[...] Thelma Lovell, who lives quietly in Cambridge, may be the most overlooked Bach scholar. Her 2011 book A Mirror to the Human Condition suggests that the theology of the cantatas can teach us ‘how to live and how to die’ even if we aren’t religious. In her forthcoming magnum opus, J.S. Bach’s Sacred Cantatas: A Cultural Christian’s Companion, she takes us through every cantata in the liturgical year, teaching us painlessly how to understand Bach’s theological and musical language.Lovell draws on an extraordinary breadth of cultural references: Sophocles, Horace, Keats, Nietzsche, Adam Smith, Terry Eagleton and the Epic of Gilgamesh. She also recommends recordings for each cantata, including interpretations by Harnoncourt, Herreweghe, Marriner and Suzuki. But more often than not she chooses Lutz. Perhaps she feels that he best understands what she calls the question of pulse: ‘Music, like the heart, has a continuous beat; its pace, whether fast or slow, has a bodily effect. Everywhere in Bach there is a forward impetus that communicates itself as life’s urgency… Bach’s ability to play with danger and then resist it becomes a token of faith’s miraculous power to conquer despair.’ ©
The Prozorovs are members of Russia’s ineffectual liberal intelligentsia. They are full of ideas about the nobility of work, despite the fact that none of them, apart from the eldest, the stressed-out teacher Olga – played with magnificent restraint by the Globe’s artistic director, Michelle Terry – has ever done much of it. Ruby Thompson’s Irina is woefully naive, enthusing about the importance of manual labour while being easily diverted by gifts of spinning tops and little notebooks and coloured pencils. Andrei, the “intellectual” Prozorov brother, is an eternal student who hopes to become a faculty professor in Moscow. Middle sister Masha, languishing in a boring marriage to the schoolmaster Kulygin (“She was eighteen when she got married, and she thought he was the cleverest man in the world. And now she doesn’t”), craves change. She gets this when she meets the sexy, sad Lieutenant-Colonel Vershinin, with his depressed wife and his musings about destiny and human evolution. ©
The society was not cloistered off from the rest of the academic world. Discussions about psychical phenomena spilt over into the most respected philosophy journals of the period. For example, one of the 1902 issues of The Monist included a paper entitled ‘Spirit or Ghost’ by Paul Carus (the journal’s editor), and musings about life after death, precognitions and telepathy also appeared in the journals Mind, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society and Philosophy. Soon after the turn of the century, popular interest in psychical research began to wane. Ectoplasm turned out to be cheesecloth. Levitating tables were discovered to be attached to fishing wire. Ghosts emerging, in near complete darkness, from ‘spiritual cabinets’ looked suspiciously like the mediums themselves dressed in white robes. But the philosophical fascination with paranormal phenomena continued. Long after psychical research had been pushed out of biology, psychology and physics departments to the margins of academia, professional philosophers continued theoretical discussions about its findings unabated. There is no better example of the symbiosis of academic philosophy and psychical research than C D Broad. ©
What might have been a tired formula – the run-down café transformed into a sanctuary for a band of likeable oddballs – is lit up by its cast, all in some way struggling with “a hairline rupture”, all seeming to watch life pass them by. And while the novel stands up for the dignity of the human amid the casual violence of progress, it contains something more existential at its heart. ©
You who own this little book after I am dead, please say farewell for ever Prytherch.As I came on Earth naked, so I shall go away naked, I have no idle ambitions, seeing the naked dead.What could we wish to hope for here since is a penalty to be born and a pain to live, to exist to die.Man dries up like a flower of the field.(William Lyndwood, “Constitutiones provinciales ecclesiae anglicanae”)
I have seen the dark universe yawning,Where the black planets roll without aim;Where they roll in their horror unheeded, without knowledge or lustre or name. ©
Дала себе зарок не жаловаться и не писать ничего личного, но иногда все же не могу удержаться: отправила рецензентам работы авторов своего сборника, получила приглашение на манчестерскую конференцию, провела занятия с ученицей по русскому, заказала несколько интересных книжек, а сезонная усталость все равно выводит из себя — легко злюсь, раздражаюсь по пустякам и работаю через силу. Видимо, приближающиеся пятьдесят потихоньку дают о себе знать... Ну да бог с ними. Март нужно просто перетерпеть.
To be sure, Gorey could be cartoonish. The bell jar world of his cozy-sinister stories, set in the England of the Victorian, Edwardian, and Bright Young Things eras and populated by vamps, shifty-eyed vicars, doubtful guests, deranged opera fans, and, famously, little dears whose absurd deaths are played for laughs (The Gashlycrumb Tinies), threatens at times to tip into goth kitsch. Gorey’s style and sensibility are so instantly recognizable, yet so uncategorizable, that, like David Lynch, he’s earned his own adjective: Goreyesque. The trouble with becoming an adjective, of course, is that it flattens you out, reduces you to a checklist of stylistic tics and well-worn themes that can quickly become the straitjacket of cliché—or, worse yet, self-parody. ©
I think I first learned of Lovecraft when I saw a paperback of his stories at a department store. The Colour out of Space from Lancer, with its ridiculous cover depicting a skull amid flames. It may be—I can’t remember—that I first heard of him when I read Bradbury’s “Pillar of Fire,” when in the future, all morbidness in life is gotten rid of. Cemeteries are destroyed, and the works of morbid writers are destroyed. He mentioned Poe, but the other authors he named . . . Lovecraft, Bierce, Derleth, Machen. Well, basically Bradbury was telling me “Go look for these authors’ works!” And so I did. Bierce puzzled me, because the book I found had stories about the civil war and a “devil’s dictionary.” But upon closer examination, there were some outré stories. Many years later, I prepared an annotated “unabridged” edition of The Devil’s Dictionary. ©
So, at seventy, I find myself revising the assumptions of a lifetime. However humbling this may be, you have to admire the creativity of the scientists who have produced a machine that demonstrates how little of what you do is creative. At the same time an uneasy inkling tells me deep down we always knew this, or feared it. What were Jonathan Swift’s parodies of mindless, jargon-spouting hacks, or, in Laputa, his vision of a machine thanks to which “the most ignorant person … might write books in philosophy”, but the betrayal of an anxiety that mechanically produced language could prove indistinguishable from our own? Doesn’t Barbara Pym, in A Few Green Leaves, have a protagonist who delights in predicting how others are going to finish their sentences? Wasn’t Samuel Beckett obsessed with the concern that everything said is perfunctory and compulsive. “The word is not out”, he wrote in 1936, “before I am blushing for my automatism.” ©
