SLOW Movement

FT: Far-sighted but no visionary

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October 21, 2011 10:19 pm

Far-sighted but no visionary

By Harry Eyres

Steve Jobs was an undoubtedly impressive human being, but I am still not convinced that it qualifies him to be called a visionary

Claudio Abbado rehearsing at the Royal Festival Hall

It would have been too easy (reader, I was tempted) to write a column dismissing all the hype about the late Steve Jobs. I must say for a non-Apple user – I have never owned a Mac, an iPod or an iPad – the effusiveness of the tributes, and in some cases the grief, was hard to fathom. The last time I remembered anything comparable was after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Whatever his other achievements, it appeared that Steve Jobs had arranged a posthumous coup: he had made sure his obituaries were written by his own PR department.

President Obama mourned him as a “visionary” who “changed the way each of us sees the world”. With still less restraint, the philosopher Alain de Botton gushed: “there are businesses that redraw the landscape entirely, creating needs we never knew we had, and remoulding our sense of what we have to have in order to be happy.” Goodness, was I only dreaming when I thought I still recognised those blue remembered hills? Might it be an advantage to remain unaware of needs I do not know I have?

You can imagine a Slow Lane line on all this: that, after all, the man had only been a creator, or refiner, of gadgets, which I for one have managed to get along quite happily without. Maybe Jobs “transformed our lives” (Obama again) somewhat, making them even more full of annoying electronic gizmos that render living in public spaces progressively less bearable. Perhaps I am missing something, but we seem to be just as fractious and addicted to short-termism as we have ever been.

But this was all just knee-jerk stuff. Not only was I not an initiate of the Apple cult but, frankly, I had little idea who Steve Jobs was. Reading his famous Stanford address was a sobering experience. Here was an undoubtedly impressive human being, a man of substance and originality.

Jobs was unusual in many ways, and not least in his approach to education. In contrast to the ever more streamlined, synchromeshed idea of expensive university degrees leading seamlessly into jobs (the normal kind), Jobs needed to drop out of university to find his way. More precisely, he dropped out of the required classes he found boring, in order to drop in to classes which inspired him. One of them was a calligraphy class which influenced all his subsequent thinking, and ensured, as he said with no false modesty, that personal computers would have “the wonderful typography they do”.

That was a very considerable achievement. I am still not convinced that it qualifies Jobs to be called a visionary. One of the qualities of visionaries is that they see far ahead; not just 10 years ahead but maybe a century or two. Often visionaries are little appreciated in their own time, dismissed as oddballs or madmen. Jobs might have been a maverick but was hardly an unappreciated one – and he became one of the richest people in America.

Might it be an advantage to remain unaware of needs I do not know I have?

A week after Jobs died I was in the Royal Festival Hall listening to Claudio Abbado conducting Anton Bruckner’s towering Fifth Symphony. If there was a Jobs connection, it might have been that Abbado has fought life-threatening illness; he made a remarkable recovery from cancer and, though he now looks gaunt, skin stretched tight over his long bony face, he stood spry and upright as he conducted the immense symphony from memory.

I am not sure Abbado would consider himself a visionary. I see him more as a supreme facilitator, a great clarifier of textures. He looked humble, not full of ego, as he took waves of applause and a standing ovation at the end of the symphony, and eventually stood to one side of the podium, as if to direct the applause away from him, towards his hand-picked Lucerne Festival Orchestra(I have never heard more hushed and precise pianissimo playing from a string section), and ultimately towards Bruckner himself.

I have a feeling that Bruckner and this symphony in particular are finally coming into their own 135 years after the Fifth was completed (amazingly, Bruckner never heard the work performed by an orchestra). For the composer Arnold Bax, hearing the corrupt Schalk-conducted version in 1906, it was a monumentally boring piece of Austro-German pedantry.

I didn’t find it boring when I first heard it, as a teenager at the Proms. It was certainly extreme; extremely long, extremely slow, extremely desolate, extremely unruly and extremely loud, especially at its thrilling ending, one of the grandest perorations in music. I found the extremes exciting (as teenagers tend to). It was like being taken on a tour of the Arctic, or Patagonia, a landscape of arresting splendour and strangeness.

Yes, Bruckner did change the way I saw the world, and myself within it. It felt vaster and more thrilling; and, if it also felt frightening, the fear was tempered by the fact that a brave soul had been there before me and charted the territory.

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Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.

FT: My shallow affair with Twitter

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July 8, 2011 10:10 pm

My shallow affair with Twitter

By Harry Eyres

Tweets are the perfect mode of (pseudo) communication for the age of narcissism

Readers, I have to confess to a foolish dalliance. Perhaps it was her sheer youthfulness that seduced me. Surely it was not the fact that she couldn’t string more than two sentences together. Or was it just that I, a middle-aged man, wanted confirmation that I could still attract – followers?

If you asked me what induced me to sign up to Twitter, I would say it was a vague desire to connect, combined with a fair dose of feline curiosity. Like the proverbial cat, I should have been wiser: what was I to expect from a medium designed (by its founder Jack Dorsey) to deliver “short burst[s] of inconsequential information”, 40.55 per cent of whose content was found in a survey in August 2009 by Pear Analytics to consist of “pointless babble”. Now that I am no longer under its spell, Twitter seems to me one of the greatest time-wasters ever conceived.

Pear Analytics classified 37.55 per cent of tweets in its survey as “conversational” but there is quite a difference between having the vague characteristics of a conversation and consisting of a true conversation. A conversation requires that you know whom you are addressing; it is predicated on a certain courtesy. People who simply shout, scream or throw comments into the air are not conversing; they may well be mad.

The lack of a sense of address is the problem with many or most political tweets. I haven’t yet received any from Barack Obama, but some of the most leaden-footed on my Twitter page have emanated from the new British Labour leader Ed Miliband. Comedians rightly made fun of a message he sent out on the eve of the big union demonstration on March 26 against the cuts: “See some of you there”, it went, provoking unfavourable comparison with some of the more stirring rallying-cries in history (“Once more unto the breach, dear friends”, “We shall fight on the beaches” etc). Another recent Miliband tweet ran as follows: “I’m looking forward to setting out some important changes ahead for Labour in my speech to the national policy forum on Saturday.” If anyone can imagine a less appetising taster for anything, let me know.

Fleetingly I had a notion that Twitter might be a medium for poetry – in particular for the haiku. One distinguished musician I followed approached this level in some of his tweets – aperçus of delicate beauty. But I fear I am too selfish; if I wrote what I thought was a good haiku I would not post it on Twitter.

The other literary form to which a tweet might aspire is the aphorism. I was impressed that the author Alain de Botton bothered to post aphorisms on Twitter but disappointed by examples such as, “The world is hardly short of good ideas – the challenge is how to make them take hold and stick.” This seemed more of a truism than an aphorism. Good aphorisms have a quality that is both distilled and poignant, the ability to pierce through the veils of ordinary perception to a bitter truth. This example verged on the vapid, like so much else on Twitter. But then, if you coined a really good aphorism, surely you would put it in a book.

No doubt I was foolish to expect conversation, or poetry, or philosophy from Twitter. Apart from being an amplifying chamber for rumour and gossip, it is the perfect mode of (pseudo) communication for the age of narcissism. I read tweets from perfectly intelligent people that informed me that they still had a sniffly cold or were making their third cup of tea of the morning; one went something like this: “I.REALLY.MUST.GET.DOWN.TO.WORK.” A psychoanalyst might have something to say about that: a displacement of a displacement?

The fundamental thing about tweets is they are nearly always about “me”; in fact, many might as well read, “Me! Me! Me!” If they do not describe some irrelevant detail of everyday life, their aim, whether confessed or covert, tends to be self-promotion. They are the product of what historian Christopher Lasch called the “the new narcissist ... who doubts even the reality of his own existence.”

Twitter is not just a phoney form of conversation, it is a deceptive medium for discussion. Because of the limit on characters, tweets move towards closure, and this is where the aesthetics and the politics of Twitter combine in a sort of negative synergy. Haikus and aphorisms are tight, terse forms achieved under intense pressure; they justify their brevity because of their concentration, like a reduced sauce. But Tweets are just short; they give the impression of decisiveness without having said anything decisive. After “Me! Me! Me!” they say “I’m right”.

God help anyone who appealed to Twitter as a court of justice. Good arguments or exchanges need the long, slow haul, not the addictive jabber of Twitter. But, for all that, Twitter did perform one service for me, helping me to survive the recent royal wedding as I read irreverent tweets about the choice of music and the archbishop’s mad hair.

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Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.

FT: When words fail us all

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August 19, 2011 10:10 pm

When words fail us all

By Harry Eyres

If the riots in English cities both invited and defied commentary, that was surely because they seemed so inarticulate

Response: Riot police in front of a burning building in Croydon, south London, on August 8

If the riots in English cities, including my home city of London, both invited and defied commentary, that was surely because they seemed so inarticulate. The BBC began by calling these outbreaks “protests” but withdrew this description when, after the original non-violent demonstration about the shooting of Mark Duggan, what appeared to be taking place was more or less random acts of destruction, arson and looting. Those arrested were shame-faced and silent rather than defiant and vocal. People on the streets heckling politicians or being interviewed by journalists did have things to say but their remarks, however suggestive, did not really amount to reasons for action.

So these were not protests in any articulate sense – in the sense, that is, of having a defined target or grievance at their core. They were different from the only other riots in London that I can remember, the Brixton riots of 1981 and 1985 and the poll tax riot of 1990; the former arising out of long-standing tensions between the black community and the police, as the subsequent Scarman report confirmed, and the latter arising out of a demonstration against a levy very widely seen as unfair. They were also different from the essentially non-violent protests of the Spanish indignados, people with defined grievances, especially concerning unemployment, able at least to articulate their own mood. They were certainly different from the protests in Tahrir Square, marked by bravery and eloquence.

An inarticulate protest is both easier and more difficult to respond to. You can respond with punitive authoritarianism, on the grounds that if those responsible for violence cannot come up with reasons for their actions, then they have no reasons and should be sent to prison – an experience which, no doubt, will create a whole new set of reasons. That is the way of repression, at both a social and an individual, psychological level. In the second of his Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Freud develops a suggestive analogy to explain the nature of repression; a noisy heckler at his lecture, “whose ill-mannered laughter, chattering and shuffling with his feet are distracting my attention”, is manhandled out of the room by three or four strongmen, who barricade the door. But that may well not be the end of the story; perhaps the expelled individual, “who has become embittered and reckless, will cause us further trouble”.

Repressing inarticulate protest may well cause further trouble. I think the first thing to do is to look at the thing which defines these protests – inarticulateness itself. You can view these events as a peculiarly English tragedy of inarticulateness. Being inarticulate means being unable to express yourself clearly, fluently or intelligibly. My dictionary gives as a suggestive example the phrase “inarticulate suffering”. Inarticulate suffering is no less real than articulate suffering; in fact it may be even more painful, because giving expression to suffering tends to alleviate it.

You can view these events as a peculiarly English tragedy of inarticulateness

A week or two before the riots, I was listening to an astonishing feature on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme about the language deprivation of many young British children. According to the British government’s “poverty tsar” Frank Field, some children arriving for their first day at school do not know their own names. The government’s communication champion for children, Jean Gross, quoted a young mother talking about her small child: “He don’t [sic] speak to me, so I don’t speak to him.” The point made by a Manchester head teacher, Neil Wilson, was that many parents are no longer speaking to their children, beyond the most basic level, so it is no wonder that the children have difficulty learning to speak, or developing a satisfyingly rich vocabulary. Here is the tragedy of inarticulateness in its starkest form.

It is something you can see being passed on from generation to generation and, though there may be biological bases for some cases of language impairment, it is obviously at least partly associated with social deprivation. I doubt there are many instances of middle-class mothers not speaking to their toddlers.

Widespread civil disorder, as opposed to essentially peaceful protest, has occurred very rarely in Britain in the 20th century. In my lifetime it has happened only under very specific circumstances, when austerity programmes were being pushed through in the teeth of recession, or when there was a general sense of manifest inequity. To attribute it to “criminality, pure and simple”, as the British prime minister and others have done, is to commit the language crime of tautology. Of course criminality is criminality. But that gets you no closer to understanding anything.

Here the ruling classes seem as inarticulate as the so-called rioting underclass. Perhaps we should not be surprised, since in England (not in Scotland, Ireland or Wales) there is an inarticulateness of the upper classes, the mumbling, stumbling inability to perceive what is staring you in the face.

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FT: Sweet nothing

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August 12, 2011 10:08 pm

Sweet nothing

By Harry Eyres

We tend to avoid that awkward pause or gap and fill it with something, but the idea that anything is better is dubious

I don’t know whether this has to do with advancing age but, increasingly, I catch myself doing absolutely nothing, especially on Tube journeys. I resist the tawdry allure of free newspapers; I even leave the London Review of Books and my battered old Loeb edition of Horace’s Odes in different pockets of my old leather shoulder bag. Of course, I might be reading a coruscating political essay or a piercing fragment of lyric poetry but it all seems too much of an effort – to add to the effort of maintaining composure while being carted around with too many others in a tunnel dug 60ft into London’s clay.

Philosophically, you could call this an embrace of nothingness or what the Spanish call la nada and the French (and Jean-Paul Sartre in particular) call le néant. Nada sounds particularly emphatic in Spanish. I remember, from when I lived in Spain, quite a lot of conversations ending with the formula, “Pues, nada”, and being rather puzzled by it. “Well, then, nothing,” sounds more than odd in English: it might sound defiant, rude or nihilistic; probably not something you would say in polite society.

But my Spanish interlocutors were not being rude or defiant; they were simply acknowledging that there was no more to say at that moment. The Spanish seem rather to like the word nada (think of the phrase “de nada”, meaning “you’re welcome”); not to be embarrassed or ashamed of it. When the young Carmen Laforet came to write the defining postwar Spanish existentialist novel (the equivalent of Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse), she could only choose one title: Nada.

But I suppose most of us, in the Anglo-Saxon world, certainly in England, are afraid of nothingness, la nada, le néant. We tend to fill it with something, anything. Many of my mother’s generation were schooled in a conversational manner that avoided nothingness, the awkward pause or gap, at all costs. When I taught American students in London, I realised that they took a dim view of any moment of silence in class; what I regarded as a pause for thought, they considered an embarrassing failure of fluency.

In Tube trains the fear of nothingness may be especially acute – who wants to spend time thinking about the fact that they are in a lightless place deep underground, at the mercy of power lines, computers, train drivers, track maintenance people, transport police? Much better to stuff your face with Pret A Manger sandwiches (quite good actually) and your mind with the not-especially nutritious offerings of free newspapers Metro and City AM.

Why do I go to such lengths to avoid something as undemanding as sitting in a chair for half an hour?

But the idea that anything is better than nothing is, to say the least, dubious. By the time you have reached the outskirts of middle age, you have surely had quite a few experiences of “anythings” that were, on balance, worse than nothing: films or plays you would rather not have seen (so often when I was a drama critic I wished I was out of the theatre, on my own, in a pub, with a pint), holidays that would have been better spent at home, unfortunate entanglements. In his great sonnet “A Une Passante” (“To a Passerby”), Baudelaire records an exchange of glances on a Paris street with a statuesque, mourning beauty: a love that might have been, an impossible possible, a love that might have killed him.

Doing nothing, or not doing anything, is, of course, only part of the approach to nothingness. As I sit in the Tube carriage not reading, not texting or tapping, I am, of course, thinking, though that is perhaps too grand a word. My mind is certainly full of stuff. Embarrassingly, I may be reliving some rally from the previous evening’s game at the tennis club: that sweet little lob, the backhand pass that might have been.

This kind of daydreaming, however enjoyable, is hardly what a Buddhist or an existentialist would call a true embrace of nothingness. All the things we do, all that self-important busyness with computers and so on, may be partly or largely a distraction from the even more preoccupying stuff whirling around in our heads, the memories, desires, regrets, recriminations, awareness of mortality and so on. To stop doing the obvious, visible activities only makes us more prey to the invisible workings of the mind.

That is why meditation is so damned hard, or why I go to such lengths to avoid something as apparently undemanding as sitting in a chair for half an hour.

For an existentialist such as Heidegger, meditation, or the moment when you stop running away from yourself, puts you in touch with angst, the anxiety that throws human beings back upon their “authentic potentiality-for-being-in-the-world”.

That sounds both terrifying and exciting. Mindfulness of breathing, the basic meditation practice that I don’t practise nearly often enough, on the other hand, can bring me in touch with something simpler and calmer: the sheer joy of inhaling and exhaling what Philip Larkin called “the deep blue air, that shows/ Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless”.

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Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.

FT: Second that emotion

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July 29, 2011 10:05 pm

Second that emotion

By Harry Eyres

The right words, connected to properly differentiated feelings, matter enormously at all times

A boy lights a candle for the victims of Norway’s twin attacks

I was struck by the contrast when the British prime minister, David Cameron, expressed outrage at the terrible attacks in Oslo and Utoya island, while the Norwegian prime minister, Jens Stoltenberg, expressed no such thing. What he conveyed, instead, was shock, dismay, sorrow and a determination that the bombing and mass murder of teenagers by Anders Breivik should not change the country’s way of life, democratic values and commitment to human rights. “You will not destroy our democracy, or our ideals for a better world,” said Stoltenberg: “No one will ever scare us away from being Norway.”

In the coverage from Norway and interviews with those who had witnessed the attacks and people in the street I heard no one expressing “outrage” or any similar emotion, or the desire to hit back against evil. What was so moving was the restraint and dignity and solidarity of the Norwegian people, gathered in communal expression of grief.

More

On this story

• Harry Eyres A 21st-century Wife of Bath?
• Harry Eyres My shallow affair with Twitter
• Harry Eyres Mozart and his major minors
• Harry Eyres The heart has its reasons
• Harry Eyres How to talk a good game

You may think I am mincing words, and at a most inappropriate time, but I believe the right words, connected to properly differentiated feelings, matter enormously at all times and especially at times like these. It is worth weighing these words, outrage, dismay, grief, and what they mean.

Outrage struck me as an odd and even ironic choice of word from David Cameron, not least because this is the staple fare and fuel of newspapers such as the now-closed News of the World, The Sun, the Daily Mirror and the Daily Mail, from which you might think the British prime minister was trying, belatedly, to distance himself. Such newspapers constantly try to stir up outrage in their readers, about a bewildering range of issues (at the same time, of course, as they are stirring up prurient interest in other people’s sex lives). Outrage is incited against immigrants, whom sober studies show to be beneficial to the economy. A notorious instance was the “naming and shaming” of paedophiles in the News of the World, which led among other things to the vandalising of a paediatrician’s home. That case reminded me of the great scene in Julius Caesar in which the mob lynches a man they believe to be the conspirator Cinna: “I am Cinna the poet” cries the victim of mistaken identity, before being torn to pieces.

So what kind of emotion is outrage? Although etymologically it has nothing to do with rage, and starts from a somewhat inchoate sense that something is beyond all bounds, you could say that outrage is rage directed outwards, an emotion which no doubt has its place, but could also be a defence mechanism. Part of the great work of psychoanalysis in the 20th century, especially the work of Melanie Klein and her followers, has been to show how often one emotion covers another, less bearable one.

Outrage, let’s face it, is relatively easy both to feel and to incite in others. It also seems to be an emotion on the rise in the age of internet chatrooms, Twitter and so on. Commentators have been remarking recently how angry everyone seems to be in cyberspace. Anger and outrage are certainly more popular emotions in the blogosphere than dismay and grief.

Dismay may be a difficult emotion, especially for political leaders, to feel, or to admit to feeling, because it implies disorientation or weakness. “Utter loss of moral courage or resolution in prospect of danger or difficulty”, the first definition in my Shorter Oxford, does not sound promising at all, or rather far too judgemental. I would say dismay can be absolutely the right and proper and human thing to feel in the face of some unexplained and apparently inexplicable tragedy or catastrophe. It is actually braver to admit to dismay than to cover it over with some more acceptable or “manly” emotion, for instance the determination to “hit back”.

Grief is more difficult than any of these because it means facing up to irrecoverable loss. Sometimes whole lives can be blighted as a result of the inability to confront loss and to grieve. Although it is dangerous to make these comparisons, I couldn’t help feeling that the Norwegian people seemed better at grieving than we in London were after the 7/7 attacks, which were met with impressive stoicism but not with public grieving.

As well as expressing outrage at the events in Norway, David Cameron promised that “we can overcome this evil and we will”. The distinguished psychoanalyst Hanna Segal, who died a few weeks ago aged 93, would have called this an omnipotent phantasy. We can no more overcome or destroy evil than we can overcome or destroy human nature, since evil is part of us. This is not to say Segal was passive in the face of evil; a refugee in Paris, then London, in 1939-40, she wanted to go back to Warsaw to fight the Nazi invaders of her native country, but couldn’t: “There were no more trains.” Instead she devoted her long life to trying to understand the ruses by which the mind avoids facing up to intolerable losses.

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Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.

FT: The long and the short of coffee

The long and the short of coffee

By Harry Eyres

Published: May 21 2011 00:05 | Last updated: May 21 2011 00:05

On a recent trip to Italy I heard a man order an espresso “un po’ lungo” (a little bit long). I was expecting he would receive the Italian version of a caffè Americano; a strongish coffee but served in a decent-sized cup and long enough to provide a few minutes of meditative sipping. Not a bit of it: when the coffee arrived, it was to my eyes indistinguishable from a normal espresso or even what in London coffee houses is called a ristretto (not a term I have ever heard anyone use in Italy). In other words, it consisted of about a teaspoon and a half of incredibly strong black coffee, concentrated to the point of viscousness, topped with that tawny foam that is the good espresso’s equivalent of the creamy head on a pint of Guinness.

Perhaps it took him 45, rather than 30 seconds, to knock it back. That, for him, was un po’ lungo.

Back in London, I attended the opening of the Southbank Centre’s 60th anniversary celebrations of the Festival of Britain (on which more later). Trying to wake myself up, I had one cup of so-called coffee and then another. Each contained at least five times the liquid volume of the espresso un po’ lungo but nothing of that beverage’s intensity, flavour or drama. Eventually, arriving back home, I had to make myself a proper cup. By this time I had had far too much coffee, yet not enough.

All this prompted wider-ranging reflections on length and shortness, not just as they affect coffee. Although many chains of coffee bars in the UK and in the US claim to be Italian either in origin or inspiration – Caffè Nero promises “the best espresso this side of Milan” – in fact, the coffee experience and philosophy they offer is a pale shadow of the Italian one. The fact is that English and American people, on the whole, cannot and do not want to drink coffee in the way Italians do. For Italians, coffee is something very short, very intense and done standing up – a sort of gastronomic knee-trembler. Even an Italian cappuccino is not much longer than an espresso – it is beautiful, served in a small cup, and designed to be dispatched swiftly. Hardly anyone sits down at a table to drink one; not least because they know they will be charged three times as much.

The success of Starbucks is based on an entirely opposing philosophy. Everything is predicated on size. Even the smallest Starbucks coffee is called “Tall”, and if it consisted of coffee as Italians understand it, it would be enough to send three human beings into orbit. Thank goodness it consists mostly of water, or some watery perversion of milk.

Many Starbucks customers like to sit on their own, often with a computer, less frequently, alas, with a book or notebook, slowly sipping their hot coffee-based beverage while dealing with e-mails. Italians, on the other hand, intensely social creatures, nearly always drink their coffees in company, conversing with someone, a friend, colleague or the barista (who is never called a barista).

Length as opposed to intensity, volume rather than flavour: here we have not just two ways of making coffee but two philosophies of life. Is it better to draw something out as long as possible, or, as the poet Andrew Marvell put it in another, erotic, context, to “roll all [its] strength and all [its] sweetness up into one ball” so that we can “tear our pleasures ... thorough the iron gates of life”?

While these reflections on the length of a cup of coffee were unfolding, I was reading and listening to the news from government statisticians that one in four of today’s under-16s “can expect to live to be 100 years old”. Apart from the fact that extreme longevity sounds like something to appeal more to the Starbucks habitué than the espresso drinker, I wondered about both the claim and the use of “expect” and “expectancy”, which have become normal parlance in discussions of lifespan.

The fact that, statistically, the mean of lifespan is 80 or 82 or 102 does not mean that any individual can expect to live that long, in the way that a Starbucks customer can expect to receive a cup with 12 or 20 fluid ounces of coffee. For a single individual, for all sorts of obvious reasons, there is absolutely no way of knowing how long he or she will live.

Presumably, “life expectancy” depends to some extent on how one chooses to live one’s life. Someone as brave as Tim Hetherington, the photojournalist and documentary-maker killed recently in Misrata in Libya, was less likely to comb grey hair than an employee of the Inland Revenue living in suburbia. But then, as the great cartoon by HM Bateman shows, and as Italian coffee drinkers instinctively know, the roof can fall on the head of the most cautious and risk-averse of human mice.

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FT: Time to listen to Tagore

Time to listen to Tagore

By Harry Eyres

Published: April 29 2011 22:17 | Last updated: April 29 2011 22:17

Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore are probably the two most famous Indians of the early to mid-20th century. The tiny, shaven-headed, dhoti-clad Gandhi (1869-1948) appears to us more sharply in focus than the lavishly bearded, robed Gurudev (Tagore’s nickname), with his air of an ancient prophet. You can’t imagine a film called Tagore filling the cinemas. Tagore (1861-1941) was a poet, a dreamer, an idealist; Gandhi combined his idealism with political nous. Yet in some ways, Tagore right now might be the more relevant, even essential figure. Perhaps that is the thinking behind the Tagore Festival at Dartington Hall, Devon from May 1-7, when poets, musicians, thinkers and environmentalists gather to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Tagore’s birth.

Gandhi, born in western India, and Tagore, born into a prominent intellectual and artistic family in Bengal, were friends with differences. They held each other in great mutual respect – Gandhi’s title of Mahatma was even given to him by Tagore – but that did not preclude outspoken disagreement. That disagreement was perhaps more tactical than strategic – both shared the aims of Hindu-Muslim unity and the abolition of the caste system – but the tactical divergences could be acute. Tagore did not hesitate to criticise sacred tenets of Gandhi-ism, including the practice of passive resistance: “Passive resistance is a force, which is not necessarily moral in itself – it can be used against truth as well as for it.”

He demurred most strongly when Gandhi declared that the 1934 Bihar earthquake was divine retribution for India upholding untouchability; Tagore insisted that purely physical events should not be laden with metaphysical interpretations. As for Gandhi’s belief in the importance of spinning at a wheel, Tagore saw it as potentially dehumanising, risking turning human beings into machines. On all their points of difference, Tagore stood up for the inviolable freedom, dignity and creativity of the individual. If those sound like noble, woolly abstractions, they did not appear that way to Tagore. In the essay “My Life”, originally a lecture given in China in 1923, he explains how he was born in Bengal at the coming together of three great movements, one religious, one literary, and one political or national. His family happened to be prominent in all three areas; his father became the leader of a religious movement combining Hindu and Christian elements, which made him deeply unpopular with traditionalists. In fact, their unconventionality and revolt against orthodoxy made the whole family virtual outcasts.

Tagore was a poet; he had “a deep sense, almost from infancy, of the beauty of nature, an intimate feeling of companionship with the trees and the clouds”, and the urge towards expressing this feeling. All poets have to make their own idiom out of the common stock of language; or, as Tagore put it, the poet “should not only have his own seeds but prepare his own soil”. He started reading the Vaishnava erotic poems and then to write his own before he was 10; by his mid-teens he was a celebrated poet. Internationally, the culmination of his poetic career was the award of the Nobel Prize for his collection Gitanjali in 1913 – the first time the prize had been awarded to an Asian.

Formal education played very little part in all this. Tagore was suspicious of it; he strongly disliked the period he spent at a school in Brighton, England, and then left University College London without a degree; later he said he “never ... had what is called an education” and that “the main object of teaching is not to give explanations but to knock at the doors of the mind”.

Quite strange then that he should have founded his own school. But Tagore’s school, founded at his father’s ashram in Santiniketan in 1901, was unconventional. He instituted open-air classrooms to give the living world of nature and human kindness priority over the dead world of rigid book-learning. He believed that “the object of education is the freedom of mind which can only be achieved through the path of freedom”. (The school, called Patha Bhavana, still exists, surrounded by Visva-Bharati university, and numbers among its alumni the economist Amartya Sen.)

What would Tagore make of the success of the galloping Indian economy? For him success depended on much more than national self-determination and economic growth. In his addresses “Civilisation and Progress” and “The Voice of Humanity” Tagore questions the western ideal of material progress devoid of a spiritual core. Already in the 1920s, he saw an aggressive force of greed linked to a science “smothering all time and space over the earth” and “all that was human ... broken into fragments.”

Tagore speaks to us of the need for a return to simplicity: for the peace that “comes from the inner spirit, the power of sympathy, the power of self-sacrifice”.

www.tagorefestival.com

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Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.

FT: Downsides to upgrades

Food for thought... from one of my favourite FT columnists.

===

Downsides to upgrades

By Harry Eyres

Published: March 25 2011 22:03 | Last updated: March 25 2011 22:03

All systems at the Slow Lane offices have recently been upgraded. These upgrades might be considered small beer in the Fast Lane but they have caused no little disruption to our world. First, we had to get a new cordless phone, as the old one, inherited when we bought the house, had begun to die in the middle of conversations.

You might think this would be quite straightforward but my experience of living in the wonderful new digital world is that nothing is straightforward. I purchased the cheapest and simplest model I could find, on special offer in John Lewis, and I imagined it might be a simple matter of plugging the thing in and getting going. How naive can you be?

I found myself faced with an instruction manual 74 pages long – the size of a substantial novella or a collection of poems – including instructions on matters such as “writing text messages”, “adding a new birthday (organiser) alarm” and “using a handset to put the base in registration mode”. There is a whole section on games (I can’t quite imagine what could induce me to play games with a telephone) and another one on security, which is the most bizarre and arcane of all. Maybe “modifying the base code” might come in useful if you were buying equipment for a place such as Guantánamo Bay but it all seems a bit excessive for a home phone.

Needless to say we still haven’t got the hang of this new phone, keep pressing the wrong buttons and have had to deactivate the answering machine (too complicated).

So far I’ve had better luck with the new printer/scanner/photocopier but can’t help feeling this magnificent, and absurdly cheap, piece of machinery, capable of producing colour prints to a professional standard, is altogether too magnificent. Perversely, I find myself missing the modest old Canon, less than half the size, which kept going loyally for more than a decade.

All of these feelings are amplified in the case of the throbbing heart of Slow Lane systems, the new laptop computer. When I mentioned to people that the old one was seven years old, their mouths gaped open as if I’d been talking about a penny-farthing bicycle or a wind-up gramophone. Seven years does not seem such a great age for a well-constructed machine – I recently retired the speakers of my hi-fi system after 40 years’ service – but computers, for all their modernity, or because of it, have no staying power; they age much faster than dogs, as fast as rats, perhaps.

The old laptop was getting slow and absent-minded and every now and then had one of those alarming blue screen episodes (senior moments, you could call them). The new one is faster and a bit sleeker and doubtless has more gigabytes of whatever you’re meant to have gigabytes of.

This machine, and this goes for any modern computer, has truly amazing capacities and powers. Linked to a search engine such as Google, it can scour the entire cyberuniverse in milliseconds. It forgets nothing, unlike this poor human brain of mine. It is incapable of making a Freudian slip; it is, I suppose, equally incapable of dreaming.

Our machines get better and better, more and more powerful, faster and faster (though not necessarily more reliable). We, on the other hand, do not. What is the effect of having this inhumanly powerful thing squatting in the centre of our lives? The computer and the web are miracles of connectivity but, as the journalist and blogger Nicholas Carr argued in The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember, “the web’s connections are not our connections”. Might they not make us feel inadequate?

Old-fashioned instruments are not like that. They don’t intimidate us with their superior power. I don’t find my piano or my bicycle or my pen and notebooks intimidating – they are made on a human scale, they are designed to help me express myself in a human way. The piano will respond to my touch like no other; in that way it is more like a person than a computer, which responds to all touches in the same binary way.

I was not among those lucky enough to get seats to Sir Simon Rattle’s concerts in London last month with his orchestra, the Berlin Philharmonic. But that splendid, flawed, beleaguered, democratic institution the BBC gave all of us here in the UK the luxury of the best seats in the Berlin Philharmonie hall, relaying two concerts the orchestra gave in its home city.

I happened to catch parts of two of them while out driving and each time I had to pull in to the side of the road. Playing as beautiful as this – in the fourth movement of Mahler’s Third Symphony, and in Stravinsky’s Apollo – might cause accidents. Apollo is Stravinsky’s Apollonian answer to his own Dionysian Rite of Spring, concerned with the assuaging powers of art, not its disruptive ones, content to convey nothing but its own magnanimities of sound. In this case the sound of 34 stringed instruments, old-fashioned things, in no need of an upgrade.

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FT: On the other hand

On the other hand

By Harry Eyres

Published: January 21 2011 22:06 | Last updated: January 21 2011 22:06

I want to speak out on behalf of an oppressed minority. This is not one of those minorities one could call fashionable; its oppression might seem negligible, and perhaps most of it, in the west at least, occurred in the past. But left-handed people, who constitute about one-tenth of the population pretty much across the board, have suffered in the course of history.

The negative connotations attached to left-sidedness and left-handedness are remarkably consistent across cultures and across history. Perhaps the most striking is the Latin adjective sinister, which starts off meaning “left” or “on the left hand”, but quickly (in Latin that is) acquires the secondary meanings “wrong”, “perverse” and then (closer to the meaning of sinister in modern English) “unfavourable”, “adverse”, “ill-omened”.

Sinister has passed into many European languages, keeping the link between left-sidedness and inauspiciousness. The French word gauche means both left and physically awkward. In English, we talk about having two left feet to designate clumsiness. The left side fares no better in Slavic or Finno-Ugrian tongues. But this is not just a European phenomenon: the Chinese word for left, zuo, can also mean “improper”. Conversely, the association of right and the right hand with notions of correctness and justice runs deep and broad through European and non-European cultures.

Tarred with this brush, left-handers have either been treated with suspicion or more violently, and with unknowable consequences, “changed” – that is, forced to use their right hand to write.

Why should this matter? I am not left-handed myself, all too right-handed I fear, but my mother is or was left-handed, until she was “changed”. She suspects that such changing might lead to quite profound cognitive and emotional disturbance. A friend tells me her father was beaten repeatedly until he switched from left to right hand, and developed a lifelong stutter.

The more we learn about handedness and the workings of the brain, the more perverse the attempt to denigrate or change natural left-handers appears to be. Left-handers, or at least people who are not strongly right-handed seem, some studies have shown, to be at a cognitive and creative and even sporting advantage. Anyone watching Rafael Nadal, Gary Sobers or Alastair Cook might have worked that out already.

According to the critic and psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist, in his fascinating book The Master and his Emissary, citing research by Marian Annett: “There are unexpectedly large numbers of left-handers among artists, athletes and ‘skilled performers of many kinds’.” Annett herself goes on to say that it is “not that there is a predominance of left-handers in talented groups, but rather that there is a shortfall in such groups of people who are strongly right-handed”.

And for McGilchrist, the implications of this apparently random quirk could hardly be more momentous. The Master and his Emissary tells a story of the human condition, and human history, based on the “power struggle” between the two hemispheres of our brains – the increasing, and, he argues, disastrous dominance of the left brain, the main seat of language and representation, over the more immediately perceiving right brain, on which it is in fact dependent.

McGilchrist’s thesis is bold and to some extent, given our limited knowledge of the immense complexities of the brain, speculative. But he is a subtle and clever thinker, and unusually qualified to range with such authority over so many different domains of knowledge.

In case you are scratching your head, or racking your brain, about what all this has to do with left-handedness, it is worth recalling one of things which has been known with certainty about the brain since the early days of neuroscience: that motor and other functions on the left side of the body are controlled by the right side of the brain and vice versa. This means that some, not all, left-handers, together with people who suffer from dyslexia and schizophrenia, might be less “likely to show ‘left-hemisphere encapsulation’”. Just possibly, left-handed people, or some of them, might be less locked in to the increasingly artificial world-view delivered by the left brain and more in touch with the more intuitive right brain and its way of perceiving the world.

If that is so, we should be rejoicing at the recent resurgence of left-handers in politics; you might expect Leonardo da Vinci, Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein to have been southpaws but not Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and David Cameron. But perhaps the real skill or genius in politics lies not so much in being left-handed as in being to see things from both sides, or as many sides as possible, that is being able to bridge the hemispheric and also the ideological divide.

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FT: A poetic disappearance

Excerpt: As always, hearing literary translators talk about their work reminded me of the immense difficulty, creativity and importance of the task. A literary text is woven in a particular language as intimately as a garment is woven in a particular fabric. Once the fabric is changed, all sorts of minute yet invisible adjustments of tailoring need to be made. The original suit cannot be reproduced in every detail.

===

Source - http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/8cf344c8-0d51-11e0-82ff-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz19DVFqk19

A poetic disappearance

By Harry Eyres

Published: December 23 2010 22:04 | Last updated: December 23 2010 22:04

Illustration by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry from the new Collector’s Library edition of ‘The Little Prince’

Part of the attraction of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince is surely its air of mystery. The tale itself is mysterious – part realistic, the plane and its pilot marooned in the desert; part fanciful, the Prince and his planet and flower – and it ends on the biggest of question marks.

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But that mystery has been enhanced by the mystery of the author’s death, in a plane crash in 1944 off the French Riviera; fragments of what was probably the plane and a bracelet belonging to Saint-Exupéry were recovered more than 50 years later.

This was not just any old plane crash, but one full of romance: a professional pilot, but too old and injured for active service, the anti-Fascist but also anti-de Gaulle airman had to cajole the Free French authorities to allow him to resume reconnaissance flights. Explanations for the crash have ranged from suicide – Saint-Exupéry was acutely depressed in the months before he died – to downing by a German fighter. Reading his own accounts of flying early passenger planes, you would not discount engine failure.

I have to admit straightaway that I have always – until now – resisted The Little Prince. I would not go so far as Andre Gregory in the film My Dinner with Andre, who found something repulsive, even fascistic, in the tale, but my nose detected a whiff of tweeness. Could the bestselling book ever written in the French language be little more than a flimsy whimsy?

Two new versions – Joann Sfar’s graphic adaptation, translated by Sarah Ardizzone, and a translation by Ros Schwartz – both of which were the subject of a discussion at the French Institute recently, have forced me to reconsider. Even quite radical reimaginings such as Sfar’s seem particularly pertinent because The Little Prince combines its high poetic polish with such an obvious air of incompleteness. My sense is that the work comes out of an agonising tension between a desire for a perpetual childhood, and a recognition of adult ties or commitments, which Saint-Exupéry never resolved – unless he resolved it by pushing the joystick down towards the blue waters of the Med.

But for translators, the questions and problems are not so speculative but eminently practical. How, for example, do you translate that famous opening request by the Little Prince, which in French consists of the words: “S’il vous plaît ... dessine-moi un mouton.”

It sounds simple but mouton in French can mean either sheep or lamb. Sarah Ardizzone and Ros Schwartz, in her beautifully judged Collector’s Library version, come to different conclusions for excellent reasons. Schwartz opts for lamb because “‘Please ... draw me a sheep’ ... was not something I could imagine a child saying spontaneously.” Ardizzone takes the opposite view: “I actually like the plosive, slightly cartoony sound of ‘sheep’. I didn’t want any echoes of ‘lamb of God’ in what is already a spiritually charged text.” Ardizzone’s sheep had another advantage: it enabled her to translate the Pilot’s exasperated “Il me broute avec son mouton celui-là” (literally, “He gets on my nerves with that sheep/lamb of his”) as the brilliant “I wish he’d stop bleating on about his sheep.”

How do you translate another of the Little Prince’s deceptively simple and childlike sayings: “Quand on a terminé sa toilette du matin il faut faire soigneusement la toilette du planète”? Not easy at all. As Schwartz says, “I could think of no single expression in English that worked for both a person and a planet.” Her solution – “Once you’ve brushed your hair and cleaned your teeth, then you clean your planet” – for once doesn’t sound quite right to me, a little too brisk and prosaic, lacking in Saint-Exupéry’s cosmic and ecological resonance.

As always, hearing literary translators talk about their work reminded me of the immense difficulty, creativity and importance of the task. A literary text is woven in a particular language as intimately as a garment is woven in a particular fabric. Once the fabric is changed, all sorts of minute yet invisible adjustments of tailoring need to be made. The original suit cannot be reproduced in every detail.

On the other hand, literary translation is just part of the unending process by which, as Auden put it in his great elegy for Yeats, “the words of a dead man / Are modified in the guts of the living”. The literary tailor-translator cannot copy the original suit, but she or he must come up with a suit for contemporary taste. Who knows, a translator may sometimes improve on the original.

Sfar’s bold graphic reworking, and Ardizzone’s fresh, unsentimental text remove the troublesome whimsy from The Little Prince. Do they also remove some of the mystery? Whereas Saint-Exupéry’s flower hovers on the border between floweriness and capricious femininity, Sfar’s flower is more openly and nakedly seductive. The Pilot-narrator becomes a much more tangible presence than in the original – an improvement, I feel. In one respect, though, Sfar in his concluding drawings deepens the mystery, poetically connecting the Little Prince’s disappearance with the author’s own last flight.

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Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.

FT: Not so shallow after all...

Not so shallow after all ...

By Harry Eyres

Published: October 1 2010 22:49 | Last updated: October 1 2010 22:49

Facebook, rather than traditional books, is a connection to the real world for today’s students

The cohort of young people just going to university, which includes many of my friends’ children and my eldest nephew, is, as usual, the target of accusations of degeneracy and warnings about dumbing-down.

In the past, such jeremiads generally concentrated on the moral aspect of things: in one of his rare moments of intemperance, the Roman poet Horace berated the young women of Rome for learning Greek dances (the provocative young minxes), the inevitable prelude to a later career of adultery. He was writing at a time when the Emperor Augustus had instigated one of those doomed back-to-basics campaigns promoting a return to “traditional values”, only to find that his own daughter had been involved in a string of adulterous affairs.

When it comes to the current generation, the accusations centre less on moral looseness and more on an inability to concentrate, brought about by an addiction to computer games and the internet. The direst of the warnings has been issued by Nicholas Carr in The Shallows, buttressed by research carried out by Gary Small, director of the Memory and Aging Research Center at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Dr Small argues that the very structure of people’s brains has been changed by new media – to the extent, as Carr puts it, that “our ability to learn suffers and our understanding remains shallow”.

As an uncle/godfather/family friend, I have to say that my own impression of this generation is not at all that they are more stupid than we were (Carr’s original and brilliant article in The Atlantic was entitled “Is Google Making us Stupid?”); rather, I would certainly say they are intelligent in a different way. To risk a clunking generalisation, they spend less time than we did reading books and more time on Facebook. I once joined Facebook, with the aim of reconnecting with international classmates from my environmental policy masters at the London School of Economics. But it struck me that any meaningful reconnection would involve a physical reunion, and that Facebook can be a kind of proxy connection, holding out a promise that is not fulfilled and very much less satisfying than the real thing.

Facebook is clearly quite different for younger people, and often central to their social lives; they use it not as a substitute for real connection but a way to keep real connections going. I got quite irritated with two members of the young generation recently in Italy when, arriving in Lucca, they headed straight for the nearest internet café and seemed content to spend half the day in the virtual world, ignoring the 12th-century churches, the tree-topped tower, the elegant cafés and artisan shops of one of the most charming small cities in Europe. But they could have said their Facebook world was more real than my idealised vision of a largely dead culture.

I share with Nicholas Carr the sense that the move from books to Facebook has altered the texture and the weave of lives and imagination. Perhaps it has simply turned them inside out. Although Small at UCLA noted in the digital generation a lack of the ability to maintain eye contact or notice “non-verbal cues in a conversation”, my experience is very different. I think we shy book-readers, with big internal worlds informed by 19th-century novels, were often the ones who found it hard to make eye contact. The generation now heading off to college, or the ones I have dealings with, appear markedly better at socialising.

Take gap years. My nephew coped admirably when faced with a class of 90 noisy, underprivileged children in Bangalore; perhaps better than I did when, considerably older, I was confronted with a class a third the size consisting of infinitely more privileged kids in Berkshire. After much travelling, he spent another month teaching at a village school in the Darjeeling hills. Combining meaningful work and living with an Indian family with backpack travel seemed a less haphazard way of using the immense opportunity of a gap year than my own South American travels.

I know about these adventures because of a series of vivid and lengthy e-mails, far better-written and more revealing, not just of the places he visited but also of his state of mind, than the rather priggish diaries I wrote in my gap year (and never showed to anyone).

This generation seems to be good at travelling. A friend’s son was recently in Mexico and Guatemala, hiring a car in Mexico and proving fearless in double-bluffing a series of corrupt cops attempting to extract from him what Mexicans call la mordida. I would probably have paid up meekly.

My friend and I did laugh when his son, en route to Guatemala, reported that he and his mates had left their hire car at the Mexican border. We laid a small bet that the car would not be there when they returned. We lost; the son had befriended a Mexican woman who looked after the car as carefully as if it had been her own.

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FT: Snobbery is to be sniffed at

Snobbery is to be sniffed at

By Harry Eyres

Published: July 31 2010 00:56 | Last updated: July 31 2010 00:56

A meeting a few years after I left university gave rise to a sharp pang of regret. The meeting happened at a diplomatic gathering in Rome and was with a girl I thought I vaguely recognised. When we got talking we realised we had both been at the same educational establishment half a dozen years earlier. I had been studying at Trinity College, Cambridge, and Elisabeth had been working as a server in the college hall to earn some pocket money while doing a course in English as a foreign language.

She was charming, beautiful, intelligent, all the things you could want anyone to be; we got on very well (I thought, at least) and she was firmly attached to someone else. The pang of regret was twofold: not only had I missed a possible friendship, but I had been so pigheadedly stupid and snobbish that I had never thought of passing the time of day with someone on the other side of the shiny metal counter.

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I had been a snob, perhaps above all an intellectual snob, and intellectual snobbery has form at Cambridge. I was reminded of that recently when I went back to my old college to do some research on the people who once upon a time would have been called “college servants”.

I interviewed various gardeners, porters, bedmakers and others and was struck not just by the richness and depth of their personal stories but by how much I had missed out on when I was an undergraduate. We undergraduates, who thought, if not that we owned the place, at least that it existed for our benefit, were the interlopers. Most gardeners, porters and bedmakers were from Cambridge families, established in the Fenland capital for generations. We on the other hand were just passing through.

But far from resenting our arrogance, or presumption of privilege, they bore witness to warm relationships on either side of the supposed upstairs-downstairs divide. One elderly bedmaker recalled enjoyable banter, cups of tea and even punt rides shared with undergraduates. On the whole, bedmakers characterised their relationships with undergraduates as quasi-maternal, but one admitted to decidedly non-maternal feelings when she saw one of her “boys”, a Jordanian prince with whom she got on famously, dressed in full ceremonial regalia. Most strikingly, I found that it was often bedmakers who were the first to notice signs of distress and disturbance in overwrought students; maybe one or two had saved lives.

EM Forster lived at different times of his life in Cambridge, a bastion of the intellectual elite if ever there was one: honorary fellow and famous novelist, member of the Bloomsbury group and of Cambridge’s intellectual secret society, the Apostles. But he was never an entirely comfortable insider. For a start there was his homosexuality, expressed in the novel Maurice which he decided would only be published after his death. He disliked his public school, Tonbridge, and the system it represented. His early romances, Where Angels Fear to Tread and A Room with a View, pit Italian passion and naturalness against English repression, snobbery and sheer lack of joie de vivre.

Forster’s creed was liberalism. In What I Believe, having begun by stating “I do not believe in Belief”, he professed his reluctant faith: “Tolerance, good temper, and sympathy – they are what matter really.” Forster’s tolerance and sympathy famously extended to the people and religion of India in his last novel, A Passage to India, published in 1924.

The test of Forsterian liberalism is surely how much sympathy (not just tolerance) is shown to the outsider, the underdog, the Other. The crux comes in his penultimate novel, Howard’s End, and concerns his treatment of the insurance clerk who aspires to the cultured life, Leonard Bast. Bast, according to the haute bourgeoise intellectual Margaret Schlegel, has in his head “husks of books, husks of culture”. Or in the prissy-sounding verdict of the omniscient narrator, he was “one of the thousands who has lost the life of the body and failed to reach the life of the spirit”.

Forster, in other words, treats Bast abominably. He makes him weak and unattractive, and ensures that he comes to a pathetic and ironic end, crushed under a falling bookcase, full of the culture he could never quite reach. As Frank Kermode, writing with undiminished grace and acuity at 90, points out in his recent book Concerning EM Forster: “Forster was probably incapable of providing a fairer account of Bast, for in general he saw the poor as different from ‘us’.”

Forster, the greatest English liberal of his day, was undone by snobbery. When John Maynard Keynes, until then firmly homosexual, took up with and married the Russian dancer and actress Lydia Lopokova, Forster was among those Bloomsburyites who disparaged the brilliant and vivacious ballerina. He did at least live to express his regret: “How we all used to underestimate her.”

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Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010

FT: A spartan Shangri-La

Excerpt:

Spartan accommodation has the advantage of not being a distraction. It also turns you outwards rather than inwards. The film Lost in Translation featured Americans stranded in a luxury hotel in Tokyo. Much of their alienation might have disappeared if the characters played by Scarlett Johansson and Bill Murray had moved to more modest quarters, forcing them to go out on to the streets and mingle with Japanese people, rather than viewing them as comical aliens.

===

A spartan Shangri-La

By Harry Eyres

Published: July 10 2010 00:20 | Last updated: July 10 2010 00:20

A rundown house in the Sierra de los Filabres in the Andalucía region of Spain

When I was a child, we always went on holiday to Scotland. These were not the kind of holidays advertised in contemporary travel brochures; no waving palms, cocktails on the beach, warm southern seas, mild Thai curries served by girls in sarongs. Instead we were headed for a land where people sprinkle salt on their porridge, where sheep nibble the grass on windy golf courses, where, if the rain does not fall, the sea-mist rolls in off the North Sea. I could not wait to get there. The sleeper train up to Inverness could not have been aiming for a more desirable destination if the carriages had been marked Shangri-La.

As an adult, I travelled often to Greek archipelagoes, taking the ferry from Piraeus to whichever island beckoned, knowing there would be somewhere simple to stay, hills to walk, the wine-dark, briny Aegean to swim in. Then I discovered a remote corner of Spain where I could rent a whitewashed house with a small garden of hibiscus and fruit trees and no mod cons for weeks on end at a peppercorn price.

One thing all these holiday destinations had in common, I recently reflected, was spartan accommodation. In Scotland the floors were linoleum and the water from the bath taps came out brown and peaty. In Spain I shivered taking cold showers on winter mornings. I sometimes shivered on winter afternoons, huddling round the estufa with a blanket on my knee.

I don’t suppose that spartan accommodation was something I consciously chose – rather, it was something that came with the territory, and the budget. But spartan or quasi-monastic accommodation has its advantages. The point of going to Scotland, or the Greek islands, or Spain, was not to rest one’s head on the most expensive pillow imaginable, to use exotic bathroom unguents or to loll on scented cushions but to be outside, to walk on springy turf or heather, to take in the incomparable views, the richness of bird life in places where the balance of life and species had not been tilted too far in the human direction.

Spartan accommodation has the advantage of not being a distraction. It also turns you outwards rather than inwards. The film Lost in Translation featured Americans stranded in a luxury hotel in Tokyo. Much of their alienation might have disappeared if the characters played by Scarlett Johansson and Bill Murray had moved to more modest quarters, forcing them to go out on to the streets and mingle with Japanese people, rather than viewing them as comical aliens.

I recently spent a few days in the Dordogne at a music festival organised by the Johann Hummel fanatic Ian Christians, under the banner of the travel, music and wine company Orpheus and Bacchus. It was also an exercise in spartan sleeping. As Ian’s charmingly low-key but high-powered wife Sharon put it: “There is a monastic aspect to the accommodation because the emphasis is on intellectual and social richness.”

The rooms at Le Faure are not uncomfortable but they are simple. I didn’t hear anyone complain about the absence of telephones or TVs or cushions. Quite the opposite; a South African doctor, who had flown all the way from San Diego to be immersed in Hummel and gently marinated in St Emilion, described the place as “an island of sanity”.

The guests didn’t complain because they were the kind of people who would rather be active than passive. Being active meant listening to live chamber music, performed with passion by artists such as the Chilingirian Quartet, the great Mozartian and Hummel exponent Howard Shelley and the excellent group The Chamber Players; and not just knocking back goblets of local wine but going to châteaux and the cool limestone cellars of St Emilion to see how it is made. Above all, it meant convivial meals marked by animated discussion.

Conversation was delightfully lubricated by both the music and the wine – although I was rather disconcerted the first evening to be instructed to open a bottle of champagne to toast the “new Conservative government”. Levon Chilingirian deftly rephrased the toast as one to the people of England, for not having given a majority to any party. Later there were conversations about the poetry of WB Yeats, the Knights Templar and abstruse forms of psychotherapy.

Much discussion centred on Hummel, presiding genius of the festival. Hummel had the misfortune to be a contemporary of Beethoven but to aspire to a Mozartian grace that was going out of fashion. I feel he was best when not trying too hard; the criticism levelled at Mozart by Emperor Joseph II – too many notes – applies more to Hummel. Meanwhile, nightingales, orioles and warblers sang in the woods behind the house, and a cuckoo produced his two-note call – spartan, economical, just right.

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Paper, scissors, tones

Paper, scissors, tones

By Harry Eyres

Published: July 3 2010 00:18 | Last updated: July 3 2010 00:18

My father and I have what you might call an oblique relationship. Feelings tend not to be conveyed directly, but mediated through other things. We talk about wine or golf or music, and through those prisms the refracted light falls on other areas of life. When I turn up at my parents’ house in my elderly second-hand car, my father solemnly inspects the tyres and tut-tuts over wear to the inside rim. I used to find this annoying but now see it as an expression of concern.

Roughly once a week these days I receive an envelope addressed in my father’s hand stuffed with newspaper cuttings. Some relate to his particular areas of concern, for instance the lamentable state of the privatised British railway system. There are stories of people who have had to pay £200 for a ticket from Manchester to Birmingham, victims of a budget-airline-style pricing policy which fails to make any distinction between optional jaunts to Lanzarote and essential national rail travel. Then there is that other scandal of the ring-fencing of the Trident nuclear submarine programme in defiance of logic and ethics, opposed by many top military figures but shunted out of open political debate first by New Labour and then by the new coalition.

Not all the cuttings are about such serious matters. My father also sends scathing and funny cartoons by Peter Brookes and extracts from the newsletter of the Rex cinema in Berkhamsted. I have taken to returning the gesture and sending the occasional satirical jibe from Private Eye or a Matt cartoon: I loved the one recently of a woman at Ascot wearing a hat marked “BP” which spouted oil over astonished race-goers.

There is something touching about receiving cuttings that someone has taken the trouble physically to snip out with scissors, put in an envelope, stamp and post. The effect of e-mailing articles found on a website is entirely different: most of us are swamped with e-mails anyway and are itching to delete anything non-essential which dares to clutter our inbox. But I doubt anyone is annoyed by a cutting. The fragile, hand-trimmed paper calls for your attention in quite a different manner from the disembodied bytes.

The cuttings my father sends me are both a physical gesture on his part and a reflection of the physical reality of newspapers in paper form. Newspapers are a wonderful jumble, as mixed and impure as life itself; as Dr Samuel Johnson said in another context: “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together”. Like a Shakespearean drama, a good newspaper presents different perspectives and tones, from tragic to comic, from sober reporting to passionate invective and comic ribaldry; a free play of views.

This has a profound connection with democracy. The link between newspapers and democracy has perhaps become something of a cliché, but it didn’t appear to me that way when I lived in Spain in the early 1980s. The founding of El País as the first truly serious newspaper, free from the dead hand of autocracy, to emerge in Spain for generations was a key event in the miraculously peaceful Spanish transition to democracy – quite as important, in my view, as other structural reforms to the constitution, education and the judicial system.

El País in those early days didn’t just report on a country but helped to remake it. It was a beacon for mature democratic debate and for cultural renewal; one of the best ways of repairing the deep damage done to Spain’s soul by 40 years of repression. For me living in Spain in the early 1980s, it was a way of learning the language, the history and culture. I saw in it the late flowering of the enlightened liberalism cut down by the civil war; I remember in particular the wise essays by the non-conformist Catholic philosopher José Luís Aranguren.

El País became a rallying point not just for Spanish but for Hispanic culture. In its pages I encountered essential Latin American voices such as those of the Uruguayans Mario Benedetti and Eduardo Galeano. I have always liked the way international news comes before national news in El País.

Nowadays El País is not quite the paper it was; too closely linked to the Spanish socialist workers’ party (PSOE) on the one hand, lacking in its former philosophical reach on the other. But now also Spain has a more plural and less high-minded newspaper culture.

I linger over this particular case because of the current panic over the future of newspapers in their traditional form. It is discouraging to hear editors sounding the death-knell over their own product. They should have more faith in it, and enunciate its political and cultural value more clearly. The problem with an internet paper or journal is that you go directly to a favourite writer or section while ignoring the rest. How many people ever read the obituaries or readers’ letters or look at cartoons online? But all those are part of the folded microcosm which makes newspapers, despite their legion abuses, the most civilised way of mediating democracy that we have yet invented.

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FT: Strokes of inspiration

Strokes of inspiration

By Harry Eyres

Published: March 27 2010 00:19 | Last updated: March 27 2010 00:19

Tong Yang-Tze’s ‘Contemplate My Life (Guan Wo Sheng)’ (2007)

I’ve just come back from Taiwan, where I met a UK customs official who spends up to four hours a day practising Chinese calligraphy. I gather that he finds it relaxing and calming, like a form of meditation. Searching for parallels in my own experience, I likened his calligraphy to my daily piano practice; but of course it has the advantage of being silent, and the results, from what I could judge, were finer. There is also the fact that I tend to get rather excited when trying to play Beethoven’s Pathétique Sonata and make all sorts of mistakes – neither of which is at all appropriate in calligraphy.

We western writers, and westerners in general, as I’ve remarked before, tend to pay very little attention to the actual act of writing, which nowadays consists mostly of fingers tapping plastic keys, leaving no trace of any physical gesture. But handwriting, of which calligraphy is the most refined expression, is all physical gesture: a series of traces bearing the stamp of a unique individuality that are at the same time aimed at the widest legibility.

When I was young, I viewed handwriting as the expression of personality. I was particularly aware of the different styles of handwriting in my own family: my mother’s fluent and beautiful but not very legible hand; my father’s small and somewhat spidery script; my sister’s artistic italic style. Of course I wanted mine to be different: artistic, too, but in a more free-form style. I remember thinking that italic writing was too regimented.

Assessing my handwriting now, I don’t feel particularly satisfied. Although I think my handwriting has a certain elegance, it’s not always easy to read (perhaps a bit more legible than Gordon Brown’s), and I often lose concentration and make mistakes, as in most things I do, I fear.

Everything about the way I write bears the marks of an occidental (rather than oriental) approach and education. There is a strange combination of instrumentality and hyper-individualism. Handwriting in the west is regarded as a means to an end, not an end in itself; it’s what you write that’s important, not how you write it. Any way that reaches the goal of intelligibility will do. This allows a freedom that might seem attractive (to many in the east as well as the west), but I am beginning to wonder whether it could be a short cut to expression that ends up impoverishing expression itself.

In the traditions of the east, the way to freedom is through discipline. There is no short cut to learning the thousands of Chinese characters, each consisting of up to 30 strokes, each one of which must be executed in precisely the right way. That doesn’t just mean from left to right, say, or up to down, but in a fundamentally artistic way.

My partner Ching Ling tells me that soon after learning to write with a stick in the sand and then pencil, she started to practise using brushes, and the old-fashioned ink made in moulded blocks. From a western perspective, this laborious method seems absurdly wasteful of time and effort. Brushes are more difficult and treacherous to use than biros or pencils and take time to clean; mixing the ink is another labour. Probably few children enjoy it at first, though a warm memory of mixing ink with your mother could stay with you for life.

What is the point? Mastering the use of brushes for calligraphy facilitates an artistic mode of expression that can become more and more enriching as you get older. In traditional Chinese culture, calligraphy has been considered a higher art form than painting or drawing. Many contemporary Chinese and Taiwanese artists use calligraphy, though often in innovative or questioning ways. My favourite among such artists is Tong Yang-Tze, whose calligraphic works in an extreme cursive or free-form style, based on ancient texts, come close to abstraction.

Tong, now in her late 60s, is hardly a traditionalist, but the exhilarating freedom and individuality of her work (shown recently at Michael Goedhuis’s gallery in London) comes out of deep knowledge of the calligraphic, literary and philosophic tradition. She strongly supports the traditional teaching of calligraphy and laments its decline in modern Taiwan and China, sacrificed to the obsession with money-making and the passing of exams.

But the reasons it might still be worth teaching calligraphy, not just in the east but also in the west, go beyond its value as artistic expression. T’ai chi masters in Taiwan sometimes insist that students spend as much time practising calligraphy as the t’ai chi forms themselves. The reason is that the smooth, continuous energy and concentration required for the forms is also required for brush-strokes.

Calligraphy, or just writing better, might help us find more peace and joy in our lives, which seems a good argument for including it in the syllabus. Sadly it is not one which would ever persuade the utilitarian commissars who control our education systems.

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FT: Does silence really exist?

Does silence really exist?

By Harry Eyres

Published: February 27 2010 00:18 | Last updated: February 27 2010 00:18

The percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie is deaf but still seems to hear something

I’ve never been one for silent retreats, or for any extreme forms of asceticism or self-abnegation. I was never tempted to become a monk, let alone a Trappist one. I do sometimes go away for short periods to somewhere quiet (for example, the beautiful Krishnamurti Centre at Brockwood Park in Hampshire), but never abjure conversation completely.

Reading Sara Maitland’s immensely stimulating A Book of Silence (I am discussing it with her at the Bath Literature Festival on March 3) has been a surprisingly noisy business for me – in terms, that is, of internal noise. The book itself is buzzing with ideas; this is more a book about silence than a book of silence, perhaps. And then I have found myself quite often, and quite violently, disagreeing with the author, sometimes out loud.

In search of silence (do you really need to search for silence, I wonder?) Maitland goes and spends 40 days alone in a remote cottage on the Isle of Skye.

This seems to me going too far, or asking for trouble, like the misguided hermit in Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra. It reminds me of my friend the writer Adam Nicolson who spent two weeks on an uninhabited island in the Outer Hebrides and ended up getting seriously spooked when his dog started growling at nothing, or perhaps a stray sheep. No wonder Maitland begins to hallucinate and hear voices.

Silence is in fact a curiously elusive concept. The moment we are quiet, we start to hear things we don’t normally hear: the sighing of the wind, birds, insects, even our own heartbeat or blood pressure. (I should make an exception for the profoundly deaf, but it seems that a profoundly deaf person such as the brilliant percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie still hears something). Perhaps, as the composer John Cage believed, silence doesn’t really exist; or, as Maitland’s friend Janet Batsleer writes to her in a letter, “all silence is waiting to be broken”.

Then there is the tendency to confuse silence with solitariness. This was the mistake of the Desert Fathers, and especially the greatest of them, St Anthony. Alone in the Egyptian desert he found himself assailed by noisy demons. During the years he spent in a ruined fort, as Adam Nicolson recounts, he could be heard groaning and weeping as he wrestled with them. One of my arguments with Maitland is that she takes the idea of silence too literally – moving around the country to more and more remote locations, which is not an option for most of us. And, in any case, are there not surprising opportunities for silent contemplation in the interstices of the noisiest city or day?

But as the book goes on, I find myself agreeing with Maitland more and more. I think she is right in her main and overarching point, that we have developed into a society or culture that is afraid of silence. The noise is now so great in many public places, partly because of all the mobile phone conversations conducted in them, that I am surprised people can actually hear the others they are phoning.

Constant noise appears to be reassuring, or at least to be thought so. That is why music or muzak plays in shops, restaurants and on aeroplanes when they are about to take off or land. But what happens when noise is so loud and ubiquitous that you can no longer hear yourself think?

Then the thought occurs that the whole point of all this din is to stop people thinking, or confronting themselves. The scary thing about silence is that you are left with yourself; the mirror which might have been conveniently darkened or blurred is now uncomfortably clean and unforgiving.

Beyond the terror of silence, as Maitland and many other writers on the subject have attested, lies a realm of joy. St Anthony survived his ordeal in the desert; he did not only survive but flourished; after his two decades of self-imposed solitary confinement, he spent years teaching and preparing other hermits, before setting off once more into the desert, and spending his old age in an oasis, where he died aged 105.

The deepest thought that Sara Maitland provokes for me is that by surrounding ourselves with noise we are cutting ourselves off from the possibility of bliss. Her book reminded me of another one, Richard Hughes’s The Wooden Shepherdess, the second volume of his ambitious historical epic of 20th-century history, The Human Predicament (the first is The Fox in the Attic).

At the end of The Fox in the Attic, Hughes’s clueless young British aristocratic hero is horrified that the beautiful blind German cousin he has fallen for is to be immured in a Carmelite convent. He has no idea that Mitzi is taking her vows not because of family pressure but because of an overwhelming vocation (nor does he know that within the walls she will find profound joy).

She will discover that “Carmel’s Enclosure is separate not from but deeply within the created world, like a beating heart”.

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FT: Blessings that grow with age

Blessings that grow with age

By Harry Eyres

Published: January 16 2010 00:09 | Last updated: January 16 2010 00:09

Nikita Magaloff (pictured in 1986, aged 74) was, by the age of 70, able to play Chopin’s Études without practising

One of the most interesting and heartening conversations I had over the quiet holiday period was about the advantages of ageing. Despite more or less patronising acknowledgements of “how much older people still have to offer”, I have the feeling that these older people are still envisaged as harmless buffers or placidly smiling grannies. It is rarely accepted that older people might actually be better at doing certain things than younger people, let alone that they might pose a threat to them.

Maybe the director-general of the BBC, Mark Thompson (52), was thinking along those lines when he agreed to be interviewed on New Year’s eve by the 89-year-old novelist PD James. She reduced him to a stuttering wreck, muttering about “top dollar” and unable to articulate the core purposes and values of the corporation.

My conversation was with a distinguished pianist and the theme was how it can become easier to learn and play music as you get older. My interlocutor recalled the great Bulgarian pianist Nikita Magaloff saying to her that “one of the great things about reaching 70 is being able to play the Chopin Études without practising”.

Then she reflected that even Magaloff was outdone by the amazing Pole Mieczyslaw Horszowski, who was still playing aged 100. She finds nowadays – in her middle years – that she can learn pieces much faster than before; the only disadvantage is that they don’t stick so long in the memory.

The pop music world is of course fixated on youth (with exceptions such as Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Van Morrison); the classical music world used to be less so, but then in the early 2000s a marketing drive from record companies conflated the youthful looks of certain nubile violin virtuosi with musical stature; now that drive seems to have extended to conductors. My pianist friend was far from complimentary about some of the hyped youthful show-ponies of the piano; one (no names) was described as belonging to the circus, another as being “100 per cent machine”. But her point was not to disparage the young, merely to point out that the art is long and the life short, that it takes a good part of a life to begin to know how to learn and play works that could sustain many lifetimes.

Another myth – apart from the one about the essential physical crumbliness and uselessness of older people – is that people mellow as they get older. There may be examples of this, but quite the opposite can also happen. Inspired by that turn-of-year conversation, I took out a rather obscure CD from my collection, a live recording of a recital given by Wilhelm Backhaus at the Salzburg Festival in 1966.

Few, I imagine, would choose this as one of their “desert island discs”. Backhaus is remembered, if at all, as a rather dour exponent of the Objective school of German piano playing, a counterpart of the harsh, aggressive Neue Sachlichkeit movement in painting. Then there are the facts that the recorded sound, in mono, is somewhat dry, and Backhaus was 82 at the time of the concert; he would continue playing for another three years, before dying immediately after his last recital at the monastery church of Ossiach in June 1969. Mellow music-making? Not a bit of it. There is a profound joy in these performances, surprising charm and tenderness in the two Mozart sonatas, but above all there is urgency and the forward drive and momentum that always marked Backhaus’s playing. He begins with two Bach preludes and fugues, given with tremendous rhythmic energy, making many contemporary performances sound mannered.

Then after the Mozart come two of the Beethoven sonatas that were always the core of Backhaus’s repertoire, the Appassionata and the last Sonata in C minor opus 111.

The advanced age of the pianist has given his playing an extra edge of intensity. The shadow of mortality (there are slips and smudges that Backhaus might have avoided when he was a young lion) gives an even more piercing communicative power; these, among Beethoven’s last words for the piano, are being played by a man who knows he may not have many more chances to communicate his thoughts about them. His response is not to play safe but to go for broke; the tempi are brisk and there is no holding back, no slowing up. Especially in the furious ending of the Appassionata, and the sublime quiet close of the sonata, this is an artist who, in company with Emily Dickinson, “could not stop for Death”.

All this has given rise to what is not exactly a new year’s resolution, but a hope for the decade just coming to birth. If the last, unlamented decade, was really the decennium of “kidulthood”, as a BBC television series recently argued, of grown-ups pretending to be children, may the next decade be one which recognises the benefits and blessings of ageing.

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FT: In the beginning

In the beginning

By Harry Eyres

Published: January 8 2010 23:12 | Last updated: January 8 2010 23:12

A learner remains unfazed in adverse weather

The now little-read Victorian poet Coventry Patmore, in the beautiful poem “Winter”, found a particular loveliness and serenity in the apparent low point of the year. January’s chill and dark were to him merely signs of “warmth and light asleep”.

In fact everything that is to come, in more obvious form, in warmer, later seasons, is already present, in dormant chrysalis mode, in the year’s coldest phase: “But sweeter yet than dream or song of Summer or Spring/ Are Winter’s sometime smiles, that seem to well/ From infancy ineffable.”

January is the unloved, stumbling beginner among the months of the year. Beginners are often treated with condescension; they are not expected to know much or be able to do much; we overtake beginner drivers with a cluck of impatience immediately swallowed as we remember we were once there ourselves.

But being a beginner is not such a bad place to find yourself. A beginner carries no baggage. Babies, in their “infancy ineffable”, attract us because of their wonderful, almost scary, openness; their bodies and minds have not yet been warped by custom and habit; Wordsworth’s “shades of the prison-house” have not yet closed upon them. They, alone among human beings, do not need to do yoga.

As a yoga practitioner, I am a perpetual beginner. I very much doubt that I shall ever reach the heady heights of what is called the Gentle Intermediate class at my local yoga centre. But with yoga this does not seem to matter. Rather in the manner of the London society women cited by Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest “who, by their own free choice, have remained thirty-five for years”, it appears that people can remain almost indefinitely and without shame in a Beginner’s yoga class.

More or less the same goes for meditation. But here I do feel more sense of shame, because having attended various Beginner’s courses I felt I should move on to a more advanced level. But Intermediate Meditation was not for me; the most basic steps of the practice, being able to find what my teacher calls “a quality of stillness,” or just being able to sit quietly for half an hour, scanning my body for tension and unnecessary holding, the unconscious grimace, the lock of the hips, and then mindfulness of breathing, counting breaths up to 10, are still more than enough for me.

But then another voice tells me there is nothing shameful about being a perpetual beginner. Near the heart of both yoga and meditation, and other spiritual and artistic practices, is the rediscovery of the perpetual freshness and newness of each moment.

This is what Zen teachers call shoshin, or beginner’s mind. Shunryn Suzuki began his book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind with these words: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s there are few.” However advanced a yogi or meditator, poet, painter or pianist you may be, each new moment is a beginning and in it, with any luck, you are a beginner again. The most accomplished pianist playing a piece for the umpteenth time is faced with the challenge of making it sound new, and newly encountered.

This is no simple task, though it is about the recovery of simplicity. The fine Scottish poet WS Graham wrote to his friend Robin Skelton, in the depths of the cold winter of 1972: “After one finishes a poem which seems to work one says ... I’ll write another because I know how to do it, but it is not so. There is the silence before one just as difficult to disturb significantly as before.”

Graham’s body of poetic work shows a man with an inordinate respect for silence and beginnings. For him, a poem needed to start in an utterly arresting manner, or it was no poem. Between 1955 and 1970 he published no work; his publishers, Faber, did not realise he was still writing. His fierce self-criticism ultimately led him to effect a holocaust of drafts, rather like Sibelius’ burning of the manuscript of his Eighth Symphony. What it must have felt like to be him, or live with him, is heartbreakingly conveyed, between the lines, in a prefatory note to the posthumous collection “Aimed at Nobody” by his widow Nessie: “At various times it was suggested to Sydney that the poetry was progressing better. But no. He said repeatedly to different people that earlier poems were not necessarily less good than later ones.”

Of course he was right. Graham with his respect for beginnings so intense that he could hardly bring himself to break the silence stands at one extreme. At the other are babies who don’t find it difficult to disturb the silence significantly; they simply bawl their heads off when they need to. Perhaps we can situate ourselves somewhere between the two, and use the year’s quiet, cold, slow start to imitate bulbs and plants, bears and insects, to rest a little, so that we can begin again with renewed vigour.

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FT: When straight is a bit narrow

When straight is a bit narrow

By Harry Eyres

Published: January 2 2010 01:24 | Last updated: January 2 2010 01:24

I remember learning about Roman roads. To be more precise, I can remember waking up at 6am on a freezing winter morning at boarding school and decamping from my quite warm and cosy bed to the shower and lavatory facilities, where the lights were kept on all night, so that I could mug up for a test on the details of construction of those undoubtedly impressive feats of engineering.

I felt no great love for the Roman surveyors and soldiers who had maintained such uniform and high standards of construction (I remember that our pedantic textbook was particularly hot on the drainage arrangements). This means that many of their roads are still in use or can be seen from the air, striding across expanses of what was once their empire in dead-straight lines.

The rather unimaginative teaching of Roman roads concentrated on the physical reality at the expense of reflection on what they represented: for example, the dominance of the military over the civil. Even more significantly, our teacher never invited us to reflect on what Roman roads were not, or what they might have replaced. Roman roads were progress, state-of-the-art means of getting about, comparable to the motorways that were being constructed in Britain around that time (the 1970s). We were meant to admire them without reservation – in particular, I think we were meant to admire their straightness.

The straight Roman roads (of course, they are not always straight, but long stretches of them are) were obviously designed as the fastest way of getting from one big centre to another. Everything in between was sidelined. You can see that there are advantages and disadvantages to this. Human settlements grow up around natural features of the landscape: river valleys and crossings, or hills that can be defended. Nature does not work in straight lines; rivers meander; to get up hills you need to double back, as John Donne reminded us when he wrote of the Hill of Truth that “he that will /Reach her about must and about must go”.

The directness with which the Romans achieved their objectives can still astonish us: even our motorways are not as straight and pay more heed to natural contours than some of their roads. And we should remember that those objectives were primarily military; hence the suffixes -cester, -chester or -caster, from the Latin word castra (military camp), in so many town names in Britain.

Obviously, the ancient Britons, Druids and other shaggy-haired characters who roamed the land before the arrival of the Romans also found their way around but in a very different way. In fact it seems that after the departure of the Romans, their roads fell out of use (no one knew how to maintain them) and the old ones were resuscitated.

Now I’m not going to suggest we abandon all of our well-engineered roads – though I would urge not building any more unnecessary ones based on outdated traffic projections – so much as suggesting a metaphorical consideration of this whole question of roads and paths. Our obsession with building fast, straightish roads that cut through landscapes and ignore humble settlements may have infected our whole way of thinking.

This at least was the view of Martin Heidegger when he gave the title Holzwege – literally Woodpaths – to his first postwar collection of essays. As he wrote in the foreword: “In the wood are paths that wind along until they end quite suddenly in an impenetrable thicket.” To be on a woodpath is a conversational German expression that means to be on the wrong track, a way that goes nowhere. But Heidegger’s point is that nowhere might turn out to be somewhere. “Woodcutters and foresters,” after all, “are familiar with these paths” and none is quite identical to another. Woodpaths don’t lead you definitively out of the woods but, then, by learning woodways and woodcraft, you might come to see the wood as somewhere full of possibility.

In my years as a university teacher I found that students increasingly wanted Roman roads or motorways rather than woodpaths. They wanted what were called “clear goals and objectives”, narrower than my old-fashioned idea of nurturing a more humane person; or rather, they wished to be presented with the shortest, quickest way of acquiring the grades they needed ... to get other grades. They seemed to want to be given the answers, rather than the means to explore and generate questions.

What works with military campaigns does not necessarily work in the field of liberal education. If your objective is to take Baghdad, you do not want to get bogged down in street-fighting in the suburbs. It’s a little different if your aim is to explore King Lear. But come to think of it, the strictly A-to-B approach does not really work with military campaigns either. When President George W Bush landed on the USS Abraham Lincoln in May 2003 a large banner behind him read, “Mission Accomplished”.

It spoke rather too soon. Not enough attention had been paid to the hinterland, the network of winding paths that makes up a country, a mind, a world.

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FT: Human beings or human resources?

Human beings or human resources?

By Harry Eyres

Published: December 23 2009 23:11 | Last updated: December 23 2009 23:11

Recently, my partner Ching Ling got an iPhone. It is an amazing piece of engineering, so sleek and clever and attractive to handle that you could hardly fail to fall for it. A poet friend who, a while ago, penned a magnificent invective against mobile phones, comparing them to sex aids, would have to revise his lines. This thing is more like a cat: you stroke it and it purrs. Not always a well-behaved cat; plugged in for recharging, it woke us up in the middle of the night bleeping loudly. I have no idea what it wanted.

Essentially, though, it is a toy. Once you acquire an iPhone, you can’t stop playing with it. But the phone is also playing with you. It is making money out of you, cajoling you into signing up for all sorts of unnecessary applications. Watching me playing with it, Ching Ling observed that I had reverted to the age of five; shortly after she revised that to three.

The iPhone represents the power and attraction of the new – of technological innovation, promising social benefits but driven by commercial interests that do not uphold the principle St Paul enunciated in his first letter to the Corinthians: “When I was a child ... I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things”. I really don’t know whether an iPhone will help me to live better; I rather suspect not. I have no idea whether mobile phones in general have added to the sum of human well-being. We seemed to get on quite well without them; I have a feeling they have made it harder for people to be on their own.

For a long time now the power of the new has trumped the power of the old. But almost a year ago, when President Barack Obama gave his inaugural address, I noted a sea-change. In the most stirring piece of political oratory delivered for decades, Obama made a distinction between new challenges and instruments and old values, including “tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism”. Later in the speech he harked back to one of the battles that gave birth to the US. It seemed the old was making a comeback, and in the UK that coincided with a sense of hollowness and decrepitude in the political project that has dominated the late 1990s and the 2000s, New Labour.

One old thing Obama did not so much talk about as represent was the power of the word. The word is probably the ultimate old thing that went out of fashion: words became “mere rhetoric”, windy nothingnesses set against the hard truths told by numbers. But Obama did not offer rhetoric so much as oratory, and many commented on the debt his speeches owed to classical models. Something rather strange and fascinating was going on: a youthful president, of African-American ancestry, was speaking not in bullet points but in the style of Cicero.

My gripe with Obama’s old things is that they are not old enough. He may speak in the style of Cicero but his values are drawn from the Enlightenment. Of course that makes sense, because America is a product of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment values Obama praises, such as tolerance and curiosity, are both admirable and essential – especially so in the context of insurgent bigotry. But they are not sufficient.

Sixty-five years ago, in The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer had a nightmare. The Enlightenment, instead of liberating mankind, had bound it in chains. “The wholly enlightened earth is radiant with calamity ... What human beings seek to learn from nature is how to enslave both it and human beings.”

You don’t have to go quite as far as the two dour Frankfurt philosophers to see that the Enlightenment project of raising human reason to god-like power has had disturbing results. These can be seen both in the state of nature, reduced and damaged possibly beyond repair, and of human beings, retooled as “human resources” – that is, means to be exploited rather than ends in themselves.

I think we need to go back beyond the time of the Enlightenment and the birth of the US to rediscover the values that give god-like dignity (what Plato called the “divine something”) to human beings and restore the non-instrumental beauty of the natural world. One place to start would be the beautifully redesigned Medieval and Renaissance galleries at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. And within those galleries you might pause in front of the Symmachi panel, an exquisite late Roman ivory carving showing a young woman performing a pagan rite at an outdoor altar. Under the shade of a spreading oak an offering is being made, and thanks are being given. We don’t know exactly of what, for what, but we can imagine it has something to do with sky and earth, and the sustaining of life.

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Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009.