LETTER FROM NOTTING HILL APRIL 2014

Spring Rambles

I have struggled to write about something other than politics, but every time I sit down to put something together my mind begins to wander and I become unfocused; everything I write descending rapidly into a discursive and eventually incoherent ramble.

This is I suspect the product of a being in a state characterised by the daily bombardment with actions that are outrageous, unjust, unprincipled and nakedly cynical. This sense of daily rage and disorientation is a direct consequence of the internet age. Fiveteen years ago my primary sources of news were the Guardian and the BBC, with more complex international stories largely excluded from the mainstream agenda. Now I have access to countless broadcasting agencies, newspapers, magazines and the blogosphere. Before I have even had breakfast I have digested half a dozen news items, all honing in on stories of major concern to me, from civil liberties to social justice, economics and the arts. Stories drawing attention to censorship, the international criminality of tax evasion and avoidance, the  destruction of basic labour rights, poverty and economic hardship. My in-box is full of demands that I sign this or that petition, highlighting a range of scandals and injustices, all worthy of my time, energy and, should I have any, money. By mid morning I am in a state somewhere between apoplexy and impotence. I am suffering from injustice overload.

Don’t get me wrong, this is an observation not a criticism. I can think of nothing, with the exception of learning to read, that has had such an impact upon my life than the combination of the internet and home PC. The world was changed fundementally for me and now I and millions of people across the planet have access to a previously unimaginable rich resource, an information and communication tool that straddles the planet. I would not be writing this and speaking to you without it. And like all such gifts it brings with it a raft of unimagined consequences.

I am minded of the story, amost certainly apocryphal, of a tribe in Papua New Guinea, hitherto completely isolated from the rest of the world. ‘Discovered’ by an Australian journalist who introduced them to the wonders of the radio. One of the first items on the news that day was the story of a young child from Sydney who had witnessed both his parents killed by an intruder. The tribe were galvanised, they pooled all their resources to provide something for the young orphan. One imagines a year or so later such a story was unlikely to illicit such a response.

Spring came early this year so that by mid-March the trees were already heavily laden with white blossom, this has now almost all fallen from the branches, though for some reason the pink blossom still remains in all its glory. I can never see trees covered in blossom without thinking of Houseman:-

’LOVELIEST of trees, the cherry now      

Is hung with bloom along the bough,     

And stands about the woodland ride      

Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,            

Twenty will not come again,  

And take from seventy springs a score,  

It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom       

Fifty springs are little room,          

About the woodlands I will go       

To see the cherry hung with snow.’

Spring mornings crisp and fresh are cotton days, scented with optimism, they are to be savoured.

I am reading ‘I Served the King of England’ by the Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal, having previously read his other novels ‘Too Loud a Solitude’ and ‘Closely Observed Trains.’  There is something extraordinary about all his books and he is regarded by many Czechs as the finest Czech writer of the twentieth century. I certainly would recommend ‘Too Loud a Solitude’ to anyone, the novel a masterpiece about the power of books themselves. ‘I Served the King of England’ has gripped me somewhat less, though it is considered his greatest work, though I suspect it too will eventually haunt the way ‘solitude’ did.

I read fewer novels these days and my life is the poorer for it. I fear I demand too much of novels. I need to merge with them so that the life of the novel and my own existence fuse. This is why in recent years I have abandoned so many novels. Though a truly great novel is a remarkable thing and can enrich a life in the way that few of the other arts can. In recent years I would count ‘The Human Stain,’ by Philip Roth, ‘Herzog’ by Saul Bellow and The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reiss’ by Jose Saramago as novels that have successfully subsumed me; each doing so in a very different way. The latter novel by the Nobel laureate Saramago is itself related in a complex way to another extraordinary book ‘The Book of Disquiet’ a book that defies description and is a book I wish to talk about some day.

The clocks have recently sprung forward and we are now blessed with more light in the evenings, the football, (soccer), season is drawing to a close with my own team Everton performing magnificently and ‘The Good Wife’ Season 5 is managing to even excel previous seasons. So, provided I do not dwell too long on the state of the world, life feels mellow. This is much as a man may ask for and for this I am grateful.

‘Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.  ~Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke’

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