final gesture, she immolates herself, riding onto the pyre astride Siegfried’s horse, Grane. In the last sequence of sung music she makes her farewells to the world and to her horse, declaring her love for Siegfried. She was once a deathless god, but now she, too, willingly embraces oblivion. And all for love.
The banks of the Rhine burst. Valhalla is destroyed, and all the world with it. Hagen reaches out for the ring with a last cry, but the Rhinemaidens rise up to reclaim it. The opera finishes as it began, as a portrait of nothingness.

And while I remember, my friend Tim tells me that the use of the word ‘quiver’ by Virginia Woolf in The Waves and Stella Gibbons in Cold Comfort Farm may mean less than I think. He told me that one of his chief memories of Constance Garnett’s translation of Anna Karenina is of her use of the word quiver, and how Anna was forever to be found in this condition. I suppose that translation must be of the same period. I’ll check on the date. Clever Stella Gibbons must just have been up on the word’s then trendiness. (I just tried to find a date for a Garnett’s translation. It seems to have been published in 1901, thirty years before The Waves, so perhaps I’m right after all.)

The flight from Boston to Provincetown is how travel ought to be all the time, and presumably is for a fortunate few. There was only me and the pilot (Molly). Admittedly the plane only seats a maximum of nine passengers, but still, it was an unforgettable experience. Even I, a nervous flier, could enjoy a flight made under these ideal conditions.  The sky was so clear, and the light so pure, we appeared to be merely skimming the water. The sun was beginning to set, the waves sparkled, the air was as still as could be. The grubbiness of the translatlantic flight was quickly cast off and I could feel the energy of approaching Provincetown feeding me as if intravenously: and who is it say that it wasn’t feeding me even more directly: at that molecular interface where our neurons jiggle and dance with the molecules of the rest of the universe.

The tide is going out, the sky is the palest blue, streaked at the horizon with  bands of colourless clouds, the canvas of the sky seemingly left unpainted there, and the slightest breeze blows as if perfectly judged for optimum human comfort. In otherwords:  it is a perfect day, and I intend to do nothing other than be in it, which is not going to be difficult. Now, yesterday, four hours into the flight across the Atlantic, that’s when it is most apparent how difficult it is to live in the moment. Buddhists tell us that they learn how to suffer extremes of cold and heat not because they wish to suffer but because they mean to be comfortable in all conditions. Me, I’ll just try and avoid the extremes.

‘…that pleasure [of reading] is so great that one cannot doubt that without it the world would be a far different and a far inferior place from what it is. Reading has changed the world and continues to change it. When the day of judgment comes therefore and all secrets are laid bare, we shall not be surprised to learn that the reason why we have grown from apes to men, and left our caves and dropped our bows and arrows and sat round the fire and talked and given to the poor and helped the sick – the reason why we have made better shelter and society out of the wastes of the desert and the tangle of the jungle is simply this – we have loved reading.’
Virginia Woolf from Essays Volume 5: 1929  to 1932

I mean to spend more time with Virginia Woolf’s non-fiction. Who could not love someone who writes in her diary:

Tuesday 17 February 1931:
‘And I feel us, compared with Aldous and Maria [Huxley], unsuccessful. They’re off today to do mines, factories…black country; did the docks when they were here; must see England. They are going to the Sex Congress at Moscow, have been in India, will go to America, speak French, visit celebrities – while I live here like a weevil in a biscuit.’

And who does not think that Mrs Dalloway is a masterpiece?
But I have been reading The Waves (published in 1931, around the time she was writing that diary entry, and that essay). It is written in a sort of high incantatory style, and by time I reached the words ‘the end’ I wanted to throw the book across the room.
I was eager to read the novel because rather to my surprise I was thrilled by Katie Mitchell’s production for The National, and which I saw when it was touring in New York. I’d heard such mixed reactions to her work that I was pretty much convinced I was going to be a naysayer; which ought to be a warning against what has become almost irresistible: having an opinion about everything. So much of ordinary everyday exchange is made up out of opinions dubiously grounded. But what is the alternative: to remain silent?
My friend Cy left at the interval, having been made so incandescent with rage she won’t talk about the experience even now months later. I had gone under duress but was quickly mesmerised by Katie Mitchell’s theatrical magic. Woolf herself called the novel a ‘playpoem’ and it has found its best expression in Katie Mitchell’s adaptation. The theme of the novel is of the underlying oneness of Nature, not just of the one-ness of the consciousness of its six main characters, and of Percival, the 7th and absent character (absent in that we never enter his interior monologue as we do the other six in turn and turn again), and who in his absence affects deeply the lives of the other six. (He dies about half way through the novel.) I feel Woolf must have been influenced by the ferment of the ideas from the 20s around how to interpret quantum physics: that a unified reality seems to underpin Nature, out of which the illusion of separate things mysteriously emerges. In the novel, the sea is a metaphor for that underlying connectedness:

‘”Yet these roaring waters,” said Neville, “upon which we build our crazy platforms are more stable than the wild, the weak and inconsequent cries that we utter when, trying to speak, we rise; when we reason and jerk out those false sayings, ‘I am this; I am that!’ Speech is false…”‘

‘But we who live in the body see with the body’s imagination things in outline…’

For me it is not enough to declare that the characters are all meant to sound the same. That is of little comfort to the reader, with readerly expectations. And even then perhaps all would have been well if I were at all drawn to that ‘one’ voice. For me the interior monologues are self-absorbed maunderings.
Katie Mitchell brought the novel alive by concentrating on this philosophical aspect of the novel – its oneness – and uses it to fire her theatrical imagination. We were made to see  in what way the material world might be an illusion. The fabric of reality dissolved around us. In the centre of the stage was a screen on which a film was being shown. The film, however, was being constructed in front of our very eyes by a group of actors and a studio filled with props. At one point in the film we ‘saw’ a woman standing on a cliff top, leaning forward over the precipice looking out at a blue sky, the wind blowing through her hair. Away from the screen, however, we could also see how the illusion was being constructed, how the fabric of reality is woven out of parts. We see one actor playing the woman, but since on screen we only see her head and upper body it hardly matters what else she is wearing. Another actor (now prop assistant) holds up a painted blue board to represent the sky, while another prop assistant (and actor) wafts a piece of stiff card in order to create enough of a disturbance of the air to blow the performing actor’s hair back.
I loved every minute of the show. It was continually inventive, often moving, though I seem to remember, as the novel is, never funny. On the whole I don’t like negative criticism, but I feel Woolf is great enough that her failures might at least be pointed up. As my friend S pointed out, ‘the trouble with The Waves is that it isn’t nourishing.’

Of course it has its moments:
‘I am immeasureable; a net whose fibres pass imperceptibly beneath the world. My net is almost indistinguishable from that which it surrounds. It lifts whales – huge leviathans and white jellies, what is amorphous and wandering; I detect, I perceive.’

or

‘Yet like children we tell each other stories, how tired I am of phrases that come down beautifully with all their feet on the ground! Also, how I distrust neat designs of life that are drawn upon half sheets of note-paper. I begin to long for some little language, such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on the pavement.’

but a little of this sort of thing goes a long way. I also liked: ‘But we – against the brick, against the branches, we six, out of how many million millions, for one moment out of what measureless abundance of past time and time to come, burnt there triumphant. The moment was all; the moment was enough.’ Except that the million millions spoils the effect. Given that she talks of the six, she must mean human beings and there have been nothing like even a single million million humans even through the whole of history. Arguably she could be referring to all life-forms and that might put her in the right ball-park. But perhaps I’m becoming pedantic out of irritation.

Woolf seems to be quite aware of the difficulties she has to overcome. I can’t help but feel that when she has a character say: ‘I have filled innumerable notebooks with phrases to be used when I have found the true story, the one story to which all the phrases refer. But I have never yet found the story. And I begin to ask, Are there stories?’ she knows that her own novel suffers for lack of narrative impulse. And we can only nod in weary agreement when she writes: ‘Yet like children we tell each other stories, how tired I am of phrases that come down beautifully with all their feet on the ground! Also, how I distrust neat designs of life that are drawn upon half sheets of note-paper. I begin to long for some little language, such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on the pavement.’

There are many passages of true bathos:

‘My being only glitters when all its facets are exposed to many people. Let them fail and I am full of holes, dwindling like burnt paper. Oh, Mrs Moffat, Mrs Moffat, I say, come and sweep it all up.’
[Did she really have to call the servant Mrs Moffat? If this were a comic novel, I’d say how brilliantly done.]

‘Now that lovely veil has fallen. I do not want possessions now. (Note: an Italian washerwoman stands on the same rung of physical refinement as the daughter of a English duke.)’
[Is that so? I wonder if the Italian washerwoman would agree?]

‘I open a little book. I read one poem . One poem is enough.
O western wind…
O western wind, you are at enmity with my mahogany table and spats, and also, alas, with vulgarity of my mistress…’

and

‘”Life, how I have dreaded you,” said Rhoda, “oh, human beings, how I have hated you! How you have nudged, how you have interrupted, how hideous you have looked in Oxford Street, how squalid sitting opposite each other staring in the Tube!…”‘
[Yes, I want to cry, what marvellous comedy choices: 'spats', 'Oxford Street'!]

[A few days earlier]
I’m in Provincetown on the tip of the Cape, north of Boston. The most easterly point in America. Travel directly east and it’s Ireland where next you pitch up. It’s one of those cold and gloomy days that makes being inside a guilt-free pleasure. The perfect reading day. Putting aside The Waves I search around for something better suited to my mood. When I look at my reading pile and see that coming up next are The Death of Ivan Ilyich and The Violent Bear it Away, I begin to see a pattern that needs to be broken. So I get on my bike and cycle to the Provincetown Book store where I know there are copies of Cold Comfort Farm and Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, passed over on previous visits because I then felt my own pressure to read what I haven’t read before. Today I’ve given in to the desire to re-read what I know I love, and what will deliver some lightening of the spirits. On the non-fiction front I’m reading Jill Bolte Taylor’s My Stroke of Insight and Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, which, as stimulating and entertaining as both are, nevertheless require rather more of a certain kind of attention than I’m ready to give them today. Perhaps the left hemisphere of my brain needs a day off, or at least a rest.

I plump for Cold Comfort Farm next, which by coincidence was published the year after The Waves came out; in my higher mind I’d remembered it as a later novel.

I’ve read Cold Comfort Farm (1932) umpteen times. I probably first read it when I was at university in the late 70s, though perhaps even then I was re-reading it. Sometimes it’s hard to say why it is so entirely satisfying, and quite so funny: ‘She liked Victorian novels. They were the only kind of novel you could read while you were eating an apple.’ Now why is that perfect, and what about it makes me laugh out loud?

Flora Poste, a young woman of 19, finds herself living with distant cousins at Cold Comfort farm, Howling, Sussex. Her love of order meets head-on the chaos of life on the farm. Apollo confronted by Dionysus. Civilization forced to address Nature; but Nature that has been perverted: ‘The trout-sperm in the muddy hollow under Nettle Flitch Weir were agitated, and well they might be. The long screams of the hunting owls tore across the night, scarlet lines on black. In the pauses, every ten minutes, they mated. It seemed chaotic, but it was more methodically arranged than you might think.’

As Lynne Truss points out in her Introduction, the ‘as well they might be’ is comic genius.
Flora is partly guided by the works of the fictitious French philosopher the Abbé Fausse-Maigre, author of a book of Penseés, and ‘The Higher Common Sense’. This latter work ‘had been written as philosophic treatise; it was an attempt, not to explain the Universe, but to reconcile Man to it inexplicability’: a sentence that came as a shock to me because it read like some sort of summary of intent of my book, and perhaps even more aptly of the book I may write next; though as I read Cold Comfort Farm I long to write a comic novel.
Not for nothing does Flora reference Persuasion and Mansfield Park. Flora possesses the capability of Anne Eliot and effects a transformation at Cold Comfort Farm every bit as powerful as that which Fanny Price brings about at Mansfield Park. But Flora has none of their meekness (even though their meekness turns out to be a disguise hiding a resolute moral core). Flora is more like a young Mary Poppins. She is, as Lynne Truss puts it, the superego organising the id. The creative powers of the id have been suppressed by the shadow-matriarchal toad-like presence of Aunt Ada Doom who by disallowing change has brought a kind of Biblical barrenness to be visited on the farm.  Legs and horns fall off the cows (brilliantly named Graceless, Aimless, Feckless and Pointless) and no one notices. Strange plants grow with strange names and monstrous flowers. Characters jump down wells, or give joyless annual birth to children they care nothing for. In a casually symbolic gesture Flora lets the bull out of the shed in which he has been enclosed for as long as anyone can remember, and so begins a process in which she gradually brings some kind of order to bear where there has only been chaos.
But even she can only go so far towards normality. Seth, representative of all things virile, and at whom all the local young women throw themselves, proves to be more interested in the ‘talkies’ than he is in sex. Flora engineers his discovery by a Hollywood producer, and off he goes towards some transformed life: ‘She watched the car drive away. It was going to Cloud Cuckoo Land; it was going to the Kingdom of Cockaigne; it was going to Hollywood. Seth would never have a chance, now, of becoming a nice, normal young man. He would become a world-famous, swollen mask.
When next she saw him, it was a year later and the mask smiled down at her in the drowsy darkness, from a great silver screen: ‘Seth Starkadder in”Small-Town Sheik”.’ Already, as the car receded, he was as unreal as Achilles.’
Cold Comfort Farm is famously a parody of the novels of Mary Webb (Gone to Earth, Precious Bane) with their overblown descriptions of nature, and in which nature has almost a sexual hold on the characters. (I have actually read both these novels, and loved them.) But Gibbons is also satirising the pantheism of D H Lawrence and his acolytes. Mr Mybug (really Meyerberg but Flora can only think as him as being called Mybug) represent a type of then modern intellectual, and about which Gibbons has some pointed things to say: ‘This was his idea of romance, Flora could see. She knew from experience that intellectuals thought the proper – nay, the only – way to fall in love with somebody was to do it in the very instant you saw them. You met somebody, and thought they were ‘A charming person. So gay and simple.’ Then you walked home from a party with them (preferably across Hampstead Heath, about three in the morning) discussing whether you should sleep together or not. Sometimes you asked them to go to Italy (preferably to Portofino) with them. You held hands, and laughed, and kissed them and called them your ‘true love’. You loved them for eight months, and then you met somebody else and began being gay and simple all over again, with small hours’ walk across Hampstead, Portofino invitation, and all.
It was very simple, gay and natural, somehow.’
Gibbons has a philosophy of ordinariness which is never quite spelt out but is implicit in the very tone of the novel and perhaps comes closest to being made explicit at the end: ‘They were all there. Enjoying themselves. Having a nice time. And having it in an ordinary human manner. Not having it because they were raping somebody, or beating somebody, or having religious mania or being doomed to silence by a gloomy, earthy pride, or loving the soil with the fierce desire of a lecher, or anything of that sort. No, they were just enjoying an ordinary human event, like any of the other millions of ordinary people in the world.’
CCF is a plea for clarity. I wonder what novelists she has in mind when she writes: ‘The farmhouse itself no longer looked like a beast about to spring. (Not that it ever had, to her, for she was not in the habit of thinking things looked exactly like other things which were as different from them in appearance as it was possible to be.) But it had looked dirty, and miserable and depressing, and when Mr Mybug had once remarked that it looked like a beast about to spring, Flora had simply not had the heart to contradict him.’
Could she be thinking of Virginia Woolf? I was struck by how similar certain passages are in both novels, except as I say that The Waves is a humour-free zone (even though Woolf can be hilariously spiteful in her diaries and journals). Woolf makes the same point about the limitations of simile: “‘Like’ and ‘like’ and ‘like’ but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of thing?” but cannot help falling into Gibbons’s trap. What is the content of a sentence like: ‘The sky is dark as polished whale-bone.’ Eh, come again?

‘These then are the flowers that grow among the rough grasses of the field which the cows trample, wind-bitten, almost deformed, without fruit or blossom.’

That’s from The Waves but it could just as well have come from Cold Comfort Farm.
CCF was her first novel and Gibbons went on to write over 20 more. It has youthful vitality and goes deep, like poetry can, and as vital things do. I adore her idiosyncratic style and  inconsistencies; her made up words, and her strange chronology. (We are told that Adam learnt a song at the wedding of George I. But what George could this be? Not the English king, who died in the 18th century. But if  George I of Greece, then why him?)
Another thing that made me wonder if Gibbons had read The Waves is the frequent appearance of the words quiver and quivering in both novels. Coincidence? Doesn’t seem  very likely.
Hurrah for the French that they awarded Gibbons the femina via heureuse prize for 1933, and much to the astonishment of Virginia Woolf, who writes to Elizabeth Bowen on May 16th 1934: ‘I was enraged to see they gave the £40 to Gibbons; still now you and Rosamond [Lehmann] can join in blaming her. Who is she? What is the book? And so you can’t buy your carpet.’ Yes, the novel was indeed Cold Comfort Farm and if Virginia Woolf had read it she might have been even more enraged.

A large example of a Bronze Age Minoan temenos is at the Juktas Sanctuary of the palace of Knossos on ancient Crete in present day Greece, the temple having a massive northern temenos.[4] Another example is at Olympia, the temenos of Zeus. There were many temene of Apollo, as he was the patron god of settlers.

In religious discourse in English, Temenos has also come to refer to a territory, plane, receptacle or field of deity or divinity.

The release of the story of Ida has obviously been a brilliant piece of PR. And it is certainly a great story, but there do seem to be some huge question marks hanging over it. No wonder there is carping from the sidelines. Scientists can be as bitchy of each other as literary writers are.

The editorial doesn’t say where such CCTV cameras are to be found, which makes me wonder if it is rather the idea of such cameras that provoked the article than their actual existence. I don’t mean this as a criticism, I am merely making an observation. Sometimes we think a fact substantiates an idea, when in fact the idea alone is just as interesting. (And this makes me think of the condition of much conceptual art, which is less interesting seen in actuality than it is in its verbal description.)

The first words of mine I ever saw in print came in a letter I wrote to The Listener (younger readers will need to Google here).  I can’t remember now what kicked it off but over a period of a few weeks various correspondents wrote in with examples of words that it would be difficult to imagine ever find much currency. My favourite was a Spanish word (I think this came in response to my own contribution of mallemaroking) which means to kill a cockerel by throwing oranges at it. I wish now I had kept a memo of that word.

Yesterday, I spent most of the day doing the Guardian Easter Crossword (by the master, Araucaria; I completed it, I’m pleased to brag, around 1am) – I would say, yesterday I spent most of the day idling away doing the Guardian Easter Crossword, but to me it felt like important work. Anyway, while flipping through the dictionary (eventually I found the word I needed – etourdi, meaning frivolous) I happened upon dromophobia, a fear of crossing the road, and teichopsia, temporary partial blindness with optical illusions, accompanying migraine. Araucaria also got me to canthus (or as he required, the plural canthi) the corner of the eyelid.

Anyway, here are a few other curious words I’ve collected over the years. Anyone care to add to them?

A
is for

Accipitrine: pertaining to hawks

Accloy: to lame with a horseshoe nail

Acronychally: under cover of darkness

Agelast: one who does not laugh

Agrise: to terrify

Angekkok: defined in Chambers Dictionary as an Eskimo conjuror; today we might say Inuit shaman.

Anthelion: a phantom sun appearing at the same height as and opposite to the sun

Apocatastasis: the final restitution of all things at the appearance of the Messiah – the final conversion and salvation of all created beings, the devil and his angels not excepted

Aporia: a professed doubt of what to choose

Aposita: an aversion to food, from Greek apo, away; and sitos, bread

Augury: the flight of an eagle, particularly as a prediction of future events

C
is for

Caliology: the science of birds’ nests

Callipygous: possessing beautiful buttocks

Carking: causing anxiety

Cerumen: earwax

Consider: to look at attentively, from con sidere, with the stars, perhaps originally a term of augury

Crithomancy: divination through consideration of the dough of cakes

D
is for

Decussate: to cross in the form of an X

Despumate: removal of froth

Desquamation: removal of scales

Dolichocephallic: long-faced

E
is for
Enatiodromia: the changing of something into its opposite. In Jung, the process by which the superabundance of any force inevitably produces its opposite; the equivalent of the principle of equilibrium in the natural world

F
is for

Familist: member of old sect which holds that religion consists in love not faith

G
is for

Gumple-foisted: sulky (Scots)

H
is for

Hidrotic: apt to perspire

I
is for

Ideopraxist: one who is impelled to carry out an idea

Inoperculate: without a lid

Interdigitation: the locking of fingers together

K
is for

Kairos: going through time and finding yourself in eternity

L
is for

Lambent: moving about as if lightly touched

Latrate: to bark like a dog

Leer: the land known to sheep. [In the UK during the last bout of foot and mouth disease, when whole populations of sheep were destroyed, it was feared that many leers would never be recovered. The knowledge, it seems, is passed on culturally among sheep rather than genetically.]

Longanimity: forebearance

M
is for

Mallemaroking: the carousing of seamen in icebound ships

Mawther: a great awkward girl

Mohock: one of a band of aristocratic ruffians of early 19th-century London

Myomancy: divination through consideration of the movement of mice

N
is for

Nemo: nobody

Notonectal: swimming on the back

Nullipara: a woman who has never given birth

O
is for

Ostracise. In Greek the word is ostraikos meaning oyster shells.  [The last librarian at the great library at Alexandria was named Theon. His daughter Hypatia, a Platonist, mathematician, astronomer and high priestess of Isis was murdered, flayed with oyster shells, by a gang of Christian monks in AD 415. She was 45 years old.] The Greeks also used the word as a name for roofing tiles, because of their resemblance to oyster shells. They had a system by which citizens might be expelled by the casting of votes. The votes were made by marking such a tile, hence to ostracise.

P
is for

Pantology: universal knowledge

Pantophobia: morbid fear of everything

Polliwog: a sailor who has not crossed the equator

Q
is for

Quadrivium, literally where four roads meet, a crossroads. In medieval times the four subjects music, astronomy, arithmetic, and geometry.

R
is for

Ridgel, ridgil: a male animal with only one testicle in position or remaining

S
is for

Sardonic: sardonion, a plant of Sardinia which was said to screw up the face of the eater

Serendipity: the faculty of making happy chance finds [Serendip, a former name of Sri Lanka. Horace Walpole coined the word serendipity in 1754 from the title of his fairy-tale ‘The Three Princes of Serendip’ whose heroes ‘were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.’

Shellback: a sailor who has crossed the equator

Sim(p)kin: Urdu corruption of champagne

Syssitia: the ancient Spartan custom of eating the chief meal together in public

Syzygy: the period of new or full moon

Spatilomancy: divination by investigation of animal excrement

T
is for

Thelemite: a monk of Rabelais’s imaginary abbey of Théleme, an order whose rule was ‘Do as you like’

Thenar: the area around the base of the thumb

Thistadeckophobia: fear of the number 13

Tityre-tu: a member of a 17th-century fraternity of aristocratic hooligans. [Opening words of Virgil’s first eclogue, Tityre-tu, ‘Tityrus, thou (lying under the spreading beech)’, conjectured to indicate the class that had beech trees and the leisure to lie under them.]

Toliban: Persian word for turban, and from which we derive the word tulip

Trivium, literally ‘where three roads meet.’ [It is at a place where three roads meet that Oedipus unknowingly kills his father.] In medieval times the three subjects grammar, rhetoric and logic were collectively named the trivium. From trivium comes the word trivial.
Together the trivium and quadrivium make up the seven liberal arts.

U
is for

Uberous: yielding abundance of milk

Uberly: full of bounteous kindness; the milk of human kindness. From the Latin uber, udder, fruitfulness

http://quickiebooks.blogspot.com/2009/04/you-are-here.html

I’m not quite sure what to make of the statue of Christ posed next to my book, but I like the photographic composition.

It’s obviously a day for surreal blogs, or is that the general state of the blog world? Take a look at attentionvsaffection

http://attentionvsaffection.blogspot.com/2009/04/you-are-here.html

who has made a poem out of page 30 of my book. Why page 30, I’m not entirely sure, but I like the effect.

And bluemoose is another writer with a distinctive voice:

http://bluemoosebooks.blogspot.com/2009/04/square-root-of-easter-eggs.html

Science has created the world we live in. All our technological inventions  – steam engines, fertilisers, particle-accelerators and i-Phones – convince us that the world is real, and becomes somehow more real the more sophisticated the technological world becomes. Technology is the outward and visible sign that science is getting somewhere. And by somewhere we mean the ability to create simulacra of reality that we call the material world. It’s what we mean by progress.

If we, the public, see clearly what science does, we understand only poorly what science is.

Science has a methodology, a way of approaching what is out there. It sets out from the position that the world is made out of things that move. Science ultimately tries to find out what those things are made of, and what we mean by motion. It turns out that it is really hard to answer these questions.

Science begins by separating out phenomena as things with names, but progresses by uniting phenomena into ever more inclusive descriptions. Four hundred years of the application of the scientific method points to a possible unification of the laws of nature. Our universe is a patch of pure radiation that expanded and evolved over billions of years into all the structures of matter we find in the universe today, including (incidentally and probably not ultimately) ourselves who tell the story.

But materialism has become so bizarre – possibly requiring the existence of an infinite number of parallel worlds, or the non-existence of hundreds of elementary particles – that it is moot what now separates mystery from mysticism.

Mysticism could be said to approach reality from the opposite direction. Mystics (who might include artists, philosophers and theologians) try to apprehend the unity of nature all in one go. The approaches may be different but they end up in the same place – a universe of unified phenomena – and they are both about looking and seeing.

Science is more intimately connected to religion than is generally supposed. If as a population we knew more about the history and philosophy of science, we might understand that a popular debate that has religion on the one side and science on the other is at best naïve, and at worst propagandist. The scientific revolution wouldn’t have happened but for monotheism (and didn’t happen in those parts of the world where there were other kinds of belief systems; China, notably). The three great monotheistic religions believe that there is something eternal and unchanging at the heart of the universe. So does science. Science is atheistic only in so far as it means to explain nature without recourse to the supernatural. Scientists, however, need not be atheistic, nor must agnosticism necessarily rule out spirituality.

Monotheistic religion and science both aim, one more explicitly than the other, to people the universe. Science attempts and succeeds in making life more comfortable for some, but science also facilitates an increasing population, only partially provides the means to support it, and at ever greater cost to the planet. In time, science expects to people other planets across the universe. Indeed it can have no other hope. Science and religion relieve suffering but also increase suffering. If religion often provides the reason for war, it is science that provides increasingly sophisticated means of killing people.

Scientific progress is also inextricably linked to economics. All business models depend on ever-increasing output and ever-increasing profitability, and the engine is technological progress. The scientific method, like capitalism, is always in search of new markets to exploit. These days there is plenty of evidence that the way we do science and the way we do business are unsustainable.  Starkly, there may not be much time left for the earth, at least not as a place willing to host us. How much unrestrained optimism in unrestrained progress can we bear? This is not an unreasonable question to ask even by the most ardent supporters of science or of capitalism. We cannot unravel the material world, and who would want to? Materialism is the greatest story ever told. But we can try to understand what it is and what we are in relationship to it.