Now for the Areopagus. Marcel Proust (whose In Search of Lost Time I’ve (finally) been reading) has put me in the mood for remembering things past and otherwise overlooked. That’s our destination, and a few lines from Charles Baudelaire’s Le Voyage, translated by Edna St. Vincent Millay, will be our embarkation:

Astonishing voyagers! What splendid stories
We read in your eyes as deep as the seas!
Show us the chest of your rich memories,
Those marvelous jewels, made of ether and stars.

We wish to voyage without steam and without sails!
To brighten the ennui of our prisons,
Make your memories, framed in their horizons,
Pass across our minds stretched like canvasses.

Tell us what you have seen.

Time to weigh anchor, setting sail on the seas of time!

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I - Classical Music

“Cara, non dubitar” from The Secret Marriage

Domenico Cimarosa (1793)

Performed by Leopold Simoneau and Pierrette Alarie with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin

The Teatro della Scala in Milan by Carlo Bossoli (1849)

Recently, and for the first time, I found time for Stendhal. He’s a writer I’ve heard lots about, and whose novels’ alluring titles (The Charterhouse of Parma; Scarlet and Black) I’ve seen in bookshops for years. Suffice to say that Stendhal lived up to his enormous reputation and I was delighted by his company. Now, and more to the point, Stendhal loved music; alongside his novels he wrote a biography of Giachino Rossini and his novels are filled with musical allusions. In The Charterhouse of Parma, for example, Milan’s La Scala is a crucial location. The taste of an author so vaunted, and one so renowned for musical erudition, is surely worth exploring.

So: who was Stendhal’s favourite composer? Domenico Cimarosa. Strange, perhaps, that the name of a man who wrote more than sixty operas performed all around Europe, who was more popular than Mozart, and whose talents were so prized that he served as court composer for both Leopold II (of the Holy Roman Empire) and Catherine the Great (of the Russian Empire), should be totally unfamiliar to us!

What I have shared is a duet called Cara, non dubitar (“Dear, don’t doubt”) from Cimarosa’s The Secret Marriage, a comic opera which opened to blockbuster success in 1793. Stendhal claimed to have seen it more than one hundred times, and it’s one of few works by Cimarosa that hasn’t completely faded from memory, with partial and occasionally full performances taking place every few years, though usually at festivals or by regional opera groups rather than major venues.

What else has survived? This is where the story of Cimarosa (and Stendhal’s love for him) becomes rather interesting. Much more popular than The Secret Marriage (and with millions of views or streams across YouTube and Spotify) is Cimarosa’s Concerto for Oboe in C Minor. But this piece was actually created in 1942 by the Australian composer Arthur Benjamin, who selected and rearranged certain passages from Cimarosa’s piano sonatas.

What makes this even more peculiar is that Stendhal never mentioned Cimarosa’s piano sonatas. Why? Because they were only discovered in the 1920s, in a trove of a manuscripts uncovered in Florence. Despite going unpublished during his lifetime, it is these sonatas have ensured Cimarosa’s survival. A rearrangement of Piano Sonata 42 by the Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson, for example, has been played thirty-six million times on Spotify. The strangest thing about all this, of course, is that the man who loved Cimarosa most — our Stendhal — would, alongside being thrilled to know that people are still listening to his music in the 21st century, be baffled to learn that he’d never heard the music for which Cimarosa is now known. Who knows what unreleased or obscure tracks our current musical superstars, much to our surprise, may be remembered for in the future?

II - Historical Figure

Samuel Daniel

The poet Samuel Daniel is, in the grand scheme of things, a minor figure in the long history of English art and language. Nonetheless, he was both an immensely successful writer and an important contributor to a major debate that has since shaped how we all write and talk (and therefore, really, think). He was born in 1562 and died in 1619, living cosynchronously with Shakespeare and taking part, alongside him, as a leading light in the Elizabeth and Jacobean flowering of English literature.

In 1602, against the backdrop of this flowering, a fellow poet called Thomas Campion wrote a short treatise called Observations on the Art of English Poesie. It was an all-out attack on the use of rhyme. Campion argued that, instead of relying on rhyme and stressed metre (i.e. where each line has a set number of syllables), poets should use write rhymelessly and with quantitative metre, whereby syllables are measured by how long it takes to say them, as in Ancient Greek or Italian poetry. Samuel Daniel, encouraged by his friends (to whom he had written private letters on the subject) published a response to Campion’s treatise, calling it A Defence of Rhyme.

These two tracts were part of a larger contemporary debate about the English language and whether it should develop on the foundation of Ancient Greek and Roman literature or whether local and more recent innovations should be allowed to flourish. Though it seems rather pedantic and recondite now, this question was once of the utmost significance; no doubt future generations will look back on our debates around language and the arts, which seem vitally important to us, as similarly trifling. But, even within these apparent trifles, there are treasures to be found!

Daniel’s treatise is striking, at first, because of his readiness to criticise Antiquity. As, for example, when he says of Roman poets:

…their boundlesse running on, often so confounds the Reader, that having once lost himselfe, must either give off unsatisfied, or uncertainely cast backe to retrieve the escaped sense, and to find way againe into his matter.

The past was not necessarily better than the present. Such was Daniel’s conviction; he rejected the idea that Greco-Roman culture had reached a state of perfection which his modern England was duty-bound to emulate:

Me thinkes we should not so soone yield our consents captive to the authoritie of Antiquitie, unlesse we saw more reason: all our understandings are not to be built by the square of Greece and Italie. We are the children of nature as well as they, we are not so placed out of the way of judgement but that the same Sunne of Discretion shineth uppon vs, wee have our portion of the same vertues as well as of the same vices.

Whereas Campion’s approach to the problem had been technical, Daniel turned to more general arguments; that is why, despite being an ostensibly hypercontextual treatise of exclusive value to literary historians, Daniel’s Defence of Rhyme somehow transforms into a timeless response to all those who would seek to shackle the present to the past, or to proclaim the superiority of one artistic method over another.

Thus he points out that China, despite not using the same poetic rules as the Ancient Greeks, was still a sophisticated, wealthy, and erudite nation:

Will not experience confute us, if wee shoulde say the state of China, which never heard of Anapestiques, Trochies, and Tribracques, were grosse, barbarous, and uncivile?

This expands into a broader attack on the idea that one particular culture could be considered artistically superior to another, and that certain forms of art are worse than others; greatness proliferates throughout all humankind, Daniel argued:

Nor can it be but a touch of arrogant ignorance, to hold this or that nation Barbarous, these or those times grosse, considering how this manifold creature man, wheresoever hee stand in the world, hath alwayes some disposition of worth, intertaines the order of societie, affects that which is most in use, and is eminent in some one thing or other, that fits his humour and the times.

And then, addressing the Renaissance’s foundational idea — that the Middle Ages were a time of barbarous darkness — Daniel says, with the same vein of humility and open-heartedness that runs throughout the whole treatise:

…it is but the clowds gathered about our owne judgement that makes us thinke all other ages wrapt up in mists, and the great distance betwixt us, that causes us to imagine men so farre off, to be so little in respect of our selves.

Wise words that are as necessary now, with forces of rampant futurism dismissing the past as irrelevant or burdensome, as they were in the year 1603.

Daniel was frustrated with highly educated men who produced more confusion than order by their erudition, and who seemed to prize pedantry over real understanding; here we find echoes of the charming common sense that defines the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. He believed that if people have been doing something and it works well, there’s no need to philosophise ourselves out of accepting it:

I thanke God that I am none of these great Schollers, if thus their high knowledges doe but give them more eyes to looke out into uncertaintie and confusion, accounting my selfe, rather beholding to my ignorance… plodding on the plaine tract I finde beaten by Custome and the Time, contenting me with what I see in use.

Nonetheless, Daniel’s argument wasn’t a nihilistic or relativistic rejection of the idea that great art exists; he evidently believed in the permanent and universal power of art. Rather, Daniel recognised that each era has its own idiosyncrasies, systems, and fashions, and that these things shape what is considered “good” at any given period in time. Therefore, he reasoned, it would be wrong to teach that any particular approach to poetry — rhymed or unrhymed — was absolutely correct:

I dare not take upon mee to teach that they ought to be so, in respect my selfe holdes them to be so, or that I thinke it right; for indeede there is no right in these things that are continually in a wand’ring motion, carried with the violence of our uncertaine likings, being but onely the time that gives them their power.

What Daniel saw was the goodness in all things, of all ages and places, which cannot be reduced to a set of frozen maxims of rules, but (like our ever-changing selves) must be adapted to circumstance and context.

Daniel’s name has lost its lustre, but, and even invisibly, his influence lives on and thrives in the books we still read and the very things we say. Languages are an ever-changing social possession, passed down from one generation to the next, with each generation altering what they’ve inherited. English as we know and write it today was, in some small but not insignificant way, shaped by Daniel.

But his own (relative) oblivion would not have surprised him; Daniel foresaw and predicted it, ending his Defence with these gorgeous, timeless, and humble words, calmly acknowledging that this great debate (which seemed so important to him and his contemporaries) would become a trifle, if not forgotten, soon enough.

…this is but a Character of that perpetuall reuolution which wee see to be in all things that neuer remaine the same, and we must heerein be content to submit our selves to the law of time, which in few yeeres wil make al that, for which we now contend, Nothing.

III - Art

Correggio

In London’s National Gallery, looking down from a screen of gilded spandrels and marble shafts at the top of its grand staircase, are three faces. They depict, from left to right (and with their names Latinised): Rembrandt, Leonardo, and Correggio.

The first two remain blockbuster names of art and culture, especially Leonardo. The third name, though known to lovers of art, will be otherwise unfamiliar. Millions of people pass through those doors every year, and if we could now choose three artists to welcome them, Correggio wouldn’t make the cut. So: who was he, and why was he once considered worthy of such an honour?

Antonio Allegri da Correggio was born in 1489 and died in 1534, at the age of forty-four. He worked in the Italian city of Parma and became its foremost painter during the High Renaissance, absorbing the influences of his contemporaries and pushing beyond the existing boundaries of Renaissance art, into the more extravagant and sensual realms of Mannerism and Baroque.

Thus, in his work, you’ll find the fruits of those who worked alongside him — Leonardo’s smoky eyes, Raphael’s mellow harmony, Titian’s luminous colours — and also the seeds that blossomed in painters who followed — Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro, Claude’s idyllic sunscapes, even hints of Watteau’s Rococo revels. His Jupiter and Io, painted in 1530, is the ideal (and most famous) example of Correggio’s style:

John Ruskin, though he disapproved of what he perceived as Correggio’s irreligiosity and generic classicism, considered him to have been one of the most technically gifted painters in history. In particular, Ruskin praised Correggio for his treatment of foliage, clouds, atmospheric effects, and hair. Notice, in this closeup from Jupiter and Io, the scrupulous realism of the leaves and the impossibly delicate curls of Io’s hair:

Correggio was also a renowned muralist, and his greatest (or most influential) achievement was to show just how magnificent ceiling paintings, especially those on the inside of a dome, could be. His Assumption of the Virgin at the Cathedral of Parma, painted in the 1520s, was a revelation; it served as a foundation for the next two centuries of illusionistic Baroque murals, whereby two-dimensional surfaces were made to look like the heavens opening up.

These achievements go some way to explaining why, when the National Gallery’s grand staircase was opened in 1887 (as an expansion to the original building of 1838) Correggio was chosen to adorn it. Indeed, one of the National Gallery’s first major purchases was two paintings by Correggio. As the German art historian Gustav Friedrich Waagen wrote in 1854:

…the most important acquisition was made in 1834, by the purchase of the two celebrated works of Correggio, the Ecce Homo, and the Education of Cupid, from the collection of the Marquis of Londonderry, for 11,500l.

Waagen believed it was more expensive than any acquisition in British history. And a few decades later, in 1900, the art historian Selwyn Brinton said this:

In approaching the work of Antonio Allegri, better known as Correggio, we have to deal with an artist who for three centuries now has been at the zenith of his popularity, whose work still remains, and will always remain, of first importance.

How things have changed! But, a little further on in the same book, Brinton says something even more extravagant (and more revealing of the caprices of art history, where reputations rise and fall, almost ruthlessly, on the Wheel of Fortune):

In tracing out that wonderful chain of evolution which the Italian genius created in the art of the Renaissance, as we pause at the very moment of the supremest unfolding of that genius, four names sound into our ears, four personalities stand out before us, most potent in their claim, whether of mystery, of serenity, of strength, of living grace; and those names, those personalities, are Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Correggio.

But the supremest genius of four personalities has, in the intervening century, turned to three: Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo are the Trinity of the Renaissance, and Correggio has become a secondary, if not tertiary, figure. It would have surprised Brinton, Waagen, and all the rest to know that Correggio’s popularity has declined, but such is the history of art. That mysterious bust above the National Gallery’s grand staircase is an afterglow of Correggio’s reputational comet, which once burned brightly but has — for now — burned low.

IV - Architecture

The Art of Arrival

Our theme has been faded stars (artists, ideas, or movements, once popular but largely forgotten) and, though there are plenty of specific buildings we might mention, it is a type of building (the decline of which) that I want to investigate: gates.

The word “gate” is multivalent. Hearing it, we might think of a little garden gate, really just a few planks of guilelessly joined wood, creaking on its familiar hinges. Alternatively, and at the opposite end of the spectrum, colossal towers, fortified and crenellated, with battlements and loopholes, are what we imagine. It is this secondary definition that I have in mind. Something like the Westgate in Canterbury:

In the past these gates were, if not merely commonplace, universal; once upon a time cities and towns were ringed with defensive walls punctuated by gates that would be closed either at night or in the event of emergency, whether siege, plague, or coup. They (along with town walls) are not something we build any longer, and most of them were demolished in the 19th century, as industrialisation led to the expansion of cities. Walls and gates had become obsolete, and the construction of new roads and houses took precedence over any historical interest. Hence the abundance of street-names like Kingsgate, Bishopsgate, or Eastgate: the last living sign of the structures that once guarded these places. Whatever gatehouses still stand are usually the consequence of a town having avoided industrialisation, or (surprisingly often) because — by virtue of being so strongly fortified — they were ideal prisons.

There is something gorgeously romantic about gates; the mere sight of them as one approaches, knowing that the old core of the city lies beyond, somehow straightens up your back. They are so unlike anything else we build, with their cyclopean proportions and unadorned bulk; a gorgeously robust relic of past ages, reminding us what things used to be like and tethering our modern fancies to local history.

And, alongside these romantic connotations, there’s a very specific form of beauty and utility to gates. See, visiting well-preserved Medieval cities like Canterbury, Rye, and Lincoln, it’s impossible not to be struck by the realisation that one is entering them. We don’t really “enter” cities any more; at some undefinable point fields become outskirts, and outskirts become industrial estates, and an industrial estate turns to suburbs, and suburbs blend imperceptibly with the centre, so that we’ve reached a city’s heart without even realising it. The lack of an entrance or exit prevents you from being able to enter a city, saying as you cross its monumental threshold, “I’ve arrived.” Nor can we quite leave properly, bidding farewell at the gate that marks a city’s edge.

A domestic comparison helps: our homes have doors for security, but they also serve a kind of ceremonial, emotional, and behavioural purpose, dividing one world (the outside) from another (the inside). City gates fulfil the same role, granting to our minds something that, from a biological or psychological perspective, they might actually need. The very entrance to a city can be something we remember and photograph; it can set a tone for what follows, creating an atmosphere of safety and peaceable seclusion, even a sense of belonging, and — simply by creating that division between inside and outside — giving the city a much stronger identity. They are also, in very simple terms, very useful landmarks.

I’m not sure we can justify building more city gates in the twenty-first century; they were, after all, constructed out of necessity during the Middle Ages. Nonetheless, they urge us not to forget a very specific type of urban design that hasn’t received the attention it deserves: the architecture of arriving and leaving.

V - Rhetoric

Homecoming Sickness

Given this week’s theme, it only makes sense that nostalgia should be the subject of our rhetorical studies. After all, nostalgia is among the most effective tools for appealing to, engaging, and even manipulating a crowd. Since time immemorial human beings have suspected that “things used to be better”, and even our present era, whatever you think about it, will eventually be looked back on with nostalgia.

But what does “nostalgia” actually mean? The idea as we think of it now is ancient, of course, but the word itself was only invented in 1688. A Swiss medical student called Johannes Hofer combined nostos, a Greek word that means “homecoming”, with algos, another Greek word meaning “pain”. This was his attempt to classicalise the German word Heimweh, which literally translates to “home pain”. Hofer used it to diagnose Swiss soldiers who’d been fighting abroad and returned psychologically distressed; what he noticed is what we now call PTSD.

Soon enough Hofer’s diagnosis had crossed borders and entered the English language; aboard a ship in 1770, the naturalist Sir Joseph Banks recorded this in his journal:

The greatest part of them were now pretty far gone with the longing for home which the Physicians have gone so far as to esteem a disease under the name of Nostalgia.

So, originally, nostalgia was a medical term; it was regarded as a sickness that (alarmingly) could be fatal. In Robley Dunglinson’s 1856 Dictionary of Medical Science, for example, we find an entry for nostalgia:

An affection produced by the desire of returning to one’s country. It is commonly attended by slow wasting, and sometimes by hectic, which may speedily induce death.

For a long time, even as the word’s purely medical usage started to loosen, it remained an entry in medical dictionaries, albeit with subtly changing emphasis. From Thomas Lathrop Stedman’s A Practical Medical Dictionary, published in 1920:

Homesickness, a longing to return to one’s home or former place of residence.

The phrase “former place of residence”, rather than one’s original homeland, suggests an expansion of Hofer’s original idea, and points toward nostalgia’s entry into the general lexicon. D.H. Lawrence’s Lost Girl, for example, a novel also published in 1920, contains this line:

The terror, the agony, the nostalgia of the heathen past was a constant torture to her mediumistic soul.

Nonetheless, the Oxford English Dictionary of 1933 has it thusly:

A form of melancholia caused by prolonged absence from one’s home or country; severe home-sickness.

And so, even in literature, nostalgia continued to be perceived as a fundamentally harmful and largely medical phenomenon; W. Somerset Maugham wrote in a collection of short stories, in 1936:

Some of the convicts… had such a nostalgia for France that they went mad with melancholy.

In the decades after the Second World War, however, as the field of psychology grew more refined and recognisably modern, nostalgia was freed from its medical genesis and started to attain its more familiar, contemporary meaning. In the 1989 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, a second definition (alongside the original from the 1933 edition, quoted above) was added:

transf. Regret or sorrowful longing for the conditions of a past age; regretful or wistful memory or recall of an earlier time.

That “transf.” at the beginning of the definition is short for “Transferred”, to indicate that a definition has become non-literal and expanded beyond its original use. As of 2026 the Oxford English Dictionary defines it like this:

Sentimental longing for or regretful memory of a period of the past, esp. one in an individual’s own lifetime; (also) sentimental imagining or evocation of a period of the past.

What was once a diagnosed medical condition of potentially fatal homesickness has become a sentimental longing for or imagining of the past. It turns out the tired one-line joke that “Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be” is, in fact, correct.

VI - Writing

Yours etc.

Whenever I read my emails, I find myself frustrated by the standardised sign-offs, otherwise called valedictions, that conclude them. Like so much else, one is tempted to believe, we used to do it better. I am referring, of course, to the impersonal and generic “Kind regards” or “Best wishes”, sometimes reduced to the casual and laconic “Best”. Are your regards kind? What do you intend to wish me? These are a far cry from the valedictions we find in old letters, as when Sir Francis Bacon wrote to the Duke of Buckingham in the early 17th century, signing off:

Thus may you long live a happy Instrument, for your King and Country, you shall not be a Meteor, or a blasing Star, but stella fixa, happy here, and more happy hereafter. Deus manu sua te ducat, thats the hearty prayer of,

Your most obliged servant,

In the face of our modern, altogether more docile valedictions, and compared with Bacon’s mellifluence, one wonders why we even bother. But (as consolingly as ever!) this problem isn’t new; I found a splendid article in the Los Angeles Times, dated 26th June 1988, saying:

In today’s hurried world of cellular phones, fax transmissions and electronic mail, letter closures and letters themselves may soon be on the endangered species list.

A similar article was published on 22nd July 1999 in The New York Times, when this process of technological development had taken further, more monumental leaps:

Acronyms are particularly popular electronic farewell devices, though senders run the risk of annoying the recipient with sign-offs that take more time to figure out than they would to spell out. Common and not-so-common TLA’s (three-letter acronymns) include BFN (bye for now), TIA (for thanks in advance or that is all), mimicking old public address systems) and FYB (follow your bliss, borrowed from the philosopher Joseph Campbell). Longer alternatives include TTFN, for ta-ta for now, TTYS (talk to you soon), PDAR (please destroy after reading) and C-Ya, for see you. L8R and Latah are commonly used for “later” (variations: E you later and Type at ya later). L2 + P has also been spotted, for live long and prosper. Then there’s g/g, for got to go, and WB (write back) soon.

How modern those acronyms must have seemed, and what a threat to traditional valedictions; how naive and harmless, how full of curious character, they are now! And, reflecting on these articles, it becomes clear that those older valedictions were exactly the same: expressions of their age, rather than of purely personal feeling.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley signed off most of her letters with lines like these:

Ever yours truly,

Affectionately yours ever,

Yours affectionately and entirely,

Most affectionately yours,

To sign off with affection seems lovely now (because it’s no longer a typical valediction) but in those days it was standard, and had been for a long time; Sir Edmund Spenser closed a letter to Walter Raleigh in 1589 with the similar:

Yours most humbly affectionate,

And so, a handful of highly personalised valedictions for specific individuals aside (like Thomas Carlyle’s Ewig, meaning “Eternally” in German, to his wife), each era has had its own set of generically accepted sign-offs, and ours is no different. Two hundred years ago no more real affection was necessarily indicated by Mary Shelley’s “affectionately” than kindness shown by our twenty-first century “Kind regards”. Nor are our drab modern sign-offs any less boilerplate than Lord Byron’s rather amusing “Believe me, etc.” (including the etc. every time) with which he signed off so many of his letters, and which was also standard for the era.

Referring to oneself as an “obedient servant” was another popular valediction throughout the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. Now, certain official circumstances aside, it would be seen as a peculiar and perhaps sycophantic way to close correspondence, especially an email. In the future our “Kind regards” and “Best wishes” will be similarly quaint, old-fashioned, and inappropriate for correspondence. It’s even possible that, two hundred years from now, somebody will look back on 21st century correspondence and think of our regards and wishes as far more heartfelt and meaningful than whatever valedictions have replaced them.

VII - The Seventh Plinth

Cutting Pages

The paperback version of my book has been released and, though one is supposed to promise what readers can expect, a recent experience reminded me of what readers shouldn’t expect: uncut pages.

For a long time books were printed on folded sheets of paper and bound without those folded sheets being trimmed; it was readers, as a consequence, who had to (using a paper or letter knife) unseal them. We don’t do have to do this any more, but if you buy old books then you will, occasionally, find one that nobody ever cut.

I first encountered this problem, years ago, with Tennyson’s In Memoriam, trying on a train to prize open its sealed pages and believing (briefly) that it must have been a kind of bizarre printing error. It happened again recently, but this time I was well aware that no mistake had been made, and it was simply the case that this particular book’s previous owner had never cut its pages. Alternatively, it’s something you may have seen in historical dramas.

There’s something vaguely sad about finding books that, despite being more than a century old, have never been read. From another point of view, I suppose, it’s quite funny: one can imagine a man with pretensions to erudition whose personal library, it turns out, is actually composed of books with unopened pages! Most of all, though, I found it thrilling to cut each new leaf, realising that this particular page hadn’t seen the light of day since long before cars were invented or even electricity. While the world has been turning and civilisation evolving this page slept, quietly, awaiting its eventual moment of return.

Uncut pages are an inconvenience, but no more of an inconvenience than, say, the fact that in order to see the break of dawn we must either stay up the whole night or rise early. Inconvenience is more or less the only route to a deeper appreciation of things, and the sheer physicality of the book becomes brutally and gorgeously apparent when you have it to cut its pages. These miraculous objects that have lifted humanity from the darkness of ignorance and spread light and life throughout the world and across the ages are, it transpires, nothing more than bundles of mulched and pressed wood (or, once upon a time, rags of cloth), dried and covered in carefully arranged splashes of ink, tied together and glued or sewn into protective bits of board or leather. To realise this, and to interact with a book on those terms, is something I hope every reader gets to experience.

(I should conclude with a word of definitional caution: the terms “uncut” and “unopened” have precise meanings and I may not have used them accurately. This fabulous little article from the Folger Shakespeare Library explains the difference between uncut and unopened.)

And that’s all

We’ve come an awfully long way and we’re not done yet; another Areopagus is glittering on the horizon! But, like all ships, we must drop anchor and rest a while, perhaps even head for port. The Greek poet George Seferis, with the twenty-fourth poem from his Mythistoremia, sings us back to shore:

Here end the works of the sea, the works of love.
Those who will some day live here where we end—
should the blood happen to darken in their memory and overflow—
let them not forget us, the weak souls among the asphodels,
let them turn the heads of the victims towards Erebus:

We who had nothing will teach them peace.

Yours etc.,

The Cultural Tutor

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Share Areopagus

Sound forth, cœlestiall organs, let heaven’s quire
Ravish the dancing orbes, make them mount higher
With nimble capers, & force Atlas tread
Upon his tiptoes, e’re his silver head
Shall kisse his golden curtain. Thou glad Isle,
That swim’st as deepe in joy, as seas, now smile;
Lett not thy weighty glories, this full tide
Of blisse, debase thee; but with a just pride
Swell: swell to such an height, that thou maist vye
With heaven itselfe for stately majesty.

The stage is set, the golden curtain has risen, and the Areopagus begins…

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I - Classical Music

Half-Time

Bohuslav Martinů (1924)

Performed by the Brno Philharmonic

The 1924 Summer Olympics Gold Medal Match in Paris, which Martinu likely attended

The World Cup has started; football must be our cue. Classical music and football have a long and delightful history, most famously with the Champions League Anthem (composed by Tony Britten and based directly on Handel’s Zadok the Priest) and with the performance of Nessun Dorma (by The Three Tenors) at four consecutive World Cup Finals, from 1990 until 2002.

Somewhat less well-known is Half-Time, written in 1924 by the Czech composer Bohuslav Martinů. In his case, rather than combining the glamour of modern football with the sophistication of the past, Martinů combined the rising tide of football culture with the equally rising tide of experimental, avant-garde music. He lived in Paris during the 1920s, when Impressionism, Expressionism, Jazz, and Neoclassicism were all reshaping the musical landscape. By the end of the decade Martinů had become a devout Neoclassical composer, but when he composed Half-Time he was in the middle of an evolution. That’s an awful lot of “isms”, but I think it helps to explain Martinů’s peculiar, pulsating music.

His was a style that rejected the emotional preponderance, lavish melodies, and historically-grounded drama of Romantic composers like Richard Wagner or Giacomo Puccini. Instead, Martinů and his contemporaries used brief melodies, intense rhythm, sudden leaps, stretched tonality, and flashes of dissonance, plus inspiration from folk and dance music, all of which combined to create the breathless frenzy that we hear in Half-Time. Frenzied, I say, but also clean, orderly, and clinical. He believed this approach reflected the modern world of machines and motor-cars, of ocean liners and aeroplanes, of glittering steel and smoke-filled cabarets. Lots of noise and movement, but (by virtue of being dominated by machines) there was also precision and calculation. You can hear all of that in Half-Time; football was (as you’ll read below) considered an equally conspicuous aspect of modern life.

Half-Time certainly isn’t, to borrow a phrase and somewhat understate the matter, everybody’s cup of tea. But even for those who cannot quite enjoy the work of composers like Martinů, his work embodies an undeniably intriguing chapter of musical history. If not for the music itself, then at least for what the rise of such music said about the society producing it, I think pieces like these are worth listening to.

II - Historical Figure

Egbert of Liège

Medieval Studies

One thousand years ago, at some point between the years 1010 and 1026, a man called Egbert wrote a textbook for schoolchildren. He was a clergyman and teacher at one of the church schools in Liège, in modern Belgium; during Egbert’s lifetime it was a principality within the Holy Roman Empire and among Europe’s most scholarly cities.

Apart from scanty details imparted in his own work (including a short prefatory letter to the Bishop of Liège) and one mention of his name in a later catalogue, we know no facts of Egbert’s life. What we can say with some certainty, however, is that he was a moderniser; Egbert wasn’t happy with the existing textbooks for novice students (both of which had been around for centuries) and wanted to improve them.

He called his new textbook The Well-Laden Ship and divided it into two parts: The Embellished Prow and The Bronze-Clad Stern. This was an elaborate metaphor with several meanings. The embellishment of the first half, being the front of the ship, was about rhetoric and fine speech; these are the parts of a ship one sees first, and the characteristics we first encounter in a person. Then came the second half, on the subject of religion, which is what (Egbert reasoned) guides humanity; the stern is the place from which a captain guides his ship.

It isn’t anything like a modern textbook, of course, but rather than thinking about whether his method of teaching was better or worse, it’s worth standing back to think of it, above all and most simply, as different. Our teaching methods wouldn’t have been appropriate or particularly useful in early 11th century Liège, and Egbert’s syllabus wouldn’t be appropriate or useful in 2026. Times change, and with them our approach to education must change.

The Well-Laden Ship (which was written in Latin) begins with a long list of single-line proverbs and sayings, most of them folkloric and likely familiar to his young students in their own language. Many are familiar to us; ten centuries later we are still saying:

I’ve never seen a wagon go when placed in front of the oxen.

Or:

When a horse is offered for free, you should not open its mouth.

Or:

An apple turns its stem toward the tree from which it fell.

And:

I would rather be slower to believe things I have heard than things I have seen.

Others are, if not familiar, then wonderfully useful proverbs:

From a shard one can discern what the pot was like.

Or:

Cleverness would be pleasing on this condition: if only person were clever.

And:

It does not benefit you much to eat a lot of honey.

Others are somewhat more obscure, like:

Nobody makes dogs’ hides suitable for storing honey.

But (and a wonderful but we have!) the sole surviving manuscript of Egbert’s Well-Laden Ship is covered with explanatory notes called “glosses”, likely written by one of his students, that provide the proverbs’ meanings. The one just mentioned is explained thus:

No sane person, who wants to have clean honey, pours it into an unclean dog’s hide.

Mixed in with these proverbs are quotes from Classical poets like Ovid, Horace, and Juvenal, lines from the Bible, and grammatical rules or explanations, such as:

Lens, lendis is a little worm; lens, lentis is a lentil.

Or:

Alius means “one of many”; alter means “one of two”.

There is even some geometry:

A compass will form equal circles from a point.

Reading The Well-Laden Ship, and using our imaginations judiciously, we can easily picture Egbert in his classroom reading out a verse to his students and asking them what it means, then helping with the more unusual Latin words until (perhaps because they know the vernacular equivalent) they work it out; we can imagine him asking his students to figure out what a particularly strange metaphor might signify, and asking them if they know who Ulysses or Barabbas was; we can even imagine the schoolboys laughing at one of the funnier or more vulgar sayings.

After the initial run of single-line proverbs, Egbert moves to two-line proverbs, then three-line, four-line, and a final group of miscellaneous length. That rounds out The Embellished Prow, and The Bronze-Clad Stern (which is shorter) contains sections of varying lengths on theology, ecclesiology, Classical history, Biblical history, general Christian wisdom, and a smattering of zoology. He describes the newt like this, more interested in what it represents metaphorically than how it functioned as a creature:

The newt is slow in its step and not steady in its stride. Although he is not agile, he seeks out royal walls. On the other hand, great birds flying through the clear void seek out ponds; and from these they are thrust into hot fires. The vain wisdom of the world yields to the less learned. Although they are slow, they seek after heaven, feeling their way. Those who think they have been quick are tossed farther away.

You can already see that The Bronze-Clad Stern is much more complicated; now his students have progressed through The Embellished Prow, it is time to work them harder. Alongside analysing the Ten Commandments, explaining the importance of Mass, and discussing figures like Moses and Job (all important training for future priests!) Egbert makes some general observations about the present day. There is remarkable realism in The Well-Laden Ship, especially when he warns his students against the excesses of certain priests and condemns the practice of tonsuring. He also offers this familiar lament:

Scholarly effort is in decline everywhere as never before. Indeed, cleverness is shunned at home and abroad. What does reading offer to pupils except tears? It is rare, worthless when it is offered for sale, and devoid of wit.

Egbert’s express purpose was to create a textbook that catered to the needs of his students, and by including so much folklore alongside more squarely religious or historical material, plus a great many strange, fascinating, and vulgar tales, he was calculating on maintaining their interest as they moved toward tackling some of Christianity’s most longstanding and pressing questions. His students surely asked about divine hiddenness, the existence of suffering, the precise details of Lucifer’s fall, or the nature of Heaven and Hell. Egbert had answers:

Hear what “weeping”, what “gnashing” in the world of hell signifies: the weeping arises from the smoke and the heat, and the gnashing of teeth from the icy river of cold. And so they have a double woe, paying for their crime, deservedly.

The Well-Laden Ship is a kind of Medieval primer, introducing new students to all the basics of what they would be learning in a brief, memorable, entertaining, and accessible fashion. They’d finish this foundational course, under Egbert’s tutelage, with a firm grasp of Latin, an introduction to Classical and Patristic writers, some Biblical and Classical history, the rudiments of Christian theology and ecclesiology, a wide knowledge of folkloric wisdom, and a mastery of metaphor (along with some other rhetorical and literary devices). Plus, of course, the proverbs and maxims themselves are useful heuristics for living a decent life. All told, then, this was a carefully worked-out educational programme; not bad for a Medieval textbook!

So The Well-Laden Ship was an ambitious project… and one that never quite achieved what Egbert hoped. His work survives in a single manuscript because, it seems, his reformed textbook was not widely adopted. In which case we are speaking here about an essentially ordinary, if somewhat progressively-minded, man of his times, whose name and work has survived more by circumstance than because of his success and influence. All the better, I say! The great are few and far between; we are, for the most part, wonderfully ordinary. In this way, then, and though it sounds unlikely, an ordinary man like Egbert can teach us more about the Middle Ages than the leading lights of his era.

All quotes are from Robert Gary Babcock’s beautifully accessible and equally scholarly translation (with helpful commentary and an illuminating introduction) published in a lovely little hardback by the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library.

III - Art

Dynamism of a Soccer Player

Umberto Boccioni (1913)

This painting is a supreme example of the artistic movement known as Futurism, which was founded in 1909 (with the publication of a “Futurist Manifesto”) and lasted through to the 1930s. It was closely linked to other avant-garde movements like Cubism, Surrealism, and Expressionism, but is distinguished from them partly by the fact that it was a specifically Italian style, and partly by how early it emerged.

Umberto Boccioni, though his life was short (he died during the First World War at the age of thirty-three) had a colossal impact on Italian art; he was among the first true Futurists, and perhaps the first true Futurist painter. What was Futurism? As its name suggests, it was about embracing modernity and casting off the shackles and misconceptions of the past. Italy is filled with essentially endless historical treasures, but in the first decade of the 20th century a group of radical artists started to believe that this immense historical baggage was holding them back. The Futurist Manifesto, written by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, pulls no punches:

It is from Italy that we launch through the world this violently upsetting incendiary manifesto of ours. With it, today, we establish Futurism, because we want to free this land from its smelly gangrene of professors, archaeologists, ciceroni and antiquarians. For too long has Italy been a dealer in second-hand clothes. We mean to free her from the numberless museums that cover her like so many graveyards.

How to free culture from the past? The Futurists were obsessed with machines, factories, cars, ocean liners, shipyards, trains, and anything else that seemed to be uniquely and fundamentally modern, that seemed to be dragging humanity (even against its will!) into the future. We have a dimmer view of technology now, but in the early 20th century it was a thrilling, fundamentally optimistic frontier.

Just consider the vigour and elation with which Marinetti writes of modernity; his words help us to make sense of Boccioni’s painting, where a footballer has been transformed into a colourful and glittering biological machine, illuminated from all angles by spotlights and trapped in a cycle of perpetual motion.

We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicolored, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives; adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon; deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.

The words and the painting go together. And notice how Boccioni has given his “soccer player” a metallic sheen, as though his body is composed of flowing steel ribbons tracing every moment the player makes during a match. Is it an arm, a shin, a boot? It is all of these things; it is pure movement, pure dynamism.

In this way, Boccioni’s Dynamism of a Soccer Player is like a painted version of his most famous sculpture, called Unique Forms of Continuity in Space and also created in 1913:

But why did Boccioni choose to paint a footballer? Because the Futurists, though it might surprise us, were also obsessed with football. It was invented in the middle of the 19th century and by the First World War had become a global phenomenon, with thousands of workers around the world pouring from their factories into stadiums on a Saturday afternoon. Football (and sport in general) has become an integral part of modern culture, even to the extent that we can’t quite imagine a society without it. But this wasn’t always the case, and perhaps the best way to grasp Boccioni’s reaction to the rise of football is by comparing his painting with a contemporary photograph:

Those footballers in their baggy woollen shirts, high-waisted shorts, and heavy leather boots look incredibly old-fashioned and quaint. We could hardly imagine anything more indicative of a less technologically-advanced era, but in these players (their athleticism, the immense crowds of industrial workers they drew, the new stadiums they were playing in) Boccioni and his Futurist peers sensed a uniquely modern phenomenon. How things look and how they feel are different; a painting, even it doesn’t “look” like reality, is a valuable historical document and insight into how people thought about the world. And so, in some sense, a painting like Boccioni’s is more accurate, or at least more revealing, than a photograph.

IV - Architecture

Defaultism

I often find myself in rooms that look like this:

These spaces seem to fill our modern apartment blocks, schools, universities, offices, co-working spaces, museums, airports, and libraries. Even when buildings didn’t used to have this appearance, they have frequently been “renovated” into it. Grey carpets, pure white walls, stark white lighting, no cornices or ceiling roses or door mouldings, white ceiling tiles (or a plain white ceiling), brushed steel railings and doorhandles, and generic, standard-issue furniture. The consequence is a cold, industrial aesthetic; these places feel more like prisons than public or domestic buildings.

It’s sort of like being inside a three-dimensional spreadsheet, and I don’t think it’s very good for our humanity. After all, nothing could be further from the detail, colour, texture, and variation of the natural world. And that explains, perhaps, why we generally prefer buildings and interiors that emulate the qualities of nature. The question isn’t what “style” we prefer, but what human beings are biologically, psychologically, and socially suited to.

Nonetheless, I think this phenomenon should be named, because when things have names they are much easier to talk about. It might not be a self-conscious style in the same way that Art Nouveau or Art Deco were, but it is a style nonetheless, a kind of contemporary vernacular that has emerged as a result of various social, economic, legal, and cultural forces. Its qualities are, in no particular order:

1. Greyscale colours

2. Harsh lighting

3. Absence of decoration

4. Brushed steel fixtures and fittings

5. Standard-issue furniture

6. Synthetic materials

7. An atmosphere of sterility

This co-working space below (the image is taken from their website) is a good example, with ominous squares of white light glowing overhead and the only warmth coming from the wooden legs of the armchairs; otherwise it is a blank, greyscale box. As ever, there are several reasons for the rise of this style, but I’ll reserve that for a future Areopagus; for now I want to focus on identifying it.

Does anybody actually like this sort of thing? I struggle to believe it. True Minimalism can be beautiful, but this is not Minimalism (or even Functionalism!) as conceived by designers like Adolf Loos, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, or Le Corbusier. And (as mentioned above) this doesn’t only apply to new buildings; I have experienced first-hand a strange determination to “refurbish” or “renovate”, especially and including things that obviously did not need to be refurbished or renovated. It is genuinely and unfixably heart-breaking to see old rooms that have faithfully done their duty for decades gutted and resurrected as pale, ghostly versions of their former selves.

Of course, the desire to renovate is nothing new. Our ancestors were far less cautious when it came to rebuilding or altering major historic buildings, for example. Just look at what the Victorians did to St Alban’s Cathedral!

Nonetheless, those Victorian restorations were at least attempts to create something sympathetic to and authentically grounded in what was being refurbished; we have the opposite approach. And so, whereas we once didn’t have the resources to constantly refurbish everything, and at least believed that if something had worked for a long time then it didn’t need changing, we now have the resources (plus a strong economic incentive) to refurbish everything we can get our hands on, combined with a general aesthetic preference for the sterility of white walls and grey carpets.

So: I have decided to call this style (for now at least) Defaultism. If one were to imagine a default room, devoid of everything that could give it any personality because it is waiting to be given one, then I think we would imagine something like this:

Each and every element is the most basic and uninteresting version of what it could be; the materials and furniture have been chosen not because of their beauty or even usefulness, but because they are the cheapest and (therefore) default option. It all feels so strangely careless.

All that remains to be asked, and most importantly, is: what do you think? Some have said that Cheapism, Absentism, or even Corporate Liminalism would be better names for this generic modern style of ours. Other suggestions are Consumerist Vernacular, Miserlyism, Genericism, and Crapism. Do you like any of these? What would you call it? Email me with what you think is the right name for this style (or, of course, with a rejection of my thesis!) and I’ll share your responses in the next Areopagus.

V - Rhetoric

“He’s got the bit between his teeth… alright.”

Sometimes, Robert Bolt teaches us, the best thing we can do is repeat ourselves. See, a few weeks ago I went to watch Lawrence of Arabia at the Prince Charles Cinema in London. The place was sold out and, I suppose, my experience wasn’t totally dissimilar to what opening night must have been like in 1962. Even in our world of Artificial Intelligence, real film projection is something that literally cannot be replicated by digital technologies, because the nature of the light entering our eyes is different. We can replicate the grain of film projection, but we cannot replicate its actual colour, texture, and vividity; the only way to see it is by looping reels of physical film into a sprocket and shining a light through them.

In any case, Robert Bolt (known for writing Doctor Zhivago and A Man for All Seasons) wrote the screenplay for Lawrence of Arabia, and what a screenplay! There’s a great deal we could say, but I want to focus on a specific (and common) technique that Bolt uses uncommonly well: repetition.

The film is punctuated by certain lines that reoccur, in each case under changed circumstances; I have chosen four examples. There are spoilers ahead, and this section will make more sense if you have seen the film; for those who haven’t, but wish to read anyway, I have tried to make it comprehensible.

1. An Extraordinary Man

The film begins with Lawrence’s funeral at St Paul’s Cathedral; on the steps, after the ceremony, a reporter asks Colonel Brighton what Lawrence was like. Brighton says, “He was the most extraordinary man I ever knew.” The audience, at this point, naturally thinks that Brighton means this as a good thing, that he must be looking back on a man who was heroic, brave, gifted, and morally upstanding. This was the general public’s view of Lawrence, and the reporter seems happy with his quote; but we notice a strange ambivalence in Brighton’s expression and tone of voice. We come away feeling slightly uneasy about his remark.

Much later in the film (which takes place nearly two decades before the funeral), when Lawrence has already whipped up a revolution, stormed Aqaba, and created a situation that he cannot quite control, turning himself into a kind of warlord and losing his own identity amidst the glory and brutality of war, we hear the same line. Lawrence is back in Cairo, where General Allenby is trying to convince him to return to Arabia; Allenby says, “You are the most extraordinary man I ever met.” And now we understand what Brighton first meant by extraordinary, with all the contradiction and ambivalence that word really contains.

2. Appraising the Situation

In Cairo, before Lawrence has been sent to Arabia, Mr Dryden — a sort of politician and spymaster — tells him that his mission will be to, “Appraise the situation.” This is already rather funny, and the audience laughed a lot; it’s the typically euphemistic language of espionage, perhaps with a dash of characteristic British understatement. We know that “appraising the situation” will mean something rather more complicated, possibly even more conniving, than the tawdry words suggest.

The audience laughed when Dryden said it, and they laughed even more when Lawrence himself says the same thing in the middle of the desert. He has joined up with Colonel Brighton, who asks Lawrence why he was sent; Lawrence replies, not without a wry smile, “To appreciate the situation.” But Bolt’s humour is never farce; we suddenly realise the true scale and strangeness of the situation, and the immense gulf that always exists between theory and practice. Plans are easy to make in an office, much harder to implement in the field.

(Why does Lawrence say appreciate rather than appraise? I can’t believe this was an oversight by Robert Bolt in an otherwise watertight script; it speaks, I think, to Lawrence’s dislike for authority and general eccentricity.)

3. Silly, barbarous, and cruel

Lawrence, newly arrived in Arabia, is led through the desert by a guide. They reach a well and they drink. A man approaches from the distance and shoots Lawrence’s guide; Lawrence tells this man, Sherif Ali, that such behaviour is the reason why Arabia has been ruled by the Ottomans for so long, and that without change they’ll never be able to win freedom. He calls Ali and his people “silly, barbarous, and cruel.” At this point Lawrence seems to have something of the moral high ground, given that he’s just seen an innocent man shot dead.

Later on, Lawrence arrives at the camp of Prince Faisal and gives him strategic advice, winning Faisal’s approval with his boldness and his detailed knowledge of the Quran. But when the prince keeps Lawrence back to speak with him privately, Faisal asks Lawrence why he is trying to help people who are “silly, barbarous, and cruel”; Sherif Ali reported to Faisal what Lawrence said at the well.

Now the situation has reversed and it is Lawrence who occupies the moral low ground, who appears to be something of a hypocrite and a schemer, much like his mentor Dryden. It is a reputational wound that, though Lawrence more than overcomes it in the short term, never quite heals. Who’s team is he really on? As the audience we instinctively side with Lawrence, but Faisal’s words make us question our allegiance to the film’s protagonist.

4. The bit between his teeth

Towards the end of the film, after Lawrence has returned to Arabia and (filled with a new, messiah-like confidence) leads the revolutionary forces toward Damascus, Brighton reports to General Allenby on the situation, saying of Lawrence, “He’s got the bit between his teeth, alright.” It’s a very funny thing to say, and another wonderful example of British understatement; the audience laughed.

Allenby asks Brighton what he means, “Cocky?” And after a pause Brighton says, “He’s really got the bit between his teeth… alright”. It’s funny to hear him say it again (the cinema erupted into laughter) but Brighton’s inability to explain Lawrence’s changed behaviour as anything other than “having the bit between his teeth” is almost apocalyptic. If Brighton simply cannot bring himself to describe what’s happened to Lawrence, then it must be something very strange and unnerving that has taken place.

It is a genuinely spine-chilling moment, perhaps the darkest moment in the whole film, and yet it was crafted with immense subtlety. Brighton could have said something superficially shocking or gruesome, but by repeating himself he conjures a much more disturbing trepidation.

***

In all four examples the use of repetition is both very funny and very meaningful; tragedy and comedy are united, and one can interpret the words in manifold ways. It sounds counter-intuitive, but Bolt created more meaning by repeating words rather than adding new ones. This has the secondary effect of engaging the audience; we are required to notice that something has been repeated, and so the potentially deeper meanings are there for us to discover, as we reflect on them, instead of being spoon-fed every little detail, which would make for a dull and tiring screenplay. Sometimes, Robert Bolt teaches us, the best thing we can do is repeat ourselves.

VI - Writing

Dramatis Personae

How to find a style? It’s what every writer needs and dreams of. A story about Robert Browning (1812-1889) is instructive, and will (I trust and hope) provide a memorable way of answering that interminable question.

Where to begin? With the fact that Browning, though very obviously a talented writer, struggled at first to find a way of writing that worked. He was good at and enjoyed crafting personalities; he could somehow inhabit a person’s moods and motivations, as if by magic, and lay out their internal state of mind. But he wasn’t good at constructing linear narratives; he couldn’t write a decent plot.

That meant plays weren’t the right medium, and it also ruled out novels. They are written in prose, anyway, which was too restrictive for Browning, who preferred to range widely and speak from the soul. It would be another seventy years before novels reached an experimental stage (with the rise of stream-of-consciousness writing) that might have suited Browning’s inclinations. No plays or novels; that left poetry.

But Browning struggled to be sufficiently “objective” when he tried to write them. He couldn’t narrate a series of events like (for example) Byron had done in Don Juan or Tennyson in his Idylls of the King. Nor could he adopt his own, autobiographical point of view, as Wordsworth had. The approach of John Keats, who crafted a kind of ethereal poetic personality to muse on the nature of the world, was too delicate and composed for Browning’s more vigorous, almost volcanic manner of expression.

The soliloquys of Shakespeare, where individual characters pour out their thoughts and feelings, trying to figure themselves out in real time, was a model for emulation. But Browning still struggled with the restrictions of existing poetic and dramatic forms; they inevitably forced him to write in a way that held back his energy, or required him to provide additional information of the sort he simply wasn’t interested in. Finally he stumbled on the idea of leaning into, rather than fighting, his inclinations. He wouldn’t try to be objective, to narrate a series of events like a story-teller with all the facts to hand; nor would he try to remould traditional poetic forms around his natural way of expressing things.

How? Browning would take a soliloquy and make that the entire poem! He decided that every word we read would come from the perspective a specific individual, without the context of additional speaking characters (except as reported speech) and without objective narration. All the information we learn about a person, or a series of events they’re involved, will be revealed to us by their musings and recollections.

Thus Browning found his form — the ‘dramatic monologue’ — and with it crafted some of the most gorgeous, moving, troubling, and labyrinthine poetry in the English language. It also brought him fame, success, and influence. There are plenty of exceptions to (better described, I suppose, as iterations on) this model, but it was the foundation for his work. With it Browning created a pantheon of living characters hardly less multitudinous than Shakespeare’s, most of them strange, eccentric, disturbed, and extraordinary. One of his collections was called Dramatis Personae, typically the name for the list of characters in a play. It acknowledged what his poetic output had become: a colossal catalogue of personalities.

The concept of a dramatic monologue is obvious in retrospect; the same is true of all artistic innovations. A thing, once invented, is easy to imagine; when something has yet to be invented you cannot simply conceive of it, but must work slowly and often erratically toward its creation. This is what Browning did, and by finding the right medium he also find his “style”; once he realised that his medium was the internal expression of a personality, the question of how to express that was much more straightforward.

What does Browning’s story teach us? That our style is what we write about, not how; the how is a result, the outward appearance, of the what. And by “about” I don’t mean in the general sense of broad topics like paintings or sport, but in the highly specific sense of which few details, among the infinitude that could be chosen, you select. We must pick our medium — our framing, if you like — and know that what is colloquially referred to as a “style” will emerge naturally from that choice; our aim must be to find our own Dramatis Personae, and all the rest will follow.

VII - The Seventh Plinth

Scottian Consolation

I’m always talking about the decline of taste. I see how new things are made, how old buildings are refurbished, and it breaks my heart to witness a deluge of tastelessness smothering the Earth. Hence the section, in this Areopagus, on Defaultism.

What consolation can there be? Sir George Gilbert Scott (famous for restoring Britain’s Medieval cathedrals and churches, and also for designing St Pancras Station and the Foreign Office Building) is a surprising source of it. Consider what he wrote in the year 1858, in a little-read book (who ever knew that Scott wrote anything?) called Remarks on Secular and Domestic Architecture:

Nothing, indeed, can be more humbling than to examine into the multiplied proofs of the fact, that during the last five centuries, in which we consider ourselves to have been gradually progressing in civilization, there has been an equally progressive deterioration in taste

The same decline of taste he was writing about has become the very thing I now dread to see destroyed! Further:

Surely nothing was ever half so villainous as the villa-building about London !

If Londoners are so idiotic as to pay such rents, we can hardly expect landlords to deal more liberally. The cupidity of the landlord goes hand in hand with the stupidity of the tenant ; and the consequence is, that the beautiful fields round London are every day being rendered hideous and disgusting by speculating builders, to whose remorseless hands they are consigned…

Even near country railway-stations the same miserable policy prevails, and we see at Harrow, Malden, Kingston, and round the Crystal Palace, outlying masses of the same hideous and close-packed house-building which disgraces the outskirts of London.

Those hideous and close-packed buildings Scott laments as tasteless, soulless, ugly modern architecture are the same hideous and close-packed buildings that tourists travel from around the world to see, that people dream of living in, that I admire each and every day. I don’t mean to say that certain problems with modern design aren’t real; they are. But Scott’s condemnation of architecture in his own time, a century and a half ago, reads as more or less identical to contemporary condemnations of twenty-first century architecture. Scott thought it was ugly; we love it. Will future generations feel the same about what we are currently building? It’s hard to believe, but history tells us that, when enough time has passed, they probably will.

And that’s all

We close with the opening stanza of Pablo Neruda’s rightly legendary Sonnet XVII, translated by Mark Eisner. There has been a great deal of information, of context and name and place, throughout this Areopagus (as throughout them all); time to move beyond the deceptive world of supposed fact and search for a more universal, unnameable form of truth.

I don’t love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz,
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as one loves certain obscure things,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.

Is there something you love, obscure and hidden, between the shadow and the soul? I hope so. Until next time, Beloved Readers; I bid you farewell!

Yours,

The Cultural Tutor

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I want to make a TV show about architecture. Last October I uploaded a pilot episode to YouTube and it went better than I could’ve hoped: 5.4 million views, 378k likes, 23k comments, and 241k subscribers on a brand-new channel. People want more, so now it’s time to make the full thing.

The concept is simple: do for buildings what Planet Earth did for nature.

Why does this matter? First, because we’re surrounded by buildings, and so this is something that’s genuinely universal. Second, because there’s a global feeling of dissatisfaction with ‘modern architecture’ and — though it gets written about online all the time — nobody’s really given a voice to that feeling on film or TV. That’s what this show will be. But we’re not just criticising modernity (that’s easy): the point is to learn from the past in order to improve the present… for everybody! Third, because there’s a drought of high-quality culture shows. This needs to change; the world is crying out (more than ever) for better documentaries about the arts.

So that’s what I’ve been doing these last few months: researching and writing scripts for six full-length episodes. They’re ready, and production will begin on the show as soon as we’ve raised the funding. You’ll find more information about the project on this website.

In which case, I suppose, there’s something of a call to action here. Here’s the post announcing our intention to make the show. Any likes, or especially comments, will help prove that there is interest in a show like this. And, if you happened to work in the industry or know anybody who does, now is the time to reveal yourselves.

To all who are or have been paid subscribers to the Areopagus, this is the work you’ve been supporting of late. Without it, I wouldn’t have been able to dedicate so much time and effort to researching and writing these scripts. A sign of my gratitude will be forthcoming in due course. I’ll say more when there’s more to say.

Finally: a reminder that my travel show with Audible is out now (listen here) and that my book remains for sale in some parts of the world. When it’s finally available in the United States I’ll be sure to let you know.

And now, with all that caveating complete, it’s time to begin. What lies ahead? Medieval encyclopaedias, 1920s newsletter, an exploration of how Homer’s Odyssey has been interpreted down the millennia (including the controversial 19th century theory that it was written by a woman), an alternative way of thinking about Gothic Architecture, Charlie Chaplin as a guide to understanding the Renaissance, and more.

Avanti! Forza! Andiamo!

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I - Classical Music

Summer Music

Arnold Bax (1915)

Performed by the London Symphony Orchestra

Golden Summer, Eaglemont by Arthur Streeton (1889)

Now that Summer is on the horizon — and, this week in England, appears to have arrived all at once! — it seems right that music not only inspired by Summer, but written with the full intention of making us feel it, should be our starting point.

This is a tone poem, a single-movement work of orchestral music intended to evoke a specified place, poem, person, idea, or theme. In other words, this music is definitively about something. And, even without this particular piece’s title — Summer Music — I think we might have guessed its subject: the fluttering woodwinds, shimmering strings, and pastoral horns seem to blow over us like a warm breeze.

But tone poems have featured more prominently than perhaps any other musical form in the Areopagus. In which case I will keep this week’s musical segment brief (rather than repeating what I have said before about tone poems) and stick to a few lines about the composer, who deserves pause for thought.

Sir Arnold Bax is a name known to devoted fans of classical music; for others it will be unfamiliar. That is because he has, so to speak, gone out of fashion. Why? I think it has something to do with prejudices about the artists of his generation (Bax was born in 1883 and lived through to 1953) who did not entirely embrace modernism and stuck to more traditional forms. This seems unfair. For although he served as Master of the King’s Music, loved cricket, and wrote a score for the 1948 film version of Oliver Twist, Bax cannot be reduced to a “stick in the mud” stereotype.

He was, rather, both a remarkably passionate and vividly imaginative man: alongside his music Bax wrote four plays, thirty short stories, and over three hundred poems under the pseudonym Dermot O’Byrne. These lines come from a 1909 poem called Green Magic, about a woman who has fallen in love with the sea. It exemplifies Bax’s combination of startlingly intense passion and relatively boilerplate sentimentality:

Give me the twilight and the stillness; fade,
O formless wizarderies, thou chill soft fire,
Thou pitiless desire!
Yes, even across this page whereon I write
Falls the green shaken light
Out of thy luminous heart, a blinding might.
Between the sighings of the falling towers
Within the firelight world I hear the showers
Of blown spray flung
On dazzled shores, and savage chantings sung
Through the grey corridors of the house of winds,
The insidious voice singing that calls and binds.
I am thy slave, mine all is vowed to thee,
Whilst over me thy love and anger roll,
And croonings of thy passionate icy soul,
With whispering waves peopling eternity.
O love! O sea!

At his worst Bax has been accused of living through a sort of prolonged artistic adolescence, unable to fight past the sheltered sentimentality that prevents art — whether poetry or music — from becoming truly great. But, even if that accusation is reasonable, I am not sure Bax ever pretended to be anything else! So let us enjoy him for what he was, without worrying about where he “ranks”, rather than for what he might have been. His Summer Music brings us Summer; for what more can we ask, as the hot months of 2026 (for those living in the northern hemisphere) unfurls its wings of glittering blue?

II - Historical Figure

Shihab al-Din al-Nuwayri

A Fountain of Delight

What was the past like? A question that never ceases to delight. Partly because of the inherent joy in discovering what strange or eerily familiar things our ancestors used to say and do; partly because, by learning about them, we are always and inevitably learning about ourselves. Only by holding up a mirror to previous ages does the twenty-first century really make any sense.

One of the best ways to answer that question is looking at historical encyclopaedias. These were (and remain, of course) collections of any society’s extant knowledge; to read them is to enter the past. One such example is the fabulously titled The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition, compiled by an Egyptian bureaucrat and scholar called Shihab al-Nuwayri in the early 14th century. All quotes included below come from Elias Muhanna’s elegantly annotated and gloriously readable 2016 translation, which I heartily recommend for anybody inclined to delve further.

So: al-Nuwayri was born in the year 1279 and after a distinguished bureaucratic career retired to Cairo, home of the Mamluk Sultanate that then ruled Egypt (and much further afield), and the cultural and literary capital of the Islamic world. There, alongside working as a copyist, he compiled The Ultimate Ambition in the Art of Erudition, drawing both on his own vast experience and the fruits of Cairo’s many academies. It was finished in 1329, four years before al-Nuwayri’s death in 1333.

He divided his encyclopaedia into five books (The Universe, The Human Being, The Animal Kingdom, The Plant Kingdom, and History) and these were further divided into five sections, with each section containing dozens or hundreds of chapters. It runs to over two million words in total, which is about four times the length of War and Peace.

What is included in The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition? Astronomy, the origins of rain, Quranic exegesis, rhetoric, verse, an exhaustive account of recorded history (all the way down to and including al-Nuwayri’s present day), zoology, botany, minerology, guidance for scribes and accountants, draft contracts for rental agreements or marriages, proverbs, medical advice, recipes, metaphysics, theology, inquiries into the nature of happiness, explanations of how to make apologies, first-hand accounts of major battles, and reports of his own dreams. That sounds like a lot, but even this wildly varied list is little more than a glance at its contents.

Where to begin with a work so vast in scope and approach? Al-Nuwayri’s own prologue should suffice: it sets out the scale of his ambition and also introduces something of his style. For al-Nuwayri there was no difference between science and poetry, between the work of a meteorologist and that of a clerk. All would benefit from this grand work:

Among the worthiest things to adorn the pages of books and to be uttered by the tongues of pens from the mouths of inkstands is the art of literature. The sharp-witted produce it and the highborn claim descent from it. The scribe makes it the means by which he achieves his ends and the path that never leads him astray. When he encamps in its valley, his deserts become cultivated, and when he visits its watering places, he deems them to be sweet. He descends into its courtyard and finds it ample and spacious, and ponders its quandaries only to have their explanations made clear.

And, for a further taste of al-Nuwayri’s range — which, surprising for modern readers, goes far beyond the religious or cultural limits we might assume to exist in 14th century Cairo; many of his passages were even (I felt) too prurient to publish here! — consider his introduction to the book on humanity:

This book contains poetic motifs that are pleasing to the listener, delightful to the ears, adorning the pages like gems… It encompasses fine similes and sublime love poems; holy lineages and famous battles; ancient proverbs whose origins are elucidated; the superstitions of the Bedouins; the stories of the soothsayers… and bawdy poems that readers may enjoy in solitude, making even the frowning face break out in a smile.

An elaborate and gorgeously poetic literary style: not only informative, but beautifully written; not merely useful, but also memorable.

What next? His book on the animal kingdom is fabulous. Here we see al-Nuwayri’s wide reading, his genuinely scientific curiosity, and his magnificent way of refusing to let one field of human activity dominate. Whereas in school we now study biology and literature as wholly separate subjects, in the 14th century poetry and anatomical study were equally valid aspects of zoology. On the lion, for example, al-Nuwayri begins:

Let us begin with the names of the lion, then recount what has been said about the types of lion, their species, their styles of hunting, their boldness and cowardice, and how the lion has been described in prose and poetry.

Some have counted up to one thousand names for the lion, but we have limited ourselves to the most famous ones… Its epithets include: the Calamitous, the Strong-Chested, the Unbending Sword, the Ill-Tempered, the Conqueror, Whose Effrontery Increases After Dark, Whose Bite is Ruinous, the Cause for Worry, Who Stalks the Herd, the Coarse, The Lion from Whom All Other Lions Flee, the Wolf, the Rapacious, the Mangler, Whose Food Has Bones in It, the Mutilator, the Limper, the Fatty, the Huge and Ponderous.

Amidst hundreds of highly accurate observations on the mating rituals and feeding habits of animals, al-Nuwayri also includes information that has not aged quite so well. This account, relating to the panther, is particularly bizarre:

One of its strange qualities is that a person bitten by a panther will attract mice, who seek out the person in order to urinate on him. If a mouse succeeds in doing so, the person will die. People take great care to guard those who have been bitten by panthers, for a mouse will do its best to seek out the wounded person. One of the most amazing stories I’ve heard is that a person was once wounded by a panther and took great care to protect himself from the mice. He got into a boat and went out into the water, thinking that no mouse could reach him. It so happened that Fate — whose decree is unavoidable — determined that a kite snatched a mouse from the ground and flew into the sky, and when it passed over the wounded man, the mouse urinated on him and he died.

More familiar is what he says of the ostrich:

A Bedouin saying is: “Stupider than an ostrich,” because when the hunter finds it, the ostrich puts its head in a heap of sand, believing that it has escaped from him.

In another part he talks about crocodiles. Reading it, I was reminded of watching nature documentaries as a child, looking on with wonder at footage of small birds pecking clean the teeth of a satiated crocodile. The amazement of readers seven hundred years ago, as al-Nuwayri recounted the same phenomenon, was surely similar:

…when its belly fills up, it comes into the land and opens its mouth, and a small spotted bird enters it and pecks at the contents of its stomach with its beak, thereby extracting it. This is a source of nourishment for the bird and a comfort to the crocodile.

When al-Nuwayri turns to vegetables the mixture of accuracy and bizarrity continues, as does his insistence on including absolutely everything he could find on any given topic. We learn about the tastes and methods of cooking different vegetables… and also learn what poetry has been written about them.

Remember: these weren’t al-Nuwayri’s poems, but poems had he had found in books or heard recited. What sorts of vegetables were described in poetry? Even broad beans!

Broad beans luminous
As strings of pearls
Enclosed in vessels
Of green silk
Their insides hidden
Like the waists of maidens
Their edges sharp
As though stolen from vultures
One side a talon
The other, a beak.

Or, quite beautifully, the apricot:

Apricots appeared in trees,
Ablaze like flame
Like green royal pavilions
Bedecked with gold-burnished bells.

His chapters on geography are fascinating. Some will be surprised to learn just how interconnected the Medieval world was; al-Nuwayri, relying on his sources, talks with authority and accuracy about nations stretching from China to Spain. On Britain he has this to say:

Of the inhabited islands in this sea is the island of Britain, which is opposite the Andalusian peninsula. Its inhabitants have red hair and blue eyes.

And, it seems, reports of British weather had even reached Cairo:

The island of England has prosperous cities, lofty mountains, valleys, and plains. The rain there is constant. Between this island and the continent is a distance of twelve miles.

Tibet receives perhaps the most unusual description of all the many countries and peoples included in The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition:

Tibet has a unique quality: whoever lives in it is overcome with inexplicable happiness and cannot stop smiling and laughing. Also, when someone dies in Tibet, his family is not terribly saddened in the way that others are saddened by the death of a loved one.

And, through no real fault of his own, al-Nuwayri inevitably includes some rather mystifying bits of geography. Like this land described as lying to the north of Europe:

It contains a pit, a deep chasm that no person can descend. Nor can anyone inside climb out of it because of its great depth. There are people living within it about whom nothing is known; however, it is clear that the pit is inhabited, for smoke has been seen coming out of it during the day, and fire can be seen at night.

Al-Nuwayri quotes extensively from the Ancient Greeks, both those who lived and worked in Hellenistic Egypt (such as Ptolemy) and in Greece itself, especially Aristotle. Most interesting, perhaps, is how al-Nuwayri — while recognising their cultural Greekness — considered them part of the wider Egyptian world:

Also among the sages of Egypt is Socrates, author of works on wisdom and theology, known for his eloquence, and Plato, author of The Republic, Laws, and discussions of city-states and kings.

Thus we see first-hand not only the influence of Ancient Greek philosophy and science (especially medicine and astronomy) on Mamluk Egypt, but also the crucial role played by Islamic scholars in preserving and expanding on the works of the Greeks, which were largely unknown in Europe at the time.

Al-Nuwayri constantly draws on other scientists and scholars of the Islamic Golden Age: poets from Sicily or Basra, theologians from Baghdad or Bukhara, historians from Damascus or Cordoba. By reading his Ultimate Ambition we are introduced to an astonishingly interconnected, quite cosmopolitan society, stretching geographically from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic, and reaching back centuries in time. Alongside titans like Avicenna we encounter more obscure writers (obscure, at least, to western readers) whom we would not otherwise meet, from al-Watwat to Ibn Wahshiyya.

But al-Nuwayri was not snobbish; the work of the great poets and the proverbs of the people both have a place in his encyclopaedia, as useful then as they are today:

It has also been said: “Making an error on the basis of advice is more praiseworthy than achieving something successfully through autocracy.”

Or, most memorably:

“Your secrets are like your blood,” meaning that spilling one’s secrets is like spilling one’s own blood.

Why did he make the encyclopaedia ? Well, what we use Wikipedia for, al-Nuwayri’s Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition was used for in 14th century Egypt; we need a place to find particular bits of information, summarised rather than detailed, perhaps with sources for further reading.

Some basic information on the hazelnut:

If it is fried and eaten with a little bit of pepper, it clears up rheum.

Or guidance for clerks in charge of the sultan’s larder:

His duties include inspecting the contents of the larder, pointing out any dwindling stocks, before they are completely depleted, and in enough time for them to be replenished. For if the request for their replenishment is delayed until they have run out completely — or if the request is issued at a point at which there does not remain enough stock to last until the fresh commodity arrives from a different country — the secretary will be held responsible for his own neglect.

Al-Nuwayri even begins chapters (just like Wikipedia articles!) by discussing the etymology of the subject in question:

With respect to the etymology of the word insan (human), there is some disagreement among people. Is insan derived from the word uns (sociability), which is the opposite of wahsha (wildness)? Or is it derived from naws (movement), which is the opposite of sukun (stillness)? Is it derived from inas (perception), or perhaps nisyan (forgetfulness), which is the opposite of dhikr (remembrance)?

Al-Nuwayri also cross-references his own work; when discussing subjects that reoccur across the encyclopaedia, he points readers to other sections and chapters they’re mentioned in. For example, on the musk deer:

Musk comes from a four-legged beast that resembles a small gazelle. We discussed the musk gazelle in the third chapter of the second section of the third book, which is in the ninth volume of this work, so there is no need to repeat it here.

In the end there’s little knowledge you can’t find in The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition; a whole life could be led by its writings. We find practical guidance for the manufacture of perfumes, medicines, or soap:

A washing lotion may be formed out of roses for this purpose by taking 40 mithqals (6 oz.) of roses that have not been touched by dew and leaving them until they wither, along with mithqals (.75 oz.) of Indian spikenard and 6 mithqals (.9 oz.) of myrrh, and forming this combination into small pastilles.

There’s even a guide to making toothpaste:

Among the tooth powders that clean the teeth is this one: Take equal parts of scorched deer horn, Yemeni salt from Andaran, meerschaum, two parts each of scorched tamarisk leaves and scorched sugarcane root, a quarter part of shadhanj, and one part of Chinese pottery. Pound it all together, mix it up, and apply to the teeth.

And, after those altogether more scientific recipes, al-Nuwayri includes a section on magical potions, like this somewhat unorthodox method for finding a lover:

Take the head of a black crow and scoop out its brain. In place of the brain, put some dirt taken from the spot where the woman whom you seek sits, and also a little detritus from the bath along with seven grains of barley. Bury the crow’s head in the ground, in a moist place. Once the barley grows to the height of four fingers, take some of it and rub it on your hand, wipe it on your face and forearms, and then approach the woman without speaking to her. She will chase after you and will not be able to live without you.

It seems bizarre now that people ever believed such things, but even in the twenty-first century we haven’t necessarily made quite as much progress as we like to think. How many companies or individuals successfully flog pseudo-scientific pills and supplements to the public, promising to fix all manner of problems?

Speaking of science, it is delightful to sense in al-Nuwayri’s work the earliest days of our modern scientific method. Their conclusions weren’t always correct, but the urge to find a conclusion, and to find one by studying the real world, is the basis of everything we’ve achieved since. This is how he describes the science of kissing, in a section about the origins and nature of human passion:

The ancient sages claimed that when two lovers kiss, the moisture from the saliva of each of their mouths reaches the stomach of the other and mixes into the whole body, reaching the liver. This is also what happens when lovers breathe into each other’s faces, for as they breathe, their breath mixes with the air and they inhale that air up into their noses. It then reaches the brain, into which it spreads like light in a crystal vessel, and then it reaches the lungs, and the heart and the veins that spread through the entire body. In this way, something loosened from the body of one becomes mixed into the body of the other, and passion originates and grows out of this mixture.

Though, inevitably, this studiousness is attached to what seem like far-fetched ways for growing certain plants or vegetables:

If you would like a pistachio tree, take the kidney of a goat and slice it open. Bury within it a bone from the spine of a peacock and sprinkle some fumewort over it and put it in the ground. After twenty-seven days, a pistachio tree will grow from it.

Nonetheless, we would be wrong to accuse al-Nuwayri of total credulity. For example, he often presents conflicting explanations of natural phenomena, giving us first one opinion and then the other:

The Bedouin Arabs called the giraffe a collection (jama’a), and it was so called because it brought together the attributes of many animals in one form. It has the neck of a camel, the skin of a panther, the horns of a gazelle, the teeth of a cow, and the head of a deer. An authority on the natures of animals wrote that it was a crossbreed of many animals, a result of the gathering of beasts during the summer at the watering place where they mated… But al-Jahiz refutes this statement, saying: “It is a piece of great ignorance, which no educated person would profess… This is a self-distinct type of animal just like the horse or the donkey, and what proves this to be the case is that it gives birth to its own young.”

And nor is he afraid of stating his own views, whether drawn on personal experience, as when he says of these contrasting views about the giraffe:

This is indisputable, for I saw a giraffe in Cairo that gave birth to another giraffe that looked like it, and it is still alive today.

Or when he simply cannot bring himself to believe a tall tale, in this case when writing about the vulture:

It is claimed that it can fly from the farthest lands of the West to the East in a single day, but I consider this to be a legend.

He is also very honest about his sources and what he finds therein, even if he does not quite list all of them:

I saw a note in the margins of the manuscript of Avicenna’s Book of Simple Drugs that I was copying, by someone who was correcting the sage’s words, something along the lines of, “Carrots have two kinds: domestic and wild…”

Among the most enjoyable and revealing qualities of al-Nuwayri’s encyclopaedia is its cohesiveness. Everything was subsumed into a single, visionary project that sought to classify and summarise the world for human good; everything was subordinated to a broader, usually implicit, though occasionally explicit, moral purpose. As when he says in his prelude to the book on the animal kingdom:

I have distinguished every animal by its virtues and vices.

We don’t tend to think of animals in terms of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ now, and the way we think of those things in general isn’t quite how al-Nuwayri thought of them either. Nonetheless, it is instructive that morality was part of zoology in the 14th century; whereas, these days, the question of virtue and vice doesn’t enter the chemistry or physics classroom.

We return to our original question: what was the past like? It’s difficult to answer because the past is rarely what we imagine it to have been; the actual past is concealed from us both by the prejudices of the present and by numberless ideas (whether innocent misconceptions or conscious misportrayals) that have accrued down the centuries. That’s why historical encyclopaedias reward reading like few other kinds of primary source; they help wipe the slate of our stereotypes clean, so that we can begin to engage with the past for what it actually was.

To end: a brief word on how books were actually written and shared in al-Nuwayri’s time. This was before the invention of the printing press, and so literally everything had to be written by hand. Scribes were therefore very, very important people. The slightest mistake could result in generations of misunderstanding; thousands of our misconceptions about the past are a consequence of scribal errors, whereby words were misspelled and then copied. Hence al-Nuwayri’s high standards:

…the scribe should read whatever he can find of books about grammar, through which he will attain the objective of knowledge of classical Arabic For even if the scribe achieves the most complete degree of eloquence in Arabic, if he produces a solecism, then all of the virtues he has attained will flee and the entire foundation of his speech will crumble.

And that also explains why al-Nuwayri dedicated a portion of the encyclopaedia to explaining the roles and duties of a scribe; this wasn’t something that had been collated before, and it represents his major original contribution to the sum of civilisational knowledge included in The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition:

When I wrote what I did about this craft, I had yet to come across a single book or page on this subject…. Every scribe had formerly depended upon his own knowledge, and the reckoning of his own intellect.

So I proceeded at that point to compose and assemble what I have now written. I began by addressing the etymology of the term diwan (scribal bureau) and the reason it was so called. I then discussed the different scribal offices, the first Islamic scribal bureau to be established, and the reason for its establishment. Then I discuss what every fiscal manager needs to know in terms of the procedures and formulas of management, its conventional practices and principles, the reports that every manager must prepare himself and have others prepare for him, and the formulas of accounting, as you shall find below.

In view of that — the laborious, scrupulous, repetitive work of those scribes who had to copy out every single book and sentence by hand — we must say thank you. Without scholars like al-Nuwayri, who dedicated their whole lives and their precious attention to rifling through old books and preserving what they found, the past would be a time of almost total darkness; without such people we might never have made it this far at all.

III - Art

Modern Times

Charlie Chaplin (1936)

Cinema is, perhaps, the modern art form. When we think of Ancient Greece we think of marble statues; when we think of the Tudors we think of the theatre; when we think of 18th century Vienna we think of symphonies and sonatas. When future ages look back on our era, I suspect that cinema will be the artform they associate with us.

With this in mind, a few weeks ago I decided to start watching silent films. I wouldn’t allow myself to watch anything else. This was a very good decision. I am now convinced, among other things, that the single greatest moment in cinematic history was the finale of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times in 1936. Why that is must wait for another Areopagus; my intention here is to lay out a certain way of thinking about films, as inspired by and based on ways of looking at other forms of art.

Any given artistic era can be divided into three distinct periods: the Archaic, the Classical, and the Decadent. Archaic Art is monumental, rudimentary, and vigorous. Classical Art is perfectly composed, lacking in nothing but also without superfluity. Decadent Art is elaborate and fantastical. You could also call these three phases Early, Middle, and Late, but I like the texture of Archaic, Classical, and Decadent.

In any case, examples will do more than words to explain what I mean. Look at the development of Greek statuary and you can see this progress very clearly. Three statues from the 6th century BC, 5th century BC, and 2nd century BC (this third is a Roman copy of a lost Greek original). In simple terms (and the simplest are usually best!) the first is rudimentary, the second is harmonious, and the third is dramatic.

Or we could look at the development of Renaissance art, where we see how quickly this arc of change can take place. Three paintings by Bartolomeo Caporali, Raphael, and Giulio Romano; one from 1450, one from 1506, and the other from 1524, each depicting the same thing. Severity evolves into serenity and collapses into melodrama.

This pattern also applies to buildings. Consider Gothic Architecture, which first emerged in the 12th century and lasted through to the 16th century. From left to right we have Early Gothic, Middle Gothic, and Late Gothic. Notice, as ever, the transition from simplicity (i.e. the tall, narrow windows) to completeness (larger windows, more complicated but nonetheless harmonious decoration) to extravagance (stone carved to look like lace, as if fluttering in the breeze):

You can zoom out and find this evolution taking place across centuries, or you can zoom right in and find it taking place across decades. It’s kind of like a fractal: the same pattern appearing however close you or however far you step back; every larger pattern is made up of identical, smaller versions of that same pattern.

The Internet is also experiencing this life-cycle; just think back to how simple the Internet once looked! Are we living through the Classical Age, or have we already become Decadent? I will leave you to decide. Even the Areopagus has undergone a similar evolution. The early volumes were extremely brief and very direct; they evolved into something more complete and harmonious; in more recent volumes I have been more experimental and elaborate.

Why do these three phases keep reoccurring across art? An idea, when newly formed and still forming, is very elastic and almost frenetic. The possibilities are endless because its limits have not yet been discovered. The simplicity of Archaic Design is therefore a consequence of untapped potential.

When that potential has been discovered and mastered we arrive at Classical Design. It feels composed and harmonious because the best and most effective way of doing everything has been thought out. Nothing could be taken away; nothing could be added.

Then, when an idea has reached its zenith, when everything has been figured out and perfected… what’s left to do? You can only elaborate on what’s already been done, which really amounts to little more than increasingly ingenious or impressive ways of repeating oneself. That’s Decadent Design.

And that brings us back to the silent era, and to Charlie Chaplin in particular. If you watch films from the early 1900s and 1910s they give the same impression as Archaic Art. There’s something rudimentary about them; the cinematic language we’re all familiar with — the way the camera moves; the way one scene flows into the next — was still nascent, and in some cases barely present. It can actually be quite jarring to watch these films, because they don’t do all that extra stuff (which we don’t realise is extra) that we’ve been accustomed to: scenes simply start, with the camera pointing at the actors, and they act. It has the style of news footage, with the simple purpose of recording what is happening. Consider Charlie Chaplin’s first appearance as “The Tramp” onscreen; it came in 1914, in a six-minute film called Kid Auto Races at Venice:

Despite this era’s simplicity you can sense the possibilities, you can sense all the different ways that things might evolve. Every single time the camera does something slightly new — panning, tilting — or the editing does something different — cross-fading, match-cutting — it feels like a revelation.

One doesn’t get quite the same feeling when watching new films. Cinema is an art that has been polished and perfected, taken almost to its limits. The camera tricks may get fancier, but they’re just variations of what we already know. That’s why, when something genuinely new does emerge (the rise of CGI, for example) it generates so much excitement. Back in the early days of cinema almost every single film did something new, and it could not have been any other way.

Most remarkable about silent films is how little time they waste. The lengthy opening sequences we expect of movies — establishing the characters, mood, and setting — are absent. At most there’s a single intertitle giving some basic facts; most often we jump straight into the action. Endings aren’t drawn out emotional affairs; we’ve seen the story, and so we fade to black swiftly.

All of this meant that, returning from silent films to the modern world of sound and CGI, I found myself surprised. All the talking — the constant talking — was annoying. What Chaplin would have conveyed with the flicker of his eyes now required a whole minute or two of subtext-laden dialogue. Modern films that once seemed fast-paced compared to films from the 1950s or 1960s now seem awfully slow in comparison to films from the 1920s. And even those films from the Golden Age of Hollywood, which we usually think of slower and less visceral, now seem decadent, elaborate, fast-paced, and full of artifice when compared with the 1920s.

So: what are the eras of cinema? It seems to me (though the lines always blur, and zooming in or out the patterns become broader or narrower in scope) that Archaic Cinema runs from its invention in the 1890s through to the early 1920s; thereafter began a Classical period that lasted until the 1950s, epitomised by Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times Lights; everything since has been Decadent.

Of course, there are smaller arcs within this broader progression. In 1928 the arrival of “talkies” (as they were then know) represented a huge leap forward. In some ways it actually reset the development of cinema, because a whole new way of making films had been opened up. That’s why films from the 1930s can actually feel less developed, and more archaic, than films from the 1920s.

Similarly (as above-mentioned) the arrival of CGI and of digital cameras precipitated another partial reset, and therefore another arc of progression. If we compare CGI from its genesis in the 1980s through to 2026 then that familiar pattern emerges. People have often said that CGI seemed to peak about fifteen years ago and hasn’t really improved since, has rather become more elaborate or experimental.

The arts rise and fall together; each art lives and dies by the qualities peculiar to its own form, but they can all be understood by general trends and patterns. That’s why, instead of the paintings we usually look at, we have investigated the world of cinema. Our understanding of each is enhanced by comparing them. As Sir Philip Sidney said:

And why not so much the better, taking the best of both the other?

IV - Architecture

Dijon Cathedral

Rational Joys

Dijon Cathedral (in Dijon, France) was built in the 13th century and restored in the 19th century; the cathedral as we see it today is a combination of these two periods.

They are the facts. But I want to ask: what do you see, when you look at this building? Our general conception of Gothic Architecture is one of fantasy. We see a monument of unfathomable majesty, a building-sized work of art that is surely, and above all else, a triumph of illimitable imaginative splendour! Audacious, magical, and exuberant.

But, in the middle of the 19th century, a Frenchman called Eugène Viollet-le-Duc saw something different. Our whole modern idea of restoring old buildings started with him; Viollet-le-Duc was also the most influential architectural theorist of the last two hundred years. Why so influential? Because he looked past mere outward forms and decoration — past the gargoyles of Gothic or the Corinthian capitals of Classical — and sought out rationality.

When he looked at Dijon Cathedral, Viollet-le-Duc saw was a very rational solution to a very specific problem: how, using limited resources, to create the largest space possible for people to gather. As he said:

At Dijon there exists a church of moderate size, under the name of Notre-Dame; it was built about 1220 and is a masterpiece of reasoning, in which the science of the builder is hidden under an apparent simplicity.

We recognize, moreover, that he must have been limited in expense and must have avoided useless expenditure. He was chary of the materials and did not use one stone too many.

How did he reach this conclusion, not only about Dijon Cathedral, but about Gothic in general? Well, one of the central tenets of Gothic Architecture is its vaulting:

These vaults allow you to enclose very large spaces, but they produce a lot of lateral thrust, i.e. they are pushing outwards. It was to counter this thrust that buttresses were used; hence Gothic Cathedrals are lined with them, either connected to the walls (as on the left) or separated from them in the form of flying buttresses (as on the right):

An alternative solution to covering the same amount of space would have been to use a different kind of roof that pushed downwards rather than outwards. This is how the Romans used to build. It is much more stable, but it also requires a great deal more stone, bricks, and other materials… and that makes it more expensive! And so, though it sounds hard to believe, Gothic Cathedrals are incredibly economical.

Flying buttresses epitomise our popular conception of Gothic Architecture as something fantastical and over-the-top, but the truth is that flying buttresses were robust way of building churches, and they required less stone. Furthermore, by taking on so much of the thrust, they allowed the walls of a church to be thinner, therefore making larger windows possible.

But when Dijon Cathedral was being built in the 1220s there wasn’t much room; the proposed site was very narrow and enclosed on all sides by houses. Thus the typical manner of building flying buttresses — which required more space — was cast aside, and the builders of Dijon Cathedral adapted them to an alternative solution. Viollet-le-Duc explains this for us:

We have already said that the architect of Notre-Dame at Dijon had at his disposal a limited area crowded in between narrow streets; so he could not give to the buttresses of the nave supporting the whole system a great projection beyond the perimeter of the aisles. If he had followed the methods adopted in his time, if he had remained submissive to routine, or, to be more accurate, to the rules already established by experience, he would have designed the flying buttresses of the nave as indicated in figure 28.

On the left is Figure 28, depicting a more typical flying buttress, as drawn by Viollet-le-Duc; on the right is Figure 29, representing the flying buttresses as actually constructed at Dijon Cathedral:

And here Viollet-le-Duc explains why it such an ingenious solution. Don’t worry about fully understanding his analysis; it is very technical and quite hard to follow. Nonetheless I think it is worth reading, if only to get a sense of how structurally complex these great Gothic cathedrals were, and how brilliant their masons, how adaptable and rational the style was. All the letters he used are in reference to Figure 29 (the image on the right of the two above this paragraph).

Let us notice that the vaults do not push directly upon the tops of the flying buttresses and that between the tops of these arches and the skewback of the vault there exists, above the triforium U, an interior support V just at the height of that thrust, neutralizing its action in a singular manner. Let us study the details: the block of stone T, against which the last voussoir of the flying buttress rests, is no other than the lintel carrying the support of which we were just speaking and at the same height as this lintel are fixed the two capitals that carry the wall arches of the vault. This lintel is set just on the level of the action of the thrust from the great vault.

Partly because the era in which they were built is so distant, and partly because these Medieval masons so sublimely executed their chosen method, we find it very hard to realise that these great Gothic cathedrals have their entire structure exposed to us. They are essentially colossal and complicated networks of stone scaffolding, with the spaces between the scaffolding occupied by stained-glass windows. And this is exactly how we build today, the difference being that we use steel rather than stone.

Thus Viollet-le-Duc was the first person to properly explain how all the flowing stonework hadn’t merely been for show, that every single block of stone was placed with intention and held a key structural role. It was only because Medieval stonemasons carved them to look pretty that think otherwise. Consider Viollet-le-Duc’s diagram of how the walls of the nave were constructed; we can now understand why he said that not a single stone was wasted!

I write all this not only because it is interesting in relation to Dijon Cathedral itself, and to Gothic Architecture as a style, but because it introduces an alternative way of looking at any building, from any era. Focus on a building’s structure, on how it’s actually holding together and standing up, and new details will be revealed.

If you’d like to read more of Viollet-le-Duc’s work, perhaps the best place to start is with How To Build a House. It takes the form of a story about a young boy who wants to build a house for his newly married sister, and lays out Viollet-le-Duc’s core principles and ideas, as applied to a specific scenario. You can read it online, for free, here.

As a final observation, and somewhat contrary to Monsieur Viollet-le-Duc, it must be said that mere rationality does not explain all of Gothic Architecture. The structure may have been perfectly rational (contrary to what we generally believe), but the urge to decorate it as they did — the floral carvings, the stained-glass windows, the sculptures — speaks to a different part of human nature. The best of what we do always unites them in perfect harmony; Gothic Architecture is, I think, exactly that.

V & VI - Rhetoric & Writing

Polytropos

[The Rhetoric and Writing sections of this Areopagus blurred into one as I wrote them; in which case it only made sense (not fearing (in true, rational, Gothic style!) the disruption of an established pattern) to combine the two sections.]

A new version of the Odyssey is coming out (in this case Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation; see the trailer here, if you haven’t already) and that means controversy. It’s nothing new. Although T.E. Lawrence (a.k.a. Lawrence of Arabia) said in the note to his 1932 translation of the Odyssey that

The twenty-eighth English rendering of the Odyssey can hardly be a literary event

we can chalk it up to his habitual understatement. There is no such thing as an uncontroversial, or at least uninteresting, translation (or adaptation) of the Odyssey. This is largely because both it and the Iliad formed the hard core of the Ancient Greek literary and religious worldview. And, by virtue of Greece’s uniquely oversized influence (via Rome) on all of subsequent history, they are both baked deep into the fabric of our society, even in places we don’t quite realise.

What controversies have there been? There was the question of whether Homer wrote his Odyssey or whether he was a poet whose work was passed down orally and only written down later. It is the second of these two suggestions that has become consensus, though not without a century of academic warfare.

And then there’s the oldest question… of authorship itself! Was Homer real? Perhaps. Some have said that Homer is really the ancient equivalent our word epic. In that case the name “Homer” might represent a long tradition of oral poetry (rather than a single individual) passed down through generations, reformulated at certain points by particularly brilliant poets, and finally written down when writing arrived in Greece.

Did the same person compose the Iliad and the Odyssey? It seems unlikely. The two works are so vastly different that we cannot reasonably imagine the same individual creating them both, nor even that they were created at the same time; the Iliad seems very clearly to be older. This has been the consensus for a very long time. But there have been challenges to it! Most famously, and essentially alone, there was the great novelist and translator Samuel Butler, who proposed that the Odyssey was composed by a woman. That was in 1897. He wrote a book laying out his view, titled The Authoress of the Odyssey, and in it said some remarkably modern-sound things:

Men seem unable to draw women at all without either laughing at them or caricaturing them; and so, perhaps, a woman never draws a man so felicitously as when she is making him ridiculous.

To his contemporary critics, who seemed to believe that no woman could possibly have done it, Butler says:

It may be urged that it is extremely improbable that any woman in any age should write such a masterpiece as the Odyssey. But so it also is that any man should do so. In all the many hundreds of years since the Odyssey was written, no man has been able to write another that will compare with it… Phenomenal works imply a phenomenal workman, but there are phenomenal women as well as phenomenal men.

And, drawing on the poem itself for evidence of his claim, argues:

The moral in every case seems to be that man knows very little, and cannot be trusted not to make a fool of himself even about the little that he does know, unless he has a woman at hand to tell him what he ought to do. There is not a single case in which a man comes to the rescue of female beauty in distress; it is invariably the other way about.

Further, pointing out differences between the Iliad and Odyssey that indicate not only a different author, but that the first was created by a man and the second by a woman:

…when there is any exhibition of domestic life and affection in the Iliad the men are dominant, and the women are under their protection, whereas throughout the Odyssey it is the women who are directing, counselling, and protecting the men.

You can read his quite remarkable book, online and for free, here.

Butler’s view has not really been echoed or even seconded, but to know that such conclusions have been drawn is to know that the Odyssey guarantees intrigue. To take any view on it whatsoever is to necessarily take a view that conflicts with what others have said and done.

Enough about the identity of Homer. Though, hereon, for the sake of ease, I will refer to “Homer” as the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey.

In a recent interview, Christopher Nolan said modern superheroes originate in the heroes of Ancient Greece. This is a comparison I also drew in my book — though, really, to point out the key difference between heroism as we conceive of it now and heroism as conceived by the Ancient Greeks — and one that has been made by many others. Readers of the Odyssey, looking for heroism as we think of it today, will find themselves disappointed.

There has been some criticism of the Greeks’ armour, specifically of Menelaus:

Anachronism is nothing new. Look at any Renaissance painting of scenes from the Odyssey and you’ll find its heroes dressed like Renaissance gentlemen. Consider Pinturicchio’s 1508 painting of Odysseus’ return to his home on Ithaca:

The Ancient Greeks certainly didn’t dress in that fashion, and nor do those ships look remotely like the ships of Odysseus and his countrymen. If Nolan’s adaptation has been accused of changing the source material to suit the present day, then this accusation must also be levelled at essentially every recreation of the Odyssey, in whatever form, since Antiquity. Yes: since Antiquity itself, since the very days of the Ancient Greeks themselves!

See, the Odyssey as we know it dates back to the 8th century BC, which was a full three hundred years before the Greek era we are most familiar with: of democratic Athens, of Socrates, Pericles, and the Parthenon. In his Aratra Pentelici John Ruskin makes the fabulous observation that we wrongly associate Greek art of the 5th century BC with the Iliad and the Odyssey. This sort of thing is that comes to mind for us: an impossibly lifelike, divinely genericised marble statue of Athena, who presides over Odysseus during his journeys:

But if we look at Greek art contemporary with Homer, or at least closer in time to his proposed life, then we will be surprised to see how rudimentary it is. Here we see, once again, that divine guide Athena. Only, we may say, looking somewhat less divine:

It was in view of comparisons like these that Ruskin said:

The inconsistency between an Homeric description of a piece of furniture or armor, and the actual rudeness of any piece of art approximating, within even three or four centuries, to the Homeric period, is so great, that we at first cannot recognize the art as elucidatory of, or in any way related to, the poetic language.

That peculiar statue is the closest thing to an ancient equivalent of our modern film adaptations, i.e. giving visual form, whether in clay or on the screen, to the poetry. And, looking at it, we find ourselves… shocked? We learn, instantaneously, that the Homeric age was radically unlike ours. And so Nolan’s adaptation is hardly less anachronistic those fabulous bronze or marble statues made in the age of Pericles; to adapt is, necessarily, to anachronise.

All of which brings us to the poem itself, and to its famous first line, which introduces the protagonist. Odysseus is described in the Odyssey’s first words as polytropos. What this word means, which doesn’t have a perfect English equivalent, has been debated for centuries.

Emily Wilson, whose 2017 translation of the Odyssey was used as the basis for Nolan’s film, translated polytropos as “complicated”. Her opening lines run thusly:

Tell me about a complicated man.
Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost…

What else have translators gone for? Through all the quotes given below I have placed in italics the word or words that correspond to polytropos.

George Chapman (made famous by John Keats’ poem) translated it like this back in 1615, as he put together the first ever translation of the Odyssey into English:

The man, O Muse, inform, that many a way
Wound with his wisdom to his wished stay…

Alexander Pope (1725):

The man for wisdom’s various arts renown’d,
Long exercised in woes, O Muse! resound…

William Cowper (1791):

Muse make the man thy theme, for shrewdness famed
And genius versatile…

Henry Cary (1823):

O Muse, inspire me to tell of the crafty
man, who wandered very much…

William Cullen Bryant (1871):

Tell me, O Muse, of that sagacious man…

Arthur Sanders Way (1880):

The Hero of craft-renown, O Song-goddess, chant me his fame…

Even William Morris (who was, we should remember, more famous in his own lifetime as a poet rather than a designer) translated the Odyssey, going for this in 1887:

Tell me, O Muse, of the Shifty, the man who wandered afar.

Samuel Butler (1900):

Tell me, O muse, of that ingenious hero…

Robert Fagles (1996):

Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns…

A.T. Murray (1919):

Tell me, O Muse, of the man of many devices…

T.E. Lawrence chose, in 1932:

O Divine Poesy
Goddess-Daughter of Zeus
Sustain for me this song
Of the various-minded Man…

Robert Fitzgerald (1961):

Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story
of that man skilled in all ways of contending…

E.V. Rieu (in a revised 1991 edition):

Tell me, Muse, of that resourceful man…

Simon Armitage (2006):

Remind us, Muse, of that man of many means…

That single word, polytropos, has been rendered into English dozens of times, and always differently, either because of the intentions of the translator or the times they were living through. William Morris’ “the Shifty” is certainly quite unusual; Bryant’s “sagacious” seems very different to Cary’s “crafty”; and Way’s “craft-renowned” feels of its time. So who was Odysseus? Was he wise (as Pope would have it) or shrewd (as Cowper preferred)? Do those words mean the same thing? And what about words that mean something different now to what they did twenty or two hundred years ago?

It is a minefield, an evolving situation that seems to require different methods of management in any given era, rather than a fixed problem with a lasting solution.

Perhaps the most important question is this: what precisely do we expect from a story first told three thousand years ago? It is a strange and brutal tale that does not match the methods or morals we expect in modern films, books, poetry, or TV. Odysseus is the protagonist, but he is not the “hero” in any current sense of the word. Anybody who has read the poem will find its culmination shocking. But “good” and “bad” as we think of them now didn’t exist in the Homeric worldview. The Romans (who called him Ulysses) disliked Odysseus for his role in the destruction of Troy, from which they believed their society to be descended. During the Middle Ages, when Dante wrote his legendary Divine Comedy, Odysseus was placed in the eighth circle of Hell!

How will Nolan’s adaption deal with him? Not like Dante, I suspect. The question is whether “good” and “bad” will be part of it, as they are not in the original poem, but as everybody since has imparted them. Will Odysseus be hero? Will he even be likeable?

And so I return to T.E. Lawrence’s translation, and in particular to his translator’s note (which I have mentioned before the Areopagus, and which has become timely once again). Rarely do we find commentators willing to criticise the Odyssey. There is something empowering about Lawrence’s withering assessment of the great poem; empowering not because we agree with him, but because opening it up to criticism makes it a living thing for us, no longer a dead and untouchable monument:

Crafty, exquisite, homogeneous—whatever great art may be, these are not its attributes. In this tale every big situation is burked and the writing is soft… The author misses his every chance of greatness, as must all his faithful translators.

Lawrence’s refusal either to adapt his heroes for a modern audience or to fall back on uncritical worship of the distant past is striking. In some sense it pleases nobody, because most of us want (and expect) one or the other. Instead, Lawrence says:

…only the central family stands out, consistently and pitilessly drawn—the sly cattish wife, that cold-blooded egotist Odysseus, and the priggish son who yet met his master-prig in Menelaus. It is sorrowful to believe that these were really Homer’s heroes and exemplars.

A straightforward film adaptation of the Odyssey would be something! Watching it, we would surely react as Lawrence did when tackling the original Greek: with a mixture of revulsion and fascination, and above all a realisation that we are grappling with something so distant that we should not, perhaps, try to make sense of it whatsoever. At the very least, Lawrence says, we shouldn’t be afraid of simply disliking the “heroes” of this strange, ancient story.

That’s one view. But we end this section with another view: John Keats’ 1816 poem On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer. It records his feelings after having read George Chapman’s translation of the Odyssey; Keats felt for the first time that he understood those ancient days, and that — despite having heard about them so many times before — their majesty was at last revealed to him:

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken…

Shall we be as Lawrences, or as Keatses, when this new film arrives in our motion picture theatres? Far more has been said about the Odyssey than is said in the poem itself; another chapter in this book of ages is being written; many more shall be written hereafter.

VII - The Seventh Plinth

Newsletters Now & Then

The world is full of newsletters; our inboxes are overflowing with them. Mine will likely be one of dozens you receive each week, solicited or otherwise. And this feels like a modern phenomenon. That’s partly because we know very little about the past, and partly because any new technology (i.e. the Internet) always makes everything related to it feel new. But the truth (as ever) is that next to nothing is genuinely new.

My favourite past-time is seeking out startling similarities between past and present. Too many things are described as “unprecedented” when they are, as a matter of hard fact, deeply precedented. And that itself is also nothing new! Every historical chronicler describes the events they are recording as the worst, best, most dramatic, most shocking, most glorious things that have ever happened. Every new technology is greeted by a tidal wave of commentary predicting doom for humankind or at least some sort of civilisational upheaval. And, among that great sea of similarities between past and present, newsletters are a minor but wonderful case.

So, I suppose there are five kinds of modern newsletter:

1. Community (i.e. a newsletter sent to members of a particular group, whether a local organisation or charity)

2. Sales (i.e. companies send out newsletter with their latest offers, deals, and product updates)

3. Internal (i.e. members of a workforce receiving general workplace updates or important information relating to their work)

4. Actual news (i.e. newspapers and media organisations sending out “briefings” with short summaries of recent news and links to full articles)

5. Personal (i.e. like the Areopagus, where a specific individual writes a daily, weekly, or monthly piece; most of Substack is like this)

There are probably some other categories of newsletter, but these are the five that seem (to me) most common and familiar. And so the question is: can we find historical equivalents for each of them?

1. Community

We have lots to choose from here, with examples going all the way back to the Middle Ages and, even, to Roman times. But I have gone for a somewhat humbler and simpler example, likely familiar in its modern form to many readers: the parish newsletter. These became incredibly common in the late 19th century, and one such case is The Monthly Magazine for the Parishes of S James, Badsey with Aldington, & S John Baptist, Wickhamford, first published in 1898. Every single volume (with the exception of the first!) is available online at this fabulous blog run by The Badsey Society.

This was the September 1900 volume, which includes information about a local show, a proposed recreation ground, and the parish’s Sunday Schools. Also: note the advert at the bottom of the third page for a grocer and tea specialist. Then, as now, newsletters relied on sponsorship!

2. Sales

It was during the late 19th century, with the rise of our modern consumerist culture, that sales ‘newsletters’ first appeared. These largely took the form of catalogues mailed directly to customers. Marketing has since become more sophisticated, or at least more scientifically and psychologically precise, but the principle remains the same: a company is informing its customers of their newest products.

A particularly beautiful example is this 1913 catalogue produced by Morris & Co. (i.e. the company founded by William Morris), featuring a range of classic and brand-new textile designs:

3. Internal

Internal company newsletters go back a very, very, very long way. They might even be the oldest form of newsletter; even during the Late Middle Ages pamphlets were distributed to members of particular guilds (mainly merchants) with crucial information regarding the price and availability of relevant goods.

But internal company newsletters as we think of them today (featuring everything from updates about new staff and notes from the CEO to information about company societies, sports teams, and awards) really got going in the 19th century, when modern workplace culture itself started to emerge. A wonderful example, albeit slightly later, is the Kodak Magazine, produced for employees of the camera and film manufacturers Kodak. Here is the front cover and opening articles of the August 1920 volume:

And here are photographs from picnics held by various departments within the Kodak:

And, finally, most humbly of all:

4. Actual news

The line between newspaper and newsletter is not totally clear. Nonetheless I think we can distinguish between them (in an unscientific, non-academic, merely colloquial way) on the grounds of length and depth. If a newspaper is long and explains events in detail, then a newsletter is brief and tends towards summary.

“Broadsides” were large sheets of paper printed on one side. Because of their cheapness, ease of manufacturing and distribution, and simplicity of content, broadsides were published in their millions from the 16th through to the 19th century. Official announcements from the government, new laws, advertisements, songs, sales, auctions, circuses, obituaries, meetings, slander, funny pictures; all of this (and more) was printed in broadside. And, amongst all that, brief summaries of recent events, which is the historical equivalent we’re looking for. Like this broadside, which gives an account of the marriage of King William and Queen Mary of England in 1689, along with a picture of the day’s events. Notice that the picture has been numbered; in the text you can find a description of who or what these numbers relate to.

5. Personal

This one is very simple: there are hundreds of historical precedents. The first that comes to mind is Dr Johnson, the legendary lexicographer and man of letters who compiled the first truly comprehensive English dictionary in the 18th century. One of his regular publications was The Idler, a short essay published weekly from April 1758 to April 1760, making one hundred and three essays in total, on the subject of whatever happened to interest him that week.

From Number 30, entitled The Corruption of News-writers, we find this lament:

No species of literary men has lately been so much multiplied as the writers of news. Not many years ago the nation was content with one gazette; but now we have not only in the metropolis papers for every morning and every evening, but almost every large town has its weekly historian.

And, in Number 7, a similar

Thus journals are daily multiplied without increase of knowledge. The tale of the morning paper is told again in the evening, and the narratives of the evening are bought again in the morning. These repetitions, indeed, waste time, but they do not shorten it. The most eager peruser of news is tired before he has completed his labour…

Even more familiar is Number 11, which begins with this famous line:

It is commonly observed, that when two Englishmen meet, their first talk is of the weather; they are in haste to tell each other, what each must already know, that it is hot or cold, bright or cloudy, windy or calm.

Admittedly Dr Johnson’s Idler was published as part of a larger newspaper called the Universal Chronicle, and so it might be considered more of a weekly column than a newsletter. But one of his previous essay series, called The Rambler, was published twice weekly from March 1750 to March 1752 as a standalone pamphlet. What could we call this if not the 18th century equivalent of a modern blog or Substack? It was very similar to The Idler; consider this, from Number 98, on the subject of politeness:

Politeness is one of those advantages which we never estimate rightly but by the inconvenience of its loss. Its influence upon the manners is constant and uniform, so that, like an equal motion, it escapes perception.

…

But as sickness shews us the value of ease, a little familiarity with those who were never taught to endeavour the gratification of others, but regulate their behaviour merely by their own will, will soon evince the necessity of established modes and formalities to the happiness and quiet of common life.

Both The Idler and The Rambler reward reading. By virtue of having been highly personal essays, rather than concerned primarily with contemporary news, their relevance has hardly dimmed at all. You can read both, online and for free, here.

As another example of the personal newsletter (i.e. a Substack) there was also John Ruskin’s Fors Clavigera, published monthly from 1870 to 1878, and then irregularly from 1880 to 1884. These took the form of letters, each about 6,000 words in length, “addressed to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain”. As was Ruskin’s way, any given letter of Fors Clavigera was ostensibly about one thing (e.g. birds, economics, recent art exhibitions, or King Richard II) but, really and inevitably, about everything.

You can also read Fors Clavigera online, and for free, here.

***

Five kinds of 21st century letter with historical precedents for all of them, and only the surface of this vast topic scratched! For now, at least, we can conclude that somebody’s physical inbox during the 19th or early 20th century would likely have resembled our digital inboxes, filled with short publications sent by community groups, employers, companies, journalists, and essayists. Plus ça change and all that!

And that’s all

The Sun was up in the cloudless sky… and has fallen away beyond the western horizon. Hot Summer darkness — or, truthfully, the more nostalgic darkness of Late Spring — has descended on Earth. What now, in the extended and immaculate blue silence? If you like to read on evenings like these then you will delight in this gorgeous poem by Wallace Stevens, putting judiciously into words the peculiar, wistful, fairytale magic that only emerges once or twice a year, when contemplating printed pages in long, deep, hot, twilight quietude:

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

Among all the work I’m doing I can only promise to dedicate as much time as I can to this newsletter; as much time, and even more of my Love. Adieu!

Yours,

The Cultural Tutor

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I’ve been working on something recently which I can now, at long and joyous last, announce… The Cultural Tutor’s Grand Tour: The Story of Europe in Six Cities.

It’s an original audio series I’ve made with Audible, a travel show with a slightly different angle on what it means to travel.

The whole history of a city can be discovered from its smallest details, details concealing stories that are unexpected, tragic, beautiful, and bizarre. And so it is these stories I’ve tried to gather, the ones you can discover just by wandering around a city’s streets and paying attention to the things we usually overlook. Clocks, football, architecture, love letters, lamp posts, coffee — these are also history, are also culture!

What will we encounter on The Cultural Tutor’s Grand Tour?

A cemetery built in the year 5845 (not a typo), the (surprisingly) thrilling history of the cappuccino, Istanbul’s most peculiar graffiti, the mystery of why there are ten days missing in your phone’s calendar, and the Dutch origins of the famous French tricolour. We’ll hear first-hand accounts of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD and the Viking siege of Paris in 885 AD — both brought to life by the miracles of modern sound engineering — and we’ll meet the likes of Jo van Gogh (Vincent’s sister-in-law), Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, and Erik Satie.

The stories are endless: FC Barcelona’s world-famous jersey was taken straight from a boys’ school in England; Naples had foreign exchange students coming all the way from China in the 18th century; our word ‘tomato’ comes straight from the Aztec word tomatl, because tomatoes came to Europe from the Americas — along with pineapples, chillis, and even potatoes!

If you’d like to listen, here’s the link; I do hope you enjoy it.

And now back to this week’s Areopagus, which comes to you as the second instalment of our Valentine’s Special: an essay on why we write about love, why we read about love, and whether it’s any good for us. There is also a ‘musical prelude’ to set the tone, both literally and figuratively.

I have tried something slightly different here. The approach, subject, and purpose are all atypical for the Areopagus. Whereas I normally try to prioritise clarity above all else, I have given this essay a more impressionistic and wide-ranging style. For example, as a rule I never mention anything in the Areopagus — a writer, an art movement, a technical term — without explaining its full context. With this essay, however, I have let myself make certain references without explaining them fully. But I have only done this because, so far as I could tell (and I hope I’m not wrong) it suited the subject better to write this way.

With all that being said, and without further ado, I present Books versus Love.

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Prelude: Classical Music

Piano Concerto No. 5, II: Adagio un poco mosso

Ludwig van Beethoven (1811)

Performed by Friedrich Gulda and the Berlin Philharmoniker

Flower Clouds by Gustave Moreau (1903)

For a musical prelude I had no choice but to select the second movement of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto. Its name is simply the tempo at which the piece is supposed to be played: Adagio un poco mosso means “Slowly, but with a little bit of movement.” The first movement is Allegro, meaning “Quickly”, and the third movement is Allegro ma non troppo, meaning “Quickly, but not too much”.

A concerto is any piece where you have a single soloist accompanied by an orchestra; the soloist could be playing a cello, violin, or (as in this case) piano. Whereas the other movements of Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto feature more prominent strings and winds, the second movement uses them very subtly and gently, almost minimalistically, to enhance the piano rather than battle with it. And so, although standalone it is sumptuous, heard in the context of the full concerto — between the far more dramatic and energetic first and third movements — Adagio un poco mosso is even more beautiful, like a lovely flower blossoming impossibly among the rocks of a wild mountainscape.

Beethoven was a master of ‘absolute music’, which is music without any externally attached meaning or context. The alternative is ‘programme music’, where a piece is given a title or even accompanying text to explain its themes and ideas. Think of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, which is inspired by the Napoleonic Wars.

But that doesn’t mean ‘absolute music’ isn’t about anything, of course. Because, even if individual notes don’t have any intrinsic meaning, they nonetheless make us feel a certain way. Adagio un poco mosso is not “about” love any more than clouds at sunset are “about” love; and yet the music is, just like those clouds, charged with the most meltingly romantic atmosphere we could imagine. And so, liberated from any particular meaning imposed on it by a specific title or theme, we are free to let this heavenly music guide our imaginations and hearts without the burden of context.

Books versus Love

Or: Bones & Bile contrasted with the Written Word,
and the Right Offices of Science and Art, so-called, Compared

George Orwell once wrote an essay called Books versus Cigarettes. In it he compared the relative cost of both and lamented that his compatriots spent their money on the former when they could have been getting much of the latter for less the price. These days his argument doesn’t quite hold true, but there are many other things to which we might compare books: boozing, football, socialising, soaps, dancing, gardening, daydreaming, sleeping, podcasts, or video games. Most often in the 21^st century we compare books with the Internet, or various parts of it, especially social media. By making these comparisons we mean to say that books are a better use of time than, say, doomscrolling Instagram or flicking through a few dozen YouTube reels. Consider the results of this poll, released last year. It caused quite a stir, precisely because our general belief is that people should spend more time reading rather than doing whatever else they happened to be doing instead:

Books are always flattered by such comparisons. That is why we make them; the purpose is to encourage reading. Alas, there is another comparison we must draw, and one that — troublingly — does not flatter books but cautions us against them.

Where to begin? I confess that, at one moment or another of late, I was thinking of nothing other than all the books I could have been — and, felt, should have been — reading. I have barely paid Charles Dickens any attention, for example. When, if not now, will I finally find the time to read him? But what of all the books I have read that demand rereading? Dante is never far from my mind. Do I really understand anything about his Divine Comedy? And how many times, after all, can one read Shakespeare? An infinitude, for he is always far ahead, waiting for us to catch up. And what of reading books in their original tongue? I speak a little Latin and less Greek, as they say — time to correct this fault? It would only take a few months of a few hours’ concerted study each day to do so. But then we also have Italian, Arabic, and Chinese, and so many other languages, dead or living, that I would benefit from learning.

This feeling follows me around and sits on my back. A horrible fogginess that distracts me from wherever I am by thoughts of what else I could be doing. Nothing unusual; we all bear, hour by hour, phantasms of elsewherity. But the curious thing about distraction-by-books is that it usually relates to the very thing we are (or should be) doing at the very moment of our distraction. If books teach us about life, surely there comes a point at which we must live rather than read. Else why read at all?

True, I have tried to read a lot; my friends tell me that I am “well read”. But by any historical standard I am woefully underread. The sheer erudition of somebody like Francis Bacon (for example) is startling: his works, like those of so many others I have quoted in these newsletters, Montaigne or Erasmus or Browne, are patterned with a shockingly broad array of references to and quotations from other writers. What it means to be well-read now (like what it means to be a heavy smoker!) is not what it meant one, two, three, or four centuries ago.

So: these thoughts and more besides (again, mainly drawing up mental lists of all the books I haven’t read) were running through my mind. Bad enough in any case; worst of all because I was having these book-thoughts while in the company of somebody I love, and who loves me, and to whom I should have been giving all my attention.

What was the point of all these books I had read if, in the midst of life itself, I was unable to live it?

In The Eagle’s Nest — a book I find myself returning to, again and again, almost against my will, as one of the broadest and wisest little things ever written — John Ruskin points out that we would rather meet Theseus himself (the mythical founder of Athens) than see his famous statue, carved by Phidias and placed on the Parthenon, though now in the British Museum. His argument was about the relationship between art and life; Ruskin argued that art must always, by definition, be secondary and inferior to life itself, saying:

You shall never love art unless you learn to love the thing it represents better.

Of all possible authorities on this matter he gives William Shakespeare, speaking through the character of Theseus (hence his comparison) in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Theseus’ bride has commented on the shoddiness of a play performed in celebration of their marriage; he responds:

The best, in this kind, are but shadows.

The best of art is only ever a shadow of life, is always in reference to life — and can therefore only be understood inasmuch as we know life, or can only be of value inasmuch as it teaches us about life, or helps us to see it more clearly.

I wonder why Ruskin didn’t also use the example of Hermione in The Winter’s Tale. At its culmination (read no further to avoid a spoiler) King Leontes is shown a statue of his long-dead wife, Hermione. All present remark on its supremest quality; Leontes most:

Still, methinks,
There is an air comes from her: what fine chisel
Could ever yet cut breath? Let no man mock me,
For I will kiss her.

This statue is Hermione herself, thought dead but actually living. The obvious, necessary question: would Leontes rather have a perfectly lifelike statue of his wife, or his living wife? We may take her statue, in asking this question, as a symbol of all art, while the real Hermione is a symbol of that which art refers to, life itself. There is surely only one answer: the real Hermione. To give any other answer is a repudiation of living. And so, this being the case — that life is always preferable — why read at all?

To unpluck that thorn we must first seek out another: why would anybody ever write about love — the intensest kind of life — in the first place? The truth is plain enough. As Lord Byron says in Don Juan, so perfectly and troublingly:

Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch’s wife,
He would have written sonnets all his life?

He is talking of Petrarch, the poet and scholar of the 14^th century whose legendary sonnets (the basic model on which all subsequent, in Italy and elsewhere, would be based) were written in the shadow of Laura. Some have argued was not real, that she was only ever an emblem of love, an imagined object of Petrarch’s affections supposed to hold the same place in his heart and mind as Beatrice did in Dante’s. Perhaps. But even in this imagined circumstance he did not have her. Alternatively, even if we accept that she was real, this is also true. In reality or fiction, Petrarch was never united with his great love.

To me it seems a lack of love is all that has ever driven writers to write of love; a lack, or at least some form disunity, for whomsoever wrote of love perfected? We know why all these love books have been written. The opening sonnet of Sir Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti goes:

One day I wrote her name upon the strand,
But came the waves and washed it away:
Again I wrote it with a second hand,
But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.
“Vain man,” said she, “that dost in vain assay,
A mortal thing so to immortalize;
For I myself shall like to this decay,
And eke my name be wiped out likewise.”
“Not so,” (quod I) “let baser things devise
To die in dust, but you shall live by fame:
My verse your vertues rare shall eternize,
And in the heavens write your glorious name:
Where whenas death shall all the world subdue,
Our love shall live, and later life renew.”

All literature of love is an attempt by the writer to deal with struggle or strife; there is no other possible reason to write of love, because love lived is in itself perfect. Spenser, scared not of his own death but of the death and ultimate erasure of his passion, wants to immortalise it in verse. That is why he has written; we are serving him by rereading his love poetry, giving continued life (as he hoped) to his mortal passion, so long as we pay it precious attention. Would we have been better reading that, then, or better living our own passion, or even striving to preserve our own against time?

Spenser was not alone; Shakespeare in his nineteenth sonnet reveals at last why he has bothered writing them at all:

Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion’s paws,
And make the earth devour her own sweet brood;
Pluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger’s jaws,
And burn the long-liv’d Phoenix in her blood;
Make glad and sorry seasons as thou fleets,
And do whate’er thou wilt, swift-footed Time,
To the wide world and all her fading sweets;
But I forbid thee one more heinous crime:
O, carve not with thy hours my love’s fair brow,
Nor draw no lines there with thine antique pen!
Him in thy course untainted do allow
For beauty’s pattern to succeeding men.
Yet do thy worst, old Time! Despite thy wrong
My love shall in my verse ever live young.

Time diminishes all things material, even beauty; but against Time humankind has invented a sort of antidote, in pigment, stone, or word, called Art.

Sir Philip Sidney, writing his own sonnet sequence within a decade of Spenser and Shakespeare, explains his purpose, more honest and less grand, in the very first:

Loving in truth, and feign in verse my love to show,
That she, dear She, might take some pleasure of my pain,
Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know,
Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain,
I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe;
Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertain,
Oft turning others leaves, to see if thence would flow
Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sun-burned brain.
But words came halting forth, wanting Inventions stay;
Invention, Natures child, fled step-dame Studies blows;
And others feet still seemed but strangers in my way.
Thus, great with child to speak, and helpless in my throws,
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite,
Fool, said my Muse to me, look in thy heart, and write.

Sidney differs from Shakespeare and Spenser; he does not yet admit of seeking to immortalise his love in verse, but wishes instead to win his love’s love (in the first place) by writing some.

In every case, thus far, Byron seems to have been right. Each of our poets has written of love because there was something they lacked or at least were forced to reconcile: their lover was dead, or did not love them, or they feared that inevitably onsetting Time threatened to bury their passions forever.

And why else did Dante write? His whole journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven seems to have been a quasi-blasphemous, visionary apology for his apocalyptic love, redrawing the lines of Christian faith so that his love for Beatrice could fall within them. But, in cases both of Dante and Petrarch, and of Sidney and Spenser and Shakespeare, do you really believe they would have rather written their poetry and not had their loves, or had their Beatrice and Laura and not written at all? It would be a terrible thing, were the first proposition true, and would mean that everything they ever wrote between them was fraudulent.

Another way of asking this is: would you rather watch an adventure unfold on screen, or be part of an adventure? Perhaps life is, must always be, a disappointment, a falling-short. If this is true then love literature — all “Love Art” — ever aims at bridging this gap between what we hope or suspect is possible and what we know to be experientially available. Ah, but we are tempted by it! I can only call it “the Unbridgeable” — that feeling, known to all who have felt it, of a strange inconsolable sense of separation from what was and what is, the tremulous pain of a moment passed and unrecoverable.

Byron also said, incorrectly but revealingly:

In her first passion woman loves her lover,
In all the others all she loves is love.

And I think that explains half the things he ever wrote!

This sense of Not-Having, this Neverhaving — a philosopher or somesuch will have coined a better neologism; for now, not having read them, I settle for my own awkward compound — is the substance of almost all Love Art.

A mere shadow, empty and eternally unsatisfactory, though alluring because of how closely the illusion matches the hoped-for and desired ends. A sort of coward’s way out for those unwilling to risk the catastrophic defeats that real love necessarily entails. Easier to read of Orlando’s fury, and thereby deludedly think we know something of love, though it be but a shadow’s shadow, than let ourselves fall hopelessly and absolutely in love, only to be spurned in the end and find our world crashing down about us. We choose the cheapest of shortcuts, trifling like Faustus with our soul to secure the meagrest of pleasures, for fear that the higher and real delight — from which the shadow is cast — will turn out too far past our grasp.

A perfectly happy person would never write, or even read, anything. Happiness is surely (and by definition) unified and thus stable, indivisible and imperfectible; the act of writing (or reading) is one of creation, of an extending outwards or an absorption, and can therefore only be carried out by a disunited, dividual, perfectible being.

The only possible alternative is what we call “devotional” literature: a type of work usually religious, always overflowing with joy. Perhaps, creatures as we find ourselves, the human uncontrollably spills over into rapture precisely when unity is achieved — when Love is perfected. Of this sort, of Devotional Love Art, I turn to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the imperturbable rejoinder to Byronism. She had her love, and wrote nonetheless:

We cannot live, except thus mutually
We alternate, aware or unaware,
The reflex act of life: and when we bear
Our virtue onward most impulsively,
Most full of invocation, and to be
Most instantly compellant, certes, there
We live most life, whoever breathes most air
And counts his dying years by sun and sea.
But when a soul, by choice and conscience, doth
Throw out her full force on another soul,
The conscience and the concentration both
Make mere life, Love. For Life in perfect whole
And aim consummated, is Love in sooth,
As nature’s magnet-heat rounds pole with pole.

There is no chord of lament here; she is not ill-at-ease with Time’s erasure, not seeking to woo or court. There is none of Dante, Petrarch, Spenser, Shakespeare, or Sidney.

The final of Sir Philip Sidney’s sonnets is a renouncement of his Love, a kind of Shakespeare-in-Prospero last bow:

Leave, me, O love which reachest but to dust,
And thou, my mind, aspire to higher things.
Grow rich in that which never taketh rust;
Whatever fades, but fading pleasure brings.
Draw in thy beams, and humble all thy might
To that sweet yoke where lasting freedomes be;
Which breakes the clouds, and opens forth the light,
That doth both shine and give us sight to see.
O take fast hold; let that light be thy guide
In this small course which birth draws out to death,
And thinke how evill becommeth him to slide,
Who seeketh heav’n, and comes of heav’nly breath.
Then farewell world; thy uttermost I see:
Eternall Lov, maintaine thy life in me.

Sir Philip switches, after a hundred sonnet’s worth of suffering, from what he elsewhere calls mere “desire” to something he considers higher. It is a leap from the romantic to the devotional — and he promptly ceases to write his love poems!

As Marlowe says in Hero and Leander, another tale itself of people who loved rather than writing about love:

It lies not in our power to love or hate,
For will in us is over-rul’d by fate.

This is true, but it does lie within our power to respond when our will to love or hate has been overruled. Shall we accept this love and plunge into it, or shall we flee, frightened?

We become twisted around one another so strangely in love, and it terrifies us. You can always tell when somebody has never been in love, has fled with fright from the apparition of the abyss. There is a caution in them, a distance. And of those who have been spurned? Even the purest love can be translated by hope into hatred. The deepest hatred always springs from an inability to reconcile oneself with failure in love.

But there is a part of us that would rather see the statue of Theseus than meet the king himself, a part of Leontes that would prefer to have a lifelike sculpture of Hermione that he might weep over instead of his beloved wife returned. We are frightened that, having the thing so anticipated, it will not meet our expectations. Neverhaving is itself a kind of permanence, defined perhaps by perpetual turmoil, but constantly satisfying to us because we can spend a lifetime struggling with it. This darker element draws us in; we want to be in that state of disharmony represented so exquisitely by Petrarch, Byron, and Spenser’s ilk — it is in some sense comforting, in some way sustaining, to indulge in the acute awareness of not being able to have something. There is, we may say, a certain rapture in falling.

After all, in our most beloved romantic stories we do not find the lovers ever writing of their romance; they are, always, living it. And there is always a struggle, always a Neverhaving. Though many tales of romance do conclude in perfect union, that is where the story ends. For what else is there to say? “And they lived happily ever after” is a sentence; it cannot be a book or play.

To speak something is to kill it, in a way; it is, necessarily, a crystallisation of something fluid and formless, plastic and evoluble, joyous and mysterious in its dreamlike essence, into something hard and real, unsatisfying if improperly cast, and like marble impossible to reshape if flawed, only destructible, capable only of being left behind as a failed vision, an unfulfilled project.

This awful tension I have rarely found more magnificently expressed than in the poetry of Marina Tsvetaeva:

Where does such tenderness come from?
These aren’t the first curls
I’ve wound around my finger—
I’ve kissed lips darker than yours.

The sky is washed and dark
(Where does such tenderness come from?)
Other eyes have known
and shifted away from my eyes.

But I’ve never heard words like this
in the night
(Where does such tenderness come from?)
with my head on your chest, rest.

Where does this tenderness come from?
And what will I do with it? Young
stranger, poet, wandering through town,
you and your eyelashes—longer than anyone’s.

Her composure is startling as she walks a tightrope, glancing upwards, downwards, backwards, forwards, across the landscape of her life and the skyscape of what her life might have been or might yet be. She explores that dark, enchanting dichotomy between Neverhaving and Having to its utmost. I let Tsvetaeva be the last word here.

We have ranged widely, must now collect our thoughts. The question that remains is whether reading (or writing) can ever be an end in itself, as love is an end. Though I adore Montaigne, I wonder what his life was like, and at what points precisely he ever lived. Above all I am bothered by the idea that Montaigne, when at dinner or with his children, or riding about his estate or reluctantly visiting the city, did nothing other than think about how he would describe these experiences. Was he always paying attention to the thoughts provoked in his mind by his surroundings, and pursuing those new lines of thought, rather than actually living in and engaging with those surroundings? Montaigne himself commented on this, I am sure, though I cannot remember in which essay and cannot place my hand on the quote. But, certainly, in one fashion or another, and probably several times, he will have made this observation.

Thomas Browne, Robert Burton, and Arthur Schopenhauer (among numberless others; these are but the ones I recall most vividly) have written of the danger of reading too much. Or, in William Hazlitt’s words:

The description of persons who have the fewest ideas of all others are mere authors and readers. It is better to be able neither to read nor write than to be able to do nothing else. A lounger who is ordinarily seen with a book in his hand is (we may be almost sure) equally without the power or inclination to attend either to what passes around him or in his own mind. Such a one may be said to carry his understanding about with him in his pocket, or to leave it at home on his library shelves. He is afraid of venturing on any train of reasoning, or of striking out any observation that is not mechanically suggested to him by passing his eyes over certain legible characters; shrinks from the fatigue of thought, which, for want of practice, becomes insupportable to him; and sits down contented with an endless, wearisome succession of words and half-formed images, which fill the void of the mind, and continually efface one another. Learning is, in too many cases, but a foil to common sense; a substitute for true knowledge.

Are books a pathway to something higher, then, or a mere escape, or less than that a way of consoling ourselves, or even less than that a substitute for true knowledge?

Humankind has been in a permanent, irreversible, and rapturous state of psychosis — though sometimes faltering, or fragile — ever since we invented (or discovered?!) language. It opened up a whole new way of being, like falling into an abyss, of increasing velocity and perpetually accumulating returns. This explains our constant embracing of carnal pleasures, or even carnal sufferings. Of the lowest order they are food and drugs, then sleep, because these are fundamentally non-linguistic, predating language, not requiring it. Then, most obsessively of all, most pleasurable and tormenting, most addictive and demanding, are violence and (to respect the taboo it perhaps ought to be?) ‘amorous congress’. No words needed here. They are bloody, animalistic, and vital — they are atavistic.

So the question is: whither humankind? We have been mangled permanently by language; such is the pessimistic view. We have been offered enlightenment, liberation, and bliss by language; such is the optimistic view. What is language? It matters not. What does it do? That is the question — because it does not seem to add anything to us. Only, it has allowed us to perceive ourselves more clearly and thoroughly, to look inwards and find what was already there, only invisible, finally revealed.

Of love I am unsure, for love may have emerged when language was invented or discovered. It is not really carnal, though parts of can sometimes be, and is only partly atavistic; dually attached is a higher and profounder grace, an all-consuming fire, in which we can choose to burn up or flee from into the darker, more comforting recesses of mere earthly delight.

In the end, I think, there is some worth in books. John Ruskin also said that the only possible purpose of art (of any good art) is either to give form to truth or grace to utility. Art, giving form to the truths of love, helps us make clearer sense of what we feel but cannot quite understand. It is (like Beatrice to Dante!) a guide, a lantern in the distance to direct us, but never a replacement for life itself, which is the thing to which we are being directed by Art.

Let me put all of that another way. What does science tell us about humankind? Lots. From a skeleton, even from a single bone, we can retell half the story of a whole life: of what they ate, where they lived, what diseases burdened them, what food nourished them. These are the miracles of chemistry, biology, and the other physical sciences. With the brightest minds and most perceptive technologies we can discover multitudes from a grain of human matter.

But what no bone can ever tell us, not even fragmentally, is how the human being who once possessed it felt. We could speculate that a certain person having had a certain disease or grisly wound meant they suffered much, and was thus unhappy. But this is childish. Day to day I find no correlation between a person’s happiness and any of their outward characteristics, be they of health or wealth or anything else. Emotion and circumstance are separated spheres. And least of all a bone tells us about love; science reaches its limits.

What a person wrote, however, can tell us what they believed or felt. So that is the right role of art, then — it is the science of emotion and imagination, which are no less part of our nature than bones and bile, may even be the highest elements. Consider it a spectrum, ranging from the basic facts of chemistry through to one’s belief or lack thereof in god; science, through to literature, are the means by which we measure and understand any given thing about a human being.

Love Art either consoles or guides us; consoles us against Neverhaving, or guides us toward what we know lies within us — that perfect union of having — and urges us bravely to seek it. But there the offices of Love Art stop short; at some point we must Love, or risk Loving, rather than reading or writing about it. Leontes rightly said that no fine chisel could ever cut breath; no Love Art could ever replace Love.

I return to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and what I think are four (three and a half, really) of the best lines ever written of Love, or ever that could be written:

…when a soul, by choice and conscience, doth
Throw out her full force on another soul,
The conscience and the concentration both
Make mere life, Love.

Browning could not have written those lines had she not loved first and written later. Writing was an aid to her ability to see and understand inwardly the magnitude of her love. Perhaps, having written once or twice, and read more often, she was able to love better. I hope so, but do not know. All we can be certain of is that she had rather felt the love she expressed than expressed it.

And here Browning pushes up against the limits of what can actually be said. We remember that Sidney stopped writing his sonnets when he chose devotion over desire; Browning could not have gone much further. All who have loved, or at least loved truly, are familiar with the event horizon that, once passed, turns all our words into irony.

Giving form to truth is the oldest and only service of Art; some truths, however, must remain forever formless — and, given form, necessarily die. It could not be any other way. For if this feeling — this way of being, really — could be described, then what a pathetic outcome for all our hopes and fears! If love is boundless, is somehow universalising and sublime, then it must necessarily be indescribable.

Reading about love can be good for us, but one day we must be put down our books and be brave enough to love, hoping only that those books will have helped us work up the courage to do it.

And that’s all

If reading about love is difficult to justify, then reading about reading about it hardly stands a chance! Nonetheless I hope you’ll think this has been justified, my Beloved Readers. A more typical Areopagus (featuring its seven short lessons) will be returning to your inboxes within the next fortnight. Until then — exeunt!

Yours,

The Cultural Tutor

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What awaits? Azerbaijani opera, life in Medieval Norfolk (told by the people who lived it), a painting that resides on the fault-line between two epochs (plus a little Montaigne), and the world’s most charming hospital. Through each of these we will investigate different kinds of love: Mystical, Familial, Educational, and Charitable.

After those first four sections on Music, Historical Figures, Painting, and Architecture, I have replaced this instalment’s final three sections (usually Rhetoric, Writing, and the Seventh Plinth) with an essay about l…

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Many of us like to set reading goals at the beginning of each year. Perhaps one per month; possibly (and ambitiously!) one per week. Could mine be among that precious number? Maybe! If not — too bad. But, if only because my book was written with the intention of directing readers to other, much older, much better books, I hope it stands a chance of making your cut.

Also (I should say) this newsletter is fairly long (about nine thousand words) and contains a number of images. As a result it may not appear fully in your email inbox, and will abruptly cut off at some point. This is not an error! You just need to click ‘show full email’ (or something similar, depending on your email provider) to see it all. Alternatively, you can read the full thing on Substa…

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It begins with a simple news bulletin, simple though sweet: I’ve been invited to join a panel of judges for a competition to design lamp posts. There’s a plan afoot to build the United Kingdom’s first new city in over fifty years. It’s called Forest City and you may have heard about it in the news. Those behind this plan intend to hold design competitions for all its street furniture and urban infrastructure; lamp posts are the first. The idea is also that, regardless of the precise path Forest City takes, and how long its vision waits to be realised, these competitions can serve a much broader role and provide models for new street furniture elsewhere. Details of the competition, including how to submit, are here.

If you are a designer, please consider making a submission. If you know any designers, please tell them about it. If you are not a designer, but care about the appearance of lamp posts, and perhaps have som…

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First, I’ll be giving a talk on 27th November in London with How To Academy, and you can get tickets here. It’s at 6:15pm in Covent Garden and I have some very, very exciting things planned for it. Also, of course, it will be delightful to meet and chat with attendees afterward!

Second, The Cultural Tutor: 49 Lessons You Wish You’d Learned at School has been included among Waterstones’ Best History Books of 2025. Humbling. And even more so given the illustrious company it’s keeping there! So, should you be looking for Christmas presents… I gently submit it for your consideration.

Third, the beautiful Spanish version of my book — El Tutor Cultural — is finally out, and you can get it here!

Anyway, and otherwise, suffice to say that responses to the short film I released a few weeks ago have been heart-warming. The video now has over two and half million views on YouTube, and the ac…

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It’s simultaneously a standalone piece and the pilot for a future series that will explore history through art and architecture, both for the sake of those things themselves and also to see what we can learn from them about life in the 21st century.

If you like the sound of this project, and want to hear more, then you can join this email list. No doubt I’ll share future developments in the Areopagus, but that list will be the place for announcements exclusively relating to The Modern World.

Alongside watching it on YouTube (where subscribing to my new channel and liking or commenting on the video is most welcome!), you can also watch it on X. Any reposts, comments, or likes there will be incredibly helpful in gathering attention and sharing the f…

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It’s been a peculiar couple of weeks, but on the whole my decision three years ago to quit a job that wasn’t doing me any good, and pursue breathlessly and even slightly recklessly the dream that compelled me above all others, has felt like the right one.

So here we are. For yourself, or perhaps as a gift, for anybody interested in my work already or looking to begin a journey into the rich world of culture — a world so much richer than the one we are led toward by what most conveniently appears in these strange, online times! — there is this book I have written.

(If you happen to order it from Amazon, and think the book worthy of feedback, your reviews on that site are incredibly, incredibly helpful!)

Enough book talk — time rolls on. And the inimitable poet Kabir, writing five hundred years ag…

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This also means, of course, that there’s one week left to take advantage of Waterstones’ 25% discount, which you can get by using the code CULTURAL25 when ordering from their website. The link is here. For all other pre-orders you can find a list of booksellers (including the Spanish edition!) here.

So: the book is divided into seven ‘pillars’ — so-called because pillars, though they are quite beautiful in their own right, can never hold up a building alone. It is only by their unity they work — like all elements of culture, from art to history to literature, which are really just different facets of the same jewel. Each pillar is roughly based on a particular aspect of what we usually call “culture”, but similar themes and ideas ripple through them al…

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Well, this marks the culmination of a lifelong dream that started at least 23 years ago. But more on that later. For now, I have only two things to say. First, that any and all links to pre-order the book (for international deliveries you can go to Blackwell’s) are to be found here. Second, that a great muchness of my gratitude goes to you, my Dear Readers. When I started the Areopagus three years ago I had no book, nor any book deal, to speak of — only a dream, a conviction, and a laptop. That I can now hold a book in my hands and say that I wrote it is not only due to those three things; it is also, perhaps even primarily, due to a fourth thing I did not have when I started out: readers.

Thank you.

And now — bac…

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What have I been doing? Putting the finishing touches to my book, The Cultural Tutor, which will be released on 4th September. For all readers who live in the UK, I should mention again that Waterstones are offering a special 25% discount if you pre-order it from them. The link to do so is here and the code required to secure that discount is, unsurprisingly, ‘CULTURAL25’. Otherwise, of course, you can use Amazon.

But that’s not all! I am delighted to announce that the Spanish edition of my book, El Tutor Cultural, is now available for pre-order. Here’s the link, including international shipping — and here’s the cover:

Otherwise: an Amazon link to order the book in the US and Canada will be available soon. I’ll let you know. If you’d like to pre…

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I’ve written a book, set to be published by Penguin on 4th September this year.

It’s called The Cultural Tutor: 49 Lessons You Wish You’d Learned at School and it’s the summation, the culmination and crystallisation, of everything I’ve been doing online these past three years.

Where to begin? What to say? If you’re a regular reader then you’ll have some idea what’s in the book and what it’s about. Culture — art, architecture, history, poetry, philosophy, literature — is for everybody. And, crucial in our times, it’s both an alternative to the 24 hour content cycle and an antidote to doomscrolling. That’s my belief, the guiding star in what I write and what I’m trying to do.

My book is intended as an all-encompassing cultural primer, a whirlwind introduction to the things we’re interested in but do…

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Anyway. To return to the Areopagus and set the tone I give you a few lines from the great Anna Akhmatova:

The grave I go to will not be my own.
But if I could step outside myself
and contemplate the person that I am,
I should know at last what envy is.

Reading her poetry I find myself — as when reading all the greatest poets — in the presence of a mind that somehow seems to observe this world in a higher resolution, in its full technicolour reality. Such is the uplifting — and, therefore, sometimes troubling — power of poetry.

Onwards.

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For the god of Ithome approves of the Muse
who comes unsullied and wearing the sandals of freedom.

This Eumelus was a celebrated poet, a composer of grand religious anthems and cycles of epic poetry chronicling the mythical history of Corinth, his native city. But, of all that work, and despite centuries of praise for him, those two lines you have just read are (among a handful of similar fragments) all that remain of Eumelus’ poetry.

A whole life of verse… and this is more or less all we have to show for it! A fact that demands some solicitude. Of all the things you have ever said or written, what two lines would you choose to endure — the only thing that survives of you — two and a half millennia hence? Impossible to answer, perhaps; worth wondering, surely.

And, with that perspective-broadening question in mind, another Areopagus…

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But, first, a technical matter. Some of you have been receiving emails that are “clipped” — that means the newsletter is not fully displayed in your inbox, and that you may have missed parts of them, particularly The Seventh Plinth and Question of the Week. A message like this may appear, interrupting the newsletter mid-sentence:

This can be fixed either by reading the Areopagus in the Substack app (or online) or by clicking “show full email” or “view entire message” when reading it in your inbox. That should open the whole newsletter and ensure you don’t miss a thing.

All that being said, all administrative queries quelled — time for us to wander the mysterious and miraculous paths of romance. Another Areopagus begins…

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Anyway. I sit here at my familiar desk, writing out these words for you — and a poem by Marina Tsvetaeva comes to mind:

My desk, most loyal friend,
thank you. You’ve been with me on
every road I’ve taken.
My scar and my protection.

My loaded writing mule.
Your tough legs have endured
the weight of all my dreams, and
burdens of piled-up thoughts.

Strange and wonderful to think how objects — desks, shoes, pens, glasses, hats — can become companions, and how many of the most important moments in our lives, whether good or bad, they have shared with us. Just think how much your average street light (for example) must have witnessed: how many kisses, quarrels, midni…

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Well, this much I say — that you may have noticed I am now offering a paid subscription to the Areopagus. Each new volume still goes out for free, because the value of education is surely in its reach. So what a paid subscription will get you is access to the full archives of the Areopagus, which are approaching one hundred volumes and nearly half a million words. You’ll also receive additional material — essays of the sort that don’t neatly fit the format of this newsletter, ones that I long have longed to write. But, above all, you’ll be supporting me to do this work — to do more of it, and more often. All this being the case, it is to the 16th century playwright Stephen Gosson I turn for needful words:

Bookes are but poore gifts, yet Kings receive them: upon which I presume, you will not turne This out of doores. Yet cannot for…

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