SLOW Movement

FT: Peaks in a trough year

Peaks in a trough year

By Harry Eyres

Published: December 19 2009 00:03 | Last updated: December 19 2009 00:03

Barcelona’s Lionel Messi scores against Bayern Munich in the Champions League last April

One of the things I like about the psychologist Abraham Maslow’s theory of peak experiences is its implication that the human being is best defined not by what it can be reduced to but by what it aspires to. I must explain that I am talking about non-materialistic aspiration, which might already sound odd. But not so odd when you reflect on what really defines music, or sporting prowess, or love for that matter.

All music could be seen as a gesture in the direction of Bach and Mozart; every forehand at a tennis club is a faltering step on the road that leads to the sublime strokes of Roger Federer; every child’s playground pass is a distant imitation of Lionel Messi. We play or listen to music, we play or watch sport, because we have been inspired by something breathtaking and apparently impossible, something that made us feel different, better, more human. A statistician concerned with normality would probably disregard peak experiences because they are so atypical but Maslow’s point is that the atypical is precisely what makes us human.

So to my peak experiences of 2009, a sobering year when all sorts of material aspirations crashed to earth. This was also a year for me marked by a spate of serious illnesses among friends of my own age – a sudden cold blast of mortality. A sobering year could also be a good time to sort the wheat from the chaff, like a whole year of winter light when things stand out more truly in their essential nature.

My musical highlight was difficult to decide. I’ve already paid tribute to Bernard Haitink’s conducting of Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony, marked by what I could only call a blazing humility. Two of my favourite pianists, about as different from each other as you could imagine, also gave great performances. In Stephen Hough’s epic Festival Hall recital, it was the late Romantic French repertoire that stood out for me: César Franck’s initially despairing, ultimately triumphant Prelude, Chorale and Fugue and the infinitely subtle undulations of Fauré’s fifth impromptu and his fifth barcarolle. Mitsuko Uchida, also at the Festival Hall, made Beethoven seem as strange as Boulez and Webern as familiar as Mozart; but above all brought Schumann’s Fantasy in C major to a fulfilment so hushed and complete that the audience could only sustain the silence.

All the same my ultimate musical highlight was spread over a couple of days in April when I eavesdropped on Gustavo Dudamel rehearsing with his Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela and talked to José Antonio Abreu, the visionary founder of Venezuela’s El Sistema youth music education programme. Revelatory was not just the wholehearted, red-blooded commitment and quality of the playing but also the way Dudamel, Abreu and the orchestra definitively exploded the myth that classical music is a socially exclusive activity.

The sporting highlight had to come from Roger Federer. His emotional victory in the French Open over the impressive Robin Soderling was not the best tennis match of the year but, by winning the only grand slam that had previously eluded him, it was the moment that sealed a compact with greatness. Federer is the most stylishly attacking player I have seen, the one with the most trust in the power and beauty of his own game, who relies least on the mistakes of others. His Wimbledon victory over the unfortunate Andy Roddick came down to a serving contest but it was also a shining example of nerve under pressure – something for all of us to aspire to.

In the world of wine, 2009 turned out to be one of those years saved in some northerly areas by September sun. September also brought my wine of the year, a bottle of 1957 Lafite from a forgotten recess of my father’s cellar. Old and dusty at first, the wine gathered fruit purity and sweetness as it opened itself up to the air, showing the peculiar grace of older wines, like the beauty of some older people or days in winter when the sun glows for not that long and without much heat but with no less loveliness than on a July scorcher. It was a bottle that gave a lesson in how to age and, in a strange way, how to live and die.

I am adding a new category of broadcasting highlight so that I can praise Roger Scruton’s wonderfully idiosyncratic BBC2 essay Why Beauty Matters. Scruton’s idea of beauty sometimes seemed nostalgic and elegiac but he argued for it with passionate eloquence, as if the ghost of Kenneth Clark had been summoned to contemplate the ruinous effects of 1960s town planning. And above all he raised Antonio Machado’s questioning riposte to utilitarianism – what is the use of all our utilities?

Bird-watching moments were fewer and further between than I would have liked in 2009 but two stand out. The first was in the bayou country of Louisiana where I was entranced to see not just pint-sized alligators but great white egrets. Then a few weeks later, crossing Elvet Bridge in Durham, north-east England, I saw a kingfisher flash over the River Wear, as brilliantly and eternally blue as a medieval stained glass window.

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FT: The graceful revolution

The graceful revolution

By Harry Eyres

Published: December 12 2009 00:41 | Last updated: December 12 2009 00:41

The emblem of the McDonald’s chain is carried during a protest surrounding José Bové’s trial in 1999

I don’t often feel tempted to raise my hand in salute but I’m making an exception for the 20th anniversary of the signing of the Slow Food Manifesto in Paris in December 1989. This is a fraternal greeting to the inspired organisation which, at the tail end of the most violent century in history, provided the perfect antidote to that lamentable paean to speed, Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto of 1909. Slow Food has not merely mobilised the beneficent force of slowness (which can be surprisingly powerful, like the tree-men Ents in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings) but has also provided one of the bases for a new politics of food and environmental quality.

Slow Food’s founder Carlo Petrini, as Italian as Marinetti but in every other way his polar opposite, saw – and set about resisting – the implications of a world and an economy in which food was being turned to industrialised fodder. Ultimately that means no less than a defence of the human and of nature, of cultural diversity and biodiversity.

But if Slow Food is a revolution, it is one conducted with style and grace, not violence. Almost everything about Slow Food is encapsulated in its first act, the protest Petrini organised against the opening of a McDonald’s hamburger joint at the foot of the Spanish Steps in Rome. Where the French activist and Roquefort farmer José Bové dismantled a half-built McDonald’s in Millau, Petrini showed he had learned more from the situationists than from the sans-culottes. Instead of breaking glass he set up some trestle tables and assembled a bunch of Italian grannies to load them with home-cooked penne.

Some might also say that act pointed to the limitations of Slow Food as a movement. It was essentially Italian and unserious. Certainly Petrini is a delightfully witty man, but just because someone is witty it does not mean he or she cannot be serious. And in terms of Italianness, it may still be the case that half of Slow Food’s 106,000 members are Italian but the movement has spread slow-growing but sturdy tentacles all over the world, from Burkina Faso to Bangladesh.

Slow Food is particularly strong in North America. That may sound strange but follows the poet Friedrich Hoelderlin’s logic that “where the danger is, there grows also the saving power”. The US is the centre of the global fast food or food-as-fodder industry; it is also the site of resistance movements, from Chez Panisse, Alice Waters’ seminal Berkeley restaurant based on local, seasonal produce, to the organic supermarket chain Whole Foods.

But let’s return to seriousness. In the UK, where the movement has not really taken hold, I get the impression Slow Food is still regarded as consisting of a few Islington foodies drizzling Ligurian olive oil over stone-baked ciabatta. It is seen as both elitist and frivolous – the concern of pampered metropolitan sophisticates with no relevance to the junk-food-eating masses.

This is both a grave misrepresentation of what Slow Food is about and a sad reflection of the hopelessly self-defeating nature of British class-based politics.

Slow Food is as much about farming as about foodiness; it is based on the American farmer-poet and essayist Wendell Berry’s observation that “eating is an agricultural act”.

Slow Food celebrations have been held this month in countries as diverse as Uganda, Chile, Mexico and India in defence of threatened local food traditions, crop varieties, artisanal methods of production and sustainable agriculture in general. This may sound quaint but it is also a matter of life and death. As BBC News reported last year, thousands of farmers have committed suicide in the Indian state of Maharashtra alone in recent years (the figure for the whole of India is estimated to be 10,000 a year), saddled with debts they could not repay. Many connect the debts with seeds and fertilisers sold on credit by large agribusinesses.

Ultimately, though, Slow Food is about pleasure. The pleasure of eating, eating as pleasure, is not an exquisite refinement reserved for the elite but an essential component of all human culture. Eating, even more than an agricultural act, is a cultural act, an act that gives meaning, that connects us to the earth and the seasons, and sustains community and conviviality.

Conviviality is at the heart of Slow Food’s philosophy, which is wonderfully non-utilitarian and, it has to be said, non-Protestant. The fast-food and food-as-fodder industries regard food as a means to an end; so too, in a different way, as the brilliant American writer Michael Pollan’s In Defence of Food has shown us, does the ideology of nutritionism, which holds that food is not really food but a collection of nutrients which make people healthy (but not necessarily happy or joyful).

There are no more intimate acts than eating and drinking, when we take the produce of the cultivated and uncultivated earth into our bodies, to sustain not only ourselves but a compact with nature. Slow Food’s revolutionary achievement is to remind us that everything starts with that communion, and we must work to make it joyful and responsible again.

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FT: Childhood for grownups

Childhood for grownups

By Harry Eyres

Published: November 21 2009 00:51 | Last updated: November 21 2009 00:51

Turner’s ‘Ullswater, Cumberland’ (c1835). A trip on the lake had a profound effect on the young Wordsworth

Last Friday in Soho I bought something I’d been intending to buy for ages. This was not a major purchase, at least in financial terms; it cost less than £5, roughly the price of a pot of tea and a chocolate éclair at my favourite Soho patisserie, Maison Bertaux in Greek Street. Somehow, though, I have a feeling that this item – a piano score, to be more precise – may give me longer-lasting pleasure than an éclair, which, as well as a cream-filled indulgence, means a flash of lightning in French.

Schumann’s Kinderszenen or Scenes from Childhood are not so much flashes of lightning, or cream-filled indulgences, as ever-renewing embers. They are pieces that more than any others I know convey human warmth – the warmth of the fireside, of a child falling asleep, tucked up in bed, of a daylight reverie. The warmth from them has not stopped radiating since the 28-year-old composer, in the ardour of his long-distance engagement to the brilliant pianist Clara Wieck, set down these 13 miniatures in the spring of 1838.

Schumann sent just the first piece, “A Tale of Distant Lands”, to Clara at the time of composition, though he referred to the others in letters. She saw the other scenes for the first time only when he sent her a copy of the published edition in March 1839. Her response was everything a young lover and composer might have wished. Clara was “utterly enraptured” by the pieces. “It’s true, isn’t it,” she wrote, “that they belong only to the two of us? I simply can’t put them out of my mind, they are so simple, so heart-warming, so very you.”

Of course Clara was wrong about the pieces belonging only to the two lovers. They have become the common property of humanity. Was she right about their simplicity? How simple are the Kinderszenen? Are they pieces primarily for children or for adults? Schumann himself gives mixed signals on this, referring to them on the title page as “easy pieces for piano” (some of them are really not very easy) and writing in a letter that the pieces are “very easy for children”. The first and the seventh, “Reverie” or “Träumerei”, are often included in grade examinations. And Schumann’s friend Franz Liszt, to whom he sent the Kinderszenen, wrote back to him saying that he was playing the pieces two or three evenings a week to his three-year-old daughter, often not getting further than the first reprise, which she asked to be repeated 20 times.

More often, though, Schumann expressed the view that the Kinderszenen were adult reflections on or recollections of childhood. “They are reminiscences by a grown-up for grown-ups, while the [Album for the Young] rather contains make-believe, presentiments and future states of mind for those who are still young.”

Immersing myself once again in these pieces, which I first came across as a 14-year-old, I feel that is right. At least, I am no longer baffled, as I was then, by the fact that pieces that were apparently simple didn’t turn out to be simple at all, either technically or interpretatively. What could be simpler than the first piece, “A Tale of Foreign Lands”, with its innocent theme accompanied by what sound like straightforward broken chords? But when you try to play it, the theme, or rather its tone, is somehow elusive, and the broken chord accompaniments are split between the two hands, requiring considerable control and delicacy not to sound lumpy.

What is not simple about Kinderszenen is that they combine two perspectives: they are simultaneously experienced from an adult’s and child’s point of view. In musical terms this is expressed through counterpoint and an intricate interweaving of textures.

But then the ultimate question posed by the Kinderszenen is whether you can ever fully separate the two perspectives – whether you can ever make a clear divide between adulthood and childhood. The porousness of the divide works both ways; not only can, and should, adults sometimes be childlike (eat éclairs, for instance), but children can have those prophetic moments of consciousness that look ahead into great expanses of not-yet-experienced time.

That at least was what the poet William Wordsworth thought. He set so much store by those deep early shakings and stirrings of consciousness, like the one he experienced one summer evening as a young boy rowing a shepherd’s boat on Ullswater, that he considered them the shaping moments of the human mind. That was how he could come to his seemingly back-to-front conclusion that “the child is father to the man”.

The last piece of Kinderszenen is called “The Poet Speaks”. This poet is not a child, clearly. But it is in this piece that the essential quality of Schumann’s miraculous set of scenes most fully emerges – the heart-warming simplicity of utterance which comes about, perhaps, when the artificial wall between the child and adult we all combine within us is taken down, and we can cross with impunity between the two states.

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FT: Does science need religion?

Does science need religion?

By Harry Eyres

Published: November 13 2009 23:52 | Last updated: November 13 2009 23:52

Galileo Galilei appeared before the Roman Inquisition in 1632

Humility, genuine humility, is always a good place to start from. But it is not the disposition that most of us probably associate with the world’s major organised religions. Individual religious persons may be humble but the churches, orders, mosques and so on tend to project pomp and certainty (otherwise they are accused of faithlessness). I was brought up within a peculiar strain of English Roman Catholicism which, in those days, combined stupendous social snobbery with scientific ignorance and dismissiveness of all who questioned its authoritarian precepts.

You could forgive some of this on the grounds of the centuries of persecution, but I have always struggled to forgive all of it. I was so alarmed at the likely fate of my ungodly, notionally Protestant but generally hard-drinking, rugby-playing grandfather that when he died I spent hours on All Souls’ Day in the school chapel saying prayers (so-called “indulgences”) to get him off years of punishment in purgatory.

We little Catholic boys were encouraged to believe that Catholics were better – that is holier – than Protestants, not to mention agnostics, atheists, Muslims or Methodists (socially beyond the pale). Did this mean that my Catholic mother was better than my Protestant/atheist father? Reproductively, it seemed that Catholics were trumps; if we had children, they would automatically become Catholics, whatever religion or lack of religion their mother professed.

You can imagine then that I came to the New Orleans Symposium on religion, science and the environment armed with a good deal of scepticism. Would the splendidly dressed religious eminences acknowledge the role that the dogmatism and intellectual blinkeredness of their religious traditions had played in creating the ecological crisis, or in generally messing up the world?

Hearteningly, there were signs that they might. Metropolitan John of Pergamon (of the Orthodox church) and one of the world’s most distinguished theologians, set the tone in his background paper. He fingered parts of the Christian tradition, notably neo-Platonism and Gnosticism, for their disdain of the body and nature, and the Calvinist ethos of capitalism, which views the world simply as raw material for exploitation. Heavy and apparently abstruse stuff, but not so abstruse when you looked out of the window and saw the polluted Mississippi flow by, carrying its load of pesticide and fertiliser effluent into the Gulf of Mexico to create the world’s largest marine “dead zone”.

Environmentalists have long berated Christians for following the Biblical injunction to dominate and populate the world with scant regard for the intrinsic value, balance and order of nature. But here on the banks of Old Man River we heard a message from the Pope stressing that “nature is prior to us” and contains its own “grammar which sets forth ends and criteria for its wise use, not its reckless exploitation”. Even more amazingly, we were addressed by the wise and sensible Rev Jim Ball of the Environmental Evangelical Network, proving that not all north American Evangelicals believe in hastening the end of the world.

In the past, and in my own past, religions got a bad name among the open-minded by fearing and opposing science and scholarship. This fear and opposition ranged from the heavy-duty persecutions of the Inquisition, burning Giordano Bruno and forbidding Galileo to disseminate his world-changing observations of planetary movements, to the silliness of those who taught me that the first five books of the Old Testament were dictated directly by God to Moses.

In New Orleans I saw religious scholars and leaders reaching out in genuine humility to other intellectual traditions; not being afraid of science, but actively embracing and using it. Of course you can see that religion needs science; it is no longer possible to deny certain kinds of geophysical and biological evidence without cutting yourself off from the community of the intellectually curious. But the more interesting question is whether science needs religion.

“Science”, according to the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “manipulates things and gives up living in them.” Or you could say that science illuminates many things but cannot tell us what they mean to us, in human terms.

What religion can bring to science, and the pressing task of planet-healing, is not the arrogant certitude that brooks no argument but passion and community.

Abused and dangerous words these may be. Passions can be whipped up by obscurantists and community too easily becomes a meaningless token. But the Latin origins of the word “passion” take us to suffering and to the cognate word “compassion”.

Science gives us repeated and intensifying warnings that the earth, our home, is in bad shape, and that we are causing potentially disastrous disruption to the great planetary systems of weather and cleansing and renewal. But it leaves us in the lurch, with the bad news. Religion and religious art, at their best, can offer communal means both of mourning our inescapable losses (think of the Bach Passions) and of celebration. Intellectual proofs on their own have never been enough to change human behaviour; we need emotional reconnection.

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FT: Art for body, mind and soul

Art for body, mind and soul

By Harry Eyres

Published: October 24 2009 00:44 | Last updated: October 24 2009 00:44

The slow suppleness and gravity-defying lightness of Cloud Gate Dance Theatre from Taiwan

I once embarked on training in something grandly styled Integrative Arts Therapy.

The idea went back to the 1920s when the psychiatrist Hanz Prinzhorn achieved remarkable results by encouraging profoundly disturbed patients to paint and draw. Prinzhorn, an art historian-turned-doctor who was close to the Surrealists and Dadaists, became convinced that the spontaneous productions of mental patients were “the eruptions of a universal human creative urge”. Reconnecting patients with this urge could do as much as, or more than, words or drugs. His collection of the artworks of patients fortunately survived the war and is now on display at the University of Heidelberg. From his experiments emerged the now institutionalised discipline of art therapy.

Integrative arts therapy had the noble aim of going beyond art therapy and bringing the resources of all the arts to bear on the work of soul-healing, or psychotherapy. Unfortunately, I found that in practice this aim led to infantilism: the turning of the therapeutic space into a kids’ playground full of fluffy cushions and painted in cheerful colours (no gloomy or disturbing art allowed). Art, I felt, was losing its edge and its full, uncanny power by being pressed into service as a therapeutic aid.

I gave up the training but not the idea that the arts are profoundly healing for the soul. Maybe that sounds a little bland or sanctimonious. Who could disprove such a claim – but then who could prove it, in a scientific age which has little time for soul? Or perhaps it sounds embarrassing; I have the feeling that nowadays most look to art not for profound soul-searching or soul-healing but for amusement, titillation, brain-teasing, sensation, outrage, disgust – all the kinds of emotion evoked by the Young British Artists and their American counterparts.

So if I claimed that art is profoundly healing, not just for the soul but also for the body, I might just get a better hearing. Two recent experiences have confirmed me in this view. A few weeks ago I went to see a friend’s chamber opera at the Bridewell Theatre off Fleet Street: a small-scale production by an outfit called Opera Engine with a jazz combo standing in for a full orchestra and (unpaid) singers who were either students or just embarking on careers. I wasn’t feeling ill but tired and aching in back and limbs and wondering how I would cope with a longish evening in an uncomfortable seat.

Jacko’s Hour is a dark tale of revenge and a daughter’s love for her father set in a Yorkshire fairground – Verdi meets High Noon with a touch of Puccini and Brighton Rock thrown in. Both libretto (by Tim Satterthwaite) and score (by Elfyn Jones) are finely worked, and give opportunities for singer-actors to voice full-blooded emotions, those inconvenient by-products of being human which are so unfashionable in the post-modern world.

I was moved by the performances of the principals and came out feeling like James Bond’s favourite cocktail, not simply stirred but shaken. My stagnant emotions had been thoroughly agitated. The result was the opposite of the physical exhaustion I had feared: I emerged newly energised and also grateful to the creative team who had given so much for so little tangible reward.

My second experience happened more recently at the Barbican, where, in the latter stages of flu, I attended Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan’s Wind Shadow. Of all artforms, dance is the one I have least affinity with – classical ballet generally bores me (no doubt because I do not understand the grammar or syntax). But I had heard Lin Hwai-min, the founder and choreographer of Cloud Gate, speak at a seminar and been impressed by his charm and modesty and the extraordinary beauty of the filmclip of Cloud Gate he introduced.

Wind Shadow might have seemed a gruelling proposition; nearly two hours of contemporary dance without obvious narrative or recognisable characters and a score consisting more of sound effects than music. Some critics accused it of being merely spectacular. The visual impact was certainly arresting: dancers covered in black gauze appeared as the shadows of the others, sometimes dragged around by them, clogging their movements, sometimes taking charge. Figures, alone or in small groups, writhed in pools of light, as if paintings by Francis Bacon had come to life, but shorn of grotesqueness and harking back to statues of discus-throwers.

Those who dismissed the work as empty spectacle had missed the three-dimensional aspect of the show, the inspiring way the dancers communicated with their bodies. These remarkable performers are trained not just in the arduous disciplines of ballet but in the subtler arts of tai chi and meditation. Watching the slow suppleness and gravity-defying lightness of their movement seemed to unlock something in my own body. I could not unfold like a flower with the grace of the dancers, but I could reach towards the light.

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FT: One thing at a time

One thing at a time

By Harry Eyres

Published: October 17 2009 00:46 | Last updated: October 17 2009 00:46

A reader once wrote to me asking for advice about multitasking. I replied, truthfully if a trifle pompously, that multitasking was not a word that featured in my vocabulary. What I meant to convey was not just a preference – multitasking was not my cup of tea – but a deeper sense that there was really something quite wrong-headed about this apparently common and current term. So the findings of a group of researchers from Stanford University, showing that multitasking is a sure recipe for incompetence, pleased but did not surprise me.

Apparently the results, published on August 24 in the Proceedings of the US National Academy of Sciences, did surprise the researchers themselves. Professor Clifford Nass and his colleagues began the project assuming that multitaskers possessed an enviable gift. When he discovered that “multitaskers were lousy at everything” it came as “a complete and total shock” to the professor. It turned out not just that multitaskers were not good at multitasking, but that they were bad at focusing, remembering and switching from one task to another.

I suppose the idea that being able to do, say, three things at once might just seem better than just doing one thing at a time. But it seems dangerous to assume that what works in the realm of juggling – clearly being able to juggle just one ball is no achievement at all – should hold good in other spheres.

I used to teach a theatre course to American undergraduates, which included a showing of Louis Malle’s My Dinner with André, the film in which the playwright and actor Wallace Shawn and the theatre director André Gregory spend 90 minutes in a Manhattan restaurant talking about art and life. During one showing I noticed that several students were writing postcards (this was before the days of texting). Eventually I paused the tape and suggested to them that the film deserved their full attention.

At the time I was bemused not just by their insistence that they could perfectly well watch the film and write a postcard at the same time, but by their air of aggrieved innocence or injured pride. Now, having heard Prof Nass speak about his findings, I realise that I was casting aspersions on their ability to multitask.

Maybe it is worth pausing here and spelling out just why I thought and still think it is not possible to write a postcard and watch My Dinner with André at the same time. Writing a postcard, strange as it may sound, requires your complete attention. It requires the directing of imaginative sympathy towards the recipient, a kind of long-distance tuning. A postcard written by a robot would not be a postcard you would want to receive; if it did not say “wish you were here”, it would consist of some other lame or inappropriate formula, because only a being employing the full human powers of mind and heart can write a postcard worth the stamp.

Watching a film, still more obviously, is not something you can do with half an eye, or half a heart. Every frame, every word, in a properly made film, has something to say to you. In the case of My Dinner with André, you are drawn into a conversation of epic intensity; only by imaginatively taking the place of Shawn, by having your own dinner with the outrageous and mesmerising Gregory, can you follow him on his crazed quest for authentic experience, for an Artaudian theatre that is as much an experiment in living as an artistic project. The film is not easy to watch, and offers no hiding place.

Unconsciously, I think, my multitasking students were operating a strategy of avoidance. Multitasking may be not so much about efficiency or productivity as a kind of flinching from full emotional and intellectual engagement with the task in hand.

My criticism of the Stanford study is that it was too limited in scope. Prof Nass and his co-researchers used only rather crude cognitive methods, testing whether their human guinea-pigs could recognise and remember different-coloured shapes, letters and numbers. This is only the tip of the iceberg, or does not get very close to the heart of the human. Deciding how well a subject was engaging with the imaginative world of a great work of art or with another person, while fiddling with a mobile or a BlackBerry, would clearly require a different kind of testing altogether.

Ultimately the problem of multitasking is not so much a cognitive one as an emotional and ethical one. It is certainly possible to drive a car and listen to a Beethoven symphony at the same time, because driving a car demands certain physical skills but does not involve any emotional engagement. Trying to listen to a Beethoven symphony and simultaneously speak to someone on the phone is neither possible nor right. By driving ourselves to distraction, attempting to juggle tasks each of which requires our full attention, we will ultimately drive others to distraction as well.

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FT: Catching Fire

Catching Fire

Review by Harry Eyres

Published: October 5 2009 05:06 | Last updated: October 5 2009 05:06

Catching Fire: How Cooking Made us Human
By Richard Wrangham
Profile £15, 309 pages
FT Bookshop price: £12

This lucidly written and accessible popular science book argues that cooking was crucial in the evolution of the human race. Its thesis is not just that some experimentally minded members of homo erectus got the idea of cooking food, but that the epochal evolution of the homines from habilines (big-brained apes) can only be explained by the move from eating raw to cooked food. Cooking, according to Richard Wrangham, accounts for our small guts, our big brains, and the sexual division of labour prevalent in nearly all societies; in effect, the beginnings of human economy as well as our particular pair-bonding and culture itself.

That may sound like the wishful thinking of a gourmet or a French cultural theorist, but Wrangham is a level-headed Englishman who is Professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard. What makes his thesis so gripping to read is that it is elegantly argued, step by step, using evidence from palaeontology, primatology, the anthropological study of hunter-gatherer societies and the science of food digestion.

The first step is to establish that raw food, including raw meat, often touted as the crucial factor in turning apes into men, is unsatisfactory as a human diet. This may well have been already obvious to most people other than raw food fanatics, especially salad-hating males, but Wrangham cites the Giessen Raw Food study conducted on 513 volunteers in which half of the women fed on raw food stopped menstruating. Counter-intuitively, he says, cooked food produces far more energy and nutrition than raw food because it is easier to chew and digest. This permits the development of the big human brain, almost four times the size of a chimpanzee’s.

But cooking brings difficulties too. The basic problem is simple: who will do the cooking – guarding the vulnerable food that (before the days of ready-meals) requires hours of preparation? No prizes for guessing that the answer in more than 97.8 per cent of the 185 cultures studied by the anthropologists Murdock and Provost is women.

Having a woman to keep the home fires burning enables the male hunter, in hunter-gatherer societies, to spend all day hunting in the knowledge that a sustaining meal awaits him. In these societies, cooking seems to be a stronger bond than sex.

Wrangham agrees with those, from John Stuart Mill to contemporary feminists, who regard this as a raw deal for women. So though cooking may make us human, the sexual division of labour it has produced also “trapped women into a subservient role enforced by male-dominated culture”.

He ends, leaping rather abruptly from the neolithic to the digital age, with a chapter on the health problems caused in affluent societies by eating too rich a diet. What he doesn’t examine is the question of whether, if cooking has made us human, giving up cooking in favour of eating pre-prepared food might be making us less human once more.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009.

FT: Coming soon - the future

Coming soon: the future

By Harry Eyres

Published: September 10 2009 15:45 | Last updated: September 10 2009 15:45

I was in no hurry to catch the Futurism exhibition at Tate Modern. Futurism is my least favourite school of 20th century art. Hardly ever in the field of human endeavour has objectionable ideology been so lavishly matched with execrable painting.

To give you a flavour of the former, here are some of the better known statements from Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto of 1909: “We declare that the splendour of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A roaring motor-car which seems to run on machine-gun fire is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace ... We want to glorify war – the only cure for the world – militarism, patriotism ... the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman.”

This manages to sound both silly and sinister at the same time – rather like PG Wodehouse’s black-shorts-wearing parody of Oswald Mosley, Roderick Spode. And not coincidentally, Marinetti’s Futurism segued seamlessly into Mussolini’s absurd and sinister version of Fascism – a point timidly glossed over in the Tate show.

Most of the art is just as bad. The Futurists were among the most inept colourists ever to wield paintbrushes, and strangely similar in their effects to some of the worst practitioners of Bolognese Baroque religious painting: lurid, turgid, meaninglessly swirling. Just occasionally you catch a Futurist painting that reminds you in a positive way that these were young men responding to the dynamism of early 20th-century street life: I loved the “Girl Running on a Balcony”, with 20 legs rather than two, by Balla.

The most awful thing about Futurism is that so many of its predictions have come true. We have had an overdose of war and the ideas that kill, and contempt for woman is alive and strong among the Taliban and elsewhere. And “the man at the wheel” sung by Marinetti as the hero of the future has found his impatient and impotent incarnation in the form of the man revving his red Porsche in a motorway jam.

We obviously need a different kind of vision of the future. But even to speak of the future now seems strangely anachronistic. For a while, thinkers and theorists have suggested that we have lost faith in the future. Artists since Warhol have craved 15 minutes of fame rather than the admiration of future generations. The suggestion is that we don’t know how many of those future generations will be born, and perhaps don’t much care either.

All this makes Jem Finer’s Longplayer project, a musical score designed to play or be played for a thousand years, seem quite an eccentric proposition. Longplayer has been edging into my field of view, or hearing, for some years now. It seemed a good moment to catch Finer, best known as the banjo player of the Pogues, rehearsing Longplayer for its first live performance at his hide-out in the far reaches of London’s Docklands (the performance is this weekend at the Roundhouse).

Finer’s idea came out of the shallow celebrations surrounding the turn of the third millennium. “People seemed to be concentrating on three or four days either side of the millennium, not on the span of a thousand years. How do you make sense of a thousand years? I thought I could make a piece of music that would last precisely a thousand years.”

This thought led Finer in interesting directions, many but not all mathematical. The score of Longplayer consists of six melodies played simultaneously on Tibetan singing bowls. Minutely calibrated changes in sequence mean that a full cycle is completed only once in a thousand years. From its inception just after midnight on December 31 1999, Longplayer has been playing in synthesised form. But part of the canniness of Finer’s design is that it incorporates thinking about technological and cultural change.

You could call this thinking both pessimistic and optimistic. Finer does not have any trust that computers and the infrastructure needed to support them will survive for the next thousand years. “I realised what was needed was simple durable elements; human beings playing instruments obeying instructions.” And not just any old instruments; wood and gut decay, strings go out of tune. Tibetan singing bowls, even if not Tibetan but made in a factory in Calcutta, have a better chance of staying the course.

Finer may be quite gloomy about the future – things look much darker than they did 10 years ago – but at the same time he is making a wager that there will be a future. In that sense Longplayer is one of the most heartening projects I have encountered in years. What makes it heartening is not a silly, naive faith in the future, but an ingenious and wisely modest kind of long-term thinking. At a time when, like Goethe’s sorcerer’s apprentice, we have summoned inhuman powers we cannot control, Longplayer is staking its own future on those treacherous, murderous, tender, all-shaping appendages, human hands.

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FT: Checks and balances

Checks and balances

By Harry Eyres

Published: August 15 2009 01:25 | Last updated: August 15 2009 01:25

I have an aversion to what I see as needless acts of bravado. People who sail single-handed round the world or scale the north face of the Eiger without crampons interest me little. Life, everyday mundane life, is quite risky enough without adding gratuitous danger.

For those reasons I had avoided seeing the film Man on Wire when it first came out in cinemas. This is the documentary, you may recall, about the French funambulist Philippe Petit, who walked on a wire between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in 1974, briefly becoming an international celebrity.

But when I finally caught up with Man on Wire on terrestrial TV, I found myself more gripped than I had expected. It was not just that I had underestimated the sheer outré daring of the act itself, but I had not considered the logistics, and teamwork, that made it possible.

Of course, if you think about it, getting a ton of rigging to the top of one of the towers and somehow stringing and securing a cable across (using a bow and arrow, attached to a fine thread, attached to a bigger thread and so on) was as remarkable and unlikely an achievement as the high-wire walk itself – probably much more so.

You might think of Petit as a nut, on a par with Timothy Treadwell, the hero of Herzog’s Grizzly Man, who believed he could fraternise with bears, but, if so, he was an inspired and inspiring nut. He had enough charisma (and for once I think that is the mot juste) to persuade a whole team of camp followers to go along with him.

This was the true essence of the film, how Petit persuaded friends, colleagues, girlfriend to make his crazy dream come true. What did they think they were doing? How would they have felt if he had plunged 1,300ft to his death?

The film persuaded you that they were not foolish or deluded. The footage of Petit practising walking on a tightrope, both before the 1974 feat and 30-odd years later, showed something unmistakable and mesmerising. This was a man born to walk on a high wire. The expression on his face in mid-walk, rightly described by one of his friends as a mask of concentration, was both transfixing and strangely archaic, like the expression of a Minoan bull-leaper. And when Petit finally performed his famous feat, photographs clearly show his face relaxing from tension into serenity.

Petit did not just walk once and for all along the wire between the towers. As one of the policemen sent to catch him put it: “He danced on that wire,” lying on it, kneeling on it, returning to make the crossing eight times. In the film, his friends repeatedly bear witness to the strange and captivating beauty of the act.

Petit’s high-wire walk was a kind of triumph, but not without human cost. All his friends agreed that something changed after it. Petit had survived unscathed, and even been transformed into a kind of demigod, but his terrestrial relationships did not fare so well. His relationship with his girlfriend died more or less in the act; just after it, Petit was invited by a star-struck admirer to go to bed with her and accepted.

He himself was, and remains to this day, unrepentant. Being French, he sees his high-wire act as a philosophical statement as much as a physical one. His feat was the most extreme rebuke imaginable to a culture obsessed with safety at all costs. For Petit, life is only really lived at the extreme, which does not mean with pointless recklessness but in a fully conscious wager with death. Only that way can a terrible beauty be born.

Most of us choose not to live on the high wire, either literally or metaphorically. From childhood we are warned against the perils of flying too high – not just our individual childhood, but the childhood of the race, when the Greek myth of Icarus taught the danger of flying too close to the sun.

But Philippe Petit and all the people who supported him – his rigging team, the employee in the World Trade Center who helped him forge a pass, even the amazed policeman touched with eloquence by what he saw – were convinced of something different. Sometimes the supreme expression of life is something that defies all the rules of caution.

This applies beyond funambulism. The other night at the BBC Proms I found myself feeling strangely out of sorts. An atmospheric but shapeless contemporary piece by John Casken did little to change my mood.

But then the pianist Stephen Hough came on to play Tchaikovsky’s Second Piano Concerto, whose main raison d’être seems to be to challenge the pianist to play more notes and at greater velocity than is humanly possible. But, improbably, Hough pulled it off, playing not just fast but with refined delicacy and in the romping finale with delicious insouciance. Here was a high-wire act of another kind, uplifting to the spirit.

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See also:

NY Times: Same Man, New Wire and a Secret Midtown Venue

FT: A holy fool atop the twin towers

FT: Florence and the good life

A dull or unsatisfactory day, or years of disappointment, can be redeemed by a burst of glory at the end.

===

Florence and the good life

By Harry Eyres

Published: August 1 2009 01:30 | Last updated: August 1 2009 03:02

The interior of Brunelleschi’s Santo Spirito church in Florence

What makes a good trip, or a good day, or even, if we are to get downright philosophical, a good life? The test is surely not that the whole trip or day or life is unwaveringly serene and sunny and without glitches. Perhaps a trip or a day could pass like that (never, alas, for me), but a life of that sort would not be human or possible. Sometimes a trip, or a day, I was thinking, can be made good by half an hour of intense pleasure or illumination, a sudden connection made, the right café found, a burst of warm sun on a church step.

I had scheduled two days in Florence either side of a professional wine and food tour of Chianti Classico, and seemed to have set myself up for disappointment. The disappointment was not so much with Florence as with myself. I simply could not recapture the excitement and hunger for culture which had energised me on my first two or three trips to the Tuscan capital. Seeing the marching columns of eager young tourists heading for Brunelleschi’s dome and Giotto’s bell-tower, I veered off the beaten track. But where to go? I decided I could not face the Uffizi, undoubtedly swarming, or the Pitti, just too far away in sweltering July sun; there was the Bargello, and those late, expressionist sculptures by Donatello, endless churches and cloisters, but none of these wonders called to me.

Walking without aim or appetite, I even began to wonder about Florence itself. Wasn’t there actually something rather dark, even menacing, about this ever-emulated city? Didn’t those battlements speak of cruelty, and wasn’t the lightless huddle of the buildings a sign of the barbarism of the times, when brutal warlords reigned? I remembered that George Bernard Shaw, returning to the English Midlands in 1894 for a show of Pre-Raphaelite art after a few weeks studying religious art in Florence, commented that “on the whole Birmingham was more hopeful than the Italian cities, for the art it had to shew me was the work of living men”.

I carried on walking, my steps taking me south, to the embankment of the Arno, and then over the Ponte Santa Trinita. I was not walking entirely without aim, I was being drawn to a corner of Florence that carries more memories for me than any other.

That corner is the Piazza Santo Spirito, with its market and cluster of reasonably-priced trattorie, its eight or so trees providing shade, the stuccoed façade and tower of one of Florence’s more hidden churches – and the Pensione Sorelle Bandini, which was the shabby-chic place to stay when I was a student.

I had lunch – fettucine with pecorini and asparagus, a green salad, a beer – on the outside terrace of the Trattoria Cabiria (named I suppose after the heroic prostitute in my favourite Fellini film Le Notti di Cabiria) while a tremendous wind made the sunshade awning balloon like the mainsail of a yacht.

Many headed for cover indoors but I stayed, buoyed up not just by the buffeting wind but by a rising tide of well-being. More precisely I felt gratitude – gratitude that this place had remained so delightfully and miraculously ordinary. I felt grateful to the kind waitress and tired-eyed waiter who remained so much calmer than the customers. I felt, finally, grateful to be in Florence again, 30 years after my first visit to this spot, possibly a bit more human than I was then.

An open door to the side of the blank church façade beckoned; I walked in and found myself in the Cenacolo Santo Spirito, the old, Gothic refectory of the original church, burned down and rebuilt in Renaissance style to plans by Brunelleschi.

The east wall of the Cenacolo, now a small, eclectic museum, is covered by a sombrely magnificent fresco of the crucifixion, attributed to Andrea Orcagna.

Orcagna was the leading artist of the mid-14th century in Florence, but he is not a household name today, except in the households of medieval art historians.

We think of Florence as primarily an early Renaissance, 15th-century city rather than a Gothic, 14th-century one; a city of light, not darkness. Orcagna survived the great plague of 1348 which killed half the city’s population; no doubt it coloured his imagination.

All the same, in the presence of death, an extraordinarily vital congregation is gathered: people of Florence, in helmets, hats and veils. But the rhythmic vitality of the fresco comes above all from the angels who dance, in an ecstasy of grief which defies grief, around the figure of the crucified Christ.

Aristotle argued in the Nicomachean Ethics that it could only be said at the end of a human life whether that human being had flourished. A dull or unsatisfactory day, or years of disappointment, can be redeemed by a burst of glory at the end.

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FT: Only disconnect

Only disconnect

By Harry Eyres

Published: July 25 2009 02:06 | Last updated: July 25 2009 02:06

The other day the gremlins struck, “not single spies but in battalions”. Within the space of 24 hours my mobile phone (of antique vintage, heavy, solid and until now reliable) died, we had a power cut, and the car packed up.

The morning without power or mobile phone was extraordinarily peaceful. I realised what I was missing by going to the computer first thing in the morning to be connected – to what? I was going to say to the day, the world and my work, but it would be to a very limited version of all three.

Quiet reigned in the house, without the urgent chatter of the Today programme or the ring of any phone (our landline phones, being electric cordless ones, were also silenced by the power failure). Peace was broken by an argument, when I complained that I had some arrangements to make that required the phone and the computer, and Ching Ling accused me of being addicted to the new technologies I spend so much time railing against.

Nothing could be further from the truth, I protested; I have spent my life immersed in, and promoting the cause of, poetry and music and nature, all of which can be appreciated with the minimum of technology. I would be happy spending the whole morning practising a Beethoven sonata, or sitting in the garden watching the sparrows and great tits. But I probably protested too much.

Later that day we set off in the car to visit my parents who live 30 miles away in the countryside. We chose the wrong moment, the middle of a violent thunderstorm with torrential rain. As usual when it rains in London, we got stuck in a traffic jam.

After a while, clouds of steam started to rise, not from between my ears but from the car radiator. I pulled in to the side of the main road out of west London and we called on the rescue services of the Automobile Association (using Ching Ling’s mobile, a beacon of constancy in a dysfunctional world).

Nothing happened. That is to say, the AA (or to be more accurate their subcontractor) did not arrive, not at the time promised, nor, after I had rung them again, at the time rescheduled. Cars crawled past us in the long queue to the Acton bridges, passengers gawping either with the curiosity born of boredom, or with Schadenfreude, or, who knows, even in some cases with sympathy. A police patrol vehicle pitched up and told me to move on to the grass verge.

But this “nothing happening” began to take on an interesting dimension. It was certainly more challenging than the short bounded stretches of time I have sometimes described in this column, waiting for a train or at an airport.

We were stranded interminably, waiting for the Godot-like breakdown service, without even the messenger boy or the strange arrivals of Lucky and Pozzo.

In some respects we were luckier than Beckett’s tramps. In my rucksack were provisions; some slices of excellent prosciutto and half a loaf of bread just purchased from the local deli; a box of Bendicks’ mints (intended as a gift for my parents, but needs must); and a book, Lucy Wadham’s amusing memoir of her relationship with France and a Frenchman.

Omar Khayyam, or at least Edward Fitzgerald’s version of him, would surely have approved: “Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,/ A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse – and Thou/ Beside me singing in the Wilderness –/ And Wilderness is Paradise enow.” As we tucked into the bread and prosciutto I did think for a moment, wistfully, about the cool glass of Mosel Kabinett I knew my father would have waiting – but it was only for a moment.

We were enjoying a picnic by the roadside – not a planned one, and not a road I would normally have chosen. In earlier days I often drove along this stretch of what Osbert Lancaster called By-Pass Variegated marvelling at its ugliness, arrogantly wondering how people could live in such surroundings. Now I could make amends, appreciating the efforts of local gardeners, and even the road landscapers, who had planted a thick hedge of hebe, hearing the full fluting of the blackbirds, watching the Messerschmidt dashes of the swifts.

Normal service was, of course, quite quickly restored (though not by the AA – we eventually made it back home under our own, thankfully reduced steam, leaving Godot to his own devices). Power returned; the radio was soon chattering again and the phones at their noisy business of interruption and persecution.

Questions came back, too. Would we be better off if we were less plugged in, or perhaps more to the point, why does it take breakdown and disconnection to achieve an opening up to the world? We can survive the odd morning without electricity and evening of being marooned; we might even enjoy it. Could we revive the old idea of a day of rest and joyful unplugging, the day once called the Sabbath?

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FT: Meanwhile, back in the city

Meanwhile, back in the city

By Harry Eyres

Published: June 20 2009 02:33 | Last updated: June 20 2009 02:33

A volunteer tends a flowerbed in Meanwhile Gardens, west London

The Meanwhile Gardens, a little urban green space not far from where I live, are not Kensington Gardens (though they lie just within the Royal Borough), let alone the hanging gardens of Babylon or the gardens of the Summer Palace in Beijing, thoughtlessly destroyed by British troops during the Opium Wars. Nor are they the gardens of Kubla Khan’s pleasure dome in Xanadu. They are decidedly modest in scale, just a four-acre ribbon of trees, walks, borders, ponds and beds hugging the south side of the Grand Union Canal as it meanders from Paddington towards Kensal Green.

All the same, they do what city gardens should do – they provide breathing space and greenery and surprising beauty in what was once a desperately poor zone and is still classified as a deprived ward. Children appreciate them; at one end there is a playhut and a skateboard park. For those requiring a quiet space for contemplation, there is a scented courtyard. The charity Mind in Kensington and Chelsea runs horticultural training schemes out of the gardens for people who have experienced mental health problems. The Meanwhile Gardens are rich in wild flowers and wildlife: the other day I heard blackcaps and chiffchaffs and willow warblers singing together in early summer concert.

I like their somehow provisional and self-deprecatory name. These are not the gardens of some glorious future, of Le Corbusier’s ville radieuse, in which all the problems of urban living have been miraculously solved, once and for all. They’ve had to eke out a place, between a council estate and one of London’s most notorious tower blocks, between the canal and the railway line. The Meanwhile Gardens do not promise salvation; salvation has not yet arrived and maybe never will, but in the meantime, life is still there to be lived.

What does it mean, the meantime or the meanwhile? It could sound like a poor time, an impoverished time. It tends to mean an interim time, the time while we are waiting (for what? for something better?). But the meantime, the meanwhile, is also where we live. Mean can also mean average, middle of the road. So the Meanwhile Gardens could be a place for dwelling as well as waiting, in between one thing and another, between the beginning and the ending, nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, or in the middle of the road of our lives, which are always between a beginning and an ending.

This may sound unambitious, but in their small way the Meanwhile Gardens point to something important. Our imperfect, provisional urban lives can be touched by beauty, can be open to flourishing and conviviality as well as mere survival. This was what the Roman poet Martial meant by rus in urbe (the countryside in the city), one of those phrases which has sounded through the centuries while its context has been forgotten.

In fact when Martial uses the phrase, he does so with a good deal of irony. He is writing from clamorously noisy Rome to his friend Sparsus, explaining why he has to take frequent country breaks to be able to think and be quiet. Rome gives him no rest at all. There are schoolteachers bawling in the morning and corn-grinders by night, not to mention hammering and metal-beating (it was a bit like that where I used to live in leafy St John’s Wood). Of course, Sparsus wouldn’t know about any of this; he lives in luxury and peace in his magnificent villa on the Janiculum hill complete with vineyard.

In other words, Martial’s rus in urbe is more of an aspiration than a reality, something in his day enjoyed only by the very rich and yearned for with envy by the hoi polloi. But it is a powerful aspiration, one which has caught the imagination of city-dwellers and planners for 2,000 years. For Martial, rus in urbe seems to be a private preserve in the midst of teeming public urban “noise and smog”. But what if rus in urbe could enter the public realm?

The great parks of cities such as London and Paris mostly started as royal or aristocratic playgrounds before being handed over to the public. The Meanwhile Gardens, on the other hand, were never an aristocratic preserve. Thirty-three years ago a local sculptor called Jamie McCullough had the idea that a derelict industrial area could be turned into a community garden. The council (then Westminster) gave temporary permission; a nickname was coined and it became, paradoxically, permanent.

This modest and provisional achievement, for me, may be a better guide for the cities of the present and the future than either aristocratic largesse or utopian planning. We cannot expect another Hyde Park or Bois de Boulogne; but in cities all over the world there are crannies which, with a bit of imagination and will, can be greened.

This is regeneration in its most basic form; another poet nearer our time, Gerard Manley Hopkins, saw a world already “seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil”, but he also recognised something else: “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.”

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FT: Seeds of discontent

Seeds of discontent

By Harry Eyres

Published: June 13 2009 01:47 | Last updated: June 13 2009 01:47

An Orchard Invisible: A Natural History of Seeds
By Jonathan Silvertown
University of Chicago Press £17.50, 216 pages
FT Bookshop price: £14

The Garden of Invention: Luther Burbank and the Business of Breeding Plants
By Jane S Smith
The Penguin Press $25.95, 354 pages

Forgotten Fruits: The Stories Behind Britain’s Traditional Fruit and Vegetables
By Christopher Stocks
Windmill £8.99, 298 pages
FT Bookshop price: £7.19

Seeds are everywhere: one square metre of cultivated ground can contain tens of thousands. Yet these humble, apparently insignificant objects are among the most amazing pieces of organic matter on the planet. Many are delicious to eat; others provide us with oil, drugs and poisons. We all know that an acorn can grow into a mighty oak. We may be less familiar with the seeds of orchids, light as dust, that need to spend their first few years as parasites on fungi, or the largest seed in the world, the bomb-sized nut of the coco de mer coconut.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

More from Books - Nov-24

The history of seeds, seedlings and varieties of plants has been little told, considering both its captivating strangeness and its immense importance to the human race. What is especially fascinating and pertinent in this history is the intersection of biology, culture, politics, commerce and sheer amateurish improvisation. Each of these three books, by a biologist, a cultural historian, and a gardener, tells the story from different perspectives: biological, cultural, political and commercial. The overall narrative is one of increasing human control over nature, which at first led to a vision of unlimited variety in the late 19th century and then, a century on, to the more anxiety-inducing prospect of uncontrolled bioengineering in which the genetic manipulation of plants seems to lead inexorably to the genetic manipulation of humans.

First is the story of how seeds have evolved – over aeons of time, through natural selection, and without human intervention – to develop the varied properties that astonish us today. Then comes a pivotal moment in the 1870s: the remarkable career of the plant breeder Luther Burbank, who was the first to see how speeding up unnatural selection could drastically alter and improve the properties of plants. It was Burbank who, unwittingly, prepared the ground for such developments as transgenic technology, which dominate discussions of plant breeding today. The arrival of commercially driven breeding and planting has often resulted in higher yields and more reliable crops but has also led to the loss of many traditional varieties.

Jonathan Silvertown, professor of ecology at the UK’s Open University, has answered two fundamental but complex questions: what are seeds and how have they evolved? An Orchard Invisible contains some dense scientific argument but Silvertown, who is fascinated by the evolutionary strategies of seeds, nevertheless succeeds in making his enthusiasm infectious enough to attract the general reader.

He describes a seed as being like “an embryo in a picnic box”. The seeds of land plants, all of which derive from a single marine ancestor, require their own food supply: this is “endosperm”, which according to the most likely theory is a kind of aborted embryo within the seed vessel that feeds its sibling. If that sounds somewhat obscure, Silvertown reminds us that endosperm has become vital to human existence: it makes up most of the kernel of food grains such as rice, wheat and corn. “Sixty per cent of the world’s food supply is made up of this tissue,” Silvertown says.

The history of evolution is exciting not least because it is a story of sex – for plants as well as animals. The sex lives of seeds and plants, little understood until the 18th century, are stranger and more varied, however. Unlike us, some plants can reproduce asexually but sexual reproduction, in the case of flowering plants through pollination, remains the most popular route. Yes, even Boston beans do it.

Sexual reproduction has evolutionary advantages for plants. One reason nearly all the elms in Britain were wiped out by Dutch elm disease was that all these trees were descended from a single clone, perhaps in the form of a set of cuttings, brought over by the Romans when they invaded. The species reproduced clonally rather than sexually, with insufficient genetic diversity to combat the disease.

For the non-specialist reader the anecdotal evidence gathered here about the sheer weird wonder of seeds – their ability, say, to survive for thousands of years, or their sensitivity to colour changes – may be more winning than the more technical arguments about evolutionary strategy. One of the best properties of seeds, Silvertown reminds us, is that they can fly – helpful in terms of evolutionary strategy, no doubt, but also instructive in the evolution of human flight: the Wright Brothers’ pioneering aircraft, which took to the skies in 1903, was inspired by a seed, not a bird.

Unsurprisingly, Darwin looms large in the seed story. The great scientist’s 1869 study “The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication” inspired the most famous plant breeder in history, Luther Burbank, who became a national institution in the US on a par with his friends Thomas Edison and Henry Ford.

Born in 1849, Burbank was a shy, dreamy young man working in a plough factory in Massachusetts when he came across Darwin’s book on animal and plant breeding a year or two after it was published. As he later said, the book “opened a new world to me. It told me that variations [in plants] seemed to be susceptible, through selection, of permanent fixture in the individual.” By selecting, grafting and hybridising, as cultural historian Jane Smith tells us in her excellent biography, The Garden of Invention, a clever plant breeder might not simply improve an existing stock but create new varieties, whose properties would persist through generations.

This had happened before but more by chance than design. Burbank was original in refining the methods beyond anything previously achieved. He described his work in surprisingly lyrical terms: “We have learnt that [plant species] are as plastic in our hands as clay in the hands of the potter or colour on the artist’s canvas and can readily be moulded into more beautiful forms than any painter or sculptor can ever hope to bring forth.”

Burbank’s first great success was with potato seeds. Growing Early Rose potatoes on his small farm, he noticed a seed ball dangling from one of the plants. He marked the plant, waited for the seed ball to ripen, then went back to collect it, only to discover the thing had dropped off. He spent three days searching for it – time not spent in vain. His experiments with the 23 seeds contained in the matured seed ball he eventually recovered and propagated were the foundation of his remarkable career. Just one of the seeds gave rise to the Russet Burbank potato, one of the most important commercial varieties in the world, used, for example, by McDonald’s. Now, in a development that Burbank would never have anticipated, the Russet Burbank has been genetically modified by agricultural company Monsanto to create the Bt “New Leaf” Russet Burbank.

The Russet Burbank may have made Luther Burbank’s name but, although he made a good living from selling to nurseries, it did not make his fortune – it would not be possible to patent plants until four years after Burbank’s death in 1926. Despite this, Burbank’s ability, or even genius, as a plant breeder was not in question, despite methods that defied system. Over his long career in Santa Rosa, California, where he lived for the last 50 years of his life, he bred and sold new varieties of plums, blackberries, quinces, cherries, strawberries, rhubarb, walnuts, daisies, lilies and sunflowers. Many of these varieties are still of commercial importance today.

Burbank’s advances in plant breeding won him heroic status as a benefactor of mankind, combined with a Tolstoyan aura as a humble gardener. It also made him the locus of competing interests, one of which was science. Burbank’s relationship with the fast-developing world of science was complex and ambiguous, and makes up the most thought-provoking episodes of Smith’s biography.

Science wanted to appropriate Burbank, or at least put his wonderful discoveries on a scientific, replicable, basis. But Burbank himself, though courting scientific respectability, was also ambivalent about it, for a variety of reasons. One was that his attitude to nature was not purely scientific but more profoundly derived from his study of the Transcendentalist philosophers and nature lovers Emerson and Thoreau. Asked to give a scientific paper, he shocked his audience by speaking in a proto-New Age language about “vibrating energies”. The second reason was more practical: there was an obvious clash between the scientific ideal of the free sharing of knowledge and the instincts of a commercial plant breeder.

Burbank felt he should have been able to benefit more from his discoveries and was a vociferous proponent of the extension of patent law to plants. But one wonders what the Emersonian gardener would have made of the brave new world of transgenic technology as practised by Monsanto and others, where the protection of patent has led to the possibility of monopolising entire food chains.

There seems to be something innocent about Burbank’s lifelong work of plant breeding, summed up by the chef and Slow Food guru Alice Waters: “There’s nothing wrong with improving plants. Luther Burbank ... did that. But he didn’t violate nature doing it.” To put it another way, it’s hard to imagine that Burbank would breed varieties designed to look good and last for ever but that taste of practically nothing, like those that fill so many supermarket shelves. Forgotten Fruits, by Christopher Stocks, a former gardening writer at the Independent on Sunday, is a portrait of the varieties we have lost, or are in danger of losing, as a result of plant-breeding, which has prioritised convenience over individuality. It is also designed as an inspiration and spur to contemporary horticulturalists to go out and plant them.

Most of this attractively anecdotal book consists of a glossary of tasty traditional varieties of fruit and vegetables that have fallen out of favour. In our age of plenty, it is fascinating to learn than we subsist on a much more restricted palette of crops than our Victorian ancestors. A leading British seed company that offers 12 varieties of peas today offered 53 in 1853. As well as this severe diminution in diversity, there has also been a drastic reduction in the acreage of the country’s orchards: around two-thirds of the country’s apple plantations disappeared between 1950 and 2000. This has led to the mass importing of apples from countries such as New Zealand, South Africa and Chile.

One of Stocks’ most important points is made in passing; many of these valuable varieties, some of which are making a comeback, were bred, more or less accidentally, by amateurs. That is where Darwin, the gentleman scientist, Luther Burbank, the artistic plant breeder, and the retired brewer Richard Cox, who bred the Cox’s Orange Pippin, join forces. In their different ways, each celebrated the immense natural variety of plants and their seeds. None would have welcomed a world in which that variety and biodiversity were sacrificed to the streamlined efficiency of mass-market monocultures. But that is only one possible outcome in the long, twisting tale of humanity’s relationship with plants.

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FT: Bookshop backwaters

Bookshop backwaters

By Harry Eyres

Published: May 30 2009 01:31 | Last updated: May 30 2009 01:31

You might think that I have little interest in the retail sector (more Brûlé territory); in fact, I suffer from a rare condition called “emporiophobia”. Far from being attracted to shops, I shun them. Imprisoned within a department store, I develop symptoms of panic, disorientation and, after about 40 minutes, loss of the will to live. There are exceptions. As a young child I was fascinated by fishmongers and, to a lesser extent, butchers. I like good food markets, delicatessens and specialist cheese shops. But my favourite shops are bookshops.

Of course writers love bookshops. They may haunt them, secretly hauling down their own works from high and invisible shelves and positioning them in front of rivals’ publications. But they may also despair of them, seeing the strange company of the sartorially challenged who frequent them, often with no intention of making a purchase.

Surely the picture I am giving is out of date. Didn’t the arrival in London of Waterstone’s and then of the impeccably smart chain Daunt Books change all that, filling their wood-panelled stores with well-heeled professionals and yummy mummies? But the smartness of Waterstone’s proved its undoing: Tim Waterstone sold out to WH Smith as long ago as 1989 and now these stylish-looking emporia are piled with three-for-two offers, the betrayal of everything truly bookish. Three-for-two offers might be suitable for budget lavatory cleaners but never for books.

In fact, while Waterstone’s and Daunt Books were coming to prominence, some irreplaceable independent London bookshops disappeared. Compendium in Camden and Bernard Stone’s Turret Bookshop (which migrated from Kensington to various venues in Covent Garden) were the only bookshops truly serious about, respectively, philosophy and poetry, and now both have gone. Of course the situation was and remains much better in America, where truly great bookshops such as Powells of Portland, Oregon, and Elliott Bay Books of Seattle continue to thrive. But London came close to having no proper bookshops at all.

Salvation has come from an unlikely quarter. Foyles was always London’s biggest independent bookshop, but also its most dingy, chaotic and, not in the best sense, Dickensian. There was a strange system of queuing up to get a ticket, then queuing up again to pay, then queuing up a third time to collect the book. People who worked there told dark tales of employment practices from another century. Foyles was a place you went to only when you had to, because an obscure or out-of-print tome was stocked there and nowhere else; it was not a place associated with pleasure.

Suddenly all that has changed. I could hardly believe the transformation when I went there recently to take part in a recent event on “wine and words”. Foyles now has probably the most attractive café in central London, modelled on the ones in the great American bookstores but more lively, with jazz at weekends. There is a gallery on the top floor where frequent events and readings are held; it also boasts a fine Yamaha grand piano, so you can catch pianists of the calibre of the brilliant young Scot Stephen Osborne limbering up for Wigmore or Southbank recitals with lunchtime run-throughs.

Next to the gallery is a particularly good music section, with an excellent collection of sheet music, as well as carefully chosen CDs and DVDs (the huge Waterstone’s in Piccadilly, by contrast has a pathetic selection of classical CDs and no music DVDs whatsoever, apart from a few hackneyed opera films). I don’t know whether this pays its way in terms of shelf space, but it feels profoundly civilised. The sound of your columnist playing Mozart’s “easy” Sonata in C from the adjoining gallery was enough to persuade one customer to buy a complete set of Mozart piano sonatas – the right degree of distance making the heart grow fonder, or the wrong notes inaudible.

Foyles is a family business, not a faceless global chain; we know from Dickens (Clennam & Co) that family businesses are not always benign, but, at their best, they permit someone to express a personal vision through an enterprise, without being excessively beholden to accountants. What happened at Foyles was a generational shift; following the death of Christina Foyle, doyenne or battle-axe according to taste, in 1999, her nephew Christopher decided to refurbish the store and modernise the company, opening three other smaller shops in London. Some apparently still miss the old chaotic and bad-tempered Foyle’s, but they must be people who prefer overcast gloom to sunshine.

Why does this matter? The point is that, as I and other emporiophobics know, bookshops are not really shops at all, or not simply shops. They occupy a peculiar no-man’s-land between the private and public sectors.

Some of them are more like libraries or clubs than shops – Joseph’s Bookstore in Golders Green is one such place. Bernard Stone ran three publishing ventures alongside his bookshop.

That was why the poet Michael Horowitz was able to describe the Turret Bookshop as “the merriest backwater of the time”. Backwaters can be curiously important in the literary culture.

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FT: Our cultural revolution

Our cultural revolution

By Harry Eyres

Published: May 16 2009 02:24 | Last updated: May 16 2009 02:24

Afew years ago I got to know a Chinese woman who had studied classical performance at the Beijing Conservatoire at the time of the Cultural Revolution. Her story was less terrible than many; she had been exiled to Mongolia and deprived of any contact with her beloved piano. Then she had been faced with the hazardous business of getting out of the country, trying to start a new life, but with a career in pieces that could never be properly reassembled. We have all heard far worse tales: parents publicly denounced, humiliated, beaten up by their own children, and teachers by their pupils, many of them ending up committing suicide.

Of course, nothing like that could ever happen in a country like Britain or the US, we think. We are free of such crazy ideological zealotry. We are not in the business of exiling pianists to Mongolia. We are tolerant, culture-loving people.

I wonder. Not long ago I got into conversation with a young British couple on the Tube who had never heard of Adam and Eve. When I recounted the creation story told in the Book of Genesis, one of them said: “Oh, it sounds like some religious thing.” I began to think that we had undergone a cultural revolution of our own, less dramatic and obviously violent than the one in China, but no less far-reaching in its effects.

Actually, our cultural revolution and the Chinese one have common roots. Both are rooted in the Enlightenment – or perhaps more accurately in Bacon’s epoch-making repudiation of large parts of Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy and Christian theology, which paved the way for the Enlightenment. In scientific terms this was immensely powerful, of course; freed from atavistic prohibitions on knowledge, science could boldly go further than the ancients could ever have imagined.

But the effect on culture and, more specifically, on language and literature of this kind of Enlightenment thinking seems more dubious. Because classical and Biblical science (Bacon would have called it natural philosophy) was lacking, the logic of Bacon’s more zealous followers was to throw out classical literature and the Bible itself – the baby with the bathwater.

Nowadays it is the exception rather than the rule for children in the west to be conversant with the Bible and the classics. New generations of literature teachers consider the Book of Job and the works of Homer and Horace to be old hat – in the most extreme cases, the work of dead white males that can happily be consigned to the dustbin in favour of literature of a more progressive bent.

They have a point. When I arrived at my rather old-fashioned secondary school, more than half the teachers were classicists; more relevantly, many of them were happy to pass on a traditional version of the classics, which appeared to have little bearing on life in the late 20th century. Of course, knowledge and pedagogy must move on: modern languages and sciences are essential ways of navigating the world. As a teenager, I joined in the call for a cull on classics and a rejuvenation of the curriculum. Perhaps I wasn’t so different from those Chinese children who publicly humiliated their teachers.

But it turns out that what holds for science does not work with literature and language, or with music. Science is comfortable with the ideology of progress – new theories supplant old ones; Copernicus and Galileo confound the geocentrists; Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection trumps all earlier ones. But literature and music do not progress in the same way. Much of 19th-century Romantic literature in Britain, Germany and Russia consists of rewritings of Hamlet. Two or three scenes from King Lear contain the whole of Beckett. Chopin and Schumann, revolutionaries in the best sense, spent their time studying the works of JS Bach.

For quite a long time now, it has been fashionable in the west – though not in China – to denounce the excesses and cruelties of the Cultural Revolution. There are signs in China now, for the first time in two or three generations, of a renewal of interest in traditional religious and philosophical systems; the stock of Confucius is rising and that of Mao falling. Peter Head, director of global planning at Arup, told me recently that part of the work Arup is doing in China on sustainable building and development has involved workshopping philosophical ideas from Taoism.

Of course, reconsidering old literary, philosophical and religious traditions carries the danger of a return to reactionary pigheadedness. Here in multicultural Britain, education rightly stresses the diversity of traditions (none of which would endorse ignorance of their own founding principles). But this should not happen at the expense of the founding traditions of the society, the traditions of Greco-Roman thought, art and literature and Judaeo-Christian religion and theology; without knowledge of those, very little else in the cultural and literary history makes sense. Ignorant of those things, a young person will walk through the great gardens of our culture, the Uffizi or the Prado or the National Gallery, the works of Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes and Goethe, without being able to name any of the flowers.

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FT: Time to look and listen

Time to look and listen

By Harry Eyres

Published: May 2 2009 02:04 | Last updated: May 2 2009 02:04

Many people seem to believe that the way to make the most of time is to cut it fine. Arriving at the very last minute means not wasting precious seconds that could be spent in a more productive pursuit than loafing around at some airport terminal or railway station – or worst of all, a waiting room.

This often carries an element of pride or machismo – waiting is for wimps. But what does not wasting time really mean? It seems to mean putting time to some profitable use or intensive cultivation: getting the highest possible yield out of it. But this attitude could lead to the ultimate waste of time; the whole of time turned into a wasteland in which no moment can be enjoyed for its own sake.

Somehow what works for salami (the fine slicing) does not succeed with time. I like time in thick slabs. When time is too finely sliced, it does not taste like time at all. If you cut all the fat off it (to adjust the metaphor), it takes on an ominous and unrelenting aspect – you feel there is never enough of it. If I cut it too fine getting to the airport or station, I spend the whole journey in an anxious stew, waiting for the tube train or bus to get stuck in a tunnel or a traffic jam on the North Circular Road.

According to my no doubt rather peculiar calculus, this results in a double loss of time. First of all, the journey itself is lost, as a stretch of enjoyable time. But leaving enough time to arrive early means not only that the journey is salvaged from the dread of last-minute, fatal delay, but also that a chunk of potentially creative time is released at the point of arrival.

The other day Ching Ling and I, on our way to visit friends, arrived early at a country railway station. Nothing much was going on there; a man arrived to pick up his daughter; we watched a group of young Chinese lads waiting for a minibus; a man with a comically friendly dog, tail wagging so hard it could be used as a source of renewable energy, turned up at the ticket office. There was a wonderfully desultory feel about things, which you rarely get in the city, combined with the haunting scents of early spring, a thrush somewhere repeating its evening song.

The minutes we spent there could certainly have been considered a waste of time. There was no particular point to them; they had figured in no schedule or timetable; they were a chronological anomaly. But they stick in my memory as some of the most precious in the past few weeks.

Thank goodness the poet Edward Thomas was not too fixated on the timetable when his express train stopped unexpectedly one June afternoon at the country station of Adelstrop. The word he uses is “unwontedly”, which implies not just that the stop was unscheduled, but that it broke the crust of ordinary, chugging, routine time and opened a portal into something different.

The sudden stop meant that Thomas was able to appreciate where he was, and where he never expected to be, rather than being moved ever onwards on smooth rails towards an ever-receding goal.

What he saw and heard was nothing special; an empty platform, a man clearing his throat, the ordinary flowers and trees and haycocks and one of the commonest birds of English summer.

But the minute Thomas spent at Adelstrop station left an indelible impression; it printed an essence of summer time in the English countryside on his visual and aural imagination. Above all that minute had depth – depth that transformed the sense of place and history.

Instead of the flat landscape you see through a train window passing at high speed, a succession of unrelated “views”, Thomas experienced the mysterious profundity of place. The place suddenly became part of him; he was planted within it, rather than being rushed through it; he became, as a perceiving being, the centre and the heart of it.

Being at the centre means perceiving concentric circles radiating outwards. And the sense that best perceives those subtle gradations of nearness and farness, which hearkens towards them, is the sense of hearing, not the sense of sight. We are used to being eye-centred (not to mention I-centred), to directing our eyes almost as an extension of our hands, to grasp and grab. Hearing works in quite a different way. We are powerless to direct our ears; we must allow sounds to come to them.

Edward Thomas, in the unexpected lull of time, allows the sound of the blackbird’s song to come to him, and he hearkens towards it. At that moment comes the epiphany. The blackbird’s call, in its contentment and plenitude, summons “all the birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire”, and with them a profound sense of English geography and history, of gentle hills and valleys, stone villages, a university city and a cathedral one, woods and fields, in their most benign and peaceful aspect. Not a waste of time at all.

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FT: Technique is not for geeks

Technique is not for geeks

By Harry Eyres

Published: April 18 2009 01:06 | Last updated: April 18 2009 01:25

The other day your columnist suffered his worst-ever humiliation on the tennis court. I was beaten in the club league by a 12-year-old (only just 12, to rub it in, and barely taller than the net). Battered and out of breath at the end of the contest, which lasted nearly two hours, I berated myself for not using what should have been superior nous and experience, not to mention sheer imposing seniority, to defeat my young opponent. Surely I could have lured him into the net and then lobbed the little blighter? But throughout the two sets, the precocious boy not only outplayed and outran but out-thought me.

You might think the best way to be beaten by a 12-year-old would be well out of sight of anyone else. My humiliation took place in full view of several other club members, so there has been no chance of hushing it up. But one of the tougher and better players in the club, observing from a neighbouring court, had one simple comment: “It’s all down to technique.”

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At first this felt like another blow to my self-esteem, or another passing shot down the line: I didn’t think my tennis technique was so bad, or so obviously lacking, though I know my sliced backhand can be a bit floaty. But in the days following the defeat, nursing bruised limbs and ego, I have found it both helpful and positive. Technique, after all, is something that you can work on and that can be improved, even in middle age. Ron, the player who made the comment, has an excellent topped backhand that I have always admired. What I didn’t realise was that he only developed it after the age of 40.

So a couple of days later I finally booked my first ever lesson with the club coach, a delightfully cheerful character who even finds time to read The Slow Lane. An hour later I had acquired so many helpful and, I reckon, easily applicable tips that I wondered why on earth I hadn’t taken this step sooner. One of the reasons was pride. I thought I didn’t really need a lesson; my game might be rusty but all it required was a little dusting and polishing.

Another reason was fear – the fear that I would be so thoroughly deconstructed that at the end of the lesson there would be nothing left of my somewhat homespun but serviceable method but a few useless bolts and dented panels. Or I might receive some version of the famous Irish set of directions for the lost traveller: “If I were you, I wouldn’t start from here.”

I was wrong on both counts. I did need a lesson: for the past 40 years I’ve been playing with my left arm and hand dangling around uselessly instead of drawing back the right one on the backhand and guiding it, and helping to turn the shoulder, on the forehand. That small adjustment already feels like a big improvement. As for deconstruction, Christian is too wise a coach to take apart what could never be reassembled.

These technical tennis tips have wider implications. Technique, after all, is a vast subject. The word comes from Greek roots: techne is the Greek word not only for technical skill or technique or method but for craft and art. From the Greek word techne also comes our word technology, which is often opposed to art.

The problem with technique, or the tendency we have to undervalue it, at least in the arts and humanities – to regard it as “mere technique” – comes from its association with mechanics. Technique is seen as something mechanical, a soulless and heartless approximation to the perfect regularity of a machine. Technique has been suspect for many years in painting (associated with kitsch), poetry (a slack version of free verse rules) and even music (how often have I heard someone say, disparagingly, “Oh, she/he’s very good, technically”?). But what if all this is based on a misunderstanding?

For a pianist such as Alfred Cortot, whose editions of Chopin are beacons of musical insight, there is nothing mechanical about technique; it is simply the practical way of understanding and getting to the heart of the music, with the fingers as well as the mind and heart. When he suggests a less obvious fingering, it is not so much in the interests of efficiency and speed as of extracting the richest and deepest meaning from the music. What both Cortot and my tennis coach Christian teach is that working on your technique need not be an inhuman chore; it can be a thoroughly enjoyable way of enhancing the expression of your humanity.

This week I have been observing the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela rehearsing and playing under their dynamic conductor Gustavo Dudamel at Southbank Centre in London. These young players, many from the poorest barrios, have honed their technique to the highest standards. But there is nothing mechanical about either their playing or their approach to music; as the trumpeter Wilfrido Galarraga movingly revealed, the humane discipline of music has probably saved his life.

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FT: Souls in search of direction

Souls in search of direction

By Harry Eyres

Published: April 11 2009 02:03 | Last updated: April 11 2009 02:03

When we talk about “orientation”, we tend to mean either a process of getting to know the ropes when starting a university or training course, or the general direction of our sexual desires. While both are important, neither quite gets to the heart of the word. To put it another way, what puts the “orient” into “orientation”?

The poet and priest John Donne was clear about the connection when he wrote his great and sombre meditation “Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward”. For the prayerful Christian or Muslim, true orientation means facing towards either Calvary, the site of Christ’s crucifixion, or the Kaaba in Mecca (following the prophet Mohammed’s decision to change the direction of prayer); devout Jews face towards the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. At this point it gets a bit tricky geographically, but clearly, if you are anywhere to the west of either Jerusalem or Mecca, this means you will be facing east.

For Donne, the metaphysical poet who loved paradox, riding westward when he should be facing east is a sign of disorientation. The soul, which should be guided by devotion, is drawn instead by pleasure and business (plus ça change), and finds its true orientation only rarely.

Donne knows his orientation, where he should be facing, by the fact that he is heading in entirely the wrong direction. With nimble if masochistic wit, he finds an excuse, offering his back for punishment. “Burn off my rusts and my deformity,” he cries in a line that still startles with its violent yearning; “Restore thine Image, so much, by thy grace,/ That thou may’st know mee, and I’ll turne my face.”

You might find Donne’s desire to be punished and corrected as distasteful as his focus on the crucifixion is unrelenting; but I find his admission of the pain and distress of disorientation extremely moving. Not just individuals but whole societies can become disoriented, according to the French journalist and writer Jacques Monin, whose recently published book The Shipwreck of Britain is a scathing denunciation of Thatcherite and post-Thatcherite Britain’s worship of financial values at the expense of all others.

For a long time now we’ve been hearing about the problem of “disaffected youth” – that is, young people who are out of love with or turned off by the values of society, who turn away from it, into either listlessness or violence. You could say that these young people are disoriented as much as disaffected – that they don’t know where to turn, or to face, and so they turn their faces away or cover them with hoods. No one finds it comfortable to be disoriented; it is a disturbing and disempowering experience. Authoritarian social reformers and commentators call for stiffer punishments to force them into line. But what if they were at least partly right – they smelled a rat, something rotten in the state?

Barack Obama’s remarkable autobiography Dreams from My Father is a story of disorientation and reorientation. Obama as a child and young man was faced with problems of orientation more extreme and confusing than those most people confront. There were geographical extremes – moves with his mother to the far west of America and then to the far east (Indonesia), while his father was drawn back to his society in Africa. Which way should he face? Then there was a problem of racial orientation, which surfaced when he went to college in California. Should he reject one half of his heritage to be accepted by the brothers and sisters who identified exclusively with their African-American roots?

Not surprisingly, there were times when young Obama felt profoundly disoriented, as well as discouraged. Even when he became involved in community organising in the South Side of Chicago, the activity that would eventually lead to his astonishingly successful (so far) political career, his first efforts were dismal failures. He found in that microcosm just as many factional interests (competing churches) and petty power struggles and profound lack of trust as you could find in the wider world. And when he went back to Kenya, he uncovered a family tragedy going back generations, of misunderstanding and rejection involving fathers and sons, first wives and second wives, which would be enough to disorient anyone.

The remarkable thing about Obama is that he has used his disorientation so creatively. Most people when disoriented retreat fearfully into the familiar and the known, into tribes of the similarly disoriented. Obama has done precisely the opposite; he has set about opening and turning his face as widely as possible, not rejecting any elements in his own background, however difficult to assimilate, and showing himself ready to meet and talk to as many others as possible.

What President Obama seems to symbolise – and this is why so much hope has been vested in him – is an inclusive orientation. Perhaps it is nothing less than what Plato put forward in the most inspired passage of The Republic, the reorientation of the mind of humanity towards the idea of the good.

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FT: Listen to the sounds of heartfelt thanks

Listen to the sound of heartfelt thanks

By Harry Eyres

Published: March 28 2009 01:05 | Last updated: March 28 2009 01:05

I’ve always felt uneasy about the idea of surprise parties – and perhaps my unease has conveyed itself to others, for nobody has ever thrown one for me. There is always the danger that despite the best intentions the person in question would have preferred to spend a quiet evening watching David Attenborough or one of those DVDs that come with the Sunday newspapers. But the surprise 50th birthday party that I attended last weekend felt thoroughly right and appropriate.

Part of the point was that the birthday girl was too self-effacing to have thought of celebrating in such public style a life that has been lived in a very unselfish way, as a daughter, teacher, mother, wife, member of a church, choral singer and choir administrator – a full life but one seldom lived in the limelight.

It seemed like an appreciation by her husband and sons for what the philosopher Ivan Illich called the “unpaid shadow work” often performed by women. Not that Caroline has resented playing the roles of mother and wife in a supposedly old-fashioned or unfashionable way: she once confided to me (I am godfather of one of her sons) that she loved nothing more than being a mother, cooking bacon and eggs for her sons and their friends before sending them off to play rugby or hockey.

The evening began with music – not least because it was music that brought husband and wife together. Two sons played Schumann (Aufschwung from Fantasiestuecke) and Debussy (the Sarabande from Pour le Piano), with considerable aplomb, and then came the first big surprise. The youthful Hampden string quartet, three of them still students at the Royal Academy of Music, arrived and performed six of the most stirring movements ever composed for this combination. I don’t think anyone was unmoved by the ardour and commitment with which this group delivered the soul-harrowing slow movement of Schubert’s Death and the Maiden quartet and the exuberant finale of Beethoven’s opus 130.

This music led us into the feasting but it was so much more than a mere prelude or preamble. It reminded me of George Herbert’s great statement in The Pearl, “I know the ways of pleasure, the sweet strains,/ The lullings and the relishes of it/ ... What mirth and music mean.” This religious poet believes there is something ultimately still more valuable than learning, pleasure and honour; but the supreme value of that something (the love of God) can only be gauged by the fullest and deepest appreciation of worldly values.

What music meant, in this instance, was a life-enhancing power of full expression. So often in life we leave things unsaid, or half-said; there was so much more we meant to say, or wished we had said better. Hearing a fine musician or group of musicians play is witnessing a gesture and an emotion fully realised. I felt that recently when the mature and distinguished Chilingirian Quartet played Haydn at their Chamberfest at the Royal College of Music; one day the talented young Hampdens may match that level.

This concert that preceded the supper was also a demonstration of the original meaning of chamber music: music played in a room, not in a great echoing hall, the small scale bringing intimacy both between performers and audience, and among audience members themselves, who could see each other’s expressions and emotions.

The meal itself was obviously an occasion for conversation; between friends and family members (three generations were present) and also new acquaintances. I got chatting to someone with an interesting view on the current times. “I don’t think this slowdown is such a bad thing,” he said, probably unaware that he was preaching to the converted; “it gives us more time to think and reflect.”

To think and reflect about things of fundamental importance, he might have added. And the whole celebration, though it had a certain grandeur (not everyone can hire a string quartet for a birthday party, but I reckon it would always be money well spent), was not grand or showy in its essence. It was essentially a celebration of the most basic human values – family affection, friendship, community.

In What is Called Thinking? Heidegger reminds us that thinking and thanking come from the same root. “The Old English thencan, to think, and thancian, to thank,” he tells us, “are closely related; the Old English noun for thought is thanc or thonc – a thought, a graceful thought, and the expression of such a thought.” He goes even further to suggest that the deepest kind of thinking is not the conceptual-rational manipulation of ideas but the thoughtful giving of thanks.

At the end of Caroline’s birthday party, her husband Nick read a poem – a sonnet, in fact – that he had written to give thoughtful thanks for a 20-year marriage. It did not consist of anodyne praise or bland platitude, but rather honest reflection on the difficulties as well as the rewards of loyalty and constancy, rather in the manner of George Meredith’s Modern Love. I thought it the most touching part of a very touching evening.

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FT: Recovery or reappraisal?

Recovery or reappraisal?

By Harry Eyres

Published: January 31 2009 00:17 | Last updated: January 31 2009 00:17

In the throes of crisis, we are instinctive conservatives, reaching for the familiar, the already experienced: we want to be how we were before, because that seems immeasurably better than the current turmoil, distress and disorientation. All we want to do is recover – our sanity, our health, the rising market.

But our understandable obsession with recovery, in fields as diverse as drugs rehabilitation and economic policy, as my friend the psychotherapist Leon Redler argued recently in a presentation given for Simon Frazer University in Vancouver, may hinder as much as help us. For a start, we should ask whether recovery is, strictly speaking, possible. Recovery implies going back to how and where we were before; but we have known from the time of Heraclitus that we cannot step into the same river twice; it is not the same water and we are not the same people.

Secondly, if we are wise, we must surely question what it was about our apparent wellness that contributed to and led up to the crisis. Was the crisis really nothing to do with us, with the way we were living – was it an overwhelming catastrophe emanating from outside of us, sent by some angry deity such as Poseidon, the god of earthquakes and tsunamis?

When King Lear recovers his sanity, after his adventures on the heath, he does not go back to how he was at the beginning of the play, the infantile and egotistical old king demanding false protestations of love and failing to recognise true affection and loyalty. That way madness lay; in fact that way was a kind of madness, an inversion of values by which the false seemed true and the true false. Instead, for the first time in his life he achieves self-recognition – “I am a very foolish fond old man” and recognition of others – “I think this lady to be my child Cordelia”. The Lear of the last scenes is touchingly, heart-breakingly different from the earlier, autocratic king – more vulnerable, older but infinitely more human.

One good thing about a breakdown, you might think, is that it offers the opportunity for a radical reappraisal of values. The car didn’t just hit an entirely unpredicted obstacle in the road; it had been travelling down the wrong road, and for some time; perhaps it had been going the way of pride, which comes before a fall. In the street where I used to live, there was a forecourt attached to an office called (I rephrase) London-Global Property Services; on it were parked four black Range Rovers with personalised number plates, one reading B1GER. Everything was getting bigger, this whole operation told you; prices, cars, egos.

Of course you didn’t really need a black Range Rover to go around looking at top-end London properties, but why not show you were B1GER than others, could tower over them, intimidate them and block their view of the road? As a cyclist, knowing the statistics about accidents involving cyclists and 4x4s, I found B1GER particularly annoying, and took part in a small piece of direct action, when I went round all the neighbourhood’s Chelsea Tractors issuing them with pseudo-parking tickets printed by a local pressure group, containing not demands for payment but helpful environmental information.

I went back to my old street the other day and found that London-Global Property Services was no longer there. The four black Range Rovers had decamped, or dematerialised, or turned into mice or Minis. I won’t say I gloated but I did feel that something was a little bit better with the world.

The disappearance of B1GER and its stablemates raised a small hope about the return of smallness, and in particular of the economist-philosopher best known for his book Small is Beautiful, Fritz Schumacher. I read Small is Beautiful, as I am sure many of you did, in the late 1970s or early 1980s, quite soon after it came out. You might think it was terribly dated and irrelevant to the problems of a globalised world. Remember, after all, that Schumacher himself was economic adviser to the British National Coal Board, which was neither small nor particularly beautiful.

In the past 30 years, as one critic put it, the world ignored Schumacher’s bad advice and prospered. But now the tables have turned. Some of his simplest points have come home to roost; you cannot have infinite growth in a finite world; excessive dependence on oil will lead to a bloody and environmentally destructive grab for the last easily obtainable reserves.

Schumacher also had more practical suggestions. He invented the term intermediate technology to designate technology that could be built and maintained using local materials and knowledge, and which would not damage the environment –  a half-way house between Gandhi’s spinning-wheel and a giant dam project. Now intermediate technology and its twin, appropriate technology, is taught in universities all over the world.

But Schumacher’s point was broader. “Economics is being taught without any awareness of the view of human nature that underlies present economic theory.” The most pressing task of our time, strange though it may sound, is that of “metaphysical reconstruction”. We need to reconnect with ethics that can give progress a human face.

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Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009