Autumn IV. Poetry and landscape

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Autumn III. Time regained again

The characteristic motive of English poetry is love of nature, especially of nature as seen in the English rural landscape. From the “Cuckoo Song” of our language in its beginnings to the perfect loveliness of Tennyson’s best verse, this note is ever sounding. It is persistent even amid the triumph of the drama. Take away from Shakespeare all his bits of natural description, all his casual allusions to the life and aspects of the country, and what a loss were there! ...

This attribute of our national mind availed even to give rise to an English school of painting. It came late; that it ever came at all is remarkable enough. A people apparently less apt for that kind of achievement never existed. So profound is the English joy in meadow and stream and hill, that, unsatisfied at last with vocal expression, it took up the brush, the pencil, the etching tool, and created a new form of art. The National Gallery represents only in a very imperfect way the richness and variety of our landscape work...

One obvious reason for the long neglect of [J.M.W.] Turner lies in the fact that his genius does not seem to be truly English. Turner’s landscape, even when it presents familiar scenes, does not show them in the familiar light. Neither the artist not the intelligent layman is satisfied. He gives us glorious visions; we admit the glory -- but we miss something which we deem essential. I doubt whether Turner tasted rural England; I doubt whether the spirit of English poetry was in him; I doubt whether the essential significance of the common things which we call beautiful was revealed to his soul. Such doubt does not affect his greatness as a poet of colour and in form, but I suspect that it has always been the cause why England would not love him. If any man whom I knew to be a man of brains confessed to me that he preferred Birket Foster, I should smile -- but I should understand.

Alpha.

J.M.W. Turner is somewhat in the public mind these days. There is a new movie about him and a major exhibition [I would have edited out much of the beginning of this video] at Tate Britain. I suspect he was one of the painters Proust was thinking about when he wrote about artists having to educate an audience to see the world -- or at least their canvasses -- the way they did. Ryecroft isn’t completely unfair to Turner here as he admits his virtues when it comes to color and form. I rather imagine that Ryecroft would prefer landscape painting over photography only in it’s potential for perfecting or idealising the image (though with Photoshop I guess the photographer can also delete the unwanted wires and or add the properly rustic worker).

I’ve never been that big a fan of Turner myself. He seems to me too much a transitional figure: Not the realism Ryecroft likes or the full impressionism/ expressionism I prefer.

VisiCalc, cat videos, and symbolic horses.

Who remembers VisiCalc nowadays? I do because I was a Sinclair ZX81 owner in the early days of personal computers. VisiCalc was the first “killer app” -- a spreadsheet for the Apple II that gave “serious” people an excuse to invest in the new gadgets. The killer app for the Internet would seem to be cat videos.

I can’t make fun of either of these things -- though for me, the original PC killer app was the BASIC computer language. Today I can’t imagine life without spreadsheets. It’s a rare day when I don’t use at least a couple spreadsheets for one thing or another,and just the thought of doing those things without spreadsheets makes me tired. And Maru is my favorite cat in the world. (How wonderful that he also has his own Wikipedia page!) But I’ve moved on from cat videos, first to goat kid videos and most recently to foals.

I suspect that both goat kid and foal videos are most effective if you’ve had contact with these animals in the past. There is one foal video with a woman petting this adorable animal that gives me a hint how some women feel about babies. Oh, and while we’re on horses, lets consider for a moment the symbolic use of horses in literature. How smooth was that?

First there’s the hard to miss episode with Vronsky racing the mare Frou-Frou in Anna Karenina (source here):

What's important about the scene symbolically is that it foreshadows what's going to happen to Anna herself. Vronsky is absolutely taken with the horse, but his love of her doesn't prevent him from doing something that ruins her forever – he misjudges where he's put his weight as Frou-Frou is gearing up to jump, and she breaks her back. This is similar to his relationship with Anna. Vronsky loves Anna, but he convinces her to have an affair with him, which destroys her. Vronsky's great tragic flaw is that he's capable of deep love, but he's just not that careful, and his lack of care has terrible consequences for the women (or female horses) with whom he gets involved...

The use of horse symbolism in Parade’s End is rather more complicated. Besides being a special (and antique) sort of Tory, Christopher Tietjens is sold to us as being especially good with horses. His "way" with horses comes up several times but first and most importantly (in my opinion) in the first volume Some Do Not. The several scenes with the Wannop’s poor horse are excellent for establishing Christopher’s character, but less effective at symbolizing his relationship with his wife, Sylvia, as we have, at this time, not seen them together. Tom Stoppard --  given the amount of time he lavished on these scenes with the horse -- was all over this symbolism I think, while writing the screenplay for the recent TV mini-series of Parade’s End.

Sylvia is a thoroughbred. She may be difficult in any number of ways, but if you start thinking of her as a spirited horse, much in the novel that is obscure becomes clear. And Christopher, for all his way with actual horses, is not in need of a thoroughbred mate. To quote what he says in the mini-series script when he first sees the Wannop’s new horse,

...Gosh, don't you know you've got a 13 hands pony harness on a 16 and a half hands horse? Let the bit out three holes.

It's tearing the animal's tongue in half...

...This isn't the rig for you, Mrs Wannop.

A pony and basketwork chaise, that's the trap for ladies...

Christopher himself needs a pony and finds one in Valentine Wannop. But where he can immediately recognize the problem with the Wannop’s horse and suggest the obvious solution -- trade for a new animal -- in his personal case he dithers and is blocked by his Tory principles... or something. What he does to Sylvia is worse than what happens to the horse in the accident with the General's automobile, but his lines at the end of the first episode of the Mini-series (addressed to the horse) could just as well apply to Sylvia ,

...Damn near forty miles in one night.

You've lost a lot of blood.

I let you down, old girl, didn't I?...

And, just because I can, here are some of the videos I've referenced. First Maru, the cat that likes to walk around with a bag on his head:

Then the foal video:

And finally some baby goats. I Have no idea why I can't display it the usual way.

Next: Autumn V. Illness.

Autumn III. Time regained again + HSB

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Autumn II. Tristram Shandy

Every one, I suppose; is subject to a trick of mind which often puzzles me. I am reading or thinking, and at a moment, without any association or suggestion that I can discover, there rises before me the vision of a place I know. Impossible to explain why that particular spot should show itself to my mind’s eye; the cerebral impulse is so subtle that no search may trace its origin. If I am reading, doubtless a thought, a phrase, possibly a mere word, on the page before me serves to awaken memory. If I am otherwise occupied, it must be an object seen, an odour, a touch; perhaps even a posture of the body suffices to recall something in the past. Sometimes the vision passes, and there an end; sometimes, however, it has successors, the memory working quite independently of my will, and no link appearing between one scene and the next.

Ten minutes ago I was talking with my gardener. Our topic was the nature of the soil, whether or not it would suit a certain kind of vegetable. Of a sudden I found myself gazing at -- the bay of Avlona. Quite certainly my thoughts had not strayed in that direction. The picture that came before me caused me a shock of surprise, and I am still vainly trying to discover how I came to behold it...

Alpha.

Amazingly, I have no more to say on this topic... for now.

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival.

I am ambulatory today... Though I note that I tend to make a variety of noises along with any sort of movement. But I survived another year of HSB! This year was a perfect storm of lovely weather and a variety of other factors to bring out the largest crowd ever. Friday went well, but at times on Saturday and Sunday it was too crowded to move from station to station, so I had to just stay where I was and monitor (help people put their trash in the right place and then pull and replace the bags when they became full) until a musical set change caused people to rearrange themselves. From mid-afternoon on I was playing catch up. And trying to stay hydrated. I don't usually buy event food and drinks, as they are over priced and often not that good, but I bought a couple fruit smoothies both days and was happy to spend the money. Each evening I did a final sort as I swapped out the bags in readiness for the following day, or as part of taking down the stations on Sunday. Each morning I had to clear out all the crap the food vendors tossed in the stations before I arrived. These people work these events for a living, week after week, possibly year after year, and yet they have no idea what goes where. And my guess is, they don't care. Aside from the satisfaction of keeping my area in order and (almost) free of unsorted bags (unsorted bags have to be hauled to our super-sorting station and hand sorted), the best part of HSB is Emmylou Harris's closing set just as the sun sets. The day's final, "magic," light disappears up the gorgeous trees surrounding the meadow. I can't say that a sea of hundreds of thousands of people makes the park more beautiful, but the sight of all those people in that setting, with Emmy Lou's voice rising above it all, is well worth the price of admission, which, technically, is free, but for me includes an astonishing amount of (admittedly paid) work. This really is the culmination of my year, both in terms of Greening but also in term of fitness. This is why I workout virtually every week of the year -- because the nasty secret of HSB is the tons and tons of glass beer and wine bottles the crowd hauls in, because the concert promoters insist on not selling alcohol. We have to haul bags, and even big toters, full of these bottles onto carts or trucks to go to the sorting station, and then into debris boxes or specialized glass recycling containers. It is both hard and dangerous since (news flash) glass breaks.

Here is a link to a (literal) overview of the event. And here is a link to an Emmylou Harris set.

Having been alerted by my experience at that previous event, I was very aware of the current fashion for short shorts. One woman was even wearing a version that displayed the bottom of her butt cheeks. What amazes me (pleasantly) is how many young women -- given the obesity epidemic in this country -- have the legs for this style. At any rate, I am grateful. After hauling around bags of trash in the hot sun for 7 straight hours a man appreciates a little visual pick-me-up. And it's a nice counter balance to the visual pollution... a crowd of over a hundred thousand people of all ages and stages of intoxication is not a pretty sight. I wish HSB was the actual end of the Greening season, but in fact there are a number of other events later in October, but they are always something of a let down. Ideally we would all get to hibernate for at least a couple months following the final cleanup of the concert grounds. Instead there's a marathon to tend to and a big tech convention... no rest for the waste diverting.

Next: Autumn IV. Poetry and landscape.

Autumn II. Tristram Shandy

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Autumn I. Hawkweed

How the mood for a book sometimes rushes upon one, either one knows not why, or in consequence, perhaps, of some most trifling suggestion. Yesterday I was walking at dusk. I came to an old farmhouse; at the garden gate a vehicle stood waiting, and I saw it was our doctor’s gig. Having passed, I turned to look back. There was a faint afterglow in the sky beyond the chimneys; a light twinkled at one of the upper windows. I said to myself, “Tristram Shandy,” and hurried home to plunge into a book which I have not opened for I dare say twenty years.

Not long ago, I awoke one morning and suddenly thought of the Correspondence between Goethe and Schiller; and so impatient did I become to open the book that I got up an hour earlier than usual. A book worth rising for... A book which helps one to forget the idle or venomous chatter going on everywhere about us, and bids us cherish hope for a world “which has such people in’t.”

These volumes I had at hand; I could reach them down from my shelves at the moment when I hungered for them. But it often happens that the book which comes into my mind could only be procured with trouble and delay; I breathe regretfully and put aside the thought. Ah! the books that one will never read again. They gave delight, perchance something more; they left a perfume in the memory; but life has passed them by for ever. I have but to muse, and one after another they rise before me. Books gentle and quieting, books noble and inspiring; books that well merit to be pored over, not once but many a time. Yet never again shall I hold them in my hand; the years fly too quickly, and are too few. Perhaps when I lie waiting for the end, some of those lost books will come into my wandering thoughts, and I shall remember them as friends to whom I owed a kindness -- friends passed upon the way. What regret in that last farewell!

Alpha.

Ha! My constant references to Uncle Toby and Tristram Shandy pay off. Like Ryecroft, it has probably been at least 20 years since I last read Laurence Sterne, and all I can imagine, from his opening, that would remind him of the book is the arrival of the doctor at the beginning of the novel to oversee the perpetually delayed birth of young Tristram. Here's a great quote from the book that always reminds me of Emmanuel Kant,

I hate set dissertations, -- and above all things in the world, 'tis one of the silliest things in one of them, to darken your hypothesis by placing a number of tall, opake words, one before another, in a right line, betwixt your own and your readers conception...

And as has happened every time I’ve referred to the book myself, this reference makes me want to jump back in and read it again. The problem -- the curse -- of loving books like this is that it is so hard to find sympathetic ears when you feel the urge to praise the cunning debate about the "squirt" (Can you save the soul of the not-quite-infant by squirting it with Holy Water before it clears the birth canal and actually enters the world?) or to sympathize with Toby’s war injury (groin) or to marvel at The Marbled Pages. 

(And speaking of the Marbled Pages, here's something I didn't know about the early editions of the book: 

It encapsulates the spirit of the pioneering book as a whole, and gets at the good old—or, in Sterne's case, not yet invented—theme of the reader's personal subjectivity. In the words of Sterne scholar Peter de Voogd, "Each marbling is unique, as is each reading of Tristram Shandy. It is fitting that your copy of Tristram Shandy is different from mine, since your subjective experience of the book is different." The Marbled Pages

Pretty amazing for a book first published in 1759.

Today an electronic version of The Marbled Pages could do the original one better by including an algorithm that alters the graphic each time the file is displayed. This would represent how the book changes with each re-reading.)

Thanks to the miracle of email, I at least have the option of sending out a quick message to the college professor who first assigned me the task of reading this odd book. I have also pestered her with questions about Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. This is perhaps extending the definition of “continuing education” past the breaking point, considering that these reading assignments are now 40 years in the past. But I feel those first readings were mostly wasted (though also necessary, of course), now I would get so much more our of the study of literature and philosophy than I did in my late teens and early 20s. Perhaps college degrees should be given out provisionally pending your completing your studies 40 or 50 years on?

The Other Cafe.

Besides the Bank Cafe, I also frequent another cafe that is slightly more convenient -- being on my hill -- and that is in almost every way the opposite of the Bank Cafe. The Other Cafe occupies a space in a Victorian apartment building that previously housed a corner market. Aside from a couple seismic retrofit steel beams, it is all of wood and probably a hundred years old. There is a narrow mezzanine reached by a tight little staircase that I am amazed meets codes. The fit-out is, if anything, more trendy, but much less corporate, than the Bank Cafe. The tables and counters downstairs are of a plywood I particularly like the edges of. The coffee beans arrive by bicycle.

The food here is better but also more expensive. The WiFi is usually much better -- though not today. The music is much less predictable. Often there is good jazz but the staff chooses what to play and some of them have peculiar taste. Overall it makes for a nice change of pace. I was skeptical that the place would draw enough business when it first opened, but it is almost always packed. Not infrequently I have to move on to my third favorite cafe because I can’t find a seat here. Today I lucked out and got a seat at one of the window counters. The light here is great for reading but a bit bright for the computer. As at the Bank Cafe, I’m not sure what everyone else is doing here for such long periods of time. Like me, they are probably all working after a fashion, or so I imagine.

Walking over here just now I saw something strange that I’m noticed several times before: It seems that there is a curious sub-set of crazy street people who can’t (for some mysterious reason) walk on the sidewalk -- they are always walking in the street regardless of traffic. The only place I tend to walk in the street is in Chinatown because the sidewalks are often so crowded as to be impassable. Perhaps, for some people, a normal sidewalk is subjectively just as overcrowded? Perhaps cars and trucks are not perceived as being quite as invasive? Really, I have no idea.

Next: Autumn III. Time regained again.

Autumn I. Hawkweed

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Summer XXVII. The Tempest

This has been a year of long sunshine. Month has followed upon month with little unkindness of the sky; I scarcely marked when July passed into August, August into September. I should think it summer still, but that I see the lanes yellow-purfled with flowers of autumn.

I am busy with the hawkweeds; that is to say, I am learning to distinguish and to name as many as I can. For scientific classification I have little mind; it does not happen to fall in with my habits of thought; but I like to be able to give its name (the “trivial” by choice) to every flower I meet in my walks. Why should I be content to say, “Oh. it’s a hawkweed”? That is but one degree less ungracious than if I dismissed all the yellow-rayed as “dandelions.” I feel as if the flower were pleased by my recognition of its personality. Seeing how much I owe them, one and all, the least I can do is to greet them severally. For the same reason I had rather say “hawkweed” than “hieracium”; the homelier word has more of kindly friendship.

Alpha.

Henry and Hans Castorp (in The Magic Mountain) could start a little flower appreciation club, though I believe Hans, being a good German, was more fascinated by the scientific classifications of the Alpine flowers he collected and studied.

So far, the urge to learn the proper name of plants has not hit me. I do, however, appreciate an ability to recognize certain wild plants like Poison Oak and Thistle. I had a nasty run-in with a thistle plant the only time I walked in Essex, from which I learned both to identify it and to give it a wide berth.

This passage reminded me of something else Bill Bryson wrote, in Notes from a Small Island, about another group keen to know the names of things... train spotters:

“You like trains, then?” I said and immediately wished I hadn’t.

The next thing I knew... I was being regaled by the world’s most boring man. I didn’t actually much listen to what he said...

“Now this train,” he was saying, “is a Metro-Cammel self-sealed unit built at the Swindon works, at a guess I’d say between July 1986 and August, or at the very latest September, of ‘88. At first I thought it couldn't be a Swindon ‘86-’88 because of the cross-stitching on the seatbacks, but then I noticed the dimpled rivets on the side panels, and I thought to myself, I thought, What we have here, Cyril my old son, is a hybrid. There aren’t many certainties in this world but Metro-Cammel dimpled rivets never lie. So where’s your home?”

It took me a moment to realize that I had been asked a question. “Uh, Skipton,” I said, only half lying.

“You’ll have Fibber McGee cross-cambers up there.” he said or something similarly meaningless to me. “Now me, I live in Upton-upon-Severn --”

“The Severn bore,” I said reflexively, employing the local name for a tidal wave on the River Severn, but meaning something quite other.

“That’s right. Runs right past the house.” ...

I ended up feeling sorry for him. His wife had died two years before -- suicide, I would guess -- and he had devoted himself since then to traveling the rail lines of Britain, counting rivets, noting breastplate numbers, and doing whatever else it is these poor people do to pass the time until God takes them away to a merciful repose...

To be honest, I know rather more about tanks, warships, and warplanes than is altogether healthy. When the odd duck at a party shamelessly admits that he's building a large scale model of an Imperial Japanese Navy aircraft carrier, that sank in 1942, and you can quiz him on port-side islands and whether or not his version will have flying-off decks, you know that you are both in trouble. Luckily, Bill Bryson wasn't around.

Next: Autumn II. Tristram Shandy.

Summer XXVII. The Tempest + Last of summer

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Summer XXVI. Music

Today I have read The Tempest. It is perhaps the play that I love best, and because I seem to myself to know it so well, I commonly pass it over in opening the book. Yet, as always in regard to Shakespeare, having read it once more, I find that my knowledge was less complete than I supposed. So it would be, live as long as one might; so it would ever be, whilst one had strength to turn the pages and a mind left to read them.

... It is ripe fruit of the supreme imagination, perfect craft of the master hand. For a man whose life’s business it has been to study the English tongue, what joy can equal that of marking the happy ease wherewith Shakespeare surpasses, in mere command of words, every achievement of those even who, apart from him, are great? I could fancy that, in The Tempest, he wrought with a peculiar consciousness of this power, smiling as the word of inimitable felicity, the phrase of incomparable cadence, was whispered to him by the Ariel that was his genius. He seems to sport with language, to amuse himself with new discovery of its resources...

Among the many reasons which make me glad to have been born in England, one of the first is that I read Shakespeare in my mother tongue. If I try to imagine myself as one who cannot know him face to face, who hears him only speaking from afar, and that in accents which only through the labouring intelligence can touch the living soul, there comes upon me a sense of chill discouragement, of dreary deprivation. I am wont to think that I can read Homer, and assuredly, if any man enjoys him, it is I; but can I for a moment dream that Homer yields me all his music, that his word is to me as to him who walked by the Hellenic shore when Hellas lived? I know that there reaches me across the vast of time no more than a faint and broken echo; I know that it would be fainter still, but for its blending with those memories of youth which are as a glimmer of the world’s primeval glory. Let every land have joy of its poet; for the poet is the land itself, all its greatness and its sweetness, all that incommunicable heritage for which men live and die. As I close the book, love and reverence possess me. Whether does my full heart turn to the great Enchanter, or to the Island upon which he has laid his spell? I know not. I cannot think of them apart. In the love and reverence awakened by this voice of voices, Shakespeare and England are but one.

Alpha.

I can’t say that I’ve read Shakespeare in my “mother tongue.” We both speak English, but they are hardly the same language. Not infrequently I feel the need for a translator for what I suspect are some of his best lines. The meaning of English words change over time while some disappear from common usage as still others appear. The Cultural Literacy of readers changes even more. The most uneducated theatergoer of Shakespeare’s time would know references I can only guess at.

Even so, I probably get a greater percentage of what Shakespeare tried to communicate than I get from reading Homer or Goethe in translation. Thomas Mann may be easier to read in translation since, as much as I appreciate his prose, I don’t detect that much poetry in it. James Agee is an American writer I esteem so much that I would urge non-English speakers not to bother reading him in translation -- unless you could find an equally talented and poetic translator. Like Edward Gibbon and Wendell Berry, he has a knack of writing sentences that make me smile merely from his use of language. The subject doesn’t seem to make much of a difference.

There is, however, another side to what I started saying about Shakespeare and changing language and the understanding of that language. Shakespeare has done an amazing job of preserving his own time. If there had been no Shakespeare, that time, and the language of that time, would be so much more foreign to us than it is now. Every performance of Shakespeare is a magical trip back to 16th century England.

Last weekend of summer.

I worked three straight eight hour days to close out our “official” summer, and the last day was the best. The local newspaper reported that 60,000 people gathered to watch or participate in “the largest dragon boat festival in the United States,” including teams from all over North America, and almost no one seemed to know how to sort their damn trash. (Why would anyone think that big aluminum cooking trays belong in with the Compost?) Between day one and day two (I worked a different event on Friday) I fine tuned my usual work plan and took advantage of some leeway I have with my boss on account of being the oldest, but more importantly, longest serving employee, so that I totally rocked yesterday. I practically received a standing ovation when I finally went to our headquarters (the usual array of giant debris boxes (dumpsters) where there was very little to sort as I had pre-sorted most of the event up-front. We were subcontractors on this job and I’ve worked many times with the guy who was in charge of the people doing set-up and hauling. He knows me and is also one of those rare people in the real world I actually enjoy talking to. He must have instructed his crews to back off and let me take care of the stations on Sunday, as I was even able to take most of them down at the end of the day, so that even the final bags were mostly sorted and could just be tossed or emptied into the dumpsters.

The frustrating thing is that all our events could be this smooth if only everyone would just do what I do. But it is surprisingly hard to convince them. And by the time they figure it out, they are often ready to move on to other things, as part-time, seasonal, low-pay, trash related work turns out not to be everyone’s life goal.

Many years ago, back when we did all our sorting back-of-house, we had a great team of people (only three of us survive) and one woman said, as four of us stood around a table drenched in compost juices sorting bag after bag of event trash, that she had a new dating rule that required her to expose her potential boyfriends to the sorting life as quickly as possible. This after a guy she was seeing took one look at her literally jumping into 40 yards of compost and took off never to be seen again. Mostly, our crews seem to date each other -- which gets awkward after the break up.

But yesterday went swimmingly. I’m tired and just a little sore but I can’t really think of any way I would have preferred to have spent my weekend.

Oww! I think I sprained my rotator cuff patting myself on the back.

Next: Autumn I. Hawkweed.

Summer XXVI. Music

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Summer XXV. Art appreciation

Of late, I have been wishing for music. An odd chance gratified my desire.

I had to go into Exeter yesterday. I got there about sunset, transacted my business, and turned to walk home again through the warm twilight. In Southernhay as I was passing a house of which the ground-floor windows stood open, there sounded the notes of a piano -- chords touched by a skillful hand. I checked my step, hoping, and in a minute or two the musician began to play that nocturne of Chopin which I love best -- I don’t know how to name it. [This seems to be the most popular one] My heart leapt. There I stood in the thickening dusk, the glorious sounds floating about me; and I trembled with very ecstasy of enjoyment. When silence came, I waited in the hope of another piece, but nothing followed, and so I went my way.

It is well for me that I cannot hear music when I will; assuredly I should not have such intense pleasure as comes to me now and then by haphazard...

Alpha.

So maybe I was wrong about Ryecroft wanting an iPod, or maybe he would find that being able to hear music at will holds advantages he couldn’t have imagined. When did recorded music become a thing? At most, the age of only “performed” music had a decade remaining.

I’m pretty sure, the more I think of it, that Ryecroft would have changed his tune on this point. Listening to music at will holds the same advantages that being able to read books from your own library holds -- the benefit of repetition being paramount. It would have been amazing to have been there at Montreux in 1969 when Eddie Harris and Les McCann performed the music that became the album Swiss Movement. But, as nice as that would have been, it wouldn’t equal the experience of listening to the album over and over and over as we did the autumn of 1970.

Swiss Movement (produced, it's worth noting, by Nesuhi Ertegun and Joel Dorn for Atlantic) was the favorite music of my guitar playing roommate at the time, and he listened to it constantly. I never tired of it, but I also was left with no great desire to add it to my collection when our household eventually broke-up. And then, over 30 years later, I started thinking about it again and bought the CD which held additional songs -- one of which is now a favorite of mine...

-- and the best liner notes I’ve ever come across (including something from Les McCann that isn't included here). Swiss Movement is now on my iPod and, whenever a song shuffles to my ear, I love the music as much as I did in my youth, but to the music is added a frisson of memory of that period of my life between high school and college plus the nerd joy of contrasting the digital quality (no scratches) and astonishing convenience of this musical presentation. I am not one of those people who weep for the age of vinyl.

Not only do I now have hundreds, if not thousands, of songs on my iPod that I can play at my whim, but some of my favorite music might not even be recognizable to Gissing as music. I have in mind Europa by Carlos Santana:

Always With Me, Always With You by Joe Satriani:

And especially Stevie Ray Vaughn version of Little Wing:

Which brings me to Proust. Proust maintained, with regard to painting but it also applies to the other arts, that the artist has to train his audience to recognize new forms of beauty. Impressionism is a new way of seeing, Le Corbusier's chapel at Ronchamp...

...is a new way for buildings to look, Little Wing is a new way for music to sound. We all get it now, but at first it has to have been a shock as there was no context for what audiences were experiencing. I’ve chosen these examples at random, there may be better ones, but the point still holds.

My favorite personal example of this is the Jazz pianist Bill Evans. I’ve always listened to Jazz so I must have heard his music for decades (years when Thelonious Monk was my favorite Jazz great) before I really “heard” his music. Maybe it took me a very long time to mature enough to appreciate Evans. Maybe it was getting older or maybe I was in the right mood or right setting and the penny finally dropped. I don’t know.

And then I thought of Katy Perry. What would Henry Ryecroft have thought watching and listening to some of her music videos? The mind reels. And, as long as this is my fantasy, let’s go all the way with it: Imagine you’ve gathered Henry Ryecroft, Jane Eyre, Fanny Price, Elizabeth Bennet, and Marianne Dashwood in an English parlor and then suddenly open up a laptop computer and start playing the video below, full screen. And the camera would be on to capture their expressions.

Next: Summer XXVIII. The Tempest.