About history

History may at first seem a strange subject for “about being here” which seeks to describe and interpret here and now. However, our present is infomed by our past. We are what we were; the sum total of our experience. Regular readers of “about being here” will have noticed how I often give a brief history or biography of my past life in leading up to describe my present one.
Likewise our society is the sum total of its past. To understand where we are today it is helpful to know where we came from. So history is a valuable subject.

I have been prompted to write about history by having just read Graham Swift’s exccellent novel “Waterland”. Its main charcter, Tom Crick, is a history teacher struggling to come to terms with his own past and at the same time puzzling about the very nature of history. One of the root meanings of “history” he says is “an inquiry” (as in “natural history”): we delve into the past seeking explanations. At the same time history as we like it presented is a “story” (the same word etymologically) a narrative that takes us from A to B. History is one way of satisfying our craving for stories - and what happened next?
In Alan Bennett’s “History Boys” there is a memorable moment in a mock Oxbridge entrance interview where the student is asked “What is history?” and gives the answer of unintended profundity: “It’s just one f***ing thing after another”.

All history is related with the benefit of hindsight and from the point of view of the victor or survivor. Today, for example, post cold war, the narrative of the Western world describes Communism as a failed experiment. All societies devise their own more or less official history to explain why they are where they are and to justify themselves, looking backwards from a very specific point in time. So the Communist sates’ history described in Marxist terms how human progress inevitably led to their ideal society. Often societies then indeed prescribe the teaching of that history to their schoolchildren so that they will fit into that society. Even if in our “western democratic society” the teaching of history is less prescriptive, it still embodies a consensual view of our present society’s interpretation and explanation of its origins.

History is by its very nature selective. The historian selects the facts that best explain where he is now. E.H. Carr’s “What is history?” is very good on what is a historical fact. Every day there are countless events but only some will later turn out to have had relevance in deciding the future. Obviously, our own lives are just the same, at one and the same time routine and utterly chaotic, it is only many years down the line that we can attribute importance to an event: I met so-and-so, who later became my wife, as opposed to I met so-and-so whom I never saw again. A logical order is only read into what happened afterwards. Our own invented biography and society’s invented history represent an attempt to make something meaningful out of life. The exercise is at once artificial and reassuring. Above all it tells the story which we like to hear.

History was my third subject at A-level at school. Actually I had wanted to do Art, for which I like to think I have a certain flair, but it was deemed to be not academic enough for a boy aiming to get into Oxford. At our first A-level lesson our teacher, Mr Kilty (who was later to appear on Mastermind on the TV, special subject hagiography), gave us the good news that “history is a slog subject”. There would be mountains of books to read. And so it turned out: I think I spent the same amount of time working on history as on French and German put together. In class we were given the factual outline and then encouraged to read widely. We soon found out that different historians had different views, explanations and interpretations of the same facts. Some of their names I can still remember: A.J.P. Taylor, E. Hobsbawm, E. Thompson, J.H. Plumb,, A. Cobham, R. Blake, to name a few. It was a good education because we were taught to analyse, compare and take what was useful to write an essay.
History like many other subjects is vast and boundless, so you have to specialize. We did 18th and 19th century British and European, (usefully supplemented by the American Revolution), stopping at the causes of World War I and the Russian Revolution. In retrospect it was a very useful area as it immediately preceded what was on our general knowledge radar about the twentieth century. It is a period that covers the building of the modern nation state and I have found that very useful as a background to working in contemporary European politics. I certainly feel that I could not do my job safely without an awareness of history and consequent sensitivities.

I went on to study literature at university, which is now predominantly what I read, but I still enjoy the occasional history book.

I think my favourite is Gibbon’s “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”. I hasten to add that so far I have read only the first three of the six volumes and even then some of the chapters in abridgement. The point is that Gibbon’s massive opus takes us from the apogee of the Roman Empire, as he saw it, at the time of Augustus all the way through to the fall of Constantinople, or the Empire in the East, in 1453. Writing as a European in the late 18thC, that is for his time almost a universal history. Gibbon is to be relished for his Augustan English prose, which is an absolute delight. He is also very funny in his irony. The historian is always present and we learn as much about Gibbon and his Enlightenment age as we do about his subject. I think that is fine as it is clear that it is his view, something which some historians try to avoid, dressing up their account as the only objective version. Gibbon also has an over-arching vision, he knows where he is going. His is the story of a gradual undermining of the old Roman civic virtues, not least by the introduction of Christianity. I like my essayist to have a clear argument, I can always disagree with him if I want to.
Above all, Gibbon has the good historian’s knack of telling a good story, with an eye for the kind of detail that captures the reader’s attention, the anecdotal and outrageous that illustrate character. He is good at what all readers of history relish alongside the story, that is information that gives some insight into daily life, the human element.
As the title tells us “Decline and Fall” is a story of decay, human failings, baddies. This is the kind of thing that readers of history (and literature) are really interested in.

The kind of history that would have us believe in relentless progress towards an ever better society is a bore and rings false. Life just isn’t like that. Things go round in cycles. Mankind does not really progress. We don’t actually learn from history. We make the same mistakes, because each generation has to learn from experience for itself. History repeats itself; some say, first as tragedy, then as farce. It’s recognizing ourselves in the recurrent cycles that brings history to life for us.

History tells us how we got where we are, but at the same time that we have not really come that far.

About languages

I am a linguist by training and profession, so languages, learning them and using them, have played an important part in my life.
For someone who as a boy grew up in Yorkshire in the 1960’s that may not seem an immediately obvious outcome. Yet paradoxically in today’s age of greater globalization, communication and international travel with potentially greater exposure to foreign languages, language learning is actually taken less seriously in England now than it was then.

I didn’t really encounter a foreign language until I started learning French at grammar school when I was eleven, and even then it was taught by an Englishman as a somewhat academic exercise, not that different from the Latin I started at the same time. Then at thirteen, in the rather odd way that schools are organized and curriculum options are offered, I had to choose between German, Ancient Greek or biology as an additional subject. I chose German, which is why I am where I am today.
My choice was inspired by the fact that we had some new neighbours in Ilkley who were Dutch. Willy and Evert spoke Dutch to each other and their dog, but English to us. They knew other languages too. They had a son who was studying at the Sorbonne in Paris. We all watched the news footage from there in May 1968 with some trepidation. Their house was full of strange and different smells (Dutch cooking, coffee and other things no doubt that I couldn’t place) and objects from the many different countries where they had lived. It all seemed very exciting to me, so I decided modern languages was for me.
After all, I was already precociously good at French; about the same time I got my teacher, Tony Kingham, to explain to me the tenses we had not yet come across in class so I could read Astérix books.

The first lessons of the new subject, German, were an intimidating experience. We actually had a native speaker. Dr H.E.H.A. Krips had been a brilliant young judge in Vienna at the time of Anschluss and decided to get out while he could. For his sins, he ended up for the rest of his life trying to foster an interest in German in young schoolboys in Bradford. He was the oldest teacher in the school in my day and his nickname (for all masters had nicknames) was “Daddy” which spoke volumes, as he was well loved. Daddy Krips actually had a radically modern approach to language teaching and spoke to us only in German for the first three classes - to our total bewilderment. He then relented and taught us what it all meant in English.
Later, in the sixth form, for our cultural improvement he once brought along a record of some Schubert settings of Goethe (which I later learned he used to sing himself as a young man). By then we were a small group of eight long-haired 70’s teenagers interested in progressive rock music. Unfortunately, at the melodramatic piano flourishes that open “der Erlkönig” my good friend David Berry subsided into a fit of wild laughter. “Ach! You know nossing!” Dr Krips burst out deeply disappointed.
It was a privileged way to learn German and we got very good at it.

In the meantime French continued apace and we had also been given an opportunity (which we were not allowed to refuse) of learning Russian from scratch to O-level in one year with Mr Lloyd. Sadly in those Soviet days there was little opportunity of contact with Russians and the printed matter that issued from the USSR was diabolical, though I did treasure a copy of “Ogonyok” which had a rather fetching woman tractor driver on its cover. So my Russian lapsed. I periodically try to revive it, it’s a kind of seven year itch; but we tend to part company when I get stuck on verbs of motion. I’ve not given up on the idea totally and a schoolboy knowledge of Russian has often helped me out in spotting key words in countries.where other Slav languages are spoken.

I won my scholarship to Oxford to read French and German in the autumn of 1976, which in those days left me with what would now be called a short gap year from January to September during which I went to live in France. I had been given a teaching job until the summer in a lycée in a town called l’Isle-Jourdain in a department called the Gers somewhere in the South - it took a lot of finding in the atlas. Although only 30 km from Toulouse, it was in fact spiritually miles from anywhere I had known.
My cousin Sheila had married a Frenchman a few years before and I had once spent a fortnight with them based in Clermont-Ferrand. I had also interrailed for a month partly in France with a friend from Bradford one previous summer. However, nothing had prepared me for the total immersion I was about to get into deepest France and the reality of French as she is spoken there.
Spending a lot of time initially with my pupils, some of whom from repeating years were actually older than me, I eagerly relearned a parallel language of “argot” and idiomatic expressions. I’m sure I learned far more French from them than they ever learned English from me. Moreover, all of this was in a strong twangy Southern accent. I remember my first friendly encounter with the school chef who was to give me left-overs from school lunches (actually quite good food) in a metal container or “gamelle” - a new word to start with - that I had been given lest I starve in the evening. He asked “Tu es venu avec le traing? Tu veux du paing? Tu veux du ving?”
South-Western French was all I spoke for weeks on end and people talked a lot. At the end of our first translation class at Christ Church that autumn, Dr Robinson tried to make some French coversation and the whole class was taken aback by the torrent of what sounded like a French peasant that issued from my mouth.
I have lived for more than half my life in French speaking countries and speaking French comes as second nature to me, though without the Southern accent these days. However, out of a certain snobbery I have never gone the whole hog on the Belgian accent. Since I had the grammar thrashed into me from a young age I also have no trouble writing French, probably with fewer spelling mistakes than the average Frenchman. The difference between spoken and written French is huge and to learn to write it after having learned to speak it is a major effort the progress of which I followed with curiosity in my own children. Given how I was taught it though, I learned to speak it after having learned to write it.

I’ve never felt as inside German. I lived in Germany for ten months in 1979-1980 in a small town called Kamen on the extreme edge of the Ruhr. I travelled about the rest of West Germany a lot at the weekends as there wasn’t much doing there (“tote Hose”), though often to see other student friends from England. I was never as utterly immersed in German as I had been in Fench in l’Isle-Jourdain. My spoken German has never been as good as my spoken French and I always find reading German a bit of an effort. It is, however, a language I enjoy immensely because of the way it builds up words out of clear components of meaning. I love signs like “Verkehrswidrig abgestellte Fahrzeuge werden kostenpflichtig abgeschleppt” (illegally parked vehicles will be towed at the owner’s expense - though the sheer poetry is lost in translation). Interpreting from German is great fun, an intellectual challenge syntactically and usually something the audience is interested in given Germany’s importance.

It was while in Kamen that I started Italian evening classes for something to do and by way of preparing to visit that Easter Simon Porter who was working in Naples. The level in the group was not very high. After six weeks the teacher suggested I move up to year two. For two years after that I did no Italian, but when I came to train as an interpreter in Brussels, there were people working with Italian in my group, so I started to pick up a lot hearing it interpreted during exercises. I made Italian friends who talked a lot among themselves in Italian and who were always very encouraging if I tried to join in with my rudimentary Italian. Eventually I came to marry an Italian. So I now speak Italian more spontaneously than I speak German, but my knowledge of it is not so deep or literary. As I mainly learned Italian by listening to it and speaking it, I cannot write it without having to look up every other word to check its spelling.

Given the large number of languages we work with at the SCIC (the European Commission’s interpreting service - see “About interpreting”) there has always been considerable pressure, both spoken from management and unspoken from my peers, to learn new languages for professional purposes. When I rejoined the staff in 1992 I was very keen to learn Spanish properly. I had a passing acquaintance with it from numerous holidays in Spain and also more recently Cuba and Mexico and it had always attracted me as an important world and literary language. Since I already had French and Italian it was not going to be too hard. However, non-linguists may be surprised to hear that there is one hell of a lot of vocabulary to learn if you’re going to use Spanish (or any other language) professionally, even if you’re on relatively familiar ground gramatically. I was also very motivated by the prospect of having three months off work living in Spain, a country I like very much; I find there is a human and social side to life there that is very appealing. Needless to say Spanish remains to this day the least strong of my professional languages and I am somewhat diffident about speaking it because of lack of practice.

Speaking a language is really like playing a musical instrument: you only get and remain good at it by constant practice. However, if you’re going to get anywhere you just have to get stuck in, no matter how inelegantly at first.

Since my addition of Spanish in 1995, I have not sought to learn another language for professional purposes.
Without a strong personal motivation (eg partner’s language) I can’t seem to find the time and energy for what is such a huge task. Also I guess I just feel like doing different activities after a day of working with languages.
Moreover, I have little professional motivation to learn another language as I know it would make little real difference to my career (and pay) given my present seniority; it could potentially affect adversely the range of meetings I do in the light of the language combinations required for them, if I were to become “too useful” elsewhere; and the obscurer the language, the less it is actually spoken and the less you get to practise it, while the higher the responsibility that goes with it as colleagues depend on you for relay (double translation).
Having said that, when I’m actually in a country where the language is new to me I’m brimming with curiosity and want to learn as much of it as I can to be able to read what’s around me and try out phrases on the locals, if only the standard pleasantries of everyday life. I have a shelf full of Teach Yourself books and various accompanying recordings on my iPod. But it’s strictly for pleasure, not business. In this way I have a smattering of Dutch and Catalan and know a few words of Greek, Portuguese, Croatian and Turkish among others. When I say a few words, that is what I mean, a few words. As a language professional I know only too well what the different levels of proficiency are.

For those of us who are actually fluent in other languages it is interesting to observe objectively how we use our different languages.
I’m writing this blog in English because English is my native or mother tongue. Engish will always be and can only ever be the language I know best and therefore my language of choice for expressing my thoughts.
The top level of my consciousness can be occupied by another language, most easily French, as the phrases and words may in that way be ready to be released spontaneously to interact with my environment and those I speak to. In that sense I may “think” in other languages.
Although I rarely remember my dreams, I know I dream in a variety of languages too and have been heard in my sleep to speak in them.
However, I believe I am only capable of deep and original thought in English. I know this because when engaged in a more profound conversation in another language I become aware of the fact that I start having to translate my new ideas from English rather than being able to draw on a ready to use stock of phrases in the other language.

I also do mental arithmetic in English. That is not because it is deep thought, but because as a boy I learned the word patterns for it in English. I don’t actually have a mathematical mind but a literary one: in my head I hear “four plus six is ten”; I don’t see 4 + 6 = 10.

English is the language I prefer to read in and the only one in which such careful use of language as in poetry can have its full resonance. I understand the words in other languages, but they don’t carry the same emotional charge. Words do not exist in isolation but have acquired from shared use over many centuries endless connotations and cultural references that the foreigner is incompletely aware of.
This insufficient awareness of the baggage of a language is why it is very easy to sound rude in another language. It is very easy to pick up swearwords in another language and be quite foul-mouthed, but it is really a very bad idea, because you can never really know the force of what you are saying. I admit I often sin myself in this respect.

In fact we speak other languages at our peril and to our disadvantage, as we lose precision in conveying our thoughts. This is why, at a negotiating political level, interpretation remains important, even if the exchange could take place in simple English as a lingua franca.
However, the fact that we are ready to venture into someone else’s linguistic terrain is usually perceived as a gesture of good will by the listener because of this readiness to expose ourselves and to get closer to them (which is why in some meetings delegates prefer not to use the interpretation even if it is available).
There is also a converse argument that using a language other than your own forces you to reformulate your ideas in a more direct way which can improve their clarity, which has been a choice made by some writers (Beckett, Conrad). However, I don’t think it’s my case.

The readiness to learn other languages, to transcend barriers, to penetrate other cultures and to understand other human beings, their context and motivations, can only enrich one’s experience of life.
Often once you have learned the language of the country you felt so attracted to and actually manage to understand the overheard conversation at the next table, it will remove the romantic verneer of the place, as you realize that these people share the same ordinary everyday concerns as those at home. Yet that in itself, the realization that we are more alike than different, is a discovery of great value which sadly many people never make. because of their reluctance to learn languages.

Speaking another language so you can join in with a group of people from another background, best of all when you are in their country, is a liberating experience that allows you not just to discover other people and cultures but also to discover new aspects of your own personality.

I may be a linguist by profession, but I also find languages essential to my personal enjoyment of life.

About winter

Winter always seems to end for me rather suddenly with the contrast of returning from skiing in the snow-covered Alps to find incipient Spring budding in my garden at home. This year is no exception. I can’t remember when I last saw as much snow at Sölden as last week, while today in Brussels the temperature got up to an incredibly mild 13°. After all, Spring is officially only three weeks away now.
So I have stowed away in the cellar again the salt that it is my duty as a good citizen in Belgium to strew on the pavement in front of my house when it snows and freezes, lest I be held liable for some fellow citizen slipping and breaking a leg in front of my house. The salt was actually needed on quite a few occasions this winter, but I don’t expect to get it out again till the next one... although you never know, a further cold snap is always possible, but I have the inkling it would not be a long one.

Generally it is with a feeling of relief that I see that Winter is on the run. My spirits start to rise already with the lengthening of the days, no longer having to stumble around in the dark in the morning or having to cycle home from work in the dark. I don’t like the darkness of winter. However, during the hours of daylight, winter light can be exquisite with the low sun really bringing out unexpected colours and the sharp contrasts between light and shade. On a clear day in the winter the visibility in the mountains has a quality all of its own. Even in Belgium a walk or ride out on a sunny winter day bring their own bracing satisfaction. Sadly in Brussels though I have to admit there are also a lot of grey, damp and cold days during Winter when I really don’t feel the urge to go out and am anxious to see it pass.

This Winter has been the hardest in Belgium for quite some years: a proper Winter. On the whole I prefer my seasons to be distinct, so I welcome that. Having been through some hardship during winter, especially by going outside regularly, my body and soul feel more exhilarated at the arrival of Spring.

So how does this year’s return to a proper Winter chime with global warming?
There are, I suppose, ups and downs, cycles within cycles and underlying long term trends. I have to recognize that we haven’t had real winters for some time around here, so I won’t deny the long term gradual rise in temperature. Global warming exists; I have seen the glaciers melting. However, I do think that we should be a little bit more humble when it comes to predicting nature; there is a lot of uncertainty surrounding the climate and just how it may be changing. While admitting that man-made pollution is a contributive factor, I can’t help thinking also that there is an over-weaning arrogance in assuming mere human beings have total influence and control over such a huge and complicated system as the global climate which we do know has been through long term extreme cycles generating both ice ages and sweltering conditions even far north. After all, if it turns out that we’re staving off the next ice age, however inadvertently, then that’s not at all bad. Or maybe, we’re doing something really terrible. Or maybe, whatever we do, the world will continue as it was going to do anyway and we will have to adapt or die.
I’m not sure I’m going to obsess about how I behave personally given the profligacy I see around me approved by the establishment.: entire buildings left illuminated when empty; security concerns at work that force me to take the lift instead of climbing the stairs for only one storey; people who will take the car everywhere when they could walk or bike there; meeting goers who jet around week in week out and then suggest I shouldn’t use the plane for my holidays etc. My carbon footprint ? - show me yours first.
And don’t get me started on emissions trading: it’s tantamount to allowing criminals to pay someone else to serve their jail sentence for them. It’s simply immoral but that’s ok evidently, as supposedly it’s sound economics.   Just how this wet dream of some now doubtless discredited futures trader could ever make a real difference in practice is a mystery to me.

I’m sceptical about to what extent global warming is solely caused by man and can therefore be reversed solely by man, and even more sceptical about the alibis for action that are touted these days when it is blatantly obvious that no one seems really serious about making any genuine changes to the ways we run our economies. The truth is that tangibe climate change will come slowly enough for man to adapt to its undesirable consequences as he muddles along.

Every age has its own doomsday scenario. In the 60’s and 70’s we were all about to go in a nuclear armageddon. Now we’ll all be drowned by rising seas or burned to a frazzle because of global warming. In previous centuries people were always equally certain that “the end of the world is nigh”. But we are all still here, having adapted.
It flatters the vanity of mankind to believe that we are potentially the last generation ever. If you work on the naive assumption that each generation is, thanks to progress, the most perfect ever, then it is gratifying to believe that you are the highest form of life ever to have existed, as nobody will come after you.
I actually believe though that man does not progress from generation to generation, even if material conditions change. Each and every man and woman in every age faces the same basic fundamental problems of life and has to resolve them to their own satisfaction by trial and error and their own personal experience. I don’t believe I’m any better than 19th, 17th, 15th or whatever century man.
The current obsession with disaster scenarios is fuelled by a misplaced human sense of self -importance. Our ancestors in the North survived the ice age. We will just have to relocate our cities and economic activities and grow different crops elsewhere. The ingenuity of man is boundless. We are not about to disappear, nor is the earth. Adaptation will always be painful: hell you may not be able to use your car as often, but so what!

I appear to have digressed somewhat from my consideration of the eternal recurrent phenomenon that is Winter for those men of the North that we Europeans are. And believe me there is also winter in the Mediterranean: even if it’s not as cold, it is also miserable at times.
It is the rotation of the seasons and the need to survive winter that has produced the highy organized civilizations of the North, the European, Chinese, Japanese and others. These are peoples who have to organize and plan in order to get through the year. Winter instils virtues.

I guess that’s how I see Winter, a necessary inconvenience that is part of life’s rich tapestry. Most of it is miserable, but at the right times it has its charms: especially when it is really cold and sunny. And of course, without the winter snow there would be no skiing.

Still, I’m glad Winter is almost over.

About belief

I’m not so sure, but maybe the title of this piece should be “About doubt”.

I remember as a teenager in the 70’s being inspired and moved by Jacob Bronowski’s BBC documentary series “the Ascent of man”, which celebrated the rise of science. One programme traced the pivotal rôle played by doubt in the progress of scientific knowledge. Only by calling into doubt received ideas, especially when they do not match one’s observation of reality, is it possible for science to move forward. He ended the programme by visiting Ausschwitz where many members of his family had died in the holocaust. Standing in the pond into which the ashes of the dead had been tossed, he concludes that this is what absolute certainty leads to and pulls out a handful of slime... A powerful image.

It is of course the same kind of absolute certainty that leads young men to blow themselves up killing innocent bystanders in the name of Islam.
One should not be afraid of admitting that one is not absolutely certain.
So I myself am not sure; I don’t know if there is a god. Technically that makes me an agnostic (from the Greek for “one who does not know”).
From the point of view of intellectual honesty it seems to me to be the only tenable position in this world. We cannot know.
In its way, to be an outright atheist, taking for certain the non-existence of God, is just as much a leap of faith as to be a believer in God.
Of course, in a sense, belief is not a question of knowledge at all but of faith.

I think I was born without the gene for faith (or I have not been granted that grace, as the theologians may put it). I cannot remember ever believing. As a boy I found there always seemed to be something distinctly implausible and questionable about what I was told in sermons in churches, at Sunday school, in religious instruction, or “divinity” as it was bizarrely called at my grammar school.
Let me say straightaway here that I am grateful for having been taught bible stories and a working knowledge of Christianity as it enables me to make sense of large parts of the history, art and literature of Western civilization which is thoroughly imbued with it. In fact I think it’s a shame that many young people these days do not have that knowledge. Especially in the protestant countries, where from the Reformation onwards the Bible was made available in the vernacular as the first widely circulated printed text, biblical references inform a not inconsiderable part of the very language we use.
So it is important to be familiar with Chirtianity to understand many things around us in the West.
Christianity also offers a useful code of values for living in our society. These values are never fully adhered to of course, nor could they be within the context of how we have structured our society, but as an ideal they are worthy of respect. Religion in its established form is a useful vehicle for public morality and all the major religions seek to promote better social behaviour and none of them can be faulted on that count.
Religion also provides the necessary solemnity for the great rituals that surround the fundamental mysteries of life: birth, entry into adulthood, marriage and death; and in societies closer to nature and subsistence agriculture, the rotation of the seasons. Many of us go to church only at the times of such ceremonies. These are functions common to all the great religions that unify societies and help provide a shared identity. As such they are worthy of respect and most people are happy to go along with them and pay lip service to them. It’s just what one does.
However, actually believing in the whole thing is another matter. Real belief or faith is something quite personal and generally I am convinced that any religion has bits in it that an individual believes in fervently and others bits somewhat less so.

When it comes to Christianity I personally believe in hardly any of it at all.
Christianity contains many odd things which familiarity leads us not to think twice about, yet if you were to transpose some of these beliefs, only changing names, to some imagined tribal religion on a Pacific island or in darkest Africa, they would be dismissed as pure mumbo-jumbo. For the best part of two millenia theologians have struggled to provide plausible explanations for the basically implausible.

Let’s start with the virgin birth. I was taught about that before even being given any sexual education. How bizarre is that? For all I knew it may have been the normal way of having children. Only later did the penny drop. In many mythologies it’s common for gods to beget children on humans to create demi-gods. At least Zeus had the decency to assume human or animal form to do it. In Christianity there is no contact, it just happens. In part it’s all to do with squaring a whole series of gods with a notionally monotheistic religion which takes us into the difficult area of the Holy Trinity that is essentially having your cake and eating it.
The Virgin Mary herself looms much larger in Catholic countries than in England. She clearly subsumes and perpetuates a much earlier cult of motherhood. Motherhood is of course a fine thing worthy of celebrating, as indeed is apple pie. The trouble with doing it through Mary is that she is a virgin. This is actually quite disturbing and disrespectful of the fundamental laws of nature. I would go so far as to blame on this particular belief some very unhealthy attitudes towards women in Latin males and a more general difficulty the Church seems to have with sexuality.

Heaven and hell. This is a strange one as there is not actually any definitive passage in the Bible on them. However, they are very present in the hysterical hard sell of Christianity through the ages: “Believe the whole package or you will go to hell”.
I have just read Dante’s “Divine Comedy” in which the poet is taken on a tour of the after-life, first by Virgil through Hell and Purgatory, then by Beatrice through Paradise. The “‘Divine Comedy” is a work of fiction, a fantasy, not a divine revelation. It is Dante’s attempt to imagine the after-life by applying strictly the religious and philosophical tenets and beliefs of his age. Thus he needs to change guide after Purgatory because Virgil is not allowed into Heaven. No matter how good a poet he is, he cannot enter Paradise because unfortunately for him he was born prior to Christianity. It is rather odd if we are dealing in eternity that there should be this relatively recent cut-off point. Logically of course for Dante, Mohammed is also in Hell, as a spreader of wrong beliefs. It’s just as well Dante is not about today as there would be a “fatwa” out against him. “Inferno” is one of the finest works of literature I have read. “Paradise” , however, is rather boring. In struggling to get to grips with something that is just spiritual and not material, which is in fact a mystical experience that defies understanding, he presents us with something that is just too elusive.
If there is a Heaven, then it is beyond our grasp. It seems to me that all attempts to imagine heaven and even God, for that matter, run into the limits of our human experience. If there is a heaven, then surely entry into it cannot be conditional on having been born in the right century on the right continent. Also the idea that God should cast into outer darkness humans that won’t believe in him smacks of a petulance and vanity that are altogether human.
Anyway the whole craving to believe in an after-life strikes me in itself to be an act of human vanity, a refusal to accept that “this is it”, a sense of self-importance unwilling to consider its own end, an inability to come to terms with the fact that we are but a moment in the endless time of life, a temporary arrangement of matter that will be superseded by another.
I do believe in an after-life in my children in the sense that half of my genes are carried forward in them to assume a new form and that some of my personality and character rubs off on my offspring. It’s not eternal though. However, mortality doesn’t bother me and frankly I find this life in its positive and negative variety preferable to any notional paradise.
Partly of course that’s because my own life is comfortable. In the past, part of the Church’s connivance in the unfair status quo was to offer future Heaven as a sop to the downtrodden whose experience of this life might otherwise have led them to rebellion. Although it was Marx who coined the phrase “religion is the opium of the people”, curiously enough it was also a trick employed by the communist states themselves as they used to promise utopia tomorrow in return for sacrifice today.
No, I believe in neither heaven nor hell. I believe life goes on after us pretty much as before us, without our physical presence but with our having been here having some transient influence on those who come next, in most cases and in the case of a few exceptional individuals the influence stays for longer. Undoubtedly Christ himself was one of these people, for I certainly believe he existed. I’m not so sure everything written about him is true.

Which brings us to the holy book of Christianity, the Bible. The Bible is a strange book in that most of it, the Old Testament, is co-opted from another religion, mainly to serve as a legitimization in the prophets for the coming of the Messiah. I can’t help thinking that there's a lot of unnecessary baggage here. If you look hard enough you can find everything and its opposite in the Old Testament.
To turn to a part of it being debated today: every old culture has its traditional creation myth; most of which are attractive in their ways and can be taken as symbolic rather than literal. I don’t want to get into an argument as to whether Genesis is to be taken literally. Let me just say that I personally don’t believe it but I think it’s a nice story. I prefer Darwin’s version of the “Origin of the species”. We can never know all about creation, but it is certainly clear that it took longer than six days. However, even if science gets us closer to understanding “how”, it does not address the question “why”; of which more later.
If you’re actually interested in Christianity, then it’s the New Testament you should be reading with its four different versions of Christ’s life and texts setting out in greater detail his teachings and then bizarrely the rather odd book that is “Revelation”.
To believe the whole thick book that is the Bible is a bit of a tall order.

To return to the life of Christ, the miracles and the resurrection, I would say that I am at best sceptical.
However, my main problem is that I have never really got the central point of Christianity: the idea that somehow I am saved because Christ died for me on the cross.

I need to start here with the notion that I need to be saved. You see I don’t accept that I am bad and bound for hell (which I don’t believe exists anyway). I don’t believe that man is fundamentally bad. I’m not denying that there are people out there who are evil and have something pathologically wrong with them that leads them to deliberately commit the most horrendous attrocities. Evil exists and is a real problem that cannot be explained away. However, most people I know, including myself, are not intrinsically nasty. We do bad things not so much out of a conscious desire to harm others as out of too great a concern about ourselves and therefore an inability to realize the repercussions of our actions on others. Sometimes we may get bad ideas, sudden desires to harm others, but usually we discard them, because as Adam Smith explains in his “Theory of moral sentiments” our behaviour is dictated by a desire that others should think well of us. There’s a self-regulating enlightened self-interest in a normally constituted person.
At one and the same time we are all outright individualists, yet condemned to live in society. I think the real pulls in the conscience that we have to constantly use our free will to choose between are not so much the stylized black and white of “good and evil” but something much greyer: what is best for me and what is right for others. Ultimately they coincide, because in both a moral and practical sense, since I live in society, what is right for the collective is to my benefit. In the short term they may not appear to coincide and we may make mistaken choices.
People on the whole are good because they work at it, it’s a lifetime effort of trying harder to recognize the bad impulses and say no to them. The Christian virtues and teachings of Christ are all helpful here. But where does Christ himself come in, other than having been an interesting philosopher who lived 2000 years ago and whose teachings were recorded for our benefit?

Probably my mistake here is to forget that Christ is not just human but also divine. Assuming I can get my head around that one, how exactly does his dying a gruesome death, and then being resurrected so as to prove he wasn’t really human after all, mean (if I choose to believe in him) that it no longer matters how many times I made the wrong moral choice, I still have a place in heaven. I’m sorry, but I just don’t get the mechanics of that.
In some way it must be a throwback to propitiating the gods with an animal sacrifice as in Homer or a human sacrifice as with the Aztecs to the sun. Christ is after all the Lamb of God. But how am I redeemed by this sacrifice; what is the link between that historic event and me now ?
But isn’t this propitiation of a potentially vindictive god all rather strange and more in keeping with barbaric religions we have dismissed?
Also have you ever considered another wholly bizarre aspect of Christianity which is the cannibalistic symbolism of the communion: the wine and the wafer as the blood and flesh of Christ ? While I believe that the sharing of food is fundamental to the human experience of community, why should we imagine that we are eating Christ ?
Again we are back to some atavistic pagan beliefs of an ancient society which sit uneasily with a whole elaborate theology thought up by the founding fathers drawing heavily on the work of the Greek philosophers.

At another level it is also implied that as a non-believer all my moral efforts at being a better man are useless; I might as well sin as much as I want, then repent and say I believe. Where is the motivation to be good in that ? And how does the careful weighing in the balance of our good and bad deeds at the Last Judgement, before being allocated our appropriate place in heaven or hell, square with having a “get out of jail free” card in our back pocket because we believe in Christ ? (The answer in Dante is Purgatory.)
Again we’re back to “If you buy into this whole rather improbable set of beliefs, the actually unlikely but still possible after-life in hell will be avoided”. Christianity is reduced to an insurance policy: just in case it turns out to be true after all, you might as well have it - and generations have succumbed to this hard sell of the monopolistic Church.

So in Christianity there is a whole series of things I don’t really get or believe in. I’m not against it as a belief, it just doesn’t work for me.
I was brought up in a notionally Christian society, I say notionally becuase the contradictions between what was taught and what was lived were always flagrant to me. I recognize Christianity as the background noise of my culture. I think the King James Bible contains some of the finest poetry in English. I enjoy some of the greatest achievements of Western art which are inspired by Christianity: the great gothic cathedrals; the painting of Michelangelo and Caravaggio; the sacred music of Bach. Yet actually I believe all these works are a celebration of the creative force and spirit of Man as much as they are a glorification of Christ and God.
I’m happy with the core of the moral teaching without all the packaging it comes in. There is one patronizing argument which says that the packaging of any religion, the rituals, the rules, the stories, are there to pass on the message to those who otherwise are not interested in thinking through all the issues about life for themselves. I myself am ready to respect anyone’s system of beliefs on the evidence of their behaviour.
At a collective level, I see belief as a personal means to a social end. If people are happy to buy the ready made package with no questions asked, conform to it and thereby be good citizens, then I think that’s wonderful, whether that package is called Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism or whatever. In fact all the great world religions and teachings have on that level much the same content.
Where I start to have a problem is when a believer subscribes 100% to a perverted version of the religion, usually disowned by the mainstream and then takes it as a justification for harming even killing others. In that sense there probably is a need for organized religion to keep the flock together and prevent slippage into heresy. The downside is that organized religion like any other large organization tends to become self-serving, interested in its own preservation and fuelled on hypocrisy.

I myself am happier with the idea of personal belief.
That’s because at the individual level, I see belief as a personal means to answer the basic riddle of life, why? what is life for? It is a question you can only answer for yourself because as Pascal says, you die by yourself. This is a question which at some stage must cross all human minds. Animals we take it don’t bother about it, they just get on with life; but it is axiomatic that self-aware human beings always have been bothered by the question.

So having discarded the trappings of Christianity, while recognizing its place in our Western culture and its value to society as a moral teaching, do I believe in God? God, after all, is a concept that goes beyond Christianity. In principle, the three great monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, share the same single God. So as Lessing’s Nathan says: “Why fight over it between the three?” (that protest is as relevant today as it ever was, thinking of Al-Qaeda and Palestine).
In a broader sense there is through most cultures a belief in the existence of the divine, the numinous something beyond our world that created it and maintains its order. Usually and optimistically, this God, for want of a better word, is benevolent. How could he be otherwise if he has given us the world and life ? However, it need not be the case. Kleist in one of his depressed moments pondering the reason for man’s existence wondered “What if there is a God and he is malevolent ?” That’s perhaps not a belief worth entertaining (Kleist killed himself).
I do see room though, as in some systems of belief, for both a god of creation and a god of destruction, a good cop and a bad cop, God and Satan. However, I don’t actually see the dichotomy in moral terms, because when an individual suffers from being on the receiving end of nature, it is purely random. Beliefs such as “God sent hurricane Katrina to punish the evil people in iniquitous New Orleans” or “God created AIDS to punish homosexuals” are strictly unacceptable in the modern world. The truth is there is a lot of unpleasantness out there in the world and nature that it is hard to account for. The Christian trick is to finesse this by saying that “God moves in mysterious ways”, thereby solving the many problems of disaster, disease, untimely death, injustice, evil and so on, without actually providing a valid explanation, merely stating “God knows what he is doing, even if we don’t”.
In hesitating, then, whether to believe in God or not, I am considering only the existence of a benevolent or just God. But to be honest, I don’t know if there is one.

Nor am I sure that the certainty of God’s existence would increase the meanigfulness of my life. I’m not convinced that “God” is actually a useful shorthand answer to the question “what is life for ?”
I believe we are all part of something larger, society and nature.
I believe the meaning of life clearly transcends the individual.
What exactly it may be is something elusive, but it is worth seeking in many ways, in many places, in many teachings, in many books. There is a real yearning in many people for a spiritual dimension to their lives. The feeling that mere material gratification is not enough is what prompts the present revival in religion in a world that until recently we mistakenly thought to be post-religious. There is a void at the heart of the life of modern man which, if he perceives it, he is eager to fill. I’m not sure the existence of God would fill it for me. I think the answer is to be found more in a mixture of greater physical and spiritual self-fulfilment, a greater engagement with others, starting with our immediate family and those near to us (the Christian “love thy neighbour”), greater recognition of our value to society and greater awareness of the rest of nature. I believe these kinds of experience can enhance our life and give it meaning.

Ultimately the answer to the question “what is life for ?” is simply “life is for life”. The continuing cycle of life, including the further propagation of our species within the society in which we live, is an end in itself.
The rest is properly a mystery and we cannot know, though we may profitably speculate.

Pascal after his many “Thoughts” on the subject reached the conclusion that believing in God is a better bet than not believing in God.
For my part, for the time being as it is not yet time to hedge my bets, I say simply “I do not know”.

About computers

It’s odd how computers have taken over our lives, that is if you think how happily we got along without them until relatively recently. Now they seem to be indispensable and certainly in many walks of life if the computer is down people can’t do anything for you. I like to think life would go on without them, certainly in its most fundamental aspects.

But let’s pause to consider how dependent we’ve become...
First of all, you’re reading this at the computer. Moreover I’m writing this at the computer. In fact, these days, I write most things at the computer. I read my programme for work on the computer. So the first thing I do when I get up on a weekday is to check if there’s been a change to it, and while I’m at it see if there’s anything in my e-mail inbox.
At work all of our administrative tasks have to be done on the computer - leave applications, travel administration, report writing etc.
In my private life, I keep my accounts on the computer. I now make my bank transfers from my computer. I book all my private plane tickets on line and buy many concert even cinema tickets that way too. I store and manage my photographs on the computer. I can listen to music I like while working at the computer and buy tracks off i-Tunes. I can have a video conversation with members of my family on Skype. And so the list goes on. I probably spend more time in front of a computer screen than in front of a TV screen.

Computers started to enter my life at work. Riccardo Ettore, one of the earliest computer-nerds and mac-freaks I know, ran a training session in which he gave us an excellent introduction to how they worked, what they could do and what the future held. It was inspirational and everything was upon us sooner than we expected.
Riccardo himself played a key role in devising the software to write and manage the programme for the interpreters . When I started in the 1980’s we had physically to go into our building at the weekend where the programme was stuck up on the wall on those old long wide print-outs with holes down the side. We had to scan through it all till we found our name and copy down by hand the details of our assignments for the week. As things progressed through the week the office had to correct the metre long paper sheets on a big table with tipp-ex, pencil and a rubber then ring up colleagues individually to inform them of the changes. Needless to say, with the subsequent expansion of the number of languages and colleagues that would never work today. Now we consult our programme on-line or if a computer is not to hand we can ring a number and get a synthesized voice to read it out to us. That’s how much things have changed.

Then at work something called e-mail was made available to us so the administration could send us messages. But then friends everywhere were also starting to have their own e-mail addresses so we used it as much for private as for professional purposes.
I like the way you can leave e-mails for people to answer at their convenience. You can think over a proposal before giving a response, without being put on the spot. That’s definitely positive. I find e-mails particularly great for finalizing practical arrangements before travelling. However, I’ve learned the hard way that e-mails are abused in the sense that although they are meant as spontaneous communication, people keep them and use them later against you. We forget too easily the old adage that it’s always better to think twice before committing anything to writing.

Timidly we were also granted internet access which might be handy for doing some background research and reading for meetings we were working in. But that soon turned out to have many other uses too.
The internet has since become so integrated into our modern Western lives that we take it for granted. It has become the most important thing we use our computers for. Most of the things I do on the computer that I listed at the start of this piece are internet based. Many are very convenient allowing us to do all sorts of things from the comfort of our own desk. The obvious downside of this is firstly that we are now having to do things for ourselves that previously other people did for us, which in some cases may be cheaper but actually takes us longer and has certainly also led to the disppearance of many jobs. The macro-economist will tell you that these people have merely been redeployed to more useful tasks and our overall productivity has increased. At work I know it merely means that I have to spend more of my own time doing things previously done by the administration. Secondly we just don’t get out and about nearly as much as before to “interface” with actual human beings, which must be an impoverishment of our lives.
The internet is potentially a fantastic source of information - if you know where to find it. It’s great to go onto the official site of somewhere you want to visit to check programme details, opening times, how to get there etc. It’s less obvious if you want to find out something and the search engine throws up thousands of possible sources of information whose reliability may be far from clear. Absolutely anybody can have a web page out there: witness this blog. It certainly represents democracy and freedom of expression at work, but without applying a little common sense and scepticism you can easily become the victim of misinformation, disinformation and undesirable influences. I’ve written before that the much vaunted information society often gives people countless little bits of a jigsaw without the bigger picture with which to put them together.
On the whole, however, targeted use rather than mindless surfing of the internet is hugely beneficial.
So what’s in my favourites menu bar ? Work obviously; my bank to manage my account; Metéo Belgique for the weather (and wonderfully web-cam shots so you can actually see what the weather’s doing in the Ardennes before you decide to go); Wikipedia, which is hugely useful, and judging from articles on things I do know about, pretty reliable; BBC for the news and just about everything; die Bahn for train timetables anywhere in Europe; Via Michelin, ditto for road route planning; You Tube for catching those media moments I missed; Ultimate guitar for working out how to play a song; Brussels airport to check timetables and see if a plane I’m meeting someone off is on time; NHS’s A-Z Health; various newspapers in my languages... Yes the possibilities of the internet are infinite.

So to return to my narrative: In short I was starting to be hooked and it seemed like a good idea to have one of these computers things at home too and thus also to make a more formal separation between private and professional use.

So I got my first PC about ten years ago. It was a chunky Packard Bell with a tower and a rather large monitor - that is in terms of the space it took up, not the size of the screen. We invested in a new extra large desk in the office to accomodate it all. It seemed a good idea to introduce the children to all of this young too as it would doubtless loom large in their lives and inevitably they are now more proficient than we are. A significant break-through was the upgrading of internet access from the dial-up connection to broadband which made it feasible to use the internet for many more things..
But the PC aged quickly and I started to lose my patience with the quirkiness and unreliability of Windows. The PC would keep on freezing and crashing on me. Moreover I’d go away for two weeks and come back to find hundreds of junk e-mails in my inbox.
So in 2004, after one crash too many, I decided to change to Mackintosh and bought an eMac. I have never looked back. Notwithstanding some problems with file conversion given Microsoft’s virtual monopoly position, things are generally simpler and more intuitive (just like Riccardo had always said it would be on a Mac). And the machine doesn’t crash on me. Last year as the memory was getting full and things were slowing up I upgraded to an iMac with a delightful large flat screen which is great for looking at photos. So that’s what I’m sitting at now.

Computers are of course great only as long as they work. Few things are more frustrating than being condemned to do something through a system that won’t work for you. I’m not the only one to verbally abuse the computer, but I don’t go so far as hitting it (any more). It’s that feeling you’re dealing with something semi-intelligent when in fact it’s just an inanimate machine that has been badly programmed by a less than competent human being. If they spoke back to us nicely and intelligently like HAL in Kubrick’s “2001”, then we’d never dream of shouting at them. Mind you , remember what HAL finally did: try to dispose of the inconvenient humans who were spoiling his plans and who then had to shut him down - a prophetic movie.
I only get irate at the computers at work, I love my iMac and never feel the need to be rude to it. Partly it’s to do with the less than user-friendly applications we have to navigate at work and partly, I guess, it’s the fact that we share the PCs there. They’re like shared bicycles: nobody looks after them and when you pick one up the tyres are not pumped up, the saddle is at the wrong height and everything a bit clunky and wobbly. They will still go, only you wish you had your own with you.
In the case of the shared PC at work, in a multi-lingual environment, somebody may have changed the keyboard setting so the letters on the keyboard don’t correspond. Yes, I’m one of those sad people who have to look at the keys and I’m used to an AZERTY, living in a French speaking country, so I have a particular dislike for the Germanic/central European QWERTZ layout on which I can never find the “m”. It’s odd really, that inheritance in the computer world of keyboard layouts from the late 19th century.
If truth be told, I’ve actually always liked typewriters so I find the typing part fun (as long as the keys correspond to the characters).

Computers in the end are really toys for boys and it’s nice when they do the things for you that you want them to. I admit to inventing tasks to do, just to fiddle around with the computer. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons I write this blog.

About my reading in 2008

My first piece last year was “About reading” and at the end of it I listed the books I had read in 2007. I’d like to start this year by considering the books I read in 2008.

Reading Montaigne’s “Essais”” was an inspiration to start this blog, so I began 2008 by finishing them all, in particular by re-reading the very long “Apologie” and all of Book III, which contains his best essays, notably the final “De l’expérience”. Montaigne is truly great and deeply human, so his best work bears plenty of re-reading. He proves his point that by concentrating on what he knows best, himself Michel de Montaigne, and writing about that as objectively as possible, he in fact succeeds in writing about the human condition in a way that is universal.

The same cannot be said of Bacon whose “Essays” are quite different and rather disappointing in comparison. They are more a manual for the courtier, yet without the incisiveness of Machiavelli, and are in no way a revelation. Montaigne tells it like it is, Bacon how he would like it to be.

Other essays I read last year include Virgina Woolf’s “Three guineas”, a strong work of feminism; Thoreau’s iconic “Civil disobedience”, very clear, personal and well worth a read; Erasmus’ “In praise of folly”, somewhat less inspiring; more of historic interest; and, though in a different form - dialogue - Plato’s three pieces on the “Last days of Socrates”.

Pamuk’s “Istanbul” is a mixture of essay and autobiographical reminiscences about growing up in that great paradoxical city and it was wonderful to read it in conjunction with our visit, as it really gives an insight into the place (see ‘”About Istanbul”).

Another autobiographical work I read was Greene’s “A sort of life” that takes you through his early life, his conversion to Catholicism and embarking on a literary career. It reads like a Greene novel, of which I have read 14, so I enjoyed it a lot.

Prompted by Montaigne’s admiration I also started reading Plutarch’s “Lives”, which are of essay length, though in my Penguin editions not presented in the original parallel couplings of one Greek and one Roman. I have now read 20 out of 50 of the lives and tend to enjoy the Romans more than the Greeks. Though Plutarch was Greek himself, the Romans were closer to him in time, and he seems to bring out their human side more (perhaps it’s the literary attraction of the flawed personality). I partcularly liked the ones Shakespeare drew on -Coriolanus, Brutus, Anthony.

I read two books of art history: Livey’s “From Giotto to Cézanne” and Gombrich’s “Story of art”. “Story of art” is a well written, thoughtful, really educational book in the best sense of the word. To illustrate his arguments Gombrich chooses well known great works of art which are shown on the same page as the related text so you can follow it all very easily. He is careful neither to talk down to the reader nor to become pretentious: quite an achievement and you really learn a lot. I actually read this book after writing my piece “About painting” and felt comforted in my own tastes and opinions.

I now turn to last year’s literature. starting with new fiction.

McEwan’s “On Chesil Beach” was my tenth of his books. I like his clear direct way of writing. McEwan is really a writer of novellas, or extended short stories and that is certainly the case with “On Chesil Beach”, where in his typically efficient way he charcterizes a man and a woman leading up to the key event of the fiasco of their wedding night and how they react to it. He is very good at capturing a certain socially constipated Britain which came just before my own time.

My next new book was Hosseini’s “A thousand splendid suns”, (his second novel after “the Kite runner”) which is a great story and an excellent documentation of the lot of women in Afghanistan.

Lewyzca’s second novel “Two caravans” describes the appalling conditions of illegal, mainly Eastern European, workers in contemporary England using a lot of comedy, so you laugh while being made aware.
Both these books work well in their different ways thanks to their authors’ concentrating on the human story and letting the narrated facts speak for themselves.

Last year’s efforts towards keeping up my languages saw me re-read, but for the first time in Spanish, Garcia Marquez’ s “Hundred years of solitude”, a truly great novel. Gabo lets his imagination run riot in a way that is totally engrossing. I love the way the plot finally works out.

In German it was a re-read of Kafka’s “ the Trial”. Incidentally, in June I stayed in a hotel in Prague which has been installed in the renovated building that used to house the insurance company for which Kafka worked. Although I didn’t get it, one room is actually where Kafka’s office was. Just imagine the dreams you could have there and maybe waking up to find yourself turned into who knows what! “The Trial” remains essential reading for modern man, even in its truncated incomplete form, though that is in its way in keeping with its dream (or nightmare) like quality and logic. David Luke, my German tutor at Oxford, always used to say: “Never forget, Kafka is funny” and he is in a very black way: the absurdity is to be laughed at as much as to be disturbed by. Kafka offers us modern myths: they are open to multiple interpretations while retaining a profound rightness.

In French I re-read two of Racine’s tragedies, “Andromaque” and “Phèdre”, as I was going to see them at the theatre (see "About theatre”). Racine is worth revisiting if only for the sheer beauty of his verse, but he remains very difficult to stage convincingly.

In Italian I read Slataper’s “Il mio Carso” which is a fictionalized autobiography of growing up in and around Trieste at the start of the 20th century. I picked it up hoping for some insights into the Carso (see “About the Carso”) but that only accounts for a small part of the book. I found it rather disappointing: the uneven work of a young man still trying to find his style and subject. It merits its obscurity.

I completed my seventh novel by Dickens, “Bleak House”. It was actually my second attempt, I got stuck the first time, I find this one took a bit of effort to get into. Dickens can be off-putting in his over-written over-adjectivized passages, maudlin sentimentality and over-done rants about paticular bees in his bonnet. But when he hits the mark, he’s certainly one of the best. His impossibly complicated plots and sub-plots keep you turning the pages once hooked and his geat comic characters are a delight.

I had another read of T.S. Eliot’s “Collected poems”. Eliot was the first poet I enjoyed as a teenager, doubtless for his ability to take seemingly everyday language as a springboard to explore some quite thought provoking ideas. You can probably never understand everything he writes, though over the years with each successive read you get closer to it. In the meantime much pleasure can be gained merely from the way he uses the language.

In 2007 I read a lot of Virginia Woolf. Last year I turned my attention to D.H. Lawrence. They are utterly different but what they have in common is that they were both writing at the same time (1920’s) and were interested in what goes on underneath, the unspoken in human relations; Woolf more in everyday situations, Lawrence more in emotionally charged moments.
What they also have in common is that most people I know have no time for either of them. I like them both. I’m not sure quite what that says about me.
In Lawrence’s own view of the world he is very much the man and Woolf the woman; the proud priapic as opposed to the inwardly reflective. But that is an over-simplification as indeed are many of Lawrence’s own ideas. In fact Lawrence is best when he is not ramming some rather odd thoughts down the reader’s throat but bringing out the inner contradictions in his characters’ actions, motives, feelings and thoughts. Anyway both writers recognize that we are all a mixture of masculine and feminine.
While Woolf is both an extremely elegant and experimental writer, Lawrence is more traditional and rough-and-ready in his handling of prose. He is actually rather uneven, some passages are very good indeed, others rather annoying. Yet on the whole I find far more good than bad in him, so I keep on reading him.
Last year I read “the White Peacock”, “Sons and Lovers”,. “the Rainbow”, “Women in love”, “the Fox; the Ladybird; the Captain's Doll”, “the Lost girl” , ” the Prussian officer” and “Aaron’s Rod”.
A recurrent theme in Lawrence is the desire to break free from the constraints of routine and class, especially in the newly indulstrialized society of early 20thC England, which Lawrence saw as constraining man’s ability to fulfil his human potential. Many of his heroes and heroines seek to achieve this by throwing off, sometimes quite irresponsibly, their present circumstances in search of a new life, usually with only limited success.
This striving to break free by rushing off somewhere else can never be the solution, as the fetters to our self-fulfilment are within ourselves. Yet Lawrence’s obsession that we can and should take our lives onto some different more intense plane beyond the humdrum is actually quite subversive and deep down probably what shocked society (his books frequently had to be censored to be published) more than his more or less explicit treatment of sexuality. If everyone were to behave like his heroes, society would collapse.
I guess all of this mirrors Lawrence”s own rather footloose life, finally dying young of disease in self-imposed exile. Woolf, more a prisoner of her social circumstances, had to work with what she had and try to come to terms with it; her own end perhaps also suggesting a kind of failure. It is of course always risky to interpret literature through the prism of the author’s biography, but in these two cases of heightened self-awareness, it’s clear where a lot of input and context was coming from.

To return to the point made by Montaigne, which I seek to pursue in this blog, writing honestly from one’s own experience of life is in literary terms probably the best way of approaching some kind of truth.

About "About being here" (2)

Dear Reader,

I started this blog a year ago. If you have been following it, I hope you have enjoyed it so far. I feel I have now found my blog persona and intend to continue in the same vein.
Last year I posted twenty-four pieces. This year there may well be fewer as I have already covered many of the important aspects about being here. Mind you, I’m not ruling out revisiting those subjects I have not yet fully explored.
I don’t work to any timetable, I merely post as the inspiration takes me.
So let yourself be surprised.

ABH