An emperor's nose

My friend describes what it was like to grow up here. He recalls roller-skating across the uninterrupted procession of state rooms on the third level; playing hide-and-seek in the closed rooms; and football in the courtyard, with the somber Roman Emperors for audience and judges. Once, he says, a stray shot, going wide off the goal, knocked Hadrian on the head and – off the pedestal. The ruler of Orbis Cognita fell flat on his face – and broke off his nose. The two boys were unable to hoist him back up alone and had to call in a footman, having first sworn him to total secrecy. The task was accomplished, the Emperor returned to his dignified elevation – and the crime never discovered: apparently no one ever looked at the Emperors close enough or long enough to notice that the nose of one had suddenly gone missing. My friend says he carried the nose in his pocket for many months afterwards, a kind of trophy.

I was reminded of a story by Tanizaki in which a fifteen year old samurai defeats an enemy but fails to take his head, it being too big for him to lop off, and makes away with just the nose instead. All sorts of complications follow when the defeated samurai turns out not to have been quite dead.

Well, yes, but the nose of an emperor!

Living on Grand Canal

There are over forty rooms in this house, and that’s not counting the mezzanine and the attic – various servants’ quarters and store rooms and such. My friends, when they are in Venice, which is ever more rare, so rare in fact that it is almost never, reside in the middling sized rooms in the southern wing, respectable rooms, with Southern exposure, and not too large, with 3 meter ceilings, which all makes them easier to heat and get around in. After all, who in this day and age, wants to walk several minutes just to get to his library?

Personally, I can’t help feeling their decision is – well – modern (so as not to say middle class): practical, comfortable, and casual. But I, since I was free to choose any room I liked, chose the Portego – the classical Venetian state room. It is on the third level of the house, the first being the damp sea level, which includes the boat parking, the second – the mezzanine – the servants quarters. The Portego is the size of a small football field (I should guess, not having ever been to one), has 12 meter ceilings, and two galleries, one on each side of the room. Once, when balls were given here, the orchestra was placed here while the lords and ladies danced below. The southern and northern walls, under the galleries, each have a set of titanic doors in them which lead to other sections of the house while the east and west walls each have a row of tall, ogee-arched windows: one gives out on the Canal, the other on the inner courtyard. The courtyard is a deep broad well, very classical, complete with Doric columns and life-sized Roman emperors in Carrara marble. (One, I am told, is a Canova).

The walls of the Portego, peeling in places, are covered with faded frescoes by Morleiter, which are, for the most part, difficult to make out. There is also magnificent plaster work, largely in bad repair, of mother of pearl shells, olive branches, and broad leafy plant I have decided must be cabbage. From the ceiling, also covered with plaster work and faded frescoes – the usual apotheosis of the resident family – chubby ladies and gentlemen rendered unhealthy looking by years of hard living, receiving obeisance of Apollo and the Muses, as far as I have been able to make it out – there hang two fantastically twisty Murano chandeliers, like gigantic snowflakes, each the size of a compact car. Though they had been wired for electricity early in the 20th century, I have been unable to get them lit.

I had the bed brought in – a large 16th century job, heavy as all creation, reddish orange with a moth-eaten white and gold brocade baldachino – and placed smack in the middle of the Portego, feet facing east. The first light of the breaking day, coming in through the lead glass windows, wakes me by glowing dimly into my morning dreams. When I fall asleep the ceiling frescoes, briefly ripped out of darkness by the swinging lights of passing boats, look down upon me several times an hour.

The desk I placed at the window – that way I can get a passable wireless signal for this laptop – as well as have good writing light all day, regardless of weather.

The only other room, if you can call it that, which I use with any frequency, is the balcony on top floor. It is a good place to sunbathe on a warm day since the house is bigger than all the surrounding structures. All I can see from there, when lying down, is the open sky. Last week I had the tub brought up there and bathed deliciously in soapy froth under the two faux Egyptian obelisks which grace the roof.

The Canal in front is quite busy all day; there hangs over it a constant hum of hundreds of internal combustion engines laboring their way up, down, and across. But come 8 PM, the traffic thins out to the occasional water bus, and it becomes very quiet and very dark indeed. With the exception of the few houses used for government offices or museums, which shut down at night, and the very few waterfront hotels, most houses in the Grand Canal are shuttered up. The city’s heart – the Canal – has been dead at night these 50 or 60 years.

I like to sit by the Canal windows – the panes are made of the bottle-bottom kind of glass, which admits light but no vision – watching the dusk gather in. Only when it gets very dark do I light a desk top chandelier – I decided against electrical light after the first few nights – and take it to the bed. There, I place it on a chair next to the state bed, crawl into the damp, cold sheets, and read. Or just look up through the 12 meters of darkness and the vague shapes of my friends’ ancestors graciously receiving homage of the gods. Every quarter of an hour a sweep of the oblique light of a passing boat brings them back into vision: fifteens seconds of immortality for a family now dead two hundred years.

I walk past here everyday

Scuole ("Schools") were civic association organized under a charter of the Republic of Venice. Their purposes were always religious -- a performance of a certain religious function or a particular form of veneration. (Originally, in the 1200's, they were lay associations of flagellants, there being a kind of boom in the practice). In addition, the schools also often served other interests of their members. Some -- dei Albanesi, dei Greci, dei Lucchesi, dei Tedeschi, and dei Schiavoni -- united resident aliens of different nations. Others united professions -- tailors, silk weavers, shoemakers, makers of silk belts, rope-makers and so forth.

Scuola del Cristo, or del Buona Morte, was founded in 1635, next to the Church of San Marcuola, in Canaregio. It's purpose was collecting the bodies of unknown dead -- usually assorted homeless -- and giving them honorable burial. (Those killed in motorcycle accidents in Bangkok are almost certain to be given their last service by a similar religious volunteer organization, whose members, like those of Scuola del Cristo, also see their work as important merit-making).

In 1742, the Scuola began to see a sharp rise in the cases of dead children. They were street urchins. All were strangled and dumped in the canals in different parts of the city, at night. Today's criminologists would immediately recognize the pattern as a serial killer on the prowl. A special task force would be put together and a massive hunt for the murderer put on. But in the 18th century such organizations did not exist; and in any case, the state did not see it as its duty to prevent the culling of social undesirables.

Members of the Scuola del Cristo, having failed to interest the authorities in the problem, continued quietly to bury the dead until, several years later, the cases ceased, the perpetrator having perhaps met his own death, or moved to disport himself elsewhere.

Several members of the Scuola had speculated that these may have been cases of witchcraft; or ritual killing. Perhaps Jews from nearby ghetto were involved? Or, perhaps, a vampire has manifested itself in the city - there was a large population of Wallachians in Venice. One Scuola member had even proposed that the Scuola organize night watch in order to prevent the murders, perhaps even capture the perpetrator.

Nothing came of those efforts.

Now, the Scuola offered a thanksgiving mass for the city's delivery from the monstrous goings on. The story is completely forgotten.

About money

I invited Anne to Venice. I said she could bring her boyfriend, too. When she wrote that they would like to come for a week, I responded that they are welcome to stay three days with me, but that the balance of the week they shall have lodge in a hotel and I offered to cover its cost. Anne refused and is not coming.

My relationship with Anne has been troubled by money in a million little ways: she refuses to be taken out to eat, for instance. The grounds are supposedly pride, though I am not sure why that should be so: we have known each other since we were both eleven. She is the one person in my life whom I have known longest. Having known me all these years, she knows well that I never try to take advantage of my relative wealth to put her under any sort of obligation.

Poor people – by which I mean anyone who counts the price of what he buys in the supermarket – feel about money differently from us. Perhaps because they are not likely to be given anything as a gift but it has a hidden price attached to it.

But in this case, the thinking is puzzling: Anne would rather inconvenience me as my guest at my house for 7 days than accept the cost of a hotel room. It is in keeping with the European prohibition against ever giving money as gift, but it makes no sense, does it.

Clearly, I have not been tactful in making my offer.

Not a beautiful story

Thinking about my post of yesterday, this morning, in the shower, I was reminded of something.

Once, while we were looking at a Botticelli Adoration of the Magi (the one with the Medici and the supposed self-portrait) Patricia asked me whether I did not think “it was a beautiful story”. I suppose she meant the birth in the stable, the angels, the shepherds, and the Magi. Perhaps the peacocks and the beautifully dressed Medici at the edges of the picture, too.

Of course, any mother is inclined to think any birth an amazingly beautiful thing. Research shows that mothers are rendered temporarily insane during the act and their memories of the event are subsequently occluded. (They must be, otherwise no one could possibly want to repeat the ordeal -- and a minimum 2.0 birth to mother ratio is needed to sustain the population).

But, surely, Patricia can’t possibly mean the immaculate conception ("thou shalt have a baby"/"I am your servant, o lord" -- did i hear anyone pronounce the word "free will"?); the slaughter of the innocents; or any of the other dreadful stuff that followed: "one does not cast pearls before swine”; the hideous death on the cross; St Thomas sticking his fingers in Christ’s putrid wounds.

Blah. I am hard-pressed to find anything beautiful here.

Explaining The Great Western Civilization to Asians

In the church of San Rafaele – Venetians are unique among Catholics in building churches dedicated to Old Testament figures and Angels – there is a beautifully painted organ parapet. It is by Guardi and represents the story of Toby.

Actually the cycle looks better from the ground than up close, which may be interpreted in two ways: either Guardi was in fact a lousy painter or else he knew what Michelangelo had to learn the hard way while painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling: things to be viewed from far away can be pretty sketchy since the visual cortex of the viewer fills in the missing but barely suggested details. In any case, the figures are graceful and the lighting dreamily beautiful. If Guardi was lousy at anything, it was in rendering human faces, but in this instance, these are too small to see from the church floor.

I was obliged to explain the story of Toby – told in the painting – to some Asian friends lately. I feel sheepish whenever I have to explain anything biblical since all the stories are so patently god-damned-awful. Forget for a moment that it is a biblical story and try to hear it with an objective ear: a Jewish man in Assyria sends his son to wed a Jewish woman in Ecbatana (Assyrian women are no good). The boy travels in the company of a beautiful man. While crossing Tigris he is nearly eaten by a giant fish. With the help of his companion he manages to kill it and acting on his advice he keeps its internal organs. The boy then arrives in Ecbatana and marries the girl, but, it turns out, the girl is cursed and he who deflowers her shall die instant death. The stranger suggests the couple spend first half of the night praying while they burn some fish innards on a brazier, which they do; and which allows the boy to deflower the girl without harm. The couple then go back to Assyria where the boy uses the fish bile to heal his father’s blindness. When all turn to the stranger to thank him, he says “do not thank me, but the almighty god” and reveals that he is Archangel Raphael.

Now, tell me, what kind of a dumb story is that?

Though, of course, it is not nearly as revolting as the story of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac to god.

Which was, we are told, a good thing.

Yuck.

Now, you figure how to present this story in palatable light to anyone not potty-trained to have a positive reaction to anything deemed "biblical". I can't.

Why financial reporting is so damn awful

Riccardo thinks complexity has no appealing value. In thus extrapolating his own preferences over the population, Riccardo is mistaken; I, at least, enjoy complexity. And when it comes to complexity it is hard to find anything more pleasurable than reading the financial reports of monoline insurers (MBI, ABK).

These have been in the news lately, setting the whole reporting community – both newsmen and blogmen alike – abuzz. By and large the news has been Jeremaic: the companies are on the verge of spectacular collapse and they will take the whole financial world down with them, and, who knows, perhaps the world as we know it, too. Reading, talking, sitting in on conferences, and above all checking on the news reports, I have come to the conclusion that the news is bad, but not as bad as the newsmen – and the markets – made it out and bought quite a lot.

In the process of conducting my research I have discovered just how lousy and erroneous financial reporting is: quite often, reporters seem to latch onto a phrase and then give it an outsize interpretation which was not intended in the original report. Why would they do this?

There are three reasons.

First, the maths involved is difficult. It isn’t exactly rocket science – in fact, it is hardly anything such – but it isn’t third grade arithmetic, either. The reporters simply do not understand well what they are reporting, which is why their reports are so often so difficult to follow. (A murky explanation is a sure sign that the explainer is in the dark himself).

Second, as a human species we have a strong preference for the scary. We have scared each other with ghost stories since the beginning of all time, and with horror movies since the beginning of the movies. It just feels more relevant to entitle a story “MBIA collapse imminent” when “Trouble at MBIA” would have been a more accurate title. That scare mongering sells more newspaper copy doesn’t hurt, either, even if it is not the principal motivation.

Finally, newspapermen are relatively poorly paid and stand quite low on the Wall Street totem pole. This perhaps makes them a little more than ready to embrace with glee – and promptly pass on – any suggestion that the rich bankers and traders stand to lose their shirts. Such stories tend to emphasize how stupid (and greedy) these bankers have been in making their disastrous investments; this, of course, amounts to saying how smart (and morally tempered) we journalists, who have not made such bets, have been by comparison. In other words: we journalists may not be as rich, but at least we are smarter and more decent.

Journalists aren’t different from the rest of us. They too spend a great deal of their time inventing excuses for their inadequacy.

My father's money

My father wrote to me:

You have never loved me. All you have ever wanted from me was my money. Therefore, unless you write to me immediately, I am going to strike you out of my will.

My father came to America penniless and in his middle age. Through hard work, he earned that amount of capital, stability and well being which is usual with the American middle class. The false comparison between his youth in Europe and his mature age in America has made him perhaps more proud of that accomplishment than it should have: most middle class Americans would consider that level of accomplishment a birthright rather than success.

Perhaps it is this pride which made him overlook the obvious – that his note effectively checkmated me – and him, and any chance of reconciliation. Did he not notice that, were I to write to him now – presumably to avoid dispossession – I would be proving nothing but precisely the theory that I have never wanted from him anything other than his money?

Falsely proud myself, I didn’t write.

But who is to say – perhaps the fact (which my father does not know) that I could easily buy his entire legacy with the spare cash on my balance sheet had something to do with the decision.

Rome and the barbarians

Whatever you do, do not go to see the overhyped show on “Rome and the Barbarians”, now, until July, at Palazzo Grassi, Venice.

I am no expert in these matters and therefore cannot know whether the exhibits assembled in the show are incredibly rare and precious; a few perhaps are – the crown of Suetilla, King of the Visigoths perhaps is, the Massimo catafalque definitely is; but from the aesthetic perspective, nearly all are utter junk. Literally: many items are just that: there seems to be an incredible number of sewing needles and rusted spear points. More than half the show is made up of fibulae – outsize decorative safety pins – which is great if the show were entitled “Roman and Barbarian fibulae III-V century A.D.” and cost 3 euro, not 15.

The display leaves a lot to be desired. First, for reasons unknown, the interior of palazzo Grassi, the main object of interest which sent me to the show, has for the purpose of this show been entirely laid with grey lining so as to hide all internal decoration from the likes of me who would see the interior without paying for it specifically. (One is relieved the organizers had insufficient funds to cover, in the same grey paneling, the delicious ceilings. Thank you, God. Thank you. Thank you).

Second, the labeling of the items is negligent: about half are unaccounted for; those which have labels are labeled in a haphazard order which makes it laborious in the extreme to figure out which label applies to which item. The labels are in any case insufficient: they give no explanation. “Phalarae”, says one. “2^nd century. So-and-so provincial museum, Germany.” There is not a word on what Phalarae are; or of how they were found or when, for example. In most instances, not a word of where and when these objects may have been made, either. At first I assumed this was intentional negligence, intended to make you buy the 5 euro audio guide, but no, less than one in four items has an audio explanation. So the explanations are lacking by design for no reason at all.

Further, often the labels are wrong: “gold and stones” says one description where “enamel on gold” would have been more correct.

The labels are bilingual, Italian and English, but the English is a joke. Umbone, says one Italian label. Umbone, says the English. Er – say what?!

The educational value of the show is negligible: the large panels and computer screens tell history we all know from 6^th grade.

And the Italian setting clinches the feeling of being ripped off: the cloak room accepts bags for free but charges two euro for every coat, including the windbreaker you just put in your bag before handing it in. “I saw you put it in”, said the cloakroom attendant with the sharp voice of the policeman who had just caught me shoplifting. “Now I have to charge you. And no, you cannot go out now to put it in out of my eyesight. Your ticket has already been cancelled. Look, what would happen if everybody would put their jacket in their bag, eh?” Er… I guess the museum would – lose two euros? How low the Italian state has fallen: the Italians museums now are reduced to laughable catch 23 maneuvers to make extra 2 euros. Come on, just charge 2 euro more for the ticket, and be big and take the jackets at no fee, will you?

By the way, I do not recommend you buy the catalogue, either. The illustrations give you no more explanations of the items pictured than the labels in the museum; and, in addition, they fail to indicate sizes of items pictured so you do not know if what you are looking at is life-sized or microscopic.

Give this show wide birth: it is a complete waste of your time and money.

Agnes does not report to work

Agnes faced a conundrum: she was offered a job which she hated and which bored her, but which offered remuneration of the sort she was not likely to be offered again. Having carefully considered, she declined; whereupon the company nearly doubled the offer. Agnes underwent a week of torment: take it, or not? A job she did not want hanged over her like the sword of Damocles but everyone – except her husband – was pushing her to accept it. It would be foolish not to at your age, they said -- Agnes is middle aged -- such offer may never come again. Since I never take advice, I also do not offer. Thus I did not offer it this time, either.

In the end, Agnes refused. Well done, I said upon hearing the news. You didn’t need it, did you? (No, she didn’t. The children have left the house; the house was paid off; she liked what she was doing, even if the pay wasn’t great). Everyone else, she said, declared me mentally deranged. Everyone else, I said, is like everyone else. And I told her a story:

Europeans, with reverence for things deep, are inclined to think personal happiness trivial. Other things matter more: Bolsheviks, civilization, church, the motherland… (the list of things we have invented to justify our personal misery is quite long). Americans, a simple people, think otherwise – and research it.

Perhaps one has to be prepared to admit to being a dumb know-nothing – in other (European) words, an American – to hit upon ideas of true genius, such as: to conduct a survey of happiness and to plot the results against the time of the week. This apparently silly survey turned out ground-breaking: the unhappiest time of the week turned out to be… Saturday morning. Why? Because on Saturday mornings… people find themselves uncertain what to do. (By Saturday afternoon things generally improve: by then they have decided to mow the lawn or work on the boat and the misery of directionlessness has lifted).

The survey thus unexpectedly shed light on the importance of employment. Bosses, it turns out, are valuable in two ways. First, by paying us (and therefore making us feel that we are worth something, even if that something is measly $4.35 an hour), they give us a sense of self-importance -- a justification for existence; and, second, by telling us what to do they lift from our shoulders the heavy responsibility of deciding of what to do with ourselves.

Or should I say, them.

For I have never liked any of my jobs; and have never needed one to occupy my time. (Somehow, I always seemed to know what I wanted to do, a character trait called autotelic – “self-purpose” – personality).

And thus, this observation, like all my general remarks about humanity, seem to describe a species I do not belong to.

I am, I suppose, like Pieter Kien, the hero of Canetti’s Auto-da-fe: each time he steps out (from his windowless library) he finds himself compelled, upon return, to scribble down in his journal another observation about people’s foolishness. It’s funny; he is perhaps meant as a caricature, an imperfect man ("head without the world"); yet, he seems so... true.

PS

Several people asked to guess the results of the happiness survey have since guessed it correctly; showing that they too feel unhappiest on Saturday morning; which has never ever been the case with me. Clearly, I am an aberration.

Old Lucy

Last night I read in The Burlington Magazine – in a carved wooden chair under the high vault and faded frescoes of the Querini Stampalia library – an essay about E. M. Forster, the aesthete English writer; his friendship with the painter, art historian and critic Roger Fry; and Old Lucy, the first version of the novel which was in due course to become A Room With A View.

(I ought to confess here that I have an inordinate, altogether unreasonable fondness for E.M. Forster.

This is due in part to his aesthetic sensitivity (like mine, really), in part to the familiarity of his life story (he repeatedly escaped the stuffiness of the first world to be in beautiful and unruly third world places like India and... Italy), and in part to the extrovert beauty of his prose; but most of all on account of a memory of the extraordinary effect which his Passage to India had on me on first reading, many years ago.

I was then a poor student at the National Normal University in Taipei by day and a teacher of English by night. My life was miserable. I lived in a messy, crowded, expensive, polluted, ugly city, on a lousy income, working and studying 18 hour days, and dealing for the most part with people who had no interest in anything but commerce. My life was almost entirely devoid of pleasure and beauty, I was constantly sleep deprived, and I kept repeating to myself, “surely, this is not what this is all about; surely, it cannot be”.

And then the Passage to India – I am not sure how it fell into my hands, or when I found the time to read it – simply knocked me out. One morning I simply found myself unable to venture out into the street. The novel’s beauty made my soul so tender, so delicate, so shimmering with otherworldly glow that – I simply could not face the world. And I didn’t. I locked the door; pulled down the curtains; turned off the phone; and for three days I lived on whatever remained in the fridge, by turns reading and -- whimpering to myself. After three days a classmate came to look me up, to see whether I was still alive. Gradually, she nursed me back to life).

So, you see, on account of that experience, whenever I come across an essay about Old Forest, I simply have to read it.

And so I did last night.

*

Now, back to the essay.

You will recall that the way A Room with a view now stands, it is a story of English enthusiasts of Italian art in Florence; its hero is an Adonis-like railway clerk; and the story is a love story in which the passionate Lucy chooses passion for this passionate Adonis over her earlier commitment to a refined but passionately reserved art professional connoisseur. Italian art and everyone’s passion for it hang in the background as decoration (as ancient Egypt or Renaissance Verona may in other works); but though they are sometimes used as a litmus test of the heroes’ sensitivity and intelligence, they are no more important than that. The story is a rather conventional love-story-cum-moral-conundrum and it could have been set in almost any other setting. (And has been over the centuries). Really, the Room, except for its resolution, can easily be mistaken for a story of the morally upright Jane Austen or George Eliot.

(Incidentally, you know of course that the reason why George Eliot was so darnedly morally upright in her novels is precisely because in real life she was – not. Which is just the opposite of Old Forest, actually).

Now, according to the Burlington article, the original version of A room with a view -- Old Lucy E.M. referred to it later – was in fact a much more interesting book. Instead of the formulaic Jane Austen/ George Eliot love-versus-moral-dilemma of the final version (yawn) the first draft was actually a fresh and original novel, setting out to treat a heretofore novelisticly untreated real life problem.

Its hero was a young art lover and its plot was his struggle with his relationship to art. It went like this: art’s beauty drew him towards others with similar interest, but these others were all turning out a disappointment. On the one hand, there were the amateurs who were more or less mindlessly following their chosen bossy guidebooks (whether Baedeker or Ruskin), and whose conversations, while invigoratingly enthusiastic, were – well – (shall we say) – “uniformed” (so as not to say: dumb). On the other hand there were the professionals – the art historians we would say today – the Bernhard Behrensons and Roger Fries – who were engaged in far more complex, far more intellectually sophisticated debates regarding art, but who chose to limit these very debates to the mind-numbingly narrow issues of attribution and dating which also disappointed: they seemed to miss entirely precisely that which made art worth pursuing to the hero – one’s psychological response to it.

Now, Old Lucy’s hero, a brainy fellow named Tancred (later renamed less pretentious and more English, “Arthur”, the name change being an important foreshadowing) was – like Old Forest one suspects – inclined to reject both these approaches. He felt turned off by his art-minded friends and at first thought that his response to the call of art should be to become an artist himself. But Leo Tolstoy’s essay What is art? and Lucy, who in the first draft does not fall in love with him (nor does he with her) convinces him in the end to give up that ambition since art fails to increase interconnectedness among men. (Which is of course a point thoroughly illustrated by his social encounters with art lovers in Florence). Whereupon Arthur leaves Italy, his future a question mark.

There.

No love story.

An internal drama – conflict and resolution – of a sensitive and intelligent man, yes, but – no sex-appeal. A real life conundrum, but one that has nothing to do with either parentage or finance or muscle or gonads. An intelligent woman heroine, yes, but one who neither sweeps one off his feet nor swoons herself – a woman as an intellectual foil.

How refreshingly original. Just the sort of novel no one ever seems to write.

*

Of course, Old Forrest did well to rewrite the book: the new version sold, got made into a movie, became famous, and he with it. But, in the course of rewriting it, he wrote an altogether new book, a different book, a book about different heroes and different problems. These problems are common problems, general problems. (After all, everyone experiences morally twisted passionate entanglements from time to time). Their commonplace made the book accessible and helped sell it.

But the result was also a duller book: it shunts what was central in Old Lucy into mere background decoration. And the experiences of those of us who love art but feel intellectually dissatisfied by the social encounters it offers and who are therefore rendered speechless and condemned to loneliness in the process – the theme of Old Lucy – disappeared altogether. Art, and the aesthetic experience, yet again was shown simply too marginal – a heartfelt issue to too few of us – to make a bestselling novel. So it does not get written up at all; or, if it does, it does not get published.

Bestseller or bust, I suppose.

But I won’t bore you with my novel-hate again.

*

Instead, a few words about interconnectedness.

It was of course Forster’s lifetime theme. His other novels – Maurice, Passage to India – are all about the impossibility to connect with others. Perhaps this was unavoidable in a homosexual man in Victorian times: there were tremendous obstacles to love and then, even when it did happen, to fulfillment. But Old Lucy suggests another cause of Old Forrest’s loneliness, above and beyond his homosexuality: his intellectual interests. A passionate response to beauty is rare enough; the ability to think (and talk) about it intelligently is even rarer. And the aesthetic experience is, in any case, an intensely private affair: it happens in our heads and no one else has any access to it. The urge to ask “do you feel what I feel?” is understandable, but silly: one can hardly explain well enough what one feels to hope to be understood, let alone to get an answer.

Old Lucy’s proposed answer to the problem, it seemed, was to give up art. (Take up something else instead, I suppose, something more likely to increase one’s interconnectedness: boy-scouting or rugby or Swedish massage come to mind).

I find the solution disappointing. The one I would propose, if I were asked to rewrite its ending, would be to give up on interconnectedness instead. Everything in life has a price and sometimes the price one has to pay for things is loneliness. And one just has to pay it, like one pays for a museum admission ticket, or one’s season pass to the opera.

Besides, it really isn’t such a bad price to pay: just look around and you will see.

*

Myself, I am getting better at it.

On March 1^st, at sunset, I flew in a small jet from Rome to Venice. As we flew over Tuscany, outside the window, to my left, I could see the great glistening convex mirror of the Bay of Genoa with Elba and some smaller islands in the middle – I hadn’t known they existed – and, higher up, just where the earth bent out of view, the French Alps, tiny like baby’s teeth, glistening pink in sunlight, and marching, like Hannibal’s elephants, to the sea. As we flew north, towards the wall of clouds which swathed Switzerland, and the sun sank, a different view opened, a classic scene replayed in countless paintings of The Damnation of the Fallen Angels: a clear, cream-yellow sky up top, in which there hung the evening star, as obnoxious as if it had been nailed; in the middle, an intense swirling red-orange ado of light from the sun which had just set, diffused through the vagueness of cloud-or-mist-sort-of-thing (a Turner-Sisley-kind of job – only better); and beneath, an area of darkness: a gradient wash ranging from light grayish blue up top to near-black at the bottom, something straight from Beccafumi; and cutting through it the bright silver tape of the Po falling downwards, into the night, towards Ravenna.

As far as I could tell, I was the only one on the plane paying any of this the slightest attention. Others were busy leafing through inflight magazines, playing with gadgets, watching movies, eating peanuts and flirting with stewardesses (one was good, but no contest for the scene outside, if you ask me). Now, if Old Forrest were to ask me, I suppose I would have to say that I did not feel particularly interconnected at the moment. But then, I didn’t seem to need to be interconnected: there didn’t seem much point in being interconnected with anyone who, his left cheek ablaze in the glow of the sunset yet was not paying it any attention. And if anyone were paying it attention – well, then, I would not want to disturb their reverie, would I? In fact, I was quite content in that moment and in its profound loneliness (if that is what one calls it). The pleasure and wonder of being there and gazing at it all did not require third party validation.

So my answer, you see, would seem to be the opposite of E.M.’s: I would not want to give up the inner aesthetic life for the illusion of social interconnectedness. The trick is – it seems to me – not to mind the loneliness.

*

I have written elsewhere that the aesthetic experience, like piano-playing, is a skill for which a certain degree of native talent is required but which above all requires constant practice: we must learn to notice how we feel about things. And I have also written elsewhere how such learning happens in pairs – how we need the guidance of others to help us see things; and their audience to help us describe what we see in words which we ourselves can hear and understand. But perhaps the aesthetic experience is like riding a bicycle: we need the stabilizing hand of another to help us get our bearing, learn to keep balance, to fall always forward, in the direction in which the bicycle rolls; but once we have learned it, we can ride by ourselves.

At that point, interconnection is no longer required.

On the French and Italian baroque operas

There are many differences between the French and Italian opera – the orchestration is different as are the styles of ornamentation; the French version requires dance divertimenti, is in five as opposed to Italian three acts, and the best music begins about the middle (since the first half was likely to be missed by the late arriving aristocrats) and so forth. One could write a long book on the subject. (Why, several have been written).

But the most essential difference is best captured by the two genres' respective vocabularies.

In the Italian baroque opera the most important words are, in descending order, vendetta (revenge), amore (love), sangue (blood), traditore (traitor), crudele (cruel) and disprezata (rejected); this reflects the opera’s preoccupation with intrigue, principally love intrigue.

By comparison, the French opera operates with a vocabulary indicative of less complex life strategies. The principal words of the French opera are gloire (glory), triumphe (triumph), victoire (victory), immortel (immortal), la chasse (the hunt). Amour comes only after chasse, because love is seen as a kind of a chase, I suppose, rather than entrapment. And there is none of this Italian scheming which requires terms like treachery and revenge.

The baroque French gentlemen fought not to right a scheming wrong but simply to establish their gloire immortelle through acts of armed victoire which did not need to be classified as either traîtrise or vengeance. You see, the French warrior needed no excuse to fight. To fight was glorious. It was natural and self-evident.

I confess that living among the furbo (cunning) Italians who daily display such amazing feats of cunning and alacrity in their everyday life, achieving the competitive life tasks – short changing a customer, securing the best seat on the bus – with art unsurpassed even by the Cantonese, I grow wistful for the simplicity of the baroque French life. Really, what could be easier to understand than man-man-stick. Honestly, I’d love to live the life for a day (maybe even two): wham bam, the best man is the one left standing. (With, maybe, in Hotspur’s phrase, crack’d skull and bleeing nose).

But there is something about this glorious life style which sits uneasy with me, and it is... the gloire itself. Gloire, it seems, the guarantor of one’s immortalité, lies in the fame which one assures for himself through all these superior feats of arms. The purpose of the superior feat of arms, therefore, it turns out, is not so much to secure for oneself the aforementioned crack’d skull, or the wonderful adrenaline rush which follows one's enemy’s thunderous collapse on the beaten ground (all that heavy armor) but – get this – what a deflator! – the favorable opinion of tout le monde.

Duh.

This actually seems to me not a very glorious thing at all. After all, is not the principal measure of one’s own superiority the ability not to care about the opinions of those whom one judges beneath himself? Really, think about it: taking an interest in the opinion of another person amounts of admitting their superiority -- their entitlement to judge us. After all, we care what grade our teachers give us, or what Mom thinks about the grades we bring home, because we depend on these people for something. On the other hand, the people we do not depend upon are free to think whatever they damn please.

And thus independence must surely mean indifference to the opinions of others and therefore, per force, to one’s gloire. For this reason, I think I would enjoy the inanities of French opera a lot more if the heroes did unto each other not for gloire but simply... because it felt good.

Still, it’s not bad opera, really, especially if the ballet divertimenti turn out half-decent.

Some thoughts regarding motorcycling

Some time ago I found myself defending a motor-biking project (the project was to ride a bike in Eastern Turkey). My interlocutors felt that what I was proposing – to ride a 125 cc bike – as I like to do, slowly, on local roads, for no more than 2 hours a day – it seems to me that one sees more of the country that way – was wrong.

The wrongness of the project lay in all sorts of things, of course, such as the general inhospitability of the country, the wildness of the populace, the relative thickness of suicide bombers on the ground, lack of reliable access to MTV and Coca-Cola, and so forth, but the principal fault of my project lay with the size of my bike. 125 cc, I was told authoritatively, was for a big trip like this just completely, wholly inadequate. I tried to explain that due to recent advances in the technology, the new 125 cc bikes are very efficient, quite powerful, and with very high gearing ratio they accelerate rapidly and can climb very steep inclines with ease. And that they also practically do not break (except the occasional flat tire). Finally, that I felt more comfortable on 125 cc bikes than on anything bigger than that.

But all my explanations were in vain: the machine I proposed to use was simply the wrong piece of equipment for the road. I could not understand my interlocutors’ objections and was becoming quite upset at my own dimwittedness which prevented me from understanding somehow just why my bike was so wholly wrong a piece of business until, suddenly, with a profound sense of relief, I realized something which should have been blindingly obvious to me from the start – I that my interlocutors were like many of those who have proposed to give me advance in the past. They had no idea what they were talking about. Neither has ever ridden a bike in his life. They were, in other words, complete idiots.

This of course never stops anyone from offering advice. Indeed, it often seems that those most free with advice are precisely the ones least qualified to give it.