There was a sense, though only a vague and uneasy feeling, it must be admitted, that something, somewhere was wrong. The wrong words, and the havoc of the heart. Deep below the streets, near London Bridge perhaps, amidst all that steel and glass, it dawned on you that probably everything that can be said has in fact been said. The terrible thought: what is the point of reading or writing?
You skimmed through some of Arnold's prose, a small and somewhat tattered book obtained at the bargain price of £1 from one of the old second-hand bookshops on Charing Cross Road. Who, today, would have the time and patience to read this (excluding specialists, that is)? And that led you to this thought:- can someone like Arnold be forgotten today; and if him, then everyone.
'Observe, think, and read'. That, today, is a sentence that goes against the grain. If one can get away from the emotive terms-'barbarism', 'philistinism'-then is there a kernel of truth that is worth attending to?
And what is a culture an antidote to? What has brought on this 'anarchy'?
~~
You sit in a beer garden in South London on a lazy afternoon. Guiness and red wine, artificial grass, music from the early 80s (Southern Freeze), mostly smiling white people with shirts opened to reveal pinkish skin turning red and brown. This little oasis has something of the fake happiness of a 19th century painting of a Sunday morning. The perfect ease of the body satiated, released from winter anxieties, angular complexities...a little pleasure island of forgetfulness (this is beginning to sound like Qutb!). There is only this moment, time is stilled, life is stalled and no-one is the worse for it. Is this it, then?
The Church's greatest fear was not that worldly pleasure would distract us from our serious calling but, rather, that there would be an unthinking and full acceptance of pleasure as a self-subsisting world.
Arnold: perfect liberty, for an Englishman, is that no-one interferes in what 'they want to do'. There is no question of desires or pleasure being ordered by 'right reason' since that opens the door to paternalism, or a lack of spontaneity.
There is nothing to insist on, no need or desire to argue, or even discuss anything. Sit back or slumber in a reclining seat; someone asks you to "keep their place"; you try your best to keep the sun out of your eyes. Conversation drifts and tails away without any significance. Some of the flow of words is broken up by texts, messages, updates. Surface realities are at one with the unruffled self. The hours float by, the wildness of the heart softened by southern dreams. Long years of affluence and civilisation, efficiency and comfort; the taming of instincts, the channeling of energies and impulses into productive activities. and we wonder to ourselves: have we really just substituted one kind of barbarism for another?
You skimmed through some of Arnold's prose, a small and somewhat tattered book obtained at the bargain price of £1 from one of the old second-hand bookshops on Charing Cross Road. Who, today, would have the time and patience to read this (excluding specialists, that is)? And that led you to this thought:- can someone like Arnold be forgotten today; and if him, then everyone.
'Observe, think, and read'. That, today, is a sentence that goes against the grain. If one can get away from the emotive terms-'barbarism', 'philistinism'-then is there a kernel of truth that is worth attending to?
And what is a culture an antidote to? What has brought on this 'anarchy'?
~~
You sit in a beer garden in South London on a lazy afternoon. Guiness and red wine, artificial grass, music from the early 80s (Southern Freeze), mostly smiling white people with shirts opened to reveal pinkish skin turning red and brown. This little oasis has something of the fake happiness of a 19th century painting of a Sunday morning. The perfect ease of the body satiated, released from winter anxieties, angular complexities...a little pleasure island of forgetfulness (this is beginning to sound like Qutb!). There is only this moment, time is stilled, life is stalled and no-one is the worse for it. Is this it, then?
The Church's greatest fear was not that worldly pleasure would distract us from our serious calling but, rather, that there would be an unthinking and full acceptance of pleasure as a self-subsisting world.
Arnold: perfect liberty, for an Englishman, is that no-one interferes in what 'they want to do'. There is no question of desires or pleasure being ordered by 'right reason' since that opens the door to paternalism, or a lack of spontaneity.
There is nothing to insist on, no need or desire to argue, or even discuss anything. Sit back or slumber in a reclining seat; someone asks you to "keep their place"; you try your best to keep the sun out of your eyes. Conversation drifts and tails away without any significance. Some of the flow of words is broken up by texts, messages, updates. Surface realities are at one with the unruffled self. The hours float by, the wildness of the heart softened by southern dreams. Long years of affluence and civilisation, efficiency and comfort; the taming of instincts, the channeling of energies and impulses into productive activities. and we wonder to ourselves: have we really just substituted one kind of barbarism for another?
No comments:
Post a Comment