A world in servitude to time

Since you liked last week's so much, here's another RS Thomas poem, written on the death of his wife. His complete works are about 500 pages worth, so there's plenty more where these came from. I like the brevity of this one, its breathless sadness and simplicity. Like the immortalities of love and life, it's gone before you can catch it.

We met
under a shower
of bird-notes.
Fifty years passed
love's moment
in a world in
servitude to time.
She was young;
I kissed with my eyes
closed and opened
them on her wrinkles.
“Come,” said death,
choosing her as his
partner for the last dance. And she,
who in life
had done everything
with a bird's grace,
opened her bill now
for the shedding
of one sigh no
heavier than a feather.

The right to silence

Of all the freedoms, speech is the one most often misused, most often claimed as an amnesty for all kinds of rank abuse.

Andrew Bolt emerged from a courtroom in which a judge found that he had published factual errors and ‘inflammatory and provocative' sentiments in breach of the Racial Discrimination Act, and claimed that it was a blow against free speech.

Tony Abbott agreed with Bolt, as he often does, saying free speech means “the right of people to say what you don't like, not just the right of people to say what you do like.”

Free speech means people can say what they please. It doesn't mean that what they say will be true, or reasonable or sensible or good. It does not mean that what they say won't be held to some standard of common accountability. And it does not mean that a judge won't find that that freedom has been abused.

The real Jane Austen

HarperCollins is commissioning six contemporary authors to write modern versions of Austen's six novels. The first is Joanna Trollope, who will rewrite Sense and Sensibility.

Most Austen fans will be apprehensive, or at least sceptical, myself among them. I'd like to think it's not just my inner pedant, that there are reasons such a project might at least run into difficulties. With all due respect to Trollope and her fellow imitators, here are several:

1. Austen's characters are judged according to their breeding, their education and information, their adherence to subtle civil codes. Part of the exercise of reading the novels is in projecting oneself into a social millieu in which manners count in a way they no longer do. Do the modern mores of social media or cafe-haunting present the same possibilities of complexity and climax?


2. Austen's plots all turn on social, moral, and economic circumstances that mostly no longer exist. What is the modern moral equivalent of Lydia Bennet's elopement or of Mr Willoughby's fickleness? What's the modern equivalent of the impropriety of Frank Churchill's secrecy, or of Mary Crawford's sentiments, or of the Musgrove sisters' inferiority?


3. Austen's prose is pretty close to perfection. Without being lyrical or even very descriptive, her prose is inimitably beautiful, and constitutes perhaps the greatest of all the pleasures of reading her. Though we wouldn't expect a contemporary novel to sound like her, it's hard to imagine how even a great contemporary author could approach that facility, that felicity of syntax and delicate balancing of phrase and cadence that make her so deeply satisfying to read.


4. Austen's wit is disarmingly sharp, sheathed as it so often is in gentility. Her singular ability to skewer insipidity, vulgarity, complacency, or dishonesty with the thrust of a few demure lines is a mastery against which few would be willing to pit their own weapons.


5. Austen's world of tea and cambric, empire lines and lavender water is no inconsiderable element of her popularity. Many of her readers take up her works precisely for the genteel joys of this quiet, indoor elegance, with its bonnets and dresses and silk shoes and shawls, its china and lacework and likenesses, all afloat a soft continuous billow of solo piano. How is this world, now synonymous with Austen, to be recreated?

There might be reasonable answers to all of these objections, and the new books themselves might prove my apprehensions groundless. However if the best these writers can do is find modern correlates for the plots or characters, correlates which naturally preclude the very Jane Austen-ness of her own period that so delights modern readers, I find it hard to see how they could be entertaining either in their own right or for her sake. I must hope, therefore, to be surprised.

Search, and ye shall find

So Google is turning 13 today. It's hard to imagine how we found anything without it, or where we searched. Yet - old though this makes me feel - I remember when it was born. I was already at university; I learned about this extraordinary new search engine in a class on research methods. And now it's all grown up! 

Actually not quite. Sherry Turkle, Director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and the Self, reminds us that the digital world is in its infancy. We've only begun to explore its possibilities and assimilate its modes into our own forms of consciousness and ways of being. Her book Alone Together skirts the risks of technology's dehumanising, isolating propensities, but argues finally that the device-driven life can still be an examined one. When used responsibly and within certain limits, it can facilitate rather than inhibit our deep needs for communion and presence. (I enjoyed her conversation about it with Krista Tippett on Public Radio, which I found using Google.)

However, while Google is immeasurably useful, much of the digital is mostly distraction. Johann Hari calls ours “the age of distraction” and says “there's a reason why that word – ‘wired’ – means both ‘connected to the internet’ and ‘high, frantic, unable to concentrate’.”  Books, he writes, are the remedy. “A book has a different relationship to time than a TV show or a Facebook update. It says that something was worth taking from the endless torrent of data and laying down on an object that will still look the same a hundred years from now.” He also quotes David Ulin's book The Lost Art of Reading – Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time: “Reading is an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction... It requires us to pace ourselves. It returns us to a reckoning with time.”  And TS Eliot, who called books “the still point of the turning world.” (H/T Google.)

I'm always happy to join a chorus praising books, but I don't see any essential conflict between books and the turn of the digital world. Nor between technology and the solacing of human needs. Those who read will read, in whatever format books are found. Those who don't read will be distracted, in any age, by anything that moves. Those who feel no need for communion will not seek it. Those who seek, now as then, shall find.

Such music as lives still

I don't know much about RS Thomas, except that he was a Welsh poet and priest with a reputation for loneliness. A streak of love lightens his otherwise bleak and unyielding lyrics, and though in a line of descent from other poet-priests, there's much in his verse to distinguish him from the tradition of Hopkins and Herbert.  He's grim almost to the point of misanthropy, and sacramental without being particularly joyous.  There's beauty, though, and thought, and, in Herbert's phrase, something understood. He was born in 1913, and died on September 25, 2000. I like the conceit of this poem better than its execution, but it's still a fine poem to remember him by. It's called “The Musician.” 

A memory of Kreisler once:

At some recital in this same city,

The seats all taken, I found myself pushed

On to the stage with a few others,

So near that I could see the toil

Of his face muscles, a pulse like a moth

Fluttering under the fine skin,

And the indelible veins of his smooth brow.

I could see, too, the twitching of the fingers,

Caught temporarily in art's neurosis,

As we sat there or warmly applauded

This player who so beautifully suffered

For each of us upon his instrument.

So it must have been on Calvary

In the fiercer light of the thorns' halo:

The men standing by and that one figure,

The hands bleeding, the mind bruised but calm,

Making such music as lives still.

And no one daring to interrupt

Because it was himself that he played

And closer than all of them the God listened.