The purity of the individual soul

To be clear, pure-minded: white. 

He looks back and thinks of the shadow-play, the intermingling of light with shade, the darkening evening skies. Below he sees the drifting, floating world and it doesn't escape his attention that for a brief moment he can think it is all the more beautiful for being ephemeral. But behind it all, the stillness and depth of a white calm is sought. The purity of the individual soul amidst all this dross and degeneracy remembered, dreamt of...

The world is nothing but two dogs fighting over a bone. He sips his latte in measured movements from up on high and observes the story of human folly with a subdued horror. All that is true lies within, the threads have been torn, as the Gnostics in Late Antiquity so well knew. Wisdom is sorrow. All the suffering and injustice in the world had to be. And once seen in this light it loses its gravity, becomes but one more picture in a sequence of images before your eyes. We are "thrown into the world" and life, too, is just a throw of the dice, a sport and a pastime. In the world of Maya hold fast to the centre, for all else falls away, is a dream, pure subjectivity, mere perception or opinion.

Stand still in the white room of your thoughts and observe the passing show. Art and poetry and fine feelings, nay, spirituality even, is a progressive detachment from the world and the body, which is to say: time itself. This spark within, this deep fallen fragment from before time, you carry with you- and only that ultimately counts, and count it does against the falseness of the world and word.

The Puritan, following the religion of the heart (which later, as Christopher Hill provocatively suggests, becomes internalized as reason), in flight across the dark seas, fleeing persecution to the New Jerusalem, imagining himself pure, separate from the heathen and this hell-fire nation. From now on the frontier is drawn inwards (Hopper). The loner, the restorer of order in a lawless world (the cowboy, 'the decider'..didn't Walker say he was the decider?). The arbitrary will ("pushpin is as good as poetry") all at sea. 

{Note: all those others who were forced to travel across the sea in chains, the very same journey, do not carry the same light within for they are the heart of darkness, not fully human-or so the Constitution says. The injustice that is inflicted on them is either imagined, merely "perceived", a politicized grievance, or it is ultimately justified in the calculus of pain and pleasure}.

The exceptional state, the state of exception. Where have we heard that before? Do settler states think that anything can be justified?

'We have longed faced the possibility that we will have to choose between a Jewish but undemocratic Israel and a democratic Israel that is no longer Jewish. The choice is here and now and I favor democracy.'

--Samuel Fleischacker.   

~

Good states of mind require things to work! (Keynes, more or less). 

Is there some 'pure' state of inner consciousness? You wonder if the instability of Europe-to take up George Steiner's point-rests in precisely this: a veering from one extreme to the other: pure materialism to pure idealsim, the royal versus the spiritual, the profane versus the sacred, revelation or history. 

Putting on your Jewish (Muslim) hat: in the beginning was the deed! To stand up to injustice, to stand for justice, is not simply a political (or 'politicized') act or stance..a "gesuture", as the moderns would have it. The notion of the purity of the individual soul requires the darkness of the other (Cavafy: how we need those barbarians!). And it ends up, invariably, in a warped kind of politics, an anti-politics.."he who would play the angel ends up playing the beast."

In time, we will say to ourselves, 

'My eyes have seen what my hand did.'

--Lowell.   

~

News from a strange planet

Ahmad had maintained that he only built a clock but the boy was unable to give a 'broader explanation' as to what it would be used for.

"It's a clock."

"And what, exactly, does this clock of yours do?"

"Er..it, like, tells the time."

"American time?"

"James Bond is the perfect man."

"And why is that?"

"Because he doesn't exist."

It was like you were really there, except you weren't, you were here and didn't even want to be there in the first place. Besides, Pluto has been downgraded. It isn't even a fucking planet any more. We're not much of a planet any more..

We've gotta get rid offa that Asad; no, we gotta keep 'im. Let's toss for it.

When Serra is canonized I hope there are protests. I'm generally a fan of Pope Franicis but he's constrained-as many religious people are-by the idea that others are only truly human when they stop being who they are and adopt their "superior" beliefs. I've always found that missionary zeal repulsive-whether it be in the name of religion or the market.  

Loyalists and loners

I'm not sure what Bernie Sanders's politics are, or if Corbyn is the real deal, but the way the right-wing is scampering at the moment you're convinced that anyone who stands for principles-provided they're good principles- will be taken down by the powers that be.

What is the point of principles if one is not concerned about the circumstances in which they are likely to be realized. That, I suppose, has always been the complaint against any idealistic sentiment. But that view is in itself an expression of a monstrous arrogance-for it presupposes a knowledge of causal mechanisms that is beyond the remit of human thinking. Who is to say how things will eventually turn out?

One thing is for sure-I think: those who are compromised, who have 'bought into' the belief that money and power are our ultimate ends, and that self-interest is the fundamental spring of human action, will always try to blacken all that shines. 

What is holy-and such a word is used with remarkable laxity nowadays, as if it was nothing-is the ability to see other people and not reduce them to one's own dreams and schemes of expansion (the settlers), not to view people as a mere means to your own ends. Amo: volo ut sis. There is nothing higher than that, is there? An impoverished view of human beings ends up, invariably, with a shoddy form of politics. 

The appeal of socialism rests, and has always rested, in precisely just this: not 'I', but 'we'; togetherness, not as a mere fact or accomplishment, but a way of looking (looking out and back, 'looking out for').

'In primitive societies people tell tales and expect their listeners not to question them'

There is no doubting the overall validity of that but is it so really different in this day and age? Well, yes, given the emphasis on scepticism, criticism, transparency and the secular decline of tradition and traditional mindsets and certainties there is no comparison, really.

But perhaps something of that attitude persists nevertheless? It seems that at least in some circles women, poor people and minorities are expected to defer to their superiors and simply listen to what they're being told. Of course, since were all modern now it doesn't work in quite such a blatant way but the old domineering tendencies are not so easy to put to bed. And the structures of authority remain very much in place.

Perhaps another manifestation of this can be seen in the way people are silenced online. This can take the form a very nasty kind of badgering which can degenerate into relentless personal attacks. Of course, amongst the educated it can take on subtler forms. Many people have noted- and I think I've been guilty of it myself-that in online conversations or discussions one can simply ignore someone's comment or call a unilateral halt to the conversation in a way that would be deemed impolite in the real world.

For all our apparent refinement something primitive remains. Racial and tribal hatreds haven't really diminished in any appreciable way. A white man's journey is holy; the same journey, enforced on the Red Man, must be passed over in silence because they're not quite fully human.

I hate to harp on about this but it is, I think, worth noting, and it's this: the most barbaric acts of the 20th century were carried out by the supposedly most civilized peoples. Not just the camps, but Hiroshima, too. This is at a par with the fact that religious folk, worked up into a frenzy, have often slaughtered their fellow human beings.

'A soul rich with intuition'

It sometimes surprises you that people set such great store in the powers of human reason. There is a kind of latent (or explicit) fanaticism, a dryness of soul, when reason is held to be the all in all...one of Pascal's two "extravagances". If there are 'good reasons' to do something then are there bad ones as well? The old problem stems, perhaps, from an overblown conception of the capacity of human beings to make sense of it all, believing we could somehow see-through magical thinking-everything sub specie aetrerni. Is there some deep theoretical/aesthetic/religious impulse that wants to arrest time, to "spatialize" it? (Is this not just a version of the old 'tree of life, tree of knowledge'?).

From where does this fanaticism of rationality come? Is it that when we lose the sense of first principles, final ends, what remains is a shadow of authentic reason, a purely mechanical and abstract version of thinking? I'm sure the firebombing of Tokyo or Hiroshima were both, in some sense, rationally planned. And it shudders to make one think-and this is Bettelheim's point-that the deployment of reason in the Camps was far from being a throwback to 'medieval irrationality' but, instead, a modern version of bureaucratic rationality taken to the extreme. 

At a more mundane level, the reason one sees in the academy is more often than not awfully one-sided and shallow. And it is accompanied by the most insufferable pettiness and arrogance. Theoria, Jonas informs us, used to be thought in relation to "higher things"; now, just about anything can be brought within the circumference of the theoretical cast of mind. You have to ask yourself again: if this counts as intelligence then what of ignorance!
Can one really know something without loving it (Wendell Berry's acute question)?

If rationality becomes reduced to mere 'requirements'-such as logical consistency-then not only is it a very poor cousin of Reason; more: it is a dangerous, unmoored 'tool' in the hands of political demagogues. Goya: "The sleep of reason..." which can, undoubtedly, be read in two ways. One way lie the Gulags, the Camps, the great clearings of human settlements. 

This is something of a caricature but to the extent that it is true there is much merit to it: The French follow Reason; the British follow, tentatively, the path of reasonableness. 

There is a particular religious approach that dovetails with this set of attitudes, even thought it comes to it from a vastly different perspective. That approach, somewhat sceptical, mindful of our partial sight and limited capacities, must also embody humility: I do not know, I cannot know everything-and knowing isn't everything! In Muslim circles this is  recognized by the well know refrain: "But God knows best". 

Bellow has a nice line, too: Not the search for perfection (which is to follow Descartes); but an acceptance of an imperfect understanding, which is Jewish. I love that line. It reminds you immediately of his wonderful story, A Silver Dish...  

'And it is in abstraction that Goethe saw the fatal loophole through which reason could escape into an illusory freedom from its commitments to what is of the senses, of feeling, of the will.'

This emancipation of reason from the totality of the human person. 

What is our relation to the world, to nature, to other beings when reason becomes excessive, a "plaything for mathematics"? Does it dim our ability to attend with "spontaneous care to the duty of the day"?

"The living revelation of the unfathomable in the particular."

{Quotes from Heller's Disinherited Mind}  

The American woodsman

In a discussion with S over on the wonderful, wonderful blog: 'firstknownwhenlost.blogspot.com' I was reminded of Calasso's American Woodsman-the Man of the future, because he has no past, no time to see anything grow, has no patience for the slow cycles that he thinks have bound us for so long. What is human,truly human, is for him the ability to break out, escape, from all that is 'given' and perhaps this amounts to the same thing: to destroy what is given.

All truth is on the frontiers, space is ultimately something to be conquered, controlled and bound, something to be traversed (Sennett was perhaps right to say that in the modern city all that matters is getting from A to B). Space suggests commensurability, abstraction and universailty whereas place is distinctive, limited, low-key. It is no surprise that for settlers and rational planners alike space is such a fundamental concept. Empty space, outer space. Imperial projects always rely on a unification of space, don't they? 

This is in stark contrast to Wendell Berry's lovely thoughts on tobacco farmers and the deep continuities of work in a community (Macintyre's 'internal goods'). There is also much to like in Berger's book which is related to all of this. 

Metis vs techne is really at the heart of it. 

The interesting (and slightly disappointing) aspect of the discussion is what you detect to be what appears to be a faint whiff of nationalism-something I've come across over the years whenever there is any criticism of 'the west' or America (and Israel, no doubt, too). Of course, it makes no difference that you are equally critical of the barbarism and nihilism of Muslims or the religious in general, that the mere mention of the so-called 'mystical east' brings tears-from laughter- to your eyes. No, to even mention the possibility that other people, radically different from you, warts and all, could have a profoundly human outlook is to be in some sense political in this day and age! 

Question: if a poet speaks of suffering that is not his own is he being political? Blake, for example? Is Milosz political if his writing is informed-obliquely or otherwise-of the spiritual degradation produced by Communism? 

Of course, I'm overreacting given the rapid growth of fundamentalism I see all around, the narrowing down of horizons that relegates all that is different from one's own perspective and position to being somehow tainted and deeply flawed-as are the people who hold those alternative views. Khair...here are the remarkable lines:

The American woodsman is interested in nothing. Any notion of sensitivity is foreign to him. Those boughs so elegantly sprouted by nature, the fine foliage, the bright colour that enlivens a part of the forest, the deeper green that darkens another part of it-all this means nothing to him. He has no memories to call upon in any particular place. His only thought is for the number of ax-strokes required to chop down a tree. He has never planted anything; he does not know such pleasures. Any tree that he plants is worthless to him, because he will never see it when it has grown sufficiently large to be chopped down. Destruction is what keeps him alive. Destruction is everywhere; hence every place suits him. He cares nothing for the field where he has done his work, because his work is only toil and no idea of sweetness is associated with it. What emerges from his hands does not pass through all the stages of growth that so touch the farmer's heart. He does not follow the destiny of his products...he has no regrets about leaving the place he has dwelled in for years.

And they [the Fishermen] have no love for any particular place and know the land only by the ugly house where they live....this man is a trigger of technical violence: his place can be any place, because his mind has lost the mnemotechnical loci from which it can hang images...Woodsman and Fisherman are ...united in their hatred for the earth that still generously envelops them. It is a hatred for all that grows and that, in growing, becomes sweet and fades. Their pace is different from everyone else's: they strike blows, they pull and tug-gestures that are a metaphor for those of the gambler who rolls the dice. And in their devotion to the blow lies their cosmopolitan mission: the blow is the same everywhere; the plant has the flavour of a single place..the citoyens seemed archaic and out-of-date compared to these two new characters, who, beyond the frontier, were acting out the gestures of burgeoning history.

---Talleyrand, cited in Roberto Calasso's Ruin of Kasch

  

This is no country

This is no country for old men, no place to gather oneself. Keep one bag loose and ready, a spare toothbrush in a top pocket, cash rolled tightly in your fist.

'Sing, Ballad-singer..
Make me forget.'

Pour, saqi, steadily,
with your open hand.

'These grasses must be made
Of her who often prayed,
Last century for repose;
And the fair girl long ago
Whom I vainly tried to know
May be entering this rose.'

This moment is your life. 
The blood of the king is now
a simple poppy in an open field!

(Hardy and Khayyam, more or less, mostly less, since the words, too, are transformed in my mouth).

~

The last performance, the old tunes played with great sadness. Close the books once and for all. And silence falls. The notes are now remembered by your stray heart.

There are no more journeys, just the shadows cast by your absence, in which we make our way. In the evenings, when the day is done, turn down the lights, and sit in the peaceful darkness, wait for the night.

~ 
It was difficult talking with him-and I'm reluctant to put down these thoughts here-but what can one say after someone has lost their wife, their soul-partner? He told me he lives in a parallel world now; he sees people going about their daily business, laughing even, but none of that is real. He himself has become threadbare, invisible. "No-one can understand." He turns his head away, nearly chews on his fingers, "Death is an ugly thing." 

Not knowing what to say, not having any knowledge but that from books (whence the silly profusion of quotes on this blog), I tell him that JCO has written a memoir, the memoir of a widow. "Do people write such things?". 

~
I tell a friend-and now regret it: either they're really after you (in which case it's serious) or else you are losing your mind. He blinks rapidly, thoughtlessly, and says: "I'll take the former."

MOOCs Shmooks

I think I went to see Turner (and some Blake) but stumbled across this and it caught my attention because it reminded me of the old country.

And that's the thing with bookshops and galleries: you don't always find what you're looking for; there's always the element of surprise. In an age where we're being directed (by communications technologies and the huge second-hand, derivative industry that is made up of reviewers, analysts, gurus, pundits and experts) to like and choose what we ought to like and choose it is difficult to genuinely think for yourself or discover something that hasn't already been summarized, packaged and marketed for you. Even authors you hadn't heard of must be sold as 'the-greatest-author-you-never-heard-of''. 

Anything from the past can be plundered, taken out of context (wasn't that Benjamin?), dusted down and staged for your comfort and consumption. "We aim to please, Sir!"

Back in the land of the pure there are some people making a fuss over Massive Online Open courses (MOOCs). Your first instinct is to ask: who is pushing this, academics or administrators, corporations and the geek brigade? W.D. (Excellent Sheep) writes, there are people out there who are interested in dismantling higher education and selling its parts. In England they go by the name of the Tories. And it's not just higher education. Looks like the NHS will go too. Obviously, someone's going to make a killing here. Crony capitalism (but why not just say capitalism?).

Anything that endures, that represents a sense of place, continuity, must not be allowed to stand in a time of liquid modernity, flexible accumulation. Of course, one has to acknowledge that the old conservative attitudes and the institutions that embodied them were replete with deep and unsettling hierarchies (class distinctions, misogyny). But that is not all that can or should be said about them.

And these so-called 'communication technologies' are just one part of the attack: instantaneity and homogenization..travel light, skim the surface, 'experience' life as an ever revolving sequence of images and spectacles. I say 'communication' but in reality they're more of a mechanism for furthering narcissistic attitudes.

I can eat on the go; and now I can get a university education on the go as well with the help of my trusty mobile phone, as long as I can keep myself away, that is, from the 10,000 books I have on my kindle and the endless t.v. programmes that I've downloaded on my ipad. I can even record my whole fleeting life slipping away and then watch it again on HD.

Requiem for a dying planet

A new type of human being has been found, one closer (or further away) from anything we've previously known, or thought we'd known. He walked away alone in the desert, away from the madness of the animals, the sinking sun, the eternal stars..but something of that stayed with him, unbeknown.

In time we have come to dispense with thought, learned how to paint by numbers, think in slogans. The image becomes detached in what a philosopher once called "the televisual order". Two legs good. Only now: not so good. Free, free from the earth and all its weight and repetiveness; thought, free-floating like a balloon disentangled from its moorings, so we can wander in pure duration, without a past or future.

The leaders of the free world:

At the end of time there is no room, no more time. No more maps to look back on and remember the lost country, no old silver photographs-kept safe behind wood and glass- to turn to-the loved ones live elsewhere. What loss was held in distances. But now there is only now, no two ways about it. And Plenty Coups said, "After that, nothing happened."

A una Rosa-Requiem For A Dying Planet - La 317e... by laststudio

In the old part of the world, its dusty streets laying in ruins, as they always have, a child remembers a word, and it is our word too, Abba.

Father.

{This post was inspired by Tom's over at http://tomclarkblog.blogspot.com/}

Metro-land and the Buddha of surbubia

Lera Lynn - My Least Favorite Life (From The... by esahulat60956

And now that the time has come, I mean that time has gone, and the green has slipped from your heart, you stand by the window, quiet and amazed, trying to remember-you're not sure what. Some sense of the other life that lived under the skin, some dim memory of a former age, now long gone, when time held together so many things and childhood hours, heavy and clumpish, dragged on forever like a thick wheel-less suitcase.

On the corner of the street, the big sloping house with the secret, cloistered garden that no-one standing on the outside would imagine was real. Patrick-or Partick, as we called him, Patrick being too posh a name for someone from the dark country- once invited us to play football on his lawns. If the grass was finely cut we would call the patch 'Wembley'. And as we were served chilled lemonade in tall glasses, we wondered who this kid, older than us, really was. No-one had seen him ever go to school or even play on the streets. Where have all these people gone now...

~

And now your life, still small, lived out in diminished horizons, which is to say, not knowing how to say, inwardly. 

The summer sun blazes away high up and we move to a different pace today. KP asks, "is this September or have I forgotten something?" What light can do is take us back, even if only for a moment, even if not really. In this other life I take a step to the right, and not to the left, that is all it takes sometimes. Then I am not me, and you are not you.

~

Phone calls in the morning: life insurance, credit cards, all for things I do not need. 

Mrs S has done her best for the last twenty years to sell me some insurance. "Now will you consider it?" Like death courting me. Eventually fobbed her off by telling her my wife was against it. Could almost hear her say, in muffled tones, "that girl never was no good." Next time must come up with a better excuse, something like, insurance is against Islam. That will end the conversation. What conversations must be ended, and which taken up again, for life to go on?

{photo courtesy of Roxana}

Days of abandonment (of books)

They say around these parts that before a season finally ends there's one last flaring up, one last reminder of what has truly passed. So, these long summer days here in the midst of what should be autumn are not that surprising, I suppose, but it does mean that there's an all-pervading sense of time not having really started, an uneasy feeling of us being stuck in the low gears.

After 165 pages or so you decided to abandon McEwan. This does sound half-crazy but why dignify the book and author by completing it? There is now an ever-growing list of books that remain uncompleted. Over the summer you gave up on Adler's Speedboat (too showy), Derek Raymond's second factory novel (simply awful tripe..such a pity given the brilliance of the other three) and a rather silly book by John Buchan. 

Other books have only temporarily been moved down the list (of course, Exley, which I've started seven times!. Maybe it's a spell. If I actually do manage to read it I'll probably stop writing here!).

Mary wisely said to me, why not just read Ferrante and forget McEwan and his ilk. It was that simple. 

~

The other day I was at a convenience store and I saw two rather huge and imposing figures-a middle aged couple-asking the cashier, "What are these?"

The cashier replied calmly, "they are cRoissants."

The man shook them about about in their box and pursued his line of inquiry: "Are they sweet?"

"No, " said the cashier. "They are salty, people have them with tea."

What an odd conversation. Ten minutes later I saw them parked outside the store in the semi-darkness, in their Pajero jeep. They were wolfing down the croissants, throwing all caution to the wind, completely devoted to the task before them with what in older times would have been called 'gay abandon.'

~

The other day a young kid spent the good part of the morning scraping clean my office floor. Really arduous work removing all that glue which had previously been stuck to the carpet. Having some sympathy for him-me being of the working classes, innit?- I made him some tea and asked him how many sugars (how much sugar) he wanted. He sipped down some of it and then nonchalantly looked up at me: "There's not enough sugar". Cheeky blighter!

~

New term. Lots of young faces and wide-eyed innocence. Are you the only person getting old in this place?

some more childish thoughts

I have to say: I'm decidedly underwhelmed. The last sixty pages of McEwan's book have been a disaster. This may be the singularly worst book that I actually complete. Do feel like throwing the towel in though since at this age one has to take time flitted away seriously.

I'm amazed that someone who writes this awfully can actually get published. I think at one stage I actually stopped engaging with it seriously and just skimmed through the pages noting the exasperating bits and the other bits which I marked with a large 'F' for fake.

Some choice examples:

So, the scene. The Jehovah's Witness kid gets the transfusion, thanks to the judge's reasonable judgement (note: reason 1, religion 0). Then a few weeks later, this kid who had previously been a kind of fanatic, as we are led to believe-though he likes poetry, the violin..ah, the old civilizing forces at work here. How bloody comforting!-writes a letter to Fiona ("call me Fiona").

He writes, 

"I need to hear your calm voice and have your clear mind discuss with me." 

WtF!! It's not just that no 17 year-old actually speaks like that; it's that the whole falseness of the words and the tone shows this book and the author up.

It gets worse:

'My Lady, will you please write to me, just a few words to say that you've read this letter and don't hate me for writing it.'

Cue vomit.

'Don't hate me..'..that's so, like, 19th century!  

I should have realized a lot earlier that this book was seriously flawed when he breezed through Fiona's 'decision' not to have children in three measly lines. That's about all the amount of empathy, or degree of understanding, I suppose, that McEwan could muster up.

Next exhibit, M'Lady..

The kid follows Fiona to romantic old Newcastle. He informs her, 'I had this huge row with my dad...I told him everything I thought about his stupid religion...'

There is more fakeness: 'These were his [God's] instructions I was obeying but it was mostly about the delicious adventure I was on,..'

Delicious!? Seriously??

'Yeah, well, anorexia is a bit like religion.'

'She couldn't hep herself, she laughed at the po-faced self-ironic afterthought...'

She is still a 59 year-old woman, right?

'He added by way of explanation, the school was enormous.'

It's at this stage that you wonder if a teenager has written this book, a po-faced teenager.

He then goes on to tell her that his meeting her in the hospital was like a grown-up coming into a room full of kids (i.e. people who believe in religion) who are 'making each other miserable and sad'. It was like the grown-up (Fiona/McEwan) saying, "Come on, stop all the nonsense, it's teatime!"

I kid thee not, it's that bad. Page 164.

More drivel...

'We replace one tooth fairy with another.'

And the response to that?

'Perhaps everyone needs tooth fairies.'

Yes, to believe that a grown-up man actually wrote this tosh does require a leap of faith.

Some reviews:

'One of the best and most perfect novels I've ever read.'
Michael Frayn (a friend, no doubt)

'It is one of the most extraordinary, powerful, moving reading experiences of my life. It is an utterly remarkable novel, delicately balanced, perfectly crafted, beautifully written.'
--Alberto Manguel.

I give up, I seriously do.

~ ~  ~  ~ ~ ~~ ~~  ~~ ~ ~ ~~

children act

I bought this book at the last moment (not the last possible moment) with some reservations. Haven't read McCewan before but there was some vague sort of recollection that other books of his that involved children weren't the most appealing. But the cover and the print convinced me (how shallow is that!).

Half way through and am finding it surprisingly enjoyable. On the back of Daniel Fuchs there's something clean, unfussy about the writing (had I read it after Stoner would my views be different?).

There are some lovely lines about the summer dark, about London in the rain. That, for me, makes it good enough. But the book also makes me think about one word, namely: competency.

Not just talking about my own incompetency which verges on the useless in just about every kind of endeavour I can think of. I'm constantly surprised that I've survived this long with a job and a roof over my head-part grateful, part smirking child, given my knowledge of what an absolute fraud I am. I'm sure if I was starting out all over again today I'd be homeless in two years. There's something to be said for the old-world inefficiencies and ignorance. As long as they don't reach alarming levels they clear a space for human sensibilities and possibilities. To work and live in a way that isn't determined by the machine or by accountants or a rigorous and narrow rationality. 

No, and not even the competence of a judge or any professional to make assessments- given the complexity of human behaviour- is something that fascinates you beyond a kind of mild interest in the interface between technique and freedom. Poets and mullahs, too, have an over-inflated view of their own competence, their own self-appointed right to legislate on affairs of the human heart. 

No, what interests me about McEwan is time and again you asked yourself: is this real? From what vantage point does he write? It's not that the writing grated-far from it-but it does leave me uneasy. Does he really understand what a woman feels about childlessness? Can he? There's almost something glib about the way he races over twenty years in three lines. Then again, perhaps that is how we think. if asked to explain what you've been doing in the last twenty years you don't suppose you could muster more than a paragraph. But I'm not sure that's what we'd expect a writer to do.

What's my beef? I think that his Britishness somehow gets in the way, takes too many things for granted (gender, the power structure, the world of appearances). Someone in court, an ordinary person, dresses as if they could have been from the judiciary themself. Then there's the repeated reference to the judge thinking about how her bottom has become too large or heavy. That's just another tired cliche. 

And then there's religion. To what extent can someone who is not religious really understand a religious perspective? Sure, one can read about things in the papers, but at the end of the day there's a sneaking suspicion that there's really something quite childish about the depiction of religious people by those who have rejected it. It's as if one can only see something in its external manifestations and mechanisms and avoid getting to the heart of it (is this the same problem when it comes to men writing about women?).

Anyway, that all sounds overly critical when the book is, so far, not that bad.

'Last time she had looked, the Thames at high tide was also swollen and a darker brown, sullen and rebellious as it rose against the piers of the bridges..But everyone pushed on, complaining, resolute, drenched. The jet stream was broken, bent southwards by factors beyond control..

[Those three words could summarize a thousand years of British history: 'complaining, resolute, drenched.']

'The notes strained at some clear human meaning, but they meant nothing at all. Just loveliness, purified. Or love in its vaguest, largest form, for all people, indiscriminately.'