Started Lesley Chamberlain's Philosophy Steamer (wish I had got Applebaum's Gulag instead). So far, not half as interesting as her fascinating Motherland.Started with a conversation about Berlin and whether-or to what extent-he was attracted by thinkers from the counter-enlightenment. Was there something very Russian in this? (and what of your own fondness for Tarkovsky, Rothko, icons, Akhmatova?)
Part of me-and not just the wahabi part-isn't very interested in the "mystical"...in fact, reading about Berdyaev one almost longs for a cool autumn mind to dispel all that fogginess and bagginess, the mystifications and darkness, the emphasis on folk, the land, and tradition; and one needs to assert, again and again, the 'I' so that it is not subsumed by the 'We'. There, see, even there it creeps in with a metaphor! Where's Bronk when you need him?! Did Spengler really say Russia was the future?
A bit like at the National, when you suddenly come across Poussin or the Flemish painters (winter scenes, Vermeer, northern sobriety, austerity, the solid, plain world of the bourgeoisie: black, not the sun) and heave a sigh of relief: Thank God! Or when you return to the patient, sombre, unfussy reasoning in economics. One wonders if others felt the same toward the end of the late middle ages (Huizinga is brilliant on this).
Rilke: "Russia because for me...the deep, daily insight that reality is something strange, something that comes infinitely slowly to those who have patience."
2 comments:
Interesting, b. Noel Annan's book, The Dons, subtitled Mentors,Eccentrics and Geniuses, has a long chapter devoted to Berlin, the title of which is: The Don as Magus. Annan describes Brelin's meeting with Akmatova when he went to Rusia in - you may already know the story. He met her in both 1945 and 1946, as a result of she suffered further persecution. Stalin:'So our 'nun' is now consorting with British spies.'
As to 'counter-enlightenment', Berlin may have been the main promoter of that notion but I myself can't make much of the various arguments, not being a philosopher, of course!I never gathered that he was exactly attracted to those ideas, rather that he was examining them.
(Annan's book provides an excellent introduction to some of the important thinkers of the C20th.But now I've gone back to Edith Wharton - light relief?)
Oh, dear. So you have a 'Wahabi-ish' part of you? I'm worried!And, er, which part IS that?):):
Hello, C. Yes, I think he was examining them but: 1) the choice of what we examine sometimes reveals an interest and 2) the *way* in which he discusses them (de Maistre in 'the crooked timbre', for example, makes them sound quite appealing!)
does the book talk about his (dubious?) relationship with the Israeli government?
Will try and pick the book up next time I'm in Blighty.
Which part? ...oh, the part that befriends very charming English women! ;-)
Best wishes,
b.
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