Tag: Diary (Page 27 of 30)

I’ve been reading A Defense of Nonsense, a rich essay by the fantastic G.K. Chesterton. Forgive me if I quote at length:

There are times when we are almost crushed, not so much with the load of evil as with the load of goodness of humanity, when we feel that we are nothing but the interiors of a humiliating splendour. But there are other times when everything seems primitive, when the ancient stars are only sparks blown from a boy’s bonfire, when the whole earth seems so young and experimental that even the white hair of the aged, in the fine biblical phrase, is like almond-trees that blossom, like the white hawthorn grown in May. That it is good for a man to realize that he is ‘the heir of all the ages’ is pretty commonly admitted; it is a less popular but equally important point that it is good for him sometimes to realize that he is not only an ancestor, but an ancestor of primal antiquity; it is good for him to wonder whether he is not a hero, and to experience ennobling doubts as to whether he is not a solar myth.

We are both descendants and ancestors of a longer history than we care to imagine. But we have a great advantage over a historical past and a hypothetical future – We exist. This undeniable superiority inspires in us a certain arrogance. Human nature provokes a solipsism of the present, where our actions are deemed obviously more important than anything people have already done, or may do in the future. Perhaps this feeling wanes when one becomes a parent, and you are no longer a peak in human evolution, merely another worn link in the chain.
As I have said before, before, there are times when I feel as though we still exist in some kind of kooky pre-enlightenment era, where nonsense prevails and in the future historians will ridicule us for our narrow mindedness. We have invented the technology to harvest power from the sun, yet our system somehow deems it more appropriate to spend billions on securing a worryingly finite oil supply, instead of at least optimising the solar harvest. Some people genuinely believe that they – and their land – have identities that persist outside their own mind. Others spend millions on make-up, and millions more on make-up remover.
What sort of ancestor do we want to be? At present, it looks like we are set to become nothing more than a mad old grandfather. Full of incoherencies and self-contradictions, he talks about things that do not matter. He might have been interesting once, but now he sits in the corner, ignored.

I wonder if anyone subscribes to my site via RSS? If so, I would appreciate a confirmation (in the comments or otherwise) that it is indeed working. In the past few days I have come to suspect that maybe it is malfunctioning.
Many thanks in advance.
As the comments prove, it does indeed seem to be working. Many thanks again!

ARCHITECT: Do I……?
LILY: What? What? (SHE GOES TO HIM) Go on. Try again. “Do I…”?
ARCHITECT: … have enough faith to design in yew?
BEAT
LILY: Design what in who?
GARDENER: Well sir. What I think: Up to you.
LILY: Me?
ARCHITECT (IGNORING HER): You have to wait so long for yew.
GARDENER: Worth it.
BEAT
ARCHITECT: In the end. But you’re never there to see it.
GARDENER: Takes a deal of philosophy.
SHOWMAN: Just a dash of imagination! Look.

– Judith Adams, Sweet Fanny Adams in Eden
I read with interest the obituaries of Randall Coate, who died in France, on 2nd December. A very good innings at 96, he seems to have lead one of those polymath lives that the obituary writers love so well. A spell at Oxford, a medalled war, a lengthy service in the foreign office, followed by a prolific career as a maze designer. He was, perhaps unsurprisingly, a friend of Jorge Luis Borges (whose collection of stories, Labyrinths, I have been extorting Biodun to read).
By far the best of the obituaries on Coate, is the one published in The Independent. This is undoubtedly because it is by Coate’s colleague and fellow Labyrinthologist, Adrian Fisher. The link inconveniently moves in to the premium section after three days, so here are the choice quotes:

He furthered the maze as a valid form of landscape art more than anyone had previously done. His maze designs abound with symbolism, from their outline shape and the internal patterns of paths and barriers, to numbers and proportions, hidden meanings, verbal allusions and puns.
…
His seventh rule [of Maze Design] stated: “Do not allow the cost of the maze to cloud your enjoyment of a creation which will bring pleasure to young and old for generations to come. You will have given our world of harsh reality and mindless speed a timeless oasis, a leisurely paradise, the substance of a dream.”

Moulded by the war, and allowed the luxury of travel through a world still under the influence of a waning empire. He seems the archetype of the sincere and unselfconscious intellectual, of the kind that does not seem to emerge any more. Even his name, Randoll Coate, seems to be from an age that has come to an end, replaced (as he predicts) by a world of commodified celebrities, and mindless speed.

Where does all this paper come from? Like Clive, I’ve being doing a spot of housekeeping – collecting together the vast piles of paper that have accumulated since I moved into my flat just over a year ago. From under the bed comes reams of catalogues, special offers and charitable calls to action that have fallen out of magazines and newspapers. Appallingly, I found a few New Statesman issues still mint in their polyethene wrapper, along with October’s National Geographic. They deliver their publications in a coarse brown packet, as if the journal has been despatched from some far flung part of the orient, rather than Surrey.
I’ve consolidated. No longer do magazines litter each corner of each room. Now, the copies of the New Statesman, a few random Prosepects, and a stray Spectator sit together in just one corner of one room, in one big and unmanageable tower. I still have several cuttings from The Times, and a couple of special reports from the Independent to file.
The packaging and loose adverts have been recycled, but I feel I should keep a hold of the magazines themselves. I do this not because I harbour some preposterous notion that I will, one day, actually go back and read what I have missed, but rather because I feel as if I am creating for myself a form of reference library. One of these days, I do not doubt that Ziaduinn Sardar’s analysis of progressive Islam will be useful to me in some way…. if I can remember in which magazine it was published.
This hoarding betrays an egotistical desire to be ‘well read’. The gentleman scholar. Of course, in the 21st century this appetite can never be satisfied, as the sheer volume of data exceeds an individual’s capacity to take it all in, even if the RSS bookmarks are all in order. Yet still I worry if I have spent a day without reading a newspaper, and the idea of cancelling a subscription to something is a heresy.
At the moment I am reading The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. He tells the story of a conspiracy in a medieval monastary, the clues to the mystery held within the pages of ancient texts, buried in the depths of a labyrinthal library. In his later book, Focault’s Pendulum, the characters take the connection of ideas to an extreme, constructing wild conspiracy theories from the most disparate sources. Both books a riddled with quotation and historical allusion, a style that John Updike once described as a permenant ‘orgy of citation and paraphrase’. It’s not clear whether Updike considers this a compliment, but I enjoy Eco’s work for this very reason. Thinking laterally and connecting ideas is part of the fun of reading and writing. The more you read, the more connections you can make, the more ideas you can have.