“Some cities are really successful, and present the solid and definite achievement of the thing at which their builders aimed; and when they do this, they present, just as a fine statue presents, something of the direct divinity of man, something immeasurably superior to mere nature, to mere common mountains, to mere vulgar seas. … The modern city is ugly, not because it is a city, but because it is not enough of a city, because it is a jungle, because it is confused and anarchic, and surging with selfish and materialistic energies. In short, the modern town is offensive because it is a great deal too like nature, a great deal too like the country.”
___
In a posthumous collection of his pieces in the Daily News (Lunacy and Letters, 1958), therefore probably written 1901-13. I quoted this passage in a piece on cities of the parts and cities of the whole.
Cf Loving your city. Chesterton, of course, loved London.
The trouble is that those who live in solid and definite cities are not better, and may not even be better-governed, than those who live in confused and anarchic ones.
___
“A child of seven is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door and saw a dragon. But a child of three is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door. Boys like romantic tales; but babies like realistic tales – because they find them romantic. In fact, a baby is about the only person, I should think, to whom a modern realistic novel could be read without boring him.”
Orthodoxy, 1908.
The modern city and the modern novel
February 9, 2010Peter Calvocoressi
February 8, 2010Telegraph. Guardian. Intelligence, Nuremberg trials, historian.
Chatham House 1949-54. Wrote the first five volumes of the post-war series in the Survey of International Affairs and compiled the companion volumes of documents.
I list the first two of his Survey volumes (for 1947-1948 and 1949-1950) here. Toynbee contributed only Introductions. I will publish a complete guide to the Survey and Documents in due course.
Where do the Balkans start?
February 7, 2010Somebody says: “Those Slovenian guys [...] call themselves ‘slavic Austrians’ and say: the Balkans start at their Croatian border.”
Toynbee, in the last post, referred to a saying in Vienna that the East began at the Leitha.
Metternich is supposed to have said: “The Balkans begin at the Rennweg.” He had a villa there. The Rennweg is now in the third Bezirk, known as the Landstrasse. Landstrasse is a district as well as a street, so nowadays you hear it stated as: “The Balkans begin in the Landstrasse.” People who say this sometimes forget that Hungary is not in the Balkans. To a modern sensibility, talk of “the Balkans” beginning here or there of course shows anti-Slavic racism.
Parts of the eastern Bezirke of Vienna in the mid-’70s felt as if they were behind the Iron Curtain. This was a heavily socialised Austria. Vienna was stranded at one end of it, with no access to its previous cultural zones of influence to the north, east and south and not belonging fully to western Europe either. If the Balkans began at the Landstrasse, they continued in the Leopoldstadt (Prater area) and beyond in Floridsdorf and Donaustadt.
To non-Viennese Austrians, the Balkans merely began in Vienna. German Protestants sometimes said “in Munich”. My German grandfather, a Protestant of Baden-Württemberg, went further and used to say “in Neu-Ulm”. Ulm is in Baden-Württemberg on the Danube, Neu-Ulm is across the religious faultline in Catholic Bavaria.
The implication was that Catholic-Austrian Schlamperei begins in Bavaria and prefigures something even messier in the Balkans. Schlamperei is an untranslatable word and means a certain slovenliness and disorderliness, which perhaps carries an Austrian charm with it, but a charm only up to a point. Toynbee reminds us that Austria was by origin
simply Bavaria’s “eastern march” or, rather, a cluster of Bavarian marches: Upper Austria, Lower Austria, and Steiermark or Styria – which was first evolved by the Bavarian body politic in order to protect its eastern flank against assaults from the Avars and Slovenes, and which afterwards became differentiated and consolidated, by a series of historical accidents, into a separate political entity. [...]
Yet its history changed its character.
[...] while the transfigured eastern march of Bavaria has been playing her great part in the life of our Western Society and in the life of the World, the Bavarian interior has remained one of those small countries which are “happy in having no history” – as is signified in the fact that it has retained the original Bavarian name which Austria has discarded. During the ten or twelve centuries that have elapsed since Bavaria and Austria first parted company and began to go their different ways, the Bavarian êthos has remained parochial and exuberant and sanguine, whereas the Austrian êthos has become oecumenical and fastidious and sceptical. The contrast between the temperaments respectively prevalent in these two South German Catholic countries to-day cannot fail to strike the traveller who passes from one into the other at almost any point on their long common frontier [...].
Earlier in the same volume:
The glory which Vienna had gained by keeping the Turks at bay in 1529 and 1682-3 was tarnished by the humiliation of French occupations in 1805 and 1809; and the Viennese, who had first made their name as the heroic defenders of Western Christendom, eventually became a by-word for an attractive but decidedly unheroic combination of fecklessness with amiability and softness with elegance.
___
Archduchess Regina von Habsburg dies. Otto, born 1912, the son of Blessed Kaiser Karl, survives her. They lived in Bavaria. He was one of the organisers of the Pan-European Picnic on the Austrian-Hungarian border near Sopron on August 19 1989 and was involved in Balkan matters in the ’90s.
A Study of History, Vol II, OUP, 1934
The Leitha
February 6, 2010Vienna was situated just to the west of the cultural boundary between the heart of Western Christendom and its eastern marches – the lands of the Crown of the Hungarian King Saint Stephen and the United Kingdom of Poland-Lithuania – in which the Western Christian culture was diluted with a tincture of the Nomad culture of the Eurasian Steppe. Vienna’s cultural function was to radiate an authentic Western culture, native to Vienna itself and to its western hinterland, into the imperfectly Westernized eastern marches of the Western World and, beyond these again, into Eastern Orthodox Christendom and Dār-al-Islām. Vienna’s performance of this cultural task was facilitated by her geographical location; for, while she lay just to the west of the cultural frontier along the line of the River Leitha (where “the East begins” according to an illuminating Viennese bon mot), she lay just to the east of the Austrian Alps, which constituted “the natural frontier” of Western Christendom in this quarter. Standing, as she thus stood, with her back to the eastern foothills of the Alps, and looking down the course of the River Danube from a point where, after having threaded its way through the Alps, it is heading for the Hungarian Alföld, en route for the Iron Gates and for the western tip of the Eurasian Steppe’s Great Western Bay, Vienna could not fail to find her missionary field in the sub-Western and non-Western worlds to the east and south-east of her.
Though the writer of this Study did not pay his first visit to Vienna till the summer of A.D. 1929, at a date more than ten years after she had been reduced politically from being the imperial capital of a cosmopolitan empire to being the national capital of an Austrian Republic whose narrow bounds embraced none of the sub-Western or non-Western territories of a now defunct Danubian Monarchy, he found the evidences of Vienna’s historic cultural mission still impressively prominent. In A.D. 1929 the names of the subscribers to the Vienna telephone service, as recorded in the book, testified that this city was a melting-pot in which Rumans, Serbs, and Bulgars, as well as Poles, Magyars, and Croats, were being reminted into pure Westerners [...]; and, when the observer travelled on eastwards to the “Saxon” cities of Transylvania, which had been under Rumanian rule since the dissolution of the Danubian Hapsburg Monarchy in A.D. 1918, he found these outposts of a Western Civilization, which were now marooned and in peril of being submerged under the resurgent flood of an alien culture, desperately clinging to a traditional link with Vienna which was their cultural lifeline – as the marooned outposts of Hellenism in Western Iran still clung to their traditional link with Antioch-on-Orontes after the military occupation of Media and Babylonia by the Arsacid Power in the sixth decade of the second century B.C.
Vienna’s influence was also radiated north, into Bohemia. I cannot find a map of the Leitha, which is a southern tributary of the Danube, but after the 1867 Ausgleich between Austria and Hungary, Transleithanien, to the Viennese, meant the Kingdom of Hungary, while Cisleithanien was Austria.
The Danube skirts the eastern Alpine foothills, rather than “threads its way through the Alps”. The Iron Gates are a gorge which forms part of the border between Romania in the north (southern Carpathians) and Serbia in the south (northern Balkans). Toynbee implies here that they are an entrance into the “Great Western Bay” of the steppe, but for the traveller up-river they are also an entrance into the extension of the bay in Hungary.
A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954 (footnote)
Messiaen on Pélleas
February 5, 2010At the Paris Conservatoire.
Charming. One of the unsolved mysteries of twentieth-century culture is: who made Messiaen’s shirts? Throughout his life he wore them with huge collars which did not seem to follow any fashion.
I saw him in London at a performance of Des canyons aux étoiles, probably in 1988 on the occasion of his 80th birthday, in a church, I believe All Souls, Langham Place. His wife Yvonne Loriod was at the piano. The orchestra was probably the London Sinfonietta and the conductor may have been Esa-Pekka Salonen.
In Our Time
February 4, 2010The In Our Time archive is now online in full: 449 episodes so far, going back to 1998. A large part was available before. Now all of it is. That’s a fortnight’s listening if you don’t sleep.
In Our Time is the septuagenarian Melvyn Bragg’s weekly BBC Radio 4 discussion on anything cultural, historical, philosophical or scientific: he says “history of ideas”, a misdescription. It’s also a podcast. A Wikipedia list shows every programme, with contributors, on a single page.
Many contributors are from London University. The second (on Politics in the 20th Century) had Gore Vidal and Alan Clark.
Not every programme hits the mark. One could parody Bragg’s manner as moderator: “We’ve got the influence of Aristotle flowing in there, I’m just trying to get the discussion driving forward.” “We’ve got the Silk Road – and can we cut to the chase.” (Most people are vague about the Silk Road; if you doubt that, watch this hilarious discussion about a “new” silk road at a WEF meeting in Istanbul in 2008 moderated by Nik Gowing; I was there.) We’re always in an era of intellectual ferment in which “almost everything is up for grabs”. There’s a vagueness of contour to some of the conversations. No matter what the subject, it can all sound curiously the same. But it’s still one of the best things on the world’s best radio channels.
1914
February 3, 2010For the first time in our lives, we find ourselves in complete uncertainty as to the future. To uncivilised people the situation is commonplace; but in twentieth-century Europe we are accustomed to look ahead, to forecast accurately what lies before us, and then to choose our path and follow it steadily to its end; and we rightly consider that this is the characteristic of civilised men. The same ideal appears in every side of our life: in the individual’s morality as a desire for “Independence” strong enough to control most human passions: in our Economics as Estimates and Insurances: in our Politics as a great sustained concentration of all our surplus energies, in which parties are becoming increasingly at one in aim and effort, while their differences are shrinking to alternatives of method, to raise the material, moral, and intellectual standard of life throughout the nation. From all this fruitful, constructive, exacting work, which demands the best from us and makes us the better for giving it, we have been violently wrenched away and plunged into a struggle for existence with people very much like ourselves, with whom we have no quarrel.
We must face the fact that this is pure evil, and that we cannot escape it. We must fight with all our strength: every particle of our energy must be absorbed in the war: and meanwhile our social construction must stand still indefinitely, or even be in part undone, and every class and individual in the country must suffer in their degree, according to the quite arbitrary chance of war, in lives horribly destroyed and work ruined.
Nationality and the War, Dent, 1915
Spirit of Davos
February 2, 2010Lance Knobel defends the WEF here and here, denying that Davos is painted “in the style of George Grosz or Otto Dix”. (Kirchner, perhaps?)
This was always a naïve way of looking at it, but the “rich man’s club” epithet still gets used. I can well understand people who stay away because they would rather be doing real work: the undeclared Steve Jobs objection.
In the old days, the WEF did seem to believe that the world was run by a very small number of people who, whether or not they were rich, would be able to solve its problems if they could only be brought together. The WEF was and to a lesser extent still is based on a conspiracy theory.
Its magazine World Link (pilot 1987, demise 2003) was launched on the premise that there were, in fact, 33,333 of them, all of whom would receive it.
The WEF produced a booklet explaining who the 33,333 were. The heads of all 142 this, the chairmen and vice-chairmen of 1,400 that. Kings, queens, popes, secretaries-general. They all added up to that magical third of a lakh.
In the remarkable last ten years, what Lance calls “the endless stream of initiatives and agendas and councils” has suggested, built, a more complicated and realistic model of the world. At Davos and elsewhere, there are communities of young global leaders, social entrepreneurs, technology pioneers, religious leaders, and others. Even in 1983, we saw a far-left British trade unionist involved.
Davos is still “highly elitist, while at the same time scurrying for a comfortable middle ground on too many issues (particularly in the kinds of cultural figures it tends to celebrate)”. Good observation on the art. At least its most star-struck phase seems to be over.
He is questioning Felix Salmon’s contention “that [the idea that] Davos was institutionally responsible, at least in part, for the economic and financial catastrophe which befell the world in 2008” was worth examining. In other words, the idea that Davos does not make people ask questions or do things differently, but makes them smug. But who are they? A very few people saw what was coming (it was staring them in the face) and their representation at Davos was probably the same as anywhere else.
Lance quotes James Gibney’s question in one of The Atlantic’s blogs. “Here’s what’s potentially dangerous about the Forum’s worthy-sounding ventures on climate, global education, corruption, and health etc. For starters, they reflect the needs and goals of the Forum and its members, not the world. The sponsors of the Global Redesign Initiative (GRI), for example, are Qatar, Singapore, and Switzerland. Why them? Will the emerging grand master plan pay extra attention to the priorities of a sharia-bound absolute monarchy, a one-party state that bans chewing gum, and a minaret-bashing, tax-dodger-protecting bastion of chauvinism, or did those countries just happen to have some no-strings-attached money to burn? Schemes like the GRI are spawned and shaped outside the public view. The biggest job for the staff members running them is to keep the people paying the bills happy.” Gibney’s Orwell quotation is especially to the point.
Lance: “Whatever the Global Redesign Initiative concludes, I think it is a very good bet that it will have no impact whatsoever on anyone.”
“It’s very disturbing to read reports that the Google/China dispute was a forbidden topic this year. In my day I never encountered such taboos, and we genuinely tried to foster real debate.”
Well, taboos on the Middle East were masked to some extent in those years, between Oslo and the Second Intifada. Then, it was possible to be moved by sessions in which Shimon Peres, Elie Wiesel and Yasser Arafat would encounter each other. I remember Peres, a flashy phrasemaker, saying in one of them that what was required was nothing less than “a second genesis of human experience”. Some in the room could have made more practical suggestions.
In 2006, the Forum’s second outsourced publication (Global Agenda, annual, launch 2004, demise 2006) was closed down in the middle of Davos when it published a (crude) article suggesting a trade boycott of Israel. The magazine had committed a breach of manners, but nothing anti-semitic had been written.
“What I was trying to point out in my post the other day is that there is a strong group of Davos participants who spend a lot of time questioning premises, intentions and outcomes. They may not make the headlines, particularly of the US and British press, which understandably concentrates on homegrown stars. I think the Davos crowd that Felix decries don’t need help with the paving of the road to hell – they arrive in the Graubünden utterly convinced of their superiority and rightness. There are others who are far more questioning and skeptical.”
“There’s another reason why I hesitate to wholeheartedly endorse the more dramatic criticisms of Davos and so-called Davos Man. The biggest noise, particularly in the last decade, may have been made by the American financiers and the advocates for a capitalism red in tooth and claw. But the roots of Davos are very firmly in what some call Rhineland Capitalism.”
“That more socially conscious capitalism [...] never really went away in Davos. It’s very easy to mock the Forum’s grandiose aspirations to ‘improve the state of the world’, but [its views are] sincerely held. [...] It may be overstated, misguided, even delusive, but the Forum is a holdout against the more corrosive elements of that world.”
Felix Salmon forgets that all lasting and useful institutions make use of human vanity. World karma isn’t worsened by incongruous congress at Davos. There are boring and very interesting people there. Some are powerful. It’s naïve and smug to over-praise Davos and naïve and chippy to over-attack it.
“Part of Klaus Schwab’s brilliance in creating and developing the Forum over the years has been sustaining the illusion of [its] power and influence. I remember some newspaper article calling Klaus the world’s greatest concierge. People within the Forum bristled. But there’s no shame in being the world’s greatest concierge. The Forum is great at bringing business and political power together, with a leavening of intellectual power [...].” But it has tried to be more than that and to drive processes.
I don’t know how well the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre works. It has a different view of the world, based on an idea not of peer-group dialogue, but of resistance by outsiders, since it knows that Davos will change nothing.
(The current Economist has a piece called “Why is economic liberalism so taboo in socially liberal Brazil?”)
A Lewis Namier-like historian or earnest thesis-writer could try to do a study of each and every participant and every initiative to determine what they contributed to what Davos discussion or WEF initiative and what the outcome was. (Impossible, but so was Namier’s attempt to do something approaching this for the eighteenth-century House of Commons.)
Grosz, The Capitalist
Auchincloss and Zinn
February 1, 2010Deaths of two American chroniclers, a WASP novelist and a left-liberal historian. In reverse order:
Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States (1980). New York Times. Telegraph. London Times.
Not to be confused with Theodore Zeldin, author of An Intimate History of Humanity (1994), nor with Theo Zinn, a classics master at my old school who wrote a Latin primer which is still in print and for whom a festschrift was written.
Louis Auchincloss, novelist, story-writer, biographer. New York Times. Telegraph. Guardian.
Vidal: “Not since Dreiser has an American writer had so much to tell us about the role of money in our lives.” Auchincloss quoted at New York Times: “That business of objecting to the subject material or the people that an author writes about is purely class prejudice, and you will note that it always disappears with an author’s death. Nobody holds it against Henry James or Edith Wharton or Thackeray or Marcel Proust.”
He seems remarkably readable. I’ve just ordered The Rector of Justin (1964), a novel about a prep school, like The Catcher in the Rye. The double obituaries are more likely to have been done with Salinger.
Zinn on Obama, quoted in the London Times: “I think people are dazzled by Obama’s rhetoric, and that people ought to begin to understand that he is going to be a mediocre president which means, in our time, a dangerous president unless there is some national movement to push him in a better direction.” Auchincloss, quoted in the Guardian: “I just think the Bushes are a big family of shits.” If he was a Republican, he must have been a Rockefeller Republican.
Bacchus Alpinus
January 31, 2010JA Symonds in his Italian Byways, Smith, Elder & Co, 1883, tells us that much of the wine drunk in Davos was from the Italian Valtelline valley in Lombardy. He stayed in Davos from August 1877 to April 1878, suffering from tuberculosis, and then settled there.
Davos participants drink Swiss wine, but possibly only notice it on the last day (today), when the initiated minority (who know that this isn’t a boring closing buffet) take the funicular up to the Schatzalp, a former sanatorium, above the town. There, weather permitting (and, for some reason, it usually does), lunch is eaten al fresco on a snowy terrace.
The lunch is a rediscovery of the sun after a week in a valley, a rediscovery of real food, prepared in the open (much of it basic mountain food), and a rediscovery of a proper spirit of wine drinking. The view towards the Jakobshorn is a big picture at last in liberatingly concrete landscape terms.
Most people get to know Dôle. This is the Swiss red wine made, in more than one region, from two thirds Pinot Noir and a third Gamay. It tastes good in the cold. If your table gets crowded, you can plunge your bottle into a bank of snow to steady it and it will be none the worse.
To the north of Graubünden, or Grisons, the Grey Leagues, which joined Switzerland in 1803, and in which Davos is situated, are Liechtenstein and Austrian Vorarlberg. To the northeast Austrian Tirol. To the east Italian Trentino-Alto Adige. To the south Lombardy. The Valtelline is reached across the Bernina Pass.
Symonds writes about the Valtelline wines, which are made from Chiavennasca grapes, the local name of the red Piedmontese Nebbiolo.
“Some years’ residence in the Canton of the Grisons made me familiar with all sorts of Valtelline wine; with masculine but rough Inferno, generous Forzato, delicate Sassella, harsher Montagner, the raspberry flavour of Grumello, the sharp invigorating twang of Villa.” He speculates on a legend that the Etruscans had colonised these hills.
“Then my thoughts ran on to the period of modern history, when the Grisons seized the Valtelline in lieu of war-pay from the Dukes of Milan. For some three centuries they held it as a subject province. From the Rath-Haus at Davos or Chur they sent their nobles – Von Salis and Buol, Planta and Sprecher von Bernegg – across the hills as governors or podestàs to Poschiavo, Sondrio, Tirano, and Morbegno. In those old days the Valtelline wines came duly every winter over snow-deep passes to fill the cellars of the Signori Grigioni. [...] The wine-carriers – Wein-führer, as they are called – first scaled the Bernina pass, halting then as now, perhaps, at Poschiavo and Pontresina [both in Graubünden]. Afterwards, in order to reach Davos, the pass of the Scaletta rose before them – a wilderness of untracked snow-drifts. The country-folk still point to narrow, light hand-sledges, on which the casks were charged before the last pitch of the pass. Some wine came, no doubt, on pack-saddles. A meadow in front of the Dischma-Thal, where the pass ends, still bears the name of the Ross-Weid, or horse-pasture. It was here that the beasts of burden used for this wine-service, rested after their long labours. In favourable weather the whole journey from Tirano [in the Valtelline] would have occupied at least four days, with scanty halts at night.
“The Valtelline slipped from the hands of the Grisons early in this century. It is rumoured that one of the Von Salis family negotiated matters with Napoleon more for his private benefit than for the interests of the state. However this may have been, when the Graubünden became a Swiss Canton, after four centuries of sovereign independence, the whole Valtelline passed to Austria, and so eventually to Italy. According to modern and just notions of nationality, this was right. In their period of power, the Grisons masters had treated their Italian dependencies with harshness. The Valtelline is an Italian valley, connected with the rest of the peninsula by ties of race and language. It is, moreover, geographically linked to Italy by the great stream of the Adda, which takes its rise upon the Stelvio, and after passing through the Lake of Como, swells the volume of the Po.
“But, though politically severed from the Valtelline, the Engadiners and Davosers have not dropped their old habit of importing its best produce. What they formerly levied as masters, they now acquire by purchase. The Italian revenue derives a large profit from the frontier dues paid at the gate between Tirano and Poschiavo on the Bernina road. Much of the same wine enters Switzerland by another route, travelling from Sondrio to Chiavenna and across the Splügen [which is north of Como, to the west]. But until quite recently, the wine itself could scarcely be found outside the Canton. It was indeed quoted upon Lombard wine-lists. Yet no one drank it; and when I tasted it at Milan, I found it quite unrecognisable. The fact seems to be that the Graubündeners alone know how to deal with it; and, as I have hinted, the wine requires a mountain climate for its full development.
[...]
“It is customary for the Graubünden wine-merchants to buy up the whole produce of a vineyard from the peasants at the end of the vintage. They go in person or depute their agents to inspect the wine, make their bargains, and seal the cellars where the wine is stored. Then, when the snow has fallen, their own horses with sleighs and trusted servants go across the passes to bring it home. Generally they have some local man of confidence at Tirano, the starting-point for the homeward journey, who takes the casks up to that place and sees them duly charged. Merchants of old standing maintain relations with the same peasants, taking their wine regularly; so that from Lorenz Gredig at Pontresina or Andreas Gredig at Davos Dörfli, from Fanconi at Samaden, or from Giacomi at Chiavenna, special qualities of wine, the produce of certain vineyards, are to be obtained. Up to the present time this wine trade has been conducted with simplicity and honesty by both the dealers and the growers. One chief merit of Valtelline wine is that it is pure. How long so desirable a state of things will survive the slow but steady development of an export business may be questioned.”
___
Participants making their way up to the Schatzalp have absolutely no idea what it took to live in the Alps. I’d like to see a study or world atlas of trans-montane trading routes, of which few survive. Of all the arduous seasonal journeys of men, herds, flocks and goods across mountain passes. We no longer know the planet from living in terrains, but are piecing the macrocosm together again in our minds in the most laborious way possible, in order to understand and repair it.
___
“With so much practical and theoretical interest in the produce of the Valtelline to stimulate my curiosity, I determined to visit the district at the season when the wine was leaving it. It was the winter of 1881-82, a winter of unparalleled beauty in the high Alps. Day succeeded day without a cloud. Night followed night with steady stars, gliding across clear mountain ranges and forests of dark pines unstirred by wind. I could not hope for a more prosperous season; and indeed I made such use of it, that between the months of January and March I crossed six passes of the Alps in open sleighs – the Fluela, Bernina, Splügen, Julier, Maloja, and Albula, with less difficulty and discomfort in mid-winter than the traveller may often find on them in June.
“At the end of January, my friend Christian and I left Davos long before the sun was up, and ascended for four hours through the interminable snow-drifts of the Fluela in a cold grey shadow.” He describes the journeys.
Alpine tourism, in which the British were pioneers – as earlier with mountaineering and later with skiing – was under way.
___
Vignette of Sankt Moritz.
“The next day was spent in visiting the winter colony at San Moritz, where the Kulm Hotel, tenanted by some twenty guests, presented in its vastness the appearance of a country-house. One of the prettiest spots in the world is the ice-rink, fashioned by the skill of Herr Caspar Badrutt on a high raised terrace, commanding the valley of the Inn and the ponderous bulwarks of Bernina. The silhouettes of skaters, defined against that landscape of pure white, passed to and fro beneath a cloudless sky. Ladies sat and worked or read on seats upon the ice. Not a breath of wind was astir, and warm beneficent sunlight flooded the immeasurable air.”
___
On the Bernina Pass he meets the slow Valtelline wine-train heading north.
“When we came to the galleries which defend the road from avalanches, we saw ahead of us a train of over forty sledges ascending, all charged with Valtelline wine. Our postillions drew up at the inner side of the gallery, between massive columns of the purest ice dependent from the rough-hewn roof and walls of rock. A sort of open loggia on the farther side framed vignettes of the Valtelline mountains in their hard cerulean shadows and keen sunlight. Between us and the view defiled the wine-sledges; and as each went by, the men made us drink out of their trinketti. These are oblong, hexagonal wooden kegs, holding about fourteen litres, which the carter fills with wine before he leaves the Valtelline, to cheer him on the homeward journey. You raise it in both hands, and when the bung has been removed, allow the liquor to flow stream-wise down your throat. It was a most extraordinary Bacchic procession – a pomp which, though undreamed of on the banks of the Ilissus, proclaimed the deity of Dionysos in authentic fashion. Struggling horses, grappling at the ice-bound floor with sharp-spiked shoes; huge, hoarse drivers, some clad in sheepskins from Italian valleys, some brown as bears in rough Graubünden home-spun; casks, dropping their spilth of red wine on the snow; greetings, embracings; patois of Bergamo, Romansch, and German roaring around the low-browed vaults and tingling ice pillars; pourings forth of libations of the new strong Valtelline on breasts and beards; – the whole made up a scene of stalwart jollity and manful labour such as I have nowhere else in such wild circumstances witnessed. Many Davosers were there, the men of Andreas Gredig, Valar, and so forth; and all of these, on greeting Christian, forced us to drain a Schluck from their unmanageable cruses. Then on they went, crying, creaking, struggling, straining through the corridor, which echoed deafeningly, the gleaming crystals of those hard Italian mountains in their winter raiment building a background of still beauty to the savage Bacchanalian riot of the team.
“How little the visitors who drink Valtelline wine at S. Moritz or Davos reflect by what strange ways it reaches them. A sledge can scarcely be laden with more than one cask of 300 litres on the ascent; and this cask, according to the state of the road, has many times to be shifted from wheels to runners and back again before the journey is accomplished. One carter will take charge of two horses, and consequently of two sledges and two casks, driving them both by voice and gesture rather than by rein. When they leave the Valtelline, the carters endeavour, as far as possible, to take the pass in gangs, lest bad weather or an accident upon the road should overtake them singly. At night they hardly rest three hours, and rarely think of sleeping, but spend the time in drinking and conversation. The horses are fed and littered; but for them too the night-halt is little better than a baiting-time. In fair weather the passage of the mountain is not difficult, though tiring. But woe to men and beasts alike if they encounter storms! Not a few perish in the passes; and it frequently happens that their only chance is to unyoke the horses and leave the sledges in a snow-wreath, seeking for themselves such shelter as may possibly be gained, frost-bitten, after hours of battling with impermeable drifts. The wine is frozen into one solid mass of rosy ice before it reaches Pontresina. This does not hurt the young vintage, but it is highly injurious to wine of some years’ standing. The perils of the journey are aggravated by the savage temper of the drivers. Jealousies between the natives of rival districts spring up; and there are men alive who have fought the whole way down from Fluela Hospice to Davos Platz with knives and stones, hammers and hatchets, wooden staves and splintered cart-wheels, staining the snow with blood, and bringing broken pates, bruised limbs, and senseless comrades home to their women to be tended.” That describing piracy.
“Bacchus Alpinus shepherded his train away from us to northward, and we passed forth into noonday from the gallery. It then seemed clear that both conductor and postillion were sufficiently merry. The plunge they took us down those frozen parapets, with shriek and jauchzen [rejoicing; first word of the Christmas Oratorio: Jauchzet!] and cracked whips, was more than ever dangerous. Yet we reached La Rosa safely. This is a lovely solitary spot, beside a rushing stream, among grey granite boulders grown with spruce and rhododendron: a veritable rose of Sharon blooming in the desert. The wastes of the Bernina stretch above, and round about are leaguered some of the most forbidding sharp-toothed peaks I ever saw. Onwards, across the silent snow, we glided in immitigable sunshine, through opening valleys and pine-woods, past the robber-huts of Pisciadella, until at evenfall we rested in the roadside inn at Poschiavo [still in Graubünden].”
___
Vignette of the frontier.
“One comes at length to a great red gate across the road, which separates Switzerland from Italy, and where the export dues on wine are paid. The Italian custom-house is romantically perched above the torrent. Two courteous and elegant finanzieri, mere boys, were sitting wrapped in their military cloaks and reading novels in the sun as we drove up. Though they made some pretence of examining the luggage, they excused themselves with sweet smiles and apologetic eyes – it was a disagreeable duty!”
Bernina by rail in the days when there was a frontier. Rattle of doors. “Passkontrolle!”. Cold air. Night silence. Half an hour later: “Passaporti!”
___
There used to be wine-tasting at the Annual Meeting. Gideon Rachman’s entertaining FT blog tells us that it was abandoned this year in the earnest spirit of the times.
How much Valtelline wine is drunk in Davos now?
___
A pose of humility
January 30, 2010I wrote this a few days ago in response to a comment on an old post.
“Trevor-Roper thought the humility was a pose and that Toynbee was rather arrogant and never actually listened to criticisms. Vol XII for T-R and others is a masterful exercise in evasion. T managed to get on the wrong side of both historians and philosophers. He was not a trained philosopher and commits occasional howlers. He worked out a certain, limited, philosophy for himself and did not pretend to be an expert. I agree with you that this came from a mystical leaning.
“As to God, he was if anything a deist in the strict 17th century sense.
“I’ve more or less given up the idea of doing a synopsis! I think I used the word ‘may’ about that! What I would like to do if I have time (it would suit the blog format) is look at all of the specific criticisms (pretty devastating on some matters) made of SOH and put them next to what T actually said. And then see how he replied (if he did) in Vol XII.”
As a writer of English Trevor-Roper was the equal of Waugh, but he had the eye and manner of a playground bully.
Lee Kuan Yew
January 29, 2010Who was the most impressive person I met at Davos, in the years when I was there, in the small capacity of a contractor?
I won’t answer that here, but Lee Kuan Yew is a runner-up. Why would the head of an oppressive Chinese Hakka emigré family clan have that position? Well – his achievement was impressive.
“He got us where we are today,” as most Singaporeans will say to you, in zombified tones.
The answer is, because he seemed so historic. This was an authentic figure of the British empire in its dissolution. Almost the last. Though he does get shown Twitter and FaceBook by his grandchildren. I will not count Robert Mugabe, whose speech at a WEF meeting in Harare in May 1997 I count as the most boring I have ever half-heard. It lasted an hour and a quarter and dwelt heavily, ominously, on agricultural reform. I don’t want to count Mahathir.
Somebody introduced me to Lee at a reception at Davos circa 1998 and it was like being introduced to Raffles. In my memory, he is wearing a white suit, like a ghost. He was standing alone, which was odd enough, at a round table laid with snacks.
This is a man thought to be obsessed with hygiene to the point of Howard Hughes-like paranoia, who (I have read) takes several baths a day. Labs will find spots of human urine and sweat on bowls of peanuts, and germs, and insect faeces. Yet Lee’s hand plunged into one as I approached.
Nineteenth-century Davos
January 28, 2010I have done two posts:
Davos 1884, about a visit by a famous Russian.
Landquart-Davos, about the arrival of sanatoria, hotels, a railway, electricity, the telephone and skiing.
Davos 1971-2010
January 27, 2010The WEF has produced a book about its first 40 years. Click here. The pdf will go to your pc. No need to do more.
(No author is mentioned on the title page. Klaus Schwab says in his Acknowledgments: “This book was made possible through the conscientious and dedicated work of my long-time executive assistant, Maryse Zwick. She spent two years after her official retirement sifting through thousands of documents, photographs and other materials to construct a historical roadmap of the Forum’s growth and development over the past four decades. [...] I would like to extend my thanks to Alejandro Reyes for his invaluable help in editing the manuscript and to Kamal Kimaoui for designing and producing this book.”)
At the end of the 1995 Annual Meeting we suggested to Klaus and the then Managing Director Maria Livanos Cattaui the idea of producing a book about the first 25 years in time for Davos ’96. I was publisher of the Forum’s then-magazine World Link. Lance Knobel was its editor-in-chief. Klaus’s reply was: “If you are asking Maria and me to look back, we will not be interested. The Forum must only look forward. We are not interested in talking about ourselves.”
No reason for him not to change his mind. The Forum has become public property since those homespun days.
___
I wrote a impressionistic piece about the Davoses I attended (1993 to 2006 inclusive) here.
___
Davos 1983. End of the recession of the early ’80s. Cusp of the boom. Again and again we hear governments being asked to get out of the way.
This is the Davos Symposium of the European Management Forum. Some Swiss still talk about the Davos Symposium. The EMF became the World Economic Forum in 1987. (When was Symposium adopted and dropped and when was Annual Meeting adopted?)
Is that a suitcase being examined near the start? I thought this was the age before security.
There’s a little more Swissness around than now. Perhaps that’s just the film. Klaus fusses about a door.
The Congress Centre is recognisable. There’s a CCTV display saying Welcome. Stéphane Garelli (who is nowhere mentioned in the new book) opens the meeting. Raymond Barre is its chairman. He was still chairing Meetings in my time. Nigerians are there, and the Malaysian trade minister, and Chinese.
The Chinese had attended every Davos since 1979, and the WEF had held meetings in China with the China Enterprise Management Association since ’81. No Russians. This is pre-Gorbachev.
There are workshops. A glimpse of a bookshop, probably run by Herr Stauffacher. There’s an “initiative centre”. A questioner in the audience (Helmut Maucher) is called a “challenger”.
There’s a session called “The Universe and the Origin of Life”. Science came in earlier than I had guessed, perhaps at the beginning. Religion, I suspect, is more recent. The English astronomer Fred Hoyle is still talking obscurely. Experts were less adept at addressing the world than they have become.
There is another on “The Disintegration of Society”. This was years before Thatcher’s infamous remark. We hear Petra Kelly of the German Greens and the English trade unionist and defender of Stalin Arthur Scargill.
You might think that Supreme Allied Commander, Europe was a transitional post-war title, but it still exists within NATO.
Another session is called “How Can We Avoid the Debt-Crash and Whose Responsibility Is It?” Alquraishi of SAMA talks about the 1982 Third World Debt Crisis.
Barre’s remarks at the end outside the Congress Centre could be transposed into a Bremner, Bird & Fortune script. Note that thoroughbred pronunciation, and use, of the word “lucidity”, and his and Klaus’s quaint use of the term “business man”.
It all looks simpler than now, but not as different as you might have expected. Everybody is wearing glasses with huge lenses, but it isn’t like comparing 1983 with 1956 in terms of dress, though some suits look cheap, and Garelli has a moustache, and Petra Kelly, with low hair and blouse clasped to the neck, looks like early Princess Diana. I asked in a recent post: “With a world continually reminded of itself in video playback, is fashion going to change more slowly? Did styles only change because we weren’t always watching ourselves and kept forgetting what we looked like?”
Here is a link to the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, one of the more interesting corners of the WEF’s present and ever-ramifying initiatives.
Davos 2010
January 26, 2010The Annual Meeting programme (Improve the State of the World: Rethink, Redesign, Rebuild) from today:
The anti-Davos, the World Social Forum, is taking place, if I can understand its opaque website, in Porto Alegre, Brazil January 25-29, Kpomassè, Benin January 28-31, Madrid January 28-31 and Prague January 29-30.
The Seasons
January 25, 2010
The first three pieces in Tchaikovsky’s collection The Seasons, played by Konstantin Igumnov. Below, their poetic epigraphs.
Январь – У камелька
January – By the Fireside“A little corner of peaceful bliss,
the night dressed in twilight;
the little fire is dying in the fireplace,
and the candle has burned out.”
(Alexander Pushkin)Февраль – Масленица
February – Shrovetide“At the lively Mardi Gras
soon a large feast will overflow.”
(Pyotr Vyazemsky)Март – Песнь жаворонка
March – Song of the Lark“The field shimmering with flowers,
the stars swirling in the heavens,
the song of the lark
fills the blue abyss.”
(Apollon Maykov)By grouping three together, the title makes more sense, since it should really be The Months.
From a different YouTube posting of the same recording:
“Along with Alexander Goldenweiser and Heinrich Neuhaus, Konstantin Igumnov (1873-1948) ‘dominated the Russian/Soviet tuition during the first half of the twentieth century’. His teachers included Nikolai Zverev (Rachmaninov’s teacher), Paul Pabst and Alexander Siloti. He completed his studies at the Moscow Conservatory with a gold medal in 1892. Igumnov premiered Rachmaninov’s Sonata No. 1 and gained a reputation as an interpreter of Beethoven’s last sonatas and the Liszt Sonata. He, of course, was recognized as a superb interpreter of the music composed by his contemporaries. In 1899, Igumnov joined the faculty at the Moscow Conservatory as a professor of piano and remained there until his death. His students included Lev Oborin, Bella Davidovich and Yakov Flier.”
There are examples of all of these except Zverev on YouTube. Even Pabst.
For piano, Tchaikovsky wrote inter alia an early C minor sonata (1865), The Seasons (1875-6), Twelve Pieces of Moderate Difficulty (1878), the unloved Grand Sonata (1878), the Schumannesque Children’s Album (1878), and, right at the end of his life, yet completely neglected, Eighteen Pieces (1893).
Nikolai Bernard commissioned The Seasons for publication in his journal Nuvellist, which appeared on the first day of each month.
Framed announcement in bold type on the cover of the December 1875 issue (no 12):
“Our celebrated composer P. I. Tchaikovsky has promised the editor of Nuvellist, that he will contribute to next year’s issues a whole series of his piano compositions, specially written for our journal, the character of which will correspond entirely to the titles of the pieces, and the month in which they will be published in the journal …”
Bernard chose the titles and epigraphs. The names of the months were not given at the time of publication.
As the Wikipedia article says, “each [piece] contains a minor melodic masterpiece”, but because they form an album, not a cycle, the work does not really bear hearing through at one sitting.
The YouTube clip is from the year before Igumnov’s death. His hands were a little wobbly. Perhaps the recording is too, at times. But it has an inner warmth. This might be the cultivated domestic playing of one of Tchaikovsky’s friends. This perfomance was given a very honourable mention in the recent BBC Radio 3 Building a Library review of recordings of this work. The prize went to a modern version by the less intimate Pletnev.
My own favourite version is an arrangement for chamber ensemble with piano (I am not sure by whom) played by a group called Concertino Moscow. It’s on iTunes: look for the Russian writing and orange artwork. A Russian voice reads the epigraphs, and nowhere does the tune of January sound more heart-easing. Aleksandr Gauk made a version for orchestra in 1942 (which is also on iTunes).
Tchaikovsky’s last residence, at Klin (1892-3), fifty miles northwest of Moscow
No domestic vernacular appeals to me more than Russian
Haiti 2
January 24, 2010Andy Kershaw in The Independent on Sunday has a low opinion, like me, of the BBC’s coverage of Haiti. I referred to desultory, formulaic reporting on BBC World, but he noticed something more interesting, presumably on the domestic channels. But first he makes a by now familiar point about the NGOs.
“There has now solidified a consensus among aid organisations that the relief they are bringing is itself a liability; that distributing what Haitians are dying for – literally – will bring on a second nightmare. So, supplies pile up at the airport because, apparently, the Haitians need to be fed and watered at gunpoint. And there aren’t enough men with guns to provide this totemic ‘security’ and there aren’t enough trucks to move the supplies around the country. (Haiti is always absolutely full of trucks. The first relief priority ought to be fuel for those convoys, to deliver the water, medicines and food. In that order.)
“This self-imposed blockade by bureaucracy is a scandal but could be easily overcome. The NGOs and the military should recognise the hysteria over ‘security’ for what it is and make use of Haiti’s best resource and its most efficient distribution network: the Haitians themselves. Stop treating them as children. Or worse. Hand over to them immediately what they need at the airport. They will find the means to collect it. Fill up their trucks and cars with free fuel. Any further restriction on, and control of, the supply of aid is not only patronising but it is in that control and restriction where any ‘security issues’ will really lurk. And it is the Haitians who best know where the aid is needed.
“An unbelievable 10,000 charities were already working in Haiti when the earthquake rocked the island, most of them tiny independent organisations. Humanitarian aid is, almost by definition, never where it is needed when natural disasters strike. But, in Haiti, what’s needed has been flown in with impressive speed. Yet the combined concern of all those organisations – many of them regarding fellow charities as professional rivals – has so far been unable to get that assistance a ride from the airport. Too much energy in the last week has been expended on bickering about procedure and the fetish about ‘security’.
“This assumption that there is a security threat has gone completely unchallenged by an army of foreign press, equally unfamiliar with Haiti and the character of the Haitians. Indeed, TV reporters particularly, having exhausted the televisual possibilities of rubble, have been talking up ‘security’, ‘unrest’ and ‘violence’ when all available evidence would indicate anything but.
“Astonishingly, among these TV dramatists, I am sorry to say, is the BBC’s Matt Frei. An incongruously ample figure around Port-au-Prince, Frei has been working himself up all week into what is now a state of near hysteria about ‘security’ and the almost non-existent ‘violence’.
“Over the weekend we saw him anticipating an outbreak of unrest, standing before a crowd of thousands of hungry, humiliated Haitians as they waited, patiently and quietly, to be given rations by UN soldiers. Their dignity and stoicism seemed to escape Frei who was, in any case, looking away from them while ranting about the inevitability of looming bloodshed – conspicuously unlikely, judging from the evidence of his own report. (When he is not almost tumescent about violence, Frei speculates and pontificates pompously to camera, or booms at earthquake victims in French. Most Haitians don’t speak French. They speak Creole.)
“Frei’s reluctance to recognise the amazing self-control of these desperate people, and instead to amplify the hysteria about violence for which he has scant evidence, has brought him at times worryingly close to calling the Haitians savages.
“Disgracefully, on Monday’s Newsnight, Frei had the audacity – and again, anything but the evidence – to declare: ‘The dignity of Haiti’s past is long forgotten.’
“No, it certainly is not. And it took Bill Clinton, being interviewed by Frei on Monday, to correct him on that one, and to point out that Haiti still has dignity, immense quantities of it, especially in the present catastrophe. Their chat was turned by Frei, inevitably, to his appetite for imminent violence. ‘But what about this history of violence,’ he asked, ‘and civil unrest in this country?’
“‘When you consider,’ explained Clinton, ‘that these people haven’t slept for four days, haven’t eaten and have spent their nights wandering the streets tripping over dead bodies, I think they’ve behaved pretty well.’
“Clinton might have added that Haiti’s history of violence has been state violence against its own people. And the Haitian enthusiasm for civil unrest has always been directed bravely at brutal and corrupt rulers.
“Most journalists were also reporting breathlessly that Port-au-Prince’s main prison had collapsed. Good story. But not for the reasons we were told. The inexperience – and indeed arrogance – of every single reporter who drew our attention to the jail, missed the real significance of its destruction.
“It was not that ‘violent criminals’, ‘murderers’, ‘gang bosses’, ‘notorious killers’ or ‘drug dealers’ had ‘simply walked out the front gates’. (And just how did these escapees miraculously avoid being crushed to death in their cells?) Even if true, that was a minor detail to the people of Port-au-Prince, who had more urgent concerns.
“The true significance of the prison’s implosion was that it represented for ordinary Haitians, like the wreckage of the presidential palace and the city’s former central army barracks, exquisite revenge upon the prime symbols of decades of state cruelty and oppression.
“And many of the prison’s inmates were surely not the dangerous stereotypes of these lurid reports. Haiti’s jails were, notoriously, full of petty thieves and other unfortunates who shouldn’t have been in there anyway. I once had to go into that Penitentiaire Nationale, where I saw hundreds of men kept in cages, without room to lie down, shuffling around literally ankle deep in their own shit, to get out of there the son of a Haitian friend who’d been arrested so that the local police could extort money from his father for the release of his boy.
“Like their fellow arrivistes in the NGOs, most reporters now in the country never saw Haiti in its everyday state of chaos and decay. They simply have no appreciation that, while the earthquake has magnified their misery, Haitians – rivalled, possibly only by the permanently flooded Bangladeshis – are the world champions at survival and that shortage, suffering, torment and the absence of infrastructure and effective government are their norms.
“Haitians are extremely industrious and always busy, even though there are few formal jobs. They are resourceful, resilient, proud and dignified. On all my visits I have marvelled at Haiti’s capacity not just to survive but to function and even, at times, to flourish. (The economy grew by 6 per cent last year. Things were on the up before the earthquake dished it out again on poor Haiti.) It is a puzzle I have never resolved and a fascination that has drawn me back to Haiti more than 20 times: it shouldn’t work; nobody knows how it works; but somehow or other it does.”
___
Chris Blattman makes a similar point about violence.
___
The CNN coverage struck me as being free of the attitudes Kershaw describes. It was engaged without getting in the way; human interest journalism, of course, not social or political analysis, but humane and honest. At times it was very hard to watch.
Sanjay Gupta went to the airport, picked up antiobiotics and took them to a hospital himself.
I changed the way I referred in the last post to the hope that Haiti will change as a result of the catastrophe. It may, for all I know – but my remark reminded me of the closing sequence (procession marching through the rubble in San Francisco in 1906 singing of a new city) in the Hollywood film.
___
More on Haiti at Marginal Revolution.
Link there to Why Is Haiti So Poor?
Wikimedia Commons
Higher religions
January 23, 2010By higher religions I mean religions designed to bring human beings into direct communion with absolute spiritual Reality as individuals, in contrast to earlier forms of religion that have brought them only into indirect communion with It through the medium of the particular society in which they have happened to be participants. Religion, in these earlier forms, is an integral part of the culture of some particular society. On the other hand the higher religions have broken – some partially, some completely – out of the configuration of the particular cultures in which they originated. They have become separate systems of specifically religious culture, in a state of tension with the systems of secular culture with which they have parted company. The advent of a higher religion thus brings with it the distinction – previously unknown – between “religious” and “secular”, “spiritual” and “temporal”, “sacred” and “profane”.
A religion cannot be extricated from the non-religious elements in culture without being divorced from the society that carries these non-religious elements on its network of relations between people. But no form of culture, secular or religious, can subsist without a social setting; and therefore the adherents of a higher religion cannot assert its independence of secular culture without at the same time incorporating it in an independent society. Every higher religion is carried on a network of social relations of its own. This is a specific form of society, distinct from both civilizations and pre-civilizational societies. A name is needed for a society of this religious species, and it would be convenient if we could label it “a church”. I have sometimes used the word “church” in this wide sense; but this usage has been contested by several of my critics, and they are, I think, right. The word “church” implies a unified ecclesiastical government, and this is possessed by perhaps no more than two of the extant higher religions: the Tantric Mahayana and the Roman Catholic denomination of Christianity. The Christian churches of the Eastern Orthodox and the Western Protestant Episcopalian denomination are respectively in communion with each other without having any common organs of ecclesiastical government. The ecclesiastical organization of most other extant higher religions is still less formal and more loose.
A Study of History, Vol XII: Reconsiderations, OUP, 1961
Haiti
January 22, 2010Anderson Cooper’s reporting from Haiti on CNN will win awards in due course and will deserve them. I saw the AC360° video podcasts for January 21, 19 and 18. Among his companions in adventure is Dr Sanjay Gupta. I rarely watch BBC World (in London, I don’t have a television), but its performance in Haiti, as on much else, has been feeble and routine.
As Haiti rebuilds itself, people will hope that the aid-stealing political class and its apparatus will be replaced by something better, but life isn’t often like that. One of the disappointments in the life of a friend of mine, a Kuwaiti citizen, has been that the shock of Saddam Hussein’s invasion did not have social effects and did not wake the Kuwaiti ruling establishment’s ideas up. Little has been heard from the Haitian government. Cooper found the cabinet operating from a police station. Its members, who all survived, were no doubt conscious of their bolt-holes in Panama or France. The prime minister, Jean-Max Bellerive, was particularly jovial.
Hong Kong 1949
January 15, 2010Almost overpoweringly evocative (if you know Hong Kong and remember vestiges of it that were like this) film of Hong Kong in 1949. I wrote about Michael Rogge’s films here. This is a longer version of a clip to which I linked in that post, but it wasn’t shot by him: he appears in it, walking from his residence at Mid-levels to the offices of the Nederlandsch-Indische Handelsbank in Central. Shirt and suit clearly by a Hong Kong tailor.
Union and uniates
January 15, 2010At the Council of Florence (A.D. 1438-9), which had been convened with the objects of negotiating a union between the Eastern Orthodox churches and the Roman See, a statesmanlike distinction was boldly drawn by the Western ecclesiastical negotiators. They required, as the conditions for union, an agreement in doctrine with the Western Church and an acceptance of the Roman See’s ecclesiastical supremacy; and they insisted on these two conditions being complied with. But at the same time they showed themselves ready to allow to Eastern Orthodox churches that did agree with these conditions wide liberty in the field of rites. They were to be free, for instance, to retain their own traditional liturgies in their own liturgical languages, and their own traditional customs and practices as, for example, the custom that parish priests should be married men. This discriminatory policy did not attain its immediate purpose. At the time, the Eastern Orthodox peoples repudiated the signatures of their representatives, and the Greek people opted for political subjection to the Ottoman Empire as, in their eyes, a lesser evil than ecclesiastical submission to the Roman See. But this immediate rebuff did not move the Vatican to revoke the terms for union that it had offered in A.D. 1438-9; and, in the course of the five centuries that have passed since that date, the result of this enlightened liberality has been the reconciliation with Rome of a number of uniate churches recruited not only from Eastern Orthodox Christendom but from the Monothelete and Monophysite and Nestorian communions too.
An Historian’s Approach to Religion, OUP, 1956
The city and the pillar
January 14, 2010… or The descent of Daniel
The harmony which Frazer denies [harmony between the service of God and the service of Man] is exemplified in practice in the lives of the Christian anchorites – a Saint Antony in his desert in Egypt or a Saint Symeon on his pillar in Syria – in an age when the Roman Empire, and the Hellenic Society embodied in it, were approaching their final dissolution. It is manifest that, in insulating themselves physically from their fellow men, these saints were entering into a far more active relation with a far wider circle than any that would have centred round them if they had remained “in the World” and had spent their lives in some secular occupation. They swayed the world from their retreats to greater effect than the Emperor in the city or than the master of the soldiers in the cantonment, because their personal pursuit of holiness through seeking communion with God was a form of social action that moved their fellow men more powerfully than any secular social service on the military or the political plane. The anchorites were recognized by their contemporaries to be pursuing the highest social aim on behalf of all Mankind with complete single-mindedness and disinterestedness; and this spectacle of their self-realization through self-surrender struck their contemporaries’ imaginations and touched their hearts and thereby played its part in the forging of a social bond of a spiritual order which held firm when Society dissolved on the political and economic levels.
Until recently it was considered to be beneficial to society for certain people to sit in rooms studying Latin and Greek texts. They were not praying and were not popular heroes. Clive James on a recent UK proposal to award university funds for research to projects which are likely to have “impact”. “Traditionally the humanities have defined themselves as those learned activities which are pursued for their own sake, but pursuing them for impact is plainly something else.”
Stylite comes from the ecclesiastical Greek stulitēs, from stulos, pillar. Stylites would sit for years on the tops of pillars in contemplation and prayer. St Simeon Stylites (c 390-459) lived near Aleppo, St Daniel (c 409-93) at Anaplus on the west side of the Bosphorus, St Simeon the Younger (521-97) near Antioch, St Alypius (522-640, dying apparently at the age of 118) in Paphlagonia. There are later examples in the Orthodox world, including in Russia.
“It has sometimes been said that the ascetic ideal of the East Roman was a barren withdrawal from the world of his day; the biography of John the Almsgiver [footnote (Toynbee or Dawes and Baynes?): John the Almsgiver [not a stylite] was Orthodox Patriarch of Alexandria from A.D. 611 to A.D. 619. During these years Syria was under Persian military occupation while Egypt was still in Roman hands, and the Patriarch had to cope with an influx of Syrian refugees.] may suggest why it was that the Byzantine in his hour of need turned instinctively for aid and comfort to the ascete in the full assurance of his sympathy and succour. … One of the outstanding features of early Byzantine asceticism is its passion for social justice and its championship of the poor and oppressed.” [Footnote: Dawes, E., and Baynes, N. H.: Three Byzantine Saints (Oxford 1948, Blackwell), pp. 198 and 197.]
The anchorites’ concern and travail for the welfare of their fellow men would still have been recognized without question by their contemporaries if the anchorites themselves had never departed from their chosen and approved way of performing the opus Dei. But there were occasions on which the anchorites showed their love for Man and their humility towards God by breaking the regime of insulation that they had imposed on themselves and returning to the World to intervene in a secular crisis.
Thus [footnote: An English translation of the original Greek text narrating the following story will be found in Dawes and Baynes, op. cit., pp. 49-59. The anonymous author was one of the Saint’s personal attendants.] in A.D. 475-6 Saint Daniel the Stylite, at the instance of the emissaries of the Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople, consented to descend from his pillar at Anaplus, up the Bosphorus, in order to save Orthodoxy from the Monophysite proclivities of the usurping Emperor Basiliscus. [Footnote: Monophysitism versus Orthodoxy was a secular as well as a religious issue at this date, since Monophysitism was becoming the theological expression of the resurgent national consciousness of the non-Hellenic peoples of the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire – particularly the Copts, Syrians, and Armenians – as against the [Chalcedonian] Orthodoxy of the “Melchite” Greek-speaking supporters of the Roman Imperial régime [...].] The mere news of the holy man’s epiphany in the cathedral church of the Apostles in the Imperial City frightened the Emperor into evacuating his own capital and retreating to the imperial palace at the seventh milestone. It was indeed a crushing indictment of his conduct of public affairs that the report of his people’s affliction should have moved the saint to re-emerge from a physical isolation in which, by that time, he had been living already for twenty-four years [footnote: For the first nine years of these twenty-four, Saint Daniel had immured himself in an ex-pagan temple; for the last fifteen he had marooned himself on the top of a pillar.] and which was to have lasted unbroken till his death. Working spiritual acts of psychical and physical healing on his way, Saint Daniel led the clergy and people of Constantinople to beard the truant prince in his suburban asylum; and, when the guards refused the crowd admission to the imperial presence, the saint directed the people to follow him in the scriptural symbolic act of shaking the dust of the palace precincts off their garments [there are references in both Testaments to the gesture of shaking dust off garments or feet] – which they did with such a thunderous reverberation that most of the guards on duty were moved to desert their imperial master and follow in the stylite’s train. In vain the Emperor sent messages after the departing saint to beg him to return to the Hebdomon [the suburb to which he had retreated]; in vain he returned to Constantinople himself and besought Daniel to visit him in his palace there. In the end the Emperor was constrained to present himself before the Saint in the Cathedral and prostrate himself at his feet; and a public profession of Orthodoxy was the price that he eventually had to pay in order to save his throne by setting Daniel at liberty to resume his station on his pillar-top.
This was the sole occasion on which Saint Daniel issued from his physical seclusion during a period of forty-two years (A.D. 451-93) which saw the Roman Empire founder in the West while in the East it escaped shipwreck under the spiritual pilotage of the stylite’s “distant control”.
“For three and thirty years [in total] (A.D. 460-93) he stood for varying periods on the three columns. … During these he was deemed worthy to receive ‘the prize of his high calling’; [footnote (Toynbee or Dawes and Baynes?): Phil. iii. 14.] he blessed all men, he prayed on behalf of all, he counselled all not to be covetous, he instructed all in the things necessary to salvation, he showed hospitality to all [on the top of the column?], yet he possessed nothing on Earth beyond the confines of the spot on which the enclosure and religious houses had been built.” [Footnote: Dawes and Baynes, op. cit., pp. 70-71.]
On the face of it, Saint Daniel’s return to the World in order to rescue his fellow men from political oppression is the same story as the return of Purun Baghat [footnote: Kipling, Rudyard: “The Miracle of Purun Baghat” in The Second Jungle Book [...].] to give warning, to the village below this Hindu hermit’s cave, of an impending landslide that would otherwise have engulfed the villagers unawares. The point is, indeed, the same in the legend of the Christian saint and in the Western storyteller’s version of a Hindu theme. The historic Christian and the imaginary Hindu hermit each rises to his highest spiritual flight by breaking away, for the love of God and Man, from a settled course of physical withdrawal from the World along which he had been seeking spiritual perfection. Yet, though both responded in the same way to the same illumination, there is a difference between their spiritual histories in the crucial point of the relation of the new light that had dawned on them to their previous spiritual outlook. The Christian saint had been led into his physical retreat from the World by the same love of God and Man that eventually moved him to descend from his pillar, whereas the Hindu sage, when he yielded to the impulse of love and pity that sent his feet hastening down the mountainside from the cave to the village, was not fulfilling his philosophy but was flying in its face – and who can say whether he would have brought himself to make this sacrifice “in real life”, if he had been an historical character authentically brought up in a philosophical tradition inherited by Hinduism from a Primitive Buddhist School, instead of having been created, as he was, by the imagination of a Western man of letters brought up in the religious tradition of Christianity?
The truth is that Frazer’s strictures, which miss their mark when he directs them against the saints, find a legitimate target in the philosophers, be they of the Indic or of the Hellenic school, who cultivate a detachment in which the withdrawal leads to no return. The Hinayanian, Stoic, and Epicurean ideal of the sage goes astray through casting Man for a superhuman role of godlike self-sufficiency and thereby condemning the adept to seek a way out of an impossible position by restricting himself to a sub-human performance. This philosophy attempts to make of Man, not a saint inspired by God’s grace, but a very god in himself; and, since this is too heavy a burden for a human soul to bear, the philosopher cannot make even a pretence of carrying it off unless he lightens his self-imposed load by casting out his God-given feelings of love and pity for the rest of God’s creatures.
Stephen Marsh, I suspect, would disagree with what seems to be the thrust of the last section as it concerns the detachment of the Greeks, having written in response to something here, and believing Toynbee to be anyway out of his depth in matters of philosophy: “Stoicism contains a great deal of ethical concern about the world outside the self including the claim that the world is the polis of good men” and “the ideal of euergetism [helping a community through patronage] makes even Epicureans like Diogenes of Oenanda concerned with promoting a good, ie happy, life for their fellow citizens”.
For similarly brilliant references to Kipling, see Mowgli’s finger and Gallicus Tumultus.
A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954
The barbarian hinterland
January 13, 2010Toynbee mischievously parodies his own view of Europe.
From Tripoli to the Alps [en route to London via Rome] we have been on the qui vive; for we have been flying over historic parts of the Oikoumenê. With the Alps behind us, we can relax; for we are entering the civilized World’s barbarian hinterland. France, Britain, Newfoundland, Alaska: these are countries without a history – or, at any rate, without any history to speak of.
“On the qui vive” here = on the lookout at terrain. From the French sentry’s “Qui vive?” = Long live who? = What are your sympathies, who goes there?
The flight was on April 22 1964. The passage was probably syndicated by The Observer. The remark was surely aimed at Trevor-Roper, who had said, about black Africa, in a televised lecture at the University of Sussex in October 1963 (reprinted in The Listener in November and then in The Rise of Christian Europe in 1966): “Perhaps in the future there will be some African history to teach. But at present there is none: there is only the history of Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness.”
Between Niger and Nile, OUP, 1965
The Oceanic world
January 12, 2010In 1965, the year Singapore broke away from Malaysia, it was still just possible to put Singapore and Massawa into the same bracket. Massawa is on an island in the Red Sea. It was the capital of the Italian colony of Eritrea from 1890 to 1900, before Asmara.
Old Massawah is unmistakably Arab. There are tall buildings of fine masonry, decorated with tasteful carving. In this island-city one is worlds away from the Africa of round mud-and-wattle tukuls with thatched roofs. One is in the Oceanic world of Zanzibar and Maskat and Bahrain and Singapore.
Four of those places are islands. The style of Massawah’s buildings is usually described as Ottoman, rather than Arab. Tukuls are the cone-roofed huts found in this part of Africa.
Between Niger and Nile, OUP, 1965
Alzheimer’s and the novel
January 12, 2010The classic instance is Iris Murdoch’s last novel, Jackson’s Dilemma. I have no interest in Iris Murdoch, but I picked it up to examine the language of that book, and it was harrowing to read it, even though, on the surface, it just about made sense.
Agatha Christie is said to have shown signs of a similar dementia in her last novel, Postern of Fate: morbid simplification of language, repetition of phrases, frequent use of indefinite words such as someone or something, non-sequiturs, a barely comprehensible story.
Napoleon and Rome
January 11, 2010When Napoleon set to work to build the débris of a cosmos of medieval Western city-states into an empire founded on the might of the most populous and powerful Western national state of his day, he signalized his intention of providing an effective substitute for “the Holy Roman Empire” by pointedly breaking with the traditional procedure for investiture with the imperial office. Instead of making a pilgrimage to Rome in the wake of an Austrasian Charlemagne and his Saxon and Franconian successors, Napoleon summoned the Pope [Pius VII] from Rome to Paris and required him to assist at his coronation [December 2 1804] in his own imperial capital. Though “the Corsican usurper” himself was neither Roman nor French, Napoleonic Paris might well feel that she could look contemporary Rome in the face. Had not Paris been the intellectual centre of the Western World since the twelfth century and its cultural centre as well since the seventeenth? And was not her new imperial master now doing for Paris what Augustus had done for Rome when – finding her a city of brick and leaving her a city of marble [footnote: Suetonius Tranquillus, C.: The Lives of the Caesars, “Divus Augustus”, chap. xxviii §3] – he gave her the physical presence that befitted the capital of the World? For the drily rational intelligence of a Napoleon, such considerations might be conclusive; yet the event was to prove that, in the Year Thirteen of the New Era of the French Revolution, Napoleon had under-estimated the longevity of traditional pieties. By flouting Rome and bullying her sovereign pontiff, he won, not respect for his own political power, but sympathy for the helplessness of his venerable victim.
parisnotes.com: “Napoleon wisely set up [...] building projects to keep Parisians employed [...]. Napoleon started construction on Père Lachaise cemetery, had parts of the Tuileries and the Louvre rebuilt, began the Madeleine, and ordered the Ourcq Canal dug. Napoleon also ordained that streets should be numbered odd on one side, even on the other, a remarkably practical concept that hadn’t occurred to anyone before.”
Was it, in such a short time, a transformation of the city? His nephew left a deeper and wider mark fifty years later.
David’s painting. Napoleon has taken the crown from a passive pope. Wikipedia has a guide to all the characters.
A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954
Lights of Geneva
January 9, 2010My mind flows back to a day in 1916 when I was standing [...] in front of a triumphal arch put up to celebrate the three hundred and eightieth anniversary of Calvin’s first arrival in the city. “Since that man came here,” said Monsieur Naville deliberately and emphatically, “this place has never been the same again.” “But anyway,” he went on to console himself, “that vulgar electric light along the lake-side has been cut off, thanks to this war.”
This war: it was the First World War, but Monsieur Naville’s war had been, and still was, the South African War, in which he had been an impassioned partisan of Great Britain. The only English newspaper that Monsieur Naville could read with comfort was the Morning Post; The Times was too Jacobin for him to be able to stand it.
He had served as a captain in the Swiss army during the Franco-Prussian War – I suppose when the French Army of the East was driven into neutral Switzerland (Neuchâtel and Vaud) in early 1871, and disarmed, imprisoned and repatriated.
Monsieur Naville was a Genevese aristocrat [I suppose Catholic], which made him an ultra-conservative. He was also an Egyptologist, and this gave him a true historical perspective. Calvin coming; the electric light coming: these were just two almost simultaneous instances of the recent deplorable vulgarization of Monsieur Naville’s home-town. And, for him, Calvin’s arrival was no more historic than the electric lighting’s arrival. A.D. 1536: the date of Calvin’s hijrah was recent indeed by comparison with the date of the Pyramid Builders, or even by comparison with the date of that ancient Egyptian Proto-Calvin Akhenaton. It was not an historic date, like those; it was a current event, and a disagreeable one at that.
Triumphal arch? I think Toynbee is misremembering this. The Reformation Wall in the grounds of Geneva University was erected between 1909 and 1917, but as far as I can tell never had a triumphal arch. 1916 was indeed the 380th anniversary of Calvin’s first arrival in Geneva: his hijrah, as Toynbee so aptly calls it. But a Geneva website points out that 1909, when the wall was inaugurated, was the 400th anniversary of Calvin’s birth and 350th of the foundation of the university: Calvin had founded it in 1559 as a theological seminary.
What was Toynbee doing in Geneva in 1916? Obviously intelligence work. McNeill, his biographer, tells us that he went on a month-long secret mission to Switzerland in 1917. Was Toynbee misremembering again? That passage was probably part of a travel dispatch to the Observer Foreign News Service in 1964. There may have been little time for fact-checking, or did McNeill not mention an earlier visit?
The secret mission was to try to persuade a secret military intelligence office known as “C” to share its reports about Ottoman affairs with him. He saw some of “C”’s political and economic reports, but was refused full access. On his return home, he asked his father-in-law Gilbert Murray (November 12 1917, less than three weeks after the start of the Bolshevik revolution) to intervene with “the grandees at the top” in the hope of persuading them “to take some action which would have a permanent effect”. “The Foreign Office has definite claims on ‘C’, and there seems no reason why these claims should not be insisted on.”
Maugham’s absurdly entertaining Ashenden stories, published in 1928 (one straggler in 1947) are inter alia about espionage in Geneva during the First World War. “At that time Geneva was a hot-bed of intrigue and its home was the hotel at which Ashenden was staying. There were Frenchmen there, Italians and Russians, Turks, Rumanians, Greeks and Egyptians. Some had fled their country, some doubtless represented it. There was a Bulgarian, an agent of Ashenden, whom for greater safety he had never spoken to, even in Geneva [...]. There was a little German prostitute, with china-blue eyes and a doll-like face, who made frequent journeys along the lake and up to Berne [...].” There was Count von Holzminden, the German agent in Vevey. The stories mention an English intelligence officer, not office, called not “C” but “R”.
What about the lights along the lake? Ashenden, crossing the lake after filing reports in Thonon in France, “looked in the direction of Geneva, could see no lights, and the sleet, turning into snow, prevented him from recognising the landmarks. [...]
“There were as usual two police officers on the quay to watch the passengers disembark and Ashenden, walking past them with as unconcerned an air as he could assume, was relieved when he had got safely by. The darkness swallowed him up and he stepped out briskly for his hotel. The wild weather with a scornful gesture had swept all the neatness from the trim promenade. The shops were closed and Ashenden passed only an occasional pedestrian who sidled along, scrunched up, as though he fled from the blind wrath of the unknown. You had a feeling in that black and bitter night that civilization, ashamed of its artificiality, cowered before the fury of elemental things. It was hail now that blew in Ashenden’s face, and the pavement was wet and slippery so that he had to walk with caution. The hotel faced the lake. When he reached it and a page-boy opened the door for him, he entered the hall with a flurry of wind that sent the papers on the porter’s desk flying into the air. Ashenden was dazzled by the light.”
Does that suggest a city, for whatever war-time reason, blacked out? The Toynbee passage is a digression, based on recollections while flying from Tripoli to Rome on April 22 1964, in
Between Niger and Nile, OUP, 1965
Gladstone and the Kindle of the future
January 8, 2010The Kindle will be soft unless you give it a hard binding. (The way French books used to be sold, still are.) I predicted soft screens, which you could scrunch up like handkerchiefs, in the mid-’90s. You’ll be able to riffle the pages, which will give it the three-dimensionality of a book. What we have now is far too linear and stiff. You’ll use gestures only, obviously.
It probably won’t smell, but modern books don’t either, any more than modern life. But there may be solutions for that. Gladstone would have found it strange that seven of Disraeli’s novels could fly invisibly through the air to land in a box which he was carrying for $7.04. He would have paid 31s 6d per 3-volume novel, or £1.57 and a half pence, multiplied by seven equals £11.02 and a half, converted to dollars at today’s rate equals $17.61. More than double.
La comédie humaine
January 7, 2010173 (according to the contents list) decently-presented novels, novellas, stories and plays onto my Kindle for $7.98, including UK tax.
Perhaps I’ll keep this Kindle for that and that only. Which makes the Balzac less of a bargain, but the Kindle more of a book. (Other material can stay archived unless needed.)
Anyone reading this a year or two hence will say: “Why did he write that?”
Not my cover
1959 again
January 6, 2010More from Panorama in 1959, the longest-running BBC television current affairs programme. This time on YouTube. Two or three posts ago, I linked to a recent documentary about how Panorama saw that year.
It goes off the air on January 10 and you may not be able to watch it outside the UK. I can just about remember how Panorama presented the world in its best years; not as early as 1959, but a few years later. The flags were being hoisted down in colony after colony and Britain was changing faster than usual.
Nevertheless, categories such as class, race, youth, colonies leave out vast tracts of life: these reviews always do.
We nearly mock the style of old-fashioned reporting here, until we notice the lack of affectation and stiltedness in much of the journalism from reporters such as Richard Lindley and Christopher Chattaway (old Panorama hands who do most of the presenting in the documentary). Deference had been left behind, irritating journalistic self-assertion hadn’t yet arrived. James Mossman’s reporting (he committed suicide in 1971) on the fate of the miners in the Forest of Dean has a passion which is really moving. But the whole hour is involving.
The first of the clips below, about racism in Britain, has material which is shown in a shorter form in the film. John Dankworth, Cleo Laine and Lonnie Donegan versus the self-professed Nazi Colin Jordan, who only died last year. How good that he lived so long.
The second clip is Panorama on the Leyton by-election of 1965, which the Labour candidate, Patrick Gordon-Walker, supposedly racist himself, lost. Colin Jordan organised a fascist demonstration. Denis Healey, the Labour defence minister, punched him.
The final sequence has interviews with some football supporters on a bus which made me ask the question again that I asked in a Comment after a post about an anti-war film: were we really that physically ugly in 1965?
ΠANTA EIΣΩ
January 5, 2010I girdled Asia, bore her blows,
Her summer suns, her winter snows,
Trod hill and plain from Rum to Ch’in:
Yet all I learnt I found within.
Written in China, December 1929. The Greek title means something like “everything inside”.
Experiences, OUP, 1969
1959
January 5, 2010Wonderful documentary at BBC Four about the year 1959, as seen at the time by the BBC television British and global current affairs programme Panorama.
Only until January 10 and probably only playable if you are in the UK. Television – class – race – youth – Egypt (interviews with a charming Nasser and with street Egyptians) – Cyprus – Bermuda – Central African Federation (Rhodesia and Nyasaland) – South Africa – Macmillan and the “wind of change” (a speech in early 1960) – women – trade unions and I’m Alright, Jack – miners – rubbish (waste) – noise – jazz – gangs and drugs in New York: would they come to Britain? – divided Berlin before the Wall – Ban the Bomb – Mao’s China – the general election.
The film makes the point that the threat to West Berlin from the east was the most commonly cited possible cause of a third world war. We saw that in the scenario of a film made a few years later.
The fascination of this film is in the on the whole far from ludicrously old-fashioned style of Panorama reporting in its great years.
The programme’s theme music from 1968 to ’71 was the thrilling opening of the last movement of Rachmaninov’s first symphony (performers not identified here): the sound of current affairs at the time. The music in 1959 was by Robert Farnon.
BBC Parliament documentary about Westminster during the Second World War, until January 9.
Plus ça change
January 4, 2010If the law of the Universe is really the sardonic law Plus ça change plus c’est la même chose [footnote: Karr, Alphonse: Les Guêpes, January 1849.], no wonder that the poet [Shelley in Hellas] cries for the Buddhist release from a Wheel of Existence which may be a thing of beauty so long as it is merely guiding the stars in their courses, but which is an intolerable tread-mill for our human feet.
Karr published the satirical journal Les Guêpes (The Wasps) from 1839 to 1849.
A Study of History, Vol IV, OUP, 1939
Phaedra
January 3, 2010John Mark Ainsley on Hans Werner Henze’s opera Phaedra, which gets its first English performance at the Barbican in London on January 17. Ainsley will sing Hippolytus.
Ainsley has fallen under Henze’s spell. So has Ian Bostridge. So have I. The illness that interrupted the composition of Phaedra in late 2005 and sent him into a quasi-coma was mysterious. I suppose it was a psychosomatic response to the ordeal of composing an opera at that age, a passage through which he had to struggle before he could complete it and return to a few more years of creative life.
Andrew Clark began this article in the FT on December 7 2005 with the words “As Hans Werner Henze lies dying at his home near Rome”.
Here is a Guardian piece about the forthcoming Henze weekend at the Barbican, which ends with Phaedra. Service says that Schoenberg is “Henze’s great composing hero”. Where does he get that from?
Henze referred to a heart attack which he suffered in the ’70s as an “industrial accident”.
I won’t be here for Phaedra, but hope to see Elegy for Young Lovers at the Young Vic in April.
1922
January 2, 2010“L’orage vient de finir, et cependant nous sommes inquiets, anxieux, comme si l’orage allait éclater.
“Presque toutes les choses humaines demeurent dans une terrible incertitude. Nous considérons ce qui a disparu, nous sommes presque détruits par ce qui est détruit; nous ne savons pas ce qui va naître, et nous pouvons raisonnablement le craindre. Nous espérons vaguement, nous redoutons précisément; nos craintes sont infiniment plus précises que nos espérances; nous confessons que la douceur de vivre est derrière nous, que l’abondance est derrière nous, mais le désarroi et le doute sont en nous et avec nous. Il n’y a pas de tête pensante, si sagace, si instruite qu’on la suppose, qui puisse se flatter de dominer ce malaise, d’échapper à cette impression de ténèbres, de mesurer la durée probable de cette période de troubles dans les échanges vitaux de l’humanité.
“Nous sommes une génération très infortunée à laquelle est échu de voir coïncider le moment de son passage dans la vie avec l’arrivée de ces grands et effrayants événements dont la résonance emplira toute notre vie.” [Footnote: Valéry, Paul: Extrait d’une conférence donnée à l’université de Zurich le 15 Novembre 1922, reprinted in Variété, pp. 33-34. [...]]
An earlier footnote gives the source as
Variété (Paris 1924, Gallimard, Éditions de la Nouvelle Revue Française) [...].
A Study of History, Vol IX, OUP, 1954
