A Veritable Treasure-Chest

Thus I have found the book - The Evening Colonnade - which I have mentioned twice on this blog already.

In the chapter entitled Little Magazines, Mr Connolly quotes what he refers to as "Hemingway's neo-Thomist *poem":

The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want,

Him for long.

Au moins un peu amusant n'est-ce pas?

I have only once attempted to read Hemingway: I tried For Whom the Bell Tolls and found it insufferably boring; why is it so difficult to appreciate writers (or for that matter artists) whom the high-brows - and others - find so great?  My feelings apply also to Shakespeare** who does absolutely nothing for me, likewise Dickens, and as I have said before, Henry James.

As for the artists, there are numerous examples: Picasso principally - at least for his more famous works - Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, or Guernica for example - meaningless to me, though I shall never forget a small pencil still life drawing of his that I saw in a small gallery in the Rue de Grenelle (Paris VIIeme); similarly Jackson Pollock or Rothko - unintelligible.  Equally when I went to the National Gallery, I was utterly bored by the Titians and so on; how many times did those buggers paint the Madonna?  I was much relieved to see that day the work of some of the Dutch masters and the wonderful paintings of Turner and the breathtakingly beautiful work of Canaletto.  

Max Ernst in places is OK, Klimt and Schiele excellent, Edward Hopper yet another of my favourites.  Lyonel Feininger is superb, e.g. as in the example below.

Image source

Until the next time.
  

* I have added a link here because I had no idea what Thomism is; if any of you can understand it, good luck to you.

**The Sonnets excepted

How To Write A Love-Letter

Once again, a little something found in Cyril Connolly's The Evening Colonnade.   This time, a review of Theodore Besterman's translations of Voltaire's love-letters to his niece.

This letter may have been written by the niece, Mme Denis; the text does not make it entirely clear (or maybe I am too thick to work out what's going on).

"You are the unique end of all my aims and I flatter myself that I shall soon  be happier.  You are my consolation, and I have no other desire than to make you happy during my life and after my death.  I will always love you tenderly until the day on which the law of nature separates what nature and love united.  Let us love until then.  A thousand kisses."

It is just possible that the letter may have been written to Walpole by Mme du Deffand...  I really don't know, but it doesn't matter for the purposes of this post.

It's a million to one that SHE will read this, but should she do so, then despite the fact that I am quoting from a book, she will understand perfectly my feelings for her and that as I quote I am thinking of HER.

Until the next time.

The Lacunae of Life

"At the age of thirty-seven,

She realised she'd never,

Ride to Paris in a sports-car,

With the warm wind in her hair."

How many times has one heard someone say "I wish I'd done XXX"? Edith Piaf famously sang "Non, je ne regrette rien" but I fear that if that were true, she was a rara avis indeed.

I am currently reading The Evening Colonnade, a collection of articles and reviews by the late Cyril Connolly; it has taken only a few pages to serve to remind me how appalling - how lacking - has been my education; this then is one of a number of lacunae in my own life.

I have previously (I am sure) quoted Mark Twain's famous dictum: "The classics: something everyone wants to have read and nobody wants to read."  Well Connolly makes the classics, by which I mean such as Swift, Pope, Dryden, Voltaire and many others, sound so rich and rewarding.  Had I only the education to appreciate them; I know them only by name.  Perhaps the classics serve to illustrate to us certain eternal truths?  I have recently been quoting verses from The Rubâ'iyât of Omar Khayyám; now read the following from Jonathan Swift, quoted by Connolly in a review of a biography of Swift by Nigel Dennis:

"God in His wisdom, hath been pleased to load our declining years with many sufferings, with diseases, and decays of nature, with the death of many friends, and the ingratitude of more... with a want of relish for all worldly enjoyments, with a general dislike of persons and things, and though all these are very natural effects of increasing years, yet they were intended by the Author of our being to ween [sic] us gradually from our fondness of life, the nearer we approach towards the end of it."

I might add to Swift's tragic words, that with age comes regret and reflection - hence perhaps this piece.

The current UK eduction budget is £99 billions; in 2005 it was £65.7 billions.  Last week my mother was talking to a teen-aged girl who is to start at University this year; a pleasant girl etc., but my mother was staggered when she found that the girl had never even heard of the Second World War; "what's that?" she asked!  One might reasonably ask what those are like who fail to qualify for University; £99 billions - one cannot help posing the question.  I remember years ago feeling inadequate because I couldn't remember the ins and outs of Cobbett and the Corn Laws or the South Sea Bubble.

Yet I maintain that I have no education; this of course is far from being the only lacuna in my life; any regulars will of course know very well what the principal one is, or perhaps I should say "who she is." And of course, there are more.

I shall now return to The Evening Colonnade and depress myself further; so many books, so little time.

Until the next time.