About my reading in 2010

At the start of the New Year I like to reflect on the books I read during the previous year.

My biggest reading achievement last year was to get to the end of Proust’s “A la recherche du temps perdu”, completing the 2000 pages of the remaining 5 volumes “le Côté de Guermantes”; “Sodome et Gomorrhe”, “la Prisonnière”, “Albertine disparue” and “le Temps retrouvé”. See “About Proust” (September 2010). Proust is not an easy read, but in the end definitely worth it.

My other big project was to reread Thomas Hardy. I had started with “the Mayor of Casterbridge” in 2009 and in 2010 I went on to read all of his other major novels: (the first four of these being new to me) “the Trumpet Major”, “Under the Greenwood tree”, “A pair of blue eyes”, “ the Wellbeloved”; (and re-reading) “Far from the Madding Crowd”, ”the Return of the Native”, “Jude the Obscure”, “the Woodlanders” “Tess of the d'Urbervilles”; and also the volume of short stories “Life's little ironies” and some of the poems. See “About Thomas Hardy” (January 2011). Hardy is undoubtedly one of the greatest novelists in any language.

Last year some of my favourite contemporary authors in English had new novels out, which I can recommend, if you like these writers’ work.

“Last night in Twisted River” is a good John Irving family saga with his favourite usual ingredients of growing up in 1950’s New England, bizarre twists of fate and comic sexual scenes.

Ian McEwan’s “Solar” is also in comic vein, and even if not one of his best novels certainly an entertaining read, especially in the Arctic adventure of its hapless anti-hero, Beard, a philandering Nobel-winning scientist cruising on his past reputation and heading for his come-uppance.

Jonathan Coe’s “Terrible privacy of Maxwell Sim” is another comic novel with an anti-hero as its central character. Coe uses the narrative technique of gradually revealing, through other people's accounts which Maxwell Sim discovers, the formative events that have shaped him, and made him the terribly lonely man he is. More generally Coe describes the kind of dysfunctional relationships between ostensibly close people which have always existed but have recently worsened in our modern society due to its growing obsession with electronic rather than human contact.

My next three novels read in English are modern and foreign.

Adiga’s “the White Tiger” is a funny and easy to read sort of literary equivalent to the film “Slumdog Millionaire” about how to survive desperate poverty in modern India.

Larsson’s “Girl who kicked the hornet's nest” is the third thriller in his “Millenium Trilogy” about the extraordinary Lisbeth, victim of society and computer hacker, set in present day Sweden. It certainly keeps you turning the pages, but I have to say that I found book 2 less convincing than book 1, and book 3 less than book 2. For me there’s more to a good book than this.

Pamuk’s “My name is Red” is a novel I know a lot of readers have found difficult, which I find surprising as it does have a simple linear chronology and though the point of view changes constantly it is always clearly indicated. It has the structure of a “whodunnit” as well, but its exotic historic setting in 16th century Istanbul and the reflective passages in it on the nature of art and the difference between East and West may well delay the plot too much for some. I myself found it quite original and satisfying.

Under the heading of classics in English I read Hawthorne’s “Scarlet letter”, which is an efficient telling of a good story on the familiar theme of how true feminine virtue wins out over the hypocrisy of society.

My two new Shakespeare plays last year, read before seeing them for the first time, were “Measure for measure” and “King John”, both unjustly neglected and with some fine scenes which are among the Bard’s best.

I move on to my foreign language reading: my French was amply served by Proust; my German came off rather poorly with an unsuccessful stab at Nietzsche’s “Also sprach Zarathustra”, without doubt one of the hardest texts I’ve ever tried; while my Italian stretched to two novels recommended by Clara; and my Spanish ran to no less than four novels.

Giordano’s “la Solitudine dei numeri primi” (“The Solitude of Prime Numbers”) is a European best seller about a young man and a woman in present day Italy who both have their own terrible traumatic pasts and who ought to be close to each other yet sadly remain alone.

Mazzantini’s “Venuto al mondo” (as yet untranslated) is quite a complex novel (not always well written, but involving) about one woman’s struggle to have a child even if she has to adopt one, the horrors of civil war in Bosnia and the life force that can overcome them.

The Mexican writer Rulfo’s “Pedro Paramo” (1955) is regarded as a classic of modern Spanish fiction, but I couldn’t really get into it, what with it’s unclear delineation between the real and the hallucinatory (the living and the dead in a ghost town) and its lack of any real story worth telling.

Then the more recent Mexican Laura Esquivel’s “Malinche” did have a potentially interesting story to tell, that of the life of the native woman who acted as Cortez the conquistador’s interpreter and therefore betrayer of her people, but I was seriously disappointed and felt a great opportunity had been missed.

Ruiz Zafon’s international bestseller, “la Sombra del viento” (“Shadow of the wind”) is a thriller set in the unlikely world of second-hand booksellers in Barcelona at the time of Franco. It is a really beautifully written book telling a great story with some good psychology in the characterization and it deserves its success.

His follow-up prequel, “el Juego del angel” (“the Angel’s game”), I still found enjoyable but less credible.

So as you can see, my reading in 2010 was dominated by novels even more than usual with them totalling 27 out of 34 completed books.

In the unduly negelected area of non-fiction, let me then mention two good books by Alain De Botton which I referred to in my entries to this blog last year: “the Pleasures and sorrows of work”, see “About work” (October 2010); and “the Consolations of philosophy”, see “About philosophy” (November 2010). De Botton writes an enjoyable book, which he likes to illustrate wittily, he has a direct and humorous style. He is careful to relate the points he makes to everyday experience and he never fails to be thought provoking.

While on my trip to Turkey last autumn I read an autobiography published in English in London in the 1950’s by an exile, Irfan Orga, “Portrait of a Turkish family” which was truly fascinating.

Lastly, in the area of economics, Skidelsky’s “Keynes: the return of the master”, confirmed my respect for one of the greatest original thinkers of the last century (maybe I’ll get round to the “General theory” this year).

So quite a few books there, but this year it’s perhaps time to read something other than novels !

About downstairs

One of my New Year's resolutions is to draw and paint more often. Long dark rainy winter evenings suggest interiors as a suitable subject. So, in something of a new departure, we present sketches of home, downstairs.

Staircase

Sitting room 1

Sitting room 2

Kitchen

Dining area

Monstera

About clothes

This is the time of year when the sales are on. I buy a lot of my clothes at the sales. I have a sneaking suspicion that it’s the only time of year at which they’re being sold at something approaching their correct price, that is without a huge mark-up. So maybe instead of writing this piece I should be dashing out there to the shops right now braving the heaving throng hunting around for bargains. Or maybe not. You see, being a man, I first ask myself the question: do I need any new clothes ? And, to be honest, the answer is no. My wardrobe and drawers are full. Also, I like to think that “style never goes out of fashion”.
I have more clothes than you could shake a proverbial stick at. I never get round to wearing them all, there are some items I’ve forgotten I owned. Moreover, the more clothes you have the less quickly you are likely to wear them out.

Indeed, does anyone wear out clothes these days, you may ask, before we simply get fed up of them in our Western affluent society ? Well I do actually. From protracted riding of my bike to work I actually wore through the seat of some woolen trousers before the summer. It took me some time to find an identical pair; I was pleased to discover the exact same pair of Marks and Spencer’s luxury dark blue trousers in wool and cashmere at their branch in... Ankara. I was disappointed when they closed their Brussels shop ten years ago. When such a standard item was getting past it, I used to just go down there and get the same again, I’m talking about plain white shirts, undies, socks and the like which require no careful choosing. M & S also sell garments in genuinely different sizes, so you don’t subsequently have to pay someone else to hem them and finish them for you. I now have to wait for a trip to England to stock up on basics.

My most basic clothes do actually get so frequently worn and washed that they start to fray and develop holes, so need to be regularly phased out and replaced. Fortunately I don’t change size much, so that in itself doesn’t give me too much of a reason for buying new clothes. Nonetheless, round about this time of year (which may not necessarily be a good plan, what with post-Christmas flab) I do go through the wardrobe and weed out trousers and jackets that are, shall I say, becoming uncomfortable. I also have an unfortunate tendency to mysteriously acquire indelible food stains on some items, especially light-coloured polo shirts, so they have to be replaced, while their predecessors are moved down the hierarchy from the category “smart” to “lounging around home” to “climbing, gardening and decorating” and finally, when no longer fit to wear, to “cleaning the oil off the bike chain” or other uses as rags.

It seems then that I have a fairly utilitarian attitude towards clothes. To tell the truth I don’t particulalry enjoy shopping for them and am glad when someone else takes the trouble to make me a gift of them. When I do go shopping for clothes myself, I like to check the composition of the fabric on the label, having a preference for natural fibres, cotton and wool.

I also try to run a “one in, one out” policy to counter my natural inclination not to get rid of anything. Any new acquisition should entail the giving or thowing away of an equivalent older item to make room for it.

Clothes are very important to a lot of people, especially women, at least judging from those in my own family, who seem to spend a lot of time shopping around for them and a lot of money buying them.
“Kleider machen Leute” or “Clothes make people”, runs one popular saying. The clothes we wear contribute a lot to that all important first impression we make. A lot of our pigeon-holing of others takes place on the basis of attire and it can be quite literally a “smart” move to dress up for a first encounter especially if it’s for professional purposes or meeting the in-laws.

Ultimately though “Clothes make people” is a saying which reflects the superficiality of society and people’s judgements of others. On the one hand, I’m not sure I value the opinion of someone who judges me so quickly as to categorize me on the basis of what seems to me to be something of only secondary importance. On the other hand, the fact that someone is prepared to make an effort to respect the dress code for an event, does show a desire to join in and play the game. That is actually quite important as a form of social interaction, it implies that you care about and respect what others attach importance to. There’s something grand about a wedding celebration in any culture where the guests have deliberately gone out of their way to be smart. People do genuinely like to fit in and not to be over-dressed or under-dressed. In the end, even Bohemians have dress conventions.

It always amuses me at important political meetings to see how the dress code for ministers is impeccable suit and for journalists and cameramen as scruffy as possible - no chance of confusing the two groups there. As interpreters there is always a chance that we may have to get in the room with the ministers, so we are expected to dress accordingly. Jacket and tie are “de rigueur” for men.
I have to admit that I actually quite like that as it helps me define my professional persona and so has an influence on how I present myself. I guess a doctor looks more serious in a white coat, a mechanic in blue overalls, an undertaker in a dark suit and a policeman in a uniform. Again, it’s part of the game and here there really is an element of clothes making the people.

However, the idea that beyond their chosen professional persona people’s personalities are more generally defined by their clothes strikes me as rather preposterous. This notion is nonetheless the main spring of the very popular British TV series “What not to wear”, where an attempt is made to demonstrate that you can change someone’s personality merely by changing his or her wardrobe. To be fair, the programme concentrates a lot on getting people to come to terms with their actual body shape and to dress accordingly, rather than pursuing some mistaken ideal or hiding from themselves. Anything that helps someone to come to terms with their own personality and to be confident about who they are is laudable. Still I think there’s a limit to what clothes can do to change you, while they do almost certainly reflect a personality you already have. There are things we would never wear because “it’s not me”, most usually by association with the dress code of some social group we would rather not identify ourselves with, or by a desire not to make ourselves an undue centre of attention or even ridicule.

Personally I don’t worry about whether “my bum looks big in this”, or whether, because I’m wearing the same jumper as six months ago, someone might think I’m no longer drawing a large salary cheque. My main aim is to be comfortable, clean and dressed practically or appropriately for my intended activity.

So what do I wear?

It is axiomatic that the working man dresses up at weekends and the professional man dresses down.
So let’s start with what I wear to work.

A very large section of my wardrobe is devoted to what I wear to work, even if that accounts for a small proportion of my time, bearing in mind that I tend to change straight back out of it as soon as I get back home, but will put it back on again if the formality of an occasion requires it, such as a wedding or an opera première.
And so, looking into my wardrobe behind me, I appear to be the owner of no less than 9 suits and 12 jackets of varying weights and colours, though generally on the sober side - we’re talking blue, grey and brown. To accompany them I have over 40 serviceable silk ties (that’s not including those that passing fashion has now relegated to the “joke / fancy dress” box). Such is the accumulation of middle age that the younger me would never have believed.

In fact, I don’t mind ties, the secret to not being constricted by them is to buy shirts that have a loose collar to start with. I do like collars, I like to keep my neck warm and most of my tops have a collar anyway. I had to wear a tie everyday at grammar school in England, so it’s something I’m used to, like the rain. My school tie was a particularly vile number, brown with a pink stripe. Mindful of it I tend do dislike any tie with diagonal stripes, though I do have a few. They’ve been something of a fashion recently, I suspect because they are associated with a British public school gentleman’s education, something worth dissociating yourself from in my opinion. Mainly I just find them boring, a bit of a missed opportunity when your tie is the only original thing you wear as a smartly dressed man at work. Perhaps it’s the streak in me which makes me prefer figurative to abstract art that makes me fond of a tie with a little motif, preferably from the natural world but definitely not to do with horse-riding. We used to get given ties at work as presidency gifts, some are even quite wearable, but the worst offender was the mid-1990’s British pizza grenade job allegedly designed by schoolchildren (one now for the joke tie box which I feel I must share with you).

Well that certainly put the “yuck” in UK.

On the whole, having lived with an Italian for over twenty-five years, I like to think I’ve got the hang of the difficult arts of colour combination and pattern co-ordination of which I was blissfully ignorant in my student days. I also like to think that I’m always well turned out, but in an understated way that is not seeking to be the centre of attraction, which is after all in keeping with my station.

The one item that really distinguishes me from others at work is my sleeveless v-neck jumper. As someone who cycles to work, exposing myself to the elements and changing temperatures, which by the way also includes the vagaries of air-conditioning in the booth, I need to modulate my layers of clothing quickly and easily, so the slipover woolen sleeveless jumper is comfortable and practical to this end and as they make good Christmas presents I now have about eight different shades of them. This works well for me as I don’t wear anything under my work shirt, which is usually white and crisply ironed (though not by myself), as it would be a hassle to remove a vest from beneath one when I’m too warm. While I wear a jacket to work I usually take it off once I sit down in the booth, but keep my little wooly on.

I most often wear a jacket and trousers but upgrade to a suit as soon as the meeting gets more “important”, as in presence of a minister etc.
Generally, the beauty of a jacket is that it has lots of pockets and since I’m not into handbags I find this very practical, so I like to wear one when travelling, even if not for work, just for the sake of being able to stow away conveniently various essentials.
For the same reason I’m very fond of a black fleece waistcoat with zip pockets especially when it’s a bit cool and I’m not quite sure how well heated is the place I’m going to.
I love pockets and as a man I’ve never quite understood what it is women seem to have against them.

I see I’m moving on to what I wear in my free time. Still slightly in the direction of work clothing, I suppose, there’s “smart casual” which is what I put on when I’m going out or am invited round to someone’s for dinner and generally consists of recent acquisitions deemed by my wife to be more presentable than slouching around home wear.
I suspect though that the real me, or the one that comes without any propitiating of the gods of conventionality and formality, is reflected by what I wear around home.
The thing about being at home is that there are always bits of housework or repair jobs to be undertaken which I will do immediately without first considering whether they will lead to stains or rips and which, therefore, in theory ought to require prior changing and in practice often lead to grief over irreperable damage. It’s a good idea, therefore, for me to wear older clothes when at home. More deeply, though, I’m one of those people who like comfort clothes, familiar or even fetishistic items, which from repeated wearing have become second nature and comforting to put on. Sadly, of course, they wear out and I can never find quite the same one again, so I have to transfer my allegiance to some other garment. This explains why I frequently appear to be wearing the same thing in photos of a certain period.

One thing I’ve not worn for well over twenty years is jeans. I admit that as a student I virtually lived in them and indeed many people of my age continue to wear them in the mistaken belief that it makes them look younger than they are. However, in my book, jeans are merely badly cut trousers made from an inferior material. Denim is too hot in the summer, not warm enough in the winter and won’t dry out once wet. I favour woolen trousers in the winter, cords in mid season, light cotton and linen in the summer. Consequently I have rather a large number of pairs of trousers, which incidentally I hate to be tight as I spend a fair bit of time sitting down. At the height of summer I move into shorts, these days on the long side, but definitely not to be worn in the big city, even in the tropics, that’s just too much the naff tourist for me.

On the other hand I tend to wear short-sleeved cotton polo shirts the whole year round, varying the thickness of what I wear over them when it’s not summer, but usually something also with a collar. I prefer them on the large side so that air moves freely under them when it’s hot. I don’t feel the need to wear any T-shirts advertising my musical tastes, political affiliations, sporting achievements, cheap humour or brand allegiance. I would feel slightly uncomfortable with such a limited definition of my personality and so prefer initial anonymity.

As I enjoy being out of doors I have a fairly extensive collection of purpose made clothes for hiking, mountaineering, cycling and skiing. I used to be sceptical about “technical” garments or more particularly about people who seem to spend a fortune on the right gear but don’t actually spend much time exercising. Over the years though I’ve come to own quite a few such garments and the investment has always been rewarded with the satisfaction of the comfort of wearing a garment specifically designed for an activity. For example, I wouldn’t dream of cycling a significant distance without tights or shorts that have a padded seat. Also I swear by the light-weight quick-drying polyester tops which I wear as the layer next to my skin for all my outdoor activities; they keep me warm and dry, even if they get smelly.
I also own a large number of fleeces and, you guessed it, anoraks (mainly Goretex).
In fact, as I’m so used to cycling around town, I hardly ever wear a long coat but usually some form of jacket that still covers all of my back when bent over the handle bars. My recent favourite during the cold spell has been a short black well-padded warm coat which I bought on a visit to Stockholm in September last year when it was already so cold I needed to get something warmer. Now the Scandinavians really know how to do a serious winter garment and I love the details on this one designed to keep you warm.

Finally, I should include a paragraph on footwear. As someone who walks and cycles a lot I believe in sensible footwear. The first thing I do with a pair of shoes in a shop is to turn them over to see what the sole is like. My shoes tend to be solid and long-lasting, so I don’t own that many pairs compared to other members of my family. Nonetheless I want them to look passingly elegant so they can be worn on all occasions. My favourite pairs are of a traditional Austrian design, bought in Vienna but actually hand crafted from quality leather in Italy. They are a satisying combination of robustness and smartness. In the summer I like a pair of Italian mocassins. Around home I wear Teva sandals. For outdoor activities I have several pairs of hiking boots and trainers, but I wouldn’t usually wear them around town unless conditions are particularly adverse.

So that’s what I wear. However, I’m not sure how much insight it gives you into my character.

About Thomas Hardy

I first read Hardy nearly twenty years ago, as a somewhat younger man then, and recently it felt like it was time to revisit him as he had left a favourable impression. So over the last year I have re-read all of Thomas Hardy’s major novels plus a few I hadn’t read before.

Hardy appeals to me as a novelist who combines straight old-fashioned good story-telling with quite a modern sensibility. This mixture of old and modern is typical of the late 19th century in which he lived. He writes of Wessex, a rural England which he is all too aware is in the process of disappearing with the coming of a more urban age and advance of the railways. He also describes a society still suffering under the constraints of a prudish Victorian morality of which he clearly disapproves and which to the modern reader may now seem ridiculous.

Hardy sets his novels in Wessex, a fictionalized South West of England in which, though the place names are changed, the locations are recognizable. It’s the area where Hardy grew up and later chose to spend most of his life: it’s the area and environment he knows best and can describe most accurately. Wessex takes many different forms: from the various lush and harsh agricultural landscapes of “Tess of the d’Urbevilles” and “Far from the madding crowd”, to the brooding Egdon Heath of “Return of the Native”, to the provincial towns of “Jude the Obscure” and “Mayor of Casterbridge”, to the woods of “the Woodlanders”, to the coastal watering holes of “the Trumpet Major” and windswept cliffs of “A pair of blue eyes” - to name but a few of the settings. All of these Hardy describes with consummate mastery and a fine eye for the changing details of nature through the seasons. He typically begins by painting a broad sweep of landscape in which human beings first appear as a detail: man is shaped by his environment, which is one of the many forces of fate that bear down on him. One of the sheer pleasures of re-reading Hardy is to savour the beauty of the descriptive passages.

While Hardy lovingly describes farming before mechanization, celebrates old countryside festive traditions, such as dancing and play-acting, and likes to play up a certain rustic charm among the minor characters, Wessex is no rural idyll. There is grinding poverty, drudgery, ignorance, strict class divisions, injustice, dishonesty, eviction, adultery, rape, unwanted pregnancy, drunkenness and so on. Basically all of human life is here. Hardy’s characters are drawn from ordinary rural folk and yet act out the great dramas of human existence.

The greatest of these is of course love, or more accurately sexual attraction between men and women. If you read a lot of Hardy novels one after another, you come to see that the fundamental plot of many is the same: A loves B; B loves C; C loves D. Somewhere along that chain marriages are concluded (often willed by would-be social-climber parents) and usually work out badly as it’s not the outcome one of the two really wanted. Hardy may be forever writing love stories, but he doesn’t do happy endings. He continues to tell the difficult story of what happens after two people get married and try to live together, he doesn’t sentimentally stop at “A married B and they lived happily ever after”, because C and D are still in the picture. Hardy tells the truth (or at least his own from experience) that many marriages are unhappy, and let’s not forget that in those days you were generally stuck in them. Much of the unhappiness can also be attributed to the constraining morality of Victorian society, most notably in “Tess” and “Jude”. This society is described by him as contradicting the natural order of things, thereby making his heroines and heroes unnecessarily miserable.
The increasingly hostile reception of these late novels by (a perhaps hypocritically) offended society led Hardy to give up writing in the genre and to concentrate on poetry and verse drama.

The constraints of society and its conventional morality are but one more of the forces of fate working against us. As a young man Hardy lost his faith in a beneficent God and came to see life more as does Gloucester in “King Lear”:

“As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods -
they kill us for their sport”

Hardy writes a great story that keeps you turning the pages. His plots are characterized by unexpected twists and yet they are borne along by an inexorable logic which is rooted in the personality of his characters whose psychology he draws so convincingly. Even if sometimes you find yourself willing them to speak up for once instead of suffering in silence out of timidity, or to stay just a bit longer so as not to miss someone, so that the crisis might be avoided, the whole point is that fate has ordained it to turn out this way, however stupid, pointless or ironic it may seem. Hardy called one of his sets of short stories “Life’s little ironies”, where he treats this kind of situation in more comic vein, but mainly his novels are a tragic depiction of life’s great ironies.

And yet for all that, I wouldn’t describe Hardy’s novels as depressing. There is something uplifting in the long-suffering tenacity and unconventional virtue of the repeatedly wronged Tess. Even Henchard, who in the brilliant opening scene of “the Mayor of Casterbridge” starts the action by the most despicable act of selling his wife, somehow manages to earn our sympathy by trying to reform but ultimately failing because he cannot escape his past and the flaws in his character that made it.

Hardy gives us an insight into human nature and relations that transcends the rural setting of Wessex making his stories still ring true in our modern age. Most often in Hardy’s novels things don’t work out as his characters hoped and planned, which often is the way in real life. Yet even so there is a force in them that suggests life is worth living all the same.

About “About being here” (4)

Dear Reader,

“About being here” is a series of occasional essays about myself and my experience of life. It now starts its fourth season.
As each year’s crop has become smaller, this year’s ambition will be to settle on equalling last year’s ten pieces. Still, I like to think it’s quality rather than quantity that counts.

I've also decided to change the font and character size, to what I actually use when writing, which is partly a function of my declining eyesight.
So if you’re stil out there reading these posts, I hope you will enjoy this next series.

And I can promise a surprise.

ABH

About philosophy

Sometimes there’s an angry little man inside my head and I find it difficult to make him go away. He rants and raves with a sense of righteous indignation, leading me to shout from my bike at passing cars, to fire off angry e-mails, and to be generally irritable and bad company. This is unpleasant for all concerned. He literally generates bad blood which poisons my system and stops me from having a good night’s sleep. He turns my otherwise sanguine Dr Jekyll into a Mr Hyde.

He was there quite often just before my half-term holidays. He then disappeared while I enjoyed a relaxed and relaxing week of not doing much in Monfalcone, apart from seeing friends and family, cycling and walking and generally admiring the autumn foliage in particular of the “sommacco” on the Carso, even if the weather was rather indifferent.

No sooner had I returned to Brussels and work than he was jumping up and down inside my head again. So I thought it was time to get a grip and be more “philosophical” about my disappointments, frustrations and difficulties. I decided to deliberately exercise some patience and positive thinking during a two day trip away for work which would involve me having to confront some of my pet hates.

1) the inadequacy of STIB: I steeled myself for a Brussels public transport journey to the airport on a Belgian public holiday. I listened to some Shostakovich string quartets on my iPod: the perfect mood music for a cold and damp grey November morning with dead leaves being gusted down deserted ugly streets. The tram came on time but left me waiting 35 minutes outside for the airport bus while my feet gradually froze.
2) airport security: it took 20 minutes to clear security on a relatively quiet day for Zaventem, removing and replacing the requisite artcicles from about my person.
3) Finland in November: as expected we reached our hotel after nightfall (4 pm) it was even colder than in Brussels and raining heavily. The hotel turned out to be located conveniently close to the conference centre on the campus of Aalto University, but miles from anywhere else. So contrary to my usual custom, I decided not to bother to venture out from my hotel room, and contemplated the limited possibilities of filling in the next few hours.

Remarkably my Zen held up and the angry little man did not appear inside my head. In fact I was having quite an enjoyable day. The main reason was that I had started to read “The Consolations of Philosophy” by Alain de Botton.

Alain de Botton writes a good book, he has a direct and humorous style, he is careful to relate points to the everyday and he never fails to be thought provoking. In this book he writes about the thinking of six philosophers which may help console us in our daily lives.

He starts with the father of western philsophy, Socrates,
and his logical system for challenging commonly held beliefs. De Botton holds up Socrates as consolation for unpopularity: he stuck to what he believed to be true, even if it made him unpopular and he was sentenced to death for it.

In the classical world he next covers Epicurus. Epicureanism is not, as you might think, sheer hedonism and indulgence of luxury, but rather the ability to take pleasure in the simple things of life, where friendship counts for far more than material possessions. Epicurus offers us consolation for not having enough money.

Then comes the Roman Seneca, who was eventually ordered to death by his pupil Nero. He is included as the representative of the contrasting Stoics who concentrate on pain rather than pleasure and teach us to accept suffering and frustration as inevitable, which means they are not worth getting worked up about. We should expect the worst and not get angry when our desires are thwarted. Seneca offers us consolation from frustration. However, there is a fine line to draw between not letting something bother you and not caring about it. It remains important to engage and to strive to improve. This has been the motor of human progress after all. The Romans didn’t put up with water shortages in their cities, they built aqueducts to supply them.

It was with some pleasure that I found De Botton’s fourth philosopher to be one of the renaissance rediscoverers of the classics, Montaigne. Montaigne, let me remind you is my inspiration for writing these essays on this blog about myself. Montaigne believed that the human condition is fully present in every man. Therefore, the best way to write about it is to describe the person you know best - yourself. Montaigne’s book, the “Essais”, is unique and difficult to classify. I studied Montaigne at university as literature, but it is certainly not fiction. Bertrand Russell in his “History of Western Philosophy” clearly doesn’t rate him as a philosopher at all and only mentions him in passing. Yet, over 400 years later, Montaigne’s writings speak to us directly and truly about life and can teach us more about it than many other philosophers’.
His main message is that human existence is physical and that the mind and body are inseparable: “Et au plus eslevé throne du monde, si ne sommes assis que sus nostre cul” (“And on the highest throne in the world, we are only seated on our arse”).
From this it follows that Montaigne was only really interested in those writers in his vast library of classical authors who had something to say that related to tangible life of which he had had a fair experience himself (having been mayor of Bordeaux and active in public affairs, managed a fair sized estate and travelled on horseback through what in those days was a fair portion of Europe). He had no time for mere bookish learning, his quest was for wisdom. And so, in the Greek etymological sense as a “lover of wisdom” (“philo-” love, “sophia” wisdom) he was a true philosopher.

In fact this concept of philosophy brings us back to Socrates and his notion that not enough attention is given to the craft of living, which ought to be our most important concern. He uses the analogy of the potter: there is an art and craft to making a Greek vase and you have to get it right if it is going to be any good. For Socrates there is an art and craft to living and this properly is the subject of philosophy.

Philosophy as an academic discipline has rather lost sight of this. I listened recently with great interest to podcasts of Marianne Talbot’s lively five introductory lectures to philosophy at Oxford University. However, I couldn’t help feeling that it was all too abstract, too sterile for me. Philosophers, over the centuries, have spent far too much time pondering on the nature and perception of reality. It sems to me that such a debate is purely theoretical, only of the mind. The body can tell you straight away what reality is. Life is not so much a case of “I think, therefore I am” as a case of “I eat and shit, therefore I am”. There are more urgent things to apply my mind to than “how can I be sure that I am sitting on a chair looking at a computer screen ?” My bum and eyes know the answer already. In my opinion, any speculation otherwise serves no useful purpose whatsoever. “Ah, but how do you define ‘useful’ ?”, asks the academic philosopher. Good point; so I will accept there is room for pure philosophy just as there is for pure mathematics as an academic discipline. What I am really interested in myself though is, I suppose, applied philosophy.

So let us return to De Botton’s book on the Consolations of Philosophy. Montaigne can offer us consolation for inadequacy: the human condition by its nature is not going to be perfect, that indeed should be its charm which we all share, rather than a source of disappointment to us.

The next chapter covers another physical aspect of ourselves viewed through the thoughts of Schopenhauer. I’ve not read Schopenhauer and I’m sure he covered a lot of other things, but De Botton uses him to offer consolation for a broken heart.
Deep within us and beyond our control is a will to live, felt by even the most pessimistic and world-weary. The will to live takes two forms; the desire to survive and the desire to reproduce. So given the importance of the second, it should come as no surprise that we are constantly distracted and our chain of thought interrupted by, to put it bluntly, sex. The problem is that the body (or subconscious, if you prefer) makes its choice of potential reproductive partner and therefore is sexually attracted to persons of the opposite sex whose genes would best complement our own in our offspring (often by being the opposite). This does not necessarily, and in fact most usually does not, make the loved one the ideal companion to live with. So we should not be surprised that many relationships don’t work out and our hearts get broken. You see, Schopenhauer was a pessimist. It’s an interesting theory, but I personally feel that the bond of shared experience in a couple will prove stronger than sometimes divergent interests.

The chapter on Schopenhauer is something in the way of a short amusing digression before De Botton takes us on to the weightier Nietzsche. Nietzsche too started off as a pessimist but had something of a revelation while holidaying in the bay of Naples, swimming in the Mediterranean, eating good Southern food and enjoying the stimulating companionship of arty intellectuals: he realized that life was actually ok, in fact rather good. I can identify with that, enjoying a stay in Italy myself.
Only patches of it are not so good. In the same way that you cannot separate mind from body, you cannot separate pleasure from pain in life; they make up a whole.
Nietzsche was also a keen mountain walker. I can identify with that too. He knew that the uplifting glorious vistas can only be reached after a period of hard slog during which you might otherwise be tempted to give up and go back down. So Nietzsche offers us consolation for difficulty. It is an integral part of life; in fact difficulty is even worth seeking out and when you come through it you feel satisfied and fulfilled.
This is something I have often felt myself, but I needed reminding of it.

Indeed, after a spell of being a grumpy old man, it was good to be reminded of the consolations of philosophy, to become more philosophical about my lot, to keep the angry little man at bay.

So to recap on De Botton’s six philosophers and how they might have an impact on my life.
Considering Socrates and his logic, I like to think that I can think for myself, but you had best judge yourself from these blog postings and I won’t be offended if they don’t please you.
I reckon I am fairly close to Epicurus and tend to be more interested in and get more pleasure from doing and being rather than from having; last week I skipped Italian shopping and went mountain biking on the Carso. I ought to spend more time with my friends though.
I could still learn a lot from Seneca about not feeling frustrated. Getting irate is just counter-productive. Between the Epicurean and Stoical approach to life, I must not forget that on the whole my life is very comfortable and my frustrations only minor.
While in Finland, the Mayor of Espoo proudly pointed out that Newsweek had worked out that Finland is the world’s best country to live in. Well, that’s the kind of result you get when you take a series of “objective” indicators like per capita GDP, public services, law and order, health and education, lack of corruption and so on. Yes, it’s clean and things work, but the who the hell wants to live in a country where it is dark and freezing for half of the year ? What about those statistics on alcoholism and suicide in Nordic countries ? All in all, Belgium is not a bad place to live, even if I don’t rate the public transport too highly.
Montaigne I have long admired and feel close to in spirit.
Not suffering from a broken heart, I have no immediate need for Schopenhauer.
My curiosity has been aroused about Nietzsche and I shall read some of his writings.

But what of the six philosophers' application of philosophy to their own lives?
Scorates and Seneca were sentenced to death by the powers that be, but took it with equanimity; Socrates because he knew he was right and preferred the truth to popularity; Seneca because he always knew the worst was going to happen. Schopenhauer was a miserable old bugger. Nietzsche went crazy. Epicurus basically lived with friends in a commune.
The one with the sanest, most useful life was, you guessed it, Montaigne.

Well, if you were expecting to learn a lot about philosophy from this essay, you’re probably disappointed and you would be better off reading Bertrand Russell’s “History of Western Philosophy”, which I promise I will finish one day.
My point is rather that if the distilled thoughts of some of the great minds from the past are to be of real value to us, they are better put to practical use in everyday life rather than studied in a vacuum.

I need philosophy to make the angry little man go away.

Philosophy is for everyone every day.

About the European Union

I have been working for the European institutions for over twenty-five years. Last year, rather quaintly, I was even given my European public service medal for it, a surprisingly heavy gong which looks like gold-foil wrapped chocolate and is routinely given to staff after twenty years’ loyal service.

It’s good to work, albeit in a humble and minor capacity, for European integration, a cause in which I believe. This over-riding purpose gives a dimension to what I’m paid to do that helps offset some of the more humdrum aspects of routine.

When people, especially my compatriots, complain about “Europe” they all too often fail to see the bigger picture, which put most simply is that the European Union has given this previously war-torn continent over half a century of peace and prosperity.
This is something easily taken for granted, but which in fact has to be worked at laboriously. The minutiae of European integration are mind-numbing and the whole thing moves forward at the speed of a glacier, so that when you’re on it, not much may appear to be happening. This is fine as it must not be forgotten that the enterprise is consensual and involves gradually changing mentalities from the narrowly national to the broadly European in outlook, all of which takes time. Thanks to European policies and legislation I have nonetheless seen major changes in my everyday life during the last decades.

I have not lived in my country of origin, England, for as long as I’ve been working here and have, therefore, gone totally native. I make no apologies for regarding myself as a European who was brought up in England, rather than as an Englishman.
For all its insularity England and later Britain has always been an important part of European history and culture, interacting in events and movements on the continent. Brits, although they ape the Americans and think they speak the same language, actually have more in common with their European neighbours on the mainland in terms of their cultural heritage, outlook on life and expectations of the state.
It’s funny but so often I have to be on the defensive explaining the benefits of the EU to some people in Britain, things which seem obvious to those of us here on the continent. Partly that”s because of consistent disinformation on the part of the British media. Partly it’s also because successive United Kingdom governments have chosen, for example, not to participate in the single currency (euro) and border-free area (Schengen) thereby depriving those who live there of the ease with which the rest of us move about Europe and make cross-border purchases.

You may think that last bit sounded reductively economic. In fact the economic is where you start and the founding fathers of Europe knew what they were doing in starting with the Coal and Steel Community and then moving on to the Economic Community in the 1950’s. It’s above all by doing business with each other that peoples first come into contact with each other on a mutually beneficial basis which requires peace and trust. Subsequently they become so dependent on each other for their livelihoods that the very idea of going to war with each other becomes absurd.
I believe that the Roman Empire and related spread of the Latin vernacular was a long-term success not because its military might forced the peoples in its provinces to espouse its ways but because they saw it as a way to improve their lives and get on in the world. “What have the Romans done for us ?” goes the sketch in Monty Python’s “Life of Brian”, “All right, apart from the roads, the schools, the sewers..” and so on. That scene can be seen parodied on YouTube as “What has the European Union done for us”, in an attempt to persuade the knee-jerk anti-Europeans that benefits are real and that most people, politicians and countries are in the EU because they want to be.

So what are the benefits of the European Union ?

The Economic Community, as it grew out of the Customs Union, used to be known as the Common Market, and the Single Market remains at the heart of the project. If you look at what is on the shelves of your local supermarket compared to what there was a few decades ago, you must acknowledge that it has delivered greater consumer choice.
By availing itself of the economies of scale of a very large market, Europe has produced world beating champions of industry. In the process some names have come and gone, but the overall result has been greater wealth creation.
A later major adjunct to the single market has been the single currency. You can read my positive views on the Euro in “About the Euro” (May 2010).

For the single market to work, a vast rule-book has had to be created to ensure common standards for safety, labelling and compatibility (etc) of products to make them acceptable across borders. This is one area where the EU gave itself a bad name in the 1980’s by trying to standardize too many things, since then the approach is rather to ensure that a few essential requirements are met. The Commission has for example abolished many of the rules on fruit and vegetable standards: yes, bent cucumbers are again ok.
The Commission is, on the other hand, pushing mobile phone manufacturers to develop a single charger good for all models, which would be welcome. By the way, on the subject of telephony, the Commission, in its capacity as competition watchdog on the single market, has successfully forced operators to reduce roaming charges as they did not reflect the real cost of international calls.
The single market has also been used as a pretext for imposing such things as minimum environmental standards and working conditions throughout the EU to avoid companies getting an unfair advantage by locating to where local rules are lax and cheaper to respect. Generally this had led to a levelling upwards which has worked in favour of citizens rather than business.

Another area where the EU has moved on is the Common Agricultural Policy. It was originally conceived in the 1950’s with the purpose of feeding countries whose agriculture had been seriously damaged in the war. It was so successful that by the 1970’s farming was over-producing mountains and lakes of subsidized food we could not consume ourselves and which were then often dumped on the world market to the detriment of dveloping countries’ agriculture.
The CAP has since then been undergoing constant reform eliminating its worst excesses and wastefulness, along the way reducing its share in EU spending from two thirds to one third. I admit that is still pretty big and the managing of it accounts for a lot of the meetings I work in. However, I have to say in its defence that all developed countries bolster their agriculture for two sound reasons: firstly, it would be foolish to abandon your own capacity to feed yourself even if you can buy food cheaper elsewhere, because the world is an uncertain place and nothing is more essential to a society than food; secondly, it would be foolish to abandon economic activity and land management in the vast rural areas of our countries.

These days, the EU spends about another third of its budget on various forms of regional and “cohesion” policy in a redistributive act that seeks to improve prosperity in its less-favoured areas, often through infrastructure projects (most obviously roads) but also by investing in human capital. Ireland has been a success story in this respect, moving from being one of the poorest members (per capita) when it joined to being one of the richest today.
More generally the EU invests in research and development to improve the lot of all its members.

The four initial economic freedoms of movement enshrined in the Treaty of Rome include not just those of goods, services and capital but also that of people. Doubtless originally conceived as free movement of labour, it has over time developed into a right for EU citizens to reside in any EU country they choose as long as they are not a financial burden on the host state. With that comes the practical ease of moving around a border-free area in the Schengen passport union and even the concept of EU citizenship, including the right to vote and stand in municipal and European elections in the country of residence.
The Erasmus programme for EU student exchanges is a practical example of promoting a sense of European citizenship, creating a new generation at ease with the idea of horizons broader than the merely national.
Generally, I would like to think that any European Union sponsored event which brings together people of different nationalities but similar background helps foster a feeling of shared European identity much more than any piece of legislation could.

As job-seeking people move more freely across borders so too does the criminal element and the EU has been at pains to enhance coordination in the vast area of justice and home affairs to keep up with that, which I’m afraid will also mean making sure that the speeding fines you pick up in other EU countries follow you back home.

On the world stage, the EU enables a lot of individually not so important countries to act together internationally and to be seen collectively to be a big player. As an individual it’s when you travel to another continent (Asia, Africa) that you start to realize that Europe isn’t just a figment of some political theorist’s imagination and that we do have a shared European identity. So maybe it should not come as a surprise to us, who are so often obsessed by our differences and immersed in internecine squabbles, that we are actually pereceived by the rest of the world as a monolithic bloc.
This is partciulalry true in the area of trade where it is always the EU and not the individual member states that engage in negotiations in WTO and elsewhere. Europe as a zone of limited natural resources but of great inventive and manufacturing capacity has for centuries gained from trade. The EU has always been a strong advocate of free trade and notwithstanding certain restrictions we do practise the lowest rates of customs duties in the world and have the biggest export and import volumes. According to economic theory, which is most often borne out in practice, free trade allows countries to make the most of the comparative advantage they enjoy in certain areas thereby enabling them to earn more. Trade not aid is the true motor of develoment.
Having said that the EU also supplements its members’ official direct aid, making us collectively the world’s biggest donor.

In terms of a Common Foreign Policy, the EU is still fumbling, notwithstanding the Lisbon Treaty’s attempts to raise its profile. Its members’ interests simply don’t always coincide and fudge is often what comes out as a common position. There are those who argue that you can’t have a common foreign policy without a common defence. I don’t hold with that myself. It’s part of our European identity that we are more interested in the carrot than the stick, conciliation rather than confrontation. At least on the continent, the challenge internally has been to supplant war with peacuful co-existence and that is externally the not so clear-cut message we seek to project to others.
Even so, we cut a more convincing figure as a union than as individual members.

These are just some of the benefits that come from EU membership. The nature of EU integration is that it is a work in progress: “the process of creating an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe” (to quote the first article in the Treaty).
Its benefits are much greater than can be construed in terms of whether a member state is in financial terms a net contributor or beneficiary, of what after all remains only a very small part of its GDP. Germany, for example, may be the biggest net contributor, but German industry benefits immeasurably from the single market.

However, as I hope you will have been convinced by my brief enumeration, the EU is far more than an economic union: it is a political project that seeks to promote and protect the peace and prosperity of the peoples of Europe.