They were soaring and swerving in impossible unison over the frenzied city when I first saw them.

Pigeons. I’d known them since childhood on the farm, of course. The half-eaten wood pigeon that one of the farm dogs brought back one day from the fields and the cooing doves in the trees behind the farmhouse. The ubiquitous flutter in city parks and squares of the rock dove or feral pigeon. Galapagos doves in Ecuador.

Pigeons, doves: I’d seen them everywhere.

But perhaps not until they became a kind of vision of synchronisation and shimmer over Shanghai in 2003 did I really see pigeons for the first time. Caught in traffic, in the backseat of the office car, with no smartphone to distract me and the meeting I was crawling towards still an hour off, I could give myself up to the contemplation of the flocks of homing pigeons blissfully circling over the city.

I would watch them to one side of the raised highway, not much higher than I was, oblivious, proud, and indifferent to anything but air and feather and sky.

As the poet Mina Loy so beautifully wrote in Property of Pigeons:

“Vast transparency” exactly captures the effect as a flock banks or soars in the early sunlight.

Since then I’ve enjoyed seeing similar sights in Istanbul, in Egypt and now in Tokyo. The best moments are when they seem to catch the sun and their wings glint with light in the early morning sky.

*

Once in China, I caught a train heading off across the Yangtze from Shanghai. On it I saw a group of young- to middle-aged men all quietly studying glossy magazines. Cars, I wondered. Or porn?

But the magazines they were reading with such attention turned out to be the local equivalent of the Pigeon Fanciers’ Gazette. I’d stumbled on the people who helped to bird the sky with the glittering morning displays I’d seen in the city.

I’ve seen coops on high rooftops in Istanbul looking out to the dazzling Sea of Marmara, the perfect setting for the glittering feathers. And while travelling from Cairo to Alexandria by train, I’d gaze in wonderment at the suddenly fertile landscape of the Delta region and the ancient pigeon towers dotted over it.

By comparison with these textured and imposing towers, the coops I see in my Tokyo neighbourhood are modest, rickety homemade affairs. The other day I came upon one, to my surprise, attracted by the sound of the pigeons cooing. As I walked towards the coop, the sound stopped. I don’t know whether this was from caution or expectation, but as I turned to leave them in peace, the peace ended and they started cooing again.

*

I recently watched Elia Kazan’s classic film On the Waterfront for the first time in decades. I’d forgotten how powerful the pigeons are, both as plot points and also as symbols (warning: the next lines contain spoilers). 1

Very early in the film, Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) calls out to his fellow pigeon fancier late one night:

These seemingly innocent words are what Malloy/Brando uses to lure Joey to the rooftop at the “request” of the gangsters in control of the union.

But Malloy has also been deceived. He thought the plan was just to scare Joey. However, the gangsters throw him off the roof to his death.

Joey’s death is the grotesque opposite of what happens to the pigeons. When they are handled and then released, they fly away in joy.

The pigeons recur throughout the film, though usually not seen in flight but caged, rather like the humans (his colleagues) that Brando slowly learns he must free.

Malloy says of the pigeons:

That statement might stand for the workers who meekly toe the line imposed by the gangsters. Like the pigeons they are well looked after, though only if they keep quiet about the gangsters’ racketeering.

The pigeons, however, ultimately suffer a cruel, symbolic and possibly redemptive fate – murdered when Malloy turns informant for the police. But before the same can happen to him, Malloy, though badly beaten, leads the workers in defiant action to break the stranglehold of the gangsters.

The humans are finally free to fly.

*

All of our current feral pigeons derive from Columba livia. 2 They were first domesticated by the Sumerians 4,000 years ago. They are intelligent and can recognise themselves in a mirror and even recognise human faces. They remember who is kind and who is not. They are completely at home in a human world.

The other day, as I stopped by the walls of a concrete-bound local river, I found a pigeon sidling towards me on the railing. When I looked at it, it stopped. But when I resumed my gaze into the waters fresh from the rains, it continued its progress towards me. Perhaps it wanted food? Or thought I had a kind face?

Maybe it was just in need of human company?

*

Writers other than Mina Loy, who I quoted from above, have admired them. For example, there’s the sublime ending to Wallace Stevens’ Sunday Morning:

But most of all in Marianne Moore’s Pigeons (1935) – a poem with a whole ecology of its own. Moore brilliantly captures the human-pigeon interactions that have continued for thousands of years.

The 2017 New York Times review of Moore’s New Collected Poems suggests that while the collection is full of her “greatest hits”, this poem belongs with the “fine non-album B-sides”.

Perhaps that’s true, but nonetheless it’s an extraordinary verbal performance, which you can read in full here:

The beginning is magnificent:

     Older than the ancient Greeks, than

     Solomon, the pigeon family is a

     ramifying one, a

     banyan of banyans; to begin

with, bluish slate,

     but with ability. Modesty cannot dull

the lustre of the pigeon

swift and sure, coming quickest and

     straightest just after a storm.

The poem goes on to describe the homing pigeon in war (where pigeons have played important roles) as messengers, compared to gods or heroes, and discusses some of the other 289 species of the bird.

Moore unleashes astonishing powers of description in honour of one of these species:

	Pelew pigeon with

	black head, metallic, wasp-lustred

grass-green breast and purple

Legs and feet...

She praises their amazing navigational abilities:

“Migrating always in the same direction.”

And she writes, too, of the Samoan tooth-billed pigeon (Didunculus strigirostris – its local name is Manumea).

The bird is apparently the closest living relative of the long-extinct dodo – formerly and uncharmingly called Didus ineptus, now known as Raphus cucullatus.

Moore’s summary of that bird’s fate is a bitter elegy:

In the last section of the poem, she returns to human-pigeon interaction. Their fate is tied to our fate and our actions. So it is like with many species on our planet, but their lives are uniquely intertwined with ours.

Moore describes, with cool irony, a new pigeon. Against the loss of the dodo, she writes, “A new pigeon cannot compensate, but we have/it.”

The new bird was, she says, “developed” by

The Gentlemen of the

     Feather Club

And is she still only talking about the pigeons, I wonder, when she concludes

“This is a dainty breed”?

Life and the memory of it so compressed

They’ve turned into each other. Which is which?

Elizabeth Bishop, “Poem” (1972).

Three years ago I visited a major Hockney exhibition in Tokyo and wrote about it here. As I mentioned then, seeing the Blue Guitar etchings after many years set off a train of memories.

But what I didn’t add was that they also seemed smaller than I’d remembered, and much as I enjoyed seeing them again, they seemed rather slight among the other wonderful Hockney paintings on show.

My reacquaintance with Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy was a different experience. It hadn’t diminished in size compared to my memory, but it seemed lessened in another way. The painting which had exhilarated me all those years ago in London felt a little airless – especially, perhaps, compared to the freedom of the pulsating landscapes in some of the later Hockney. Perhaps context and place make a difference as well as time.

*

About a year later I read an essay by Julian Barnes, who I’ve quoted here before, called Art and Memory. In it, he discusses how his memory – or expectations – of artworks have led to surprise or disappointment upon later viewings.

In the first example he gives, he buys a painting to complete his late wife’s collection of paintings and then realises that he had miscalculated – or rather, wrongly assumed – the size of the canvas he bought at auction online.

“I had seen the picture in an online catalogue, its size there at most about three inches by two. It had not been held up and shown to bidders in the room and online during the sale. I had imagined it as being a taut, concentrated picture of about ten or twelve inches by six or eight. Of course, the actual dimensions were printed in the catalogue, but I had paid them no attention because I knew the picture’s size, its exact, ideal size, without checking: it was a size which fitted in with the rest of my wife’s collection. [My emphasis]

The experience makes Barnes begin to consider the gap between what we see and what is in our minds.

“It made me reflect on the distorting distance that can invade between image and reality; between what we think we see, or hope to see, and what is really there; also, more widely, on how the reproduced image can hamper the way we look at art.”

*

Two hundred years earlier, in an essay published in 1822, Pictures at Burleigh House, William Hazlitt explored a similar theme. Revisiting the country home after a long absence, he writes of the works on display:

“All is still the same, like a petrification of the mind — the same things in the same places; but their effect is not the same upon me. I am twenty years the worse for wear and tear.”

He reported that paintings that had previously delighted him no longer did so.

“The Rembrandts disappointed me quite. I could hardly find a trace of the impression which had been inlaid in my imagination.

Instead of broken wrinkles and indented flesh, I saw hard lines and stained canvas. I had seen better Rembrandts since, and had learned to see nature better.” 1

*

Later in his essay, Barnes addresses art and memory, commenting, “More common than the falsifying effect of anticipation is the falsifying of memory.”

He recalls a painting by Félix Vallotton, The Lie, which had impressed him thirty years earlier. He then goes on to describe his reaction to encountering the painting again.

About ten years later, I saw it again, this time in its native Switzerland, in a retrospective of Vallotton’s work. I was genuinely shocked by how small it was – indeed, the smallest picture in the whole show. Its radiance in my memory must have swelled it to about four times the size of what was now in front of me.

In the rest of the essay, he catalogues other instances of misremembering great artworks he’d seen. And from this he develops a tentative theory:

As far as it is possible to generalise, I think we misremember small pictures as being larger than they are, and large pictures as smaller. Also, what we are remembering is not just the painting itself but its effect on us; and some parts of it will inevitably remain fresher than others.

*

Perhaps Barnes’ theory can apply not just to paintings but also to other kinds of works of art; in my case, to Ryōan-ji Temple in Kyoto. This happened to me with two visits to the famous garden separated by a significant gap of time.

I first visited in the mid-1990s when I lived in Kyoto and was hugely impressed by the design and the atmosphere of calm the garden exuded (which miraculously survived even the arrival of a busload of schoolchildren).

Nearly twenty years later, I visited again. This time, the celebrated and still exquisite garden seemed smaller and, I confess, had lost much of its varnish of mystique. It hadn’t exactly deteriorated into a mere expanse of rock and gravel (I guess that would have been a more literal ‘petrification of the mind’ than Hazlitt’s), but something in the harmony that had stayed in my memory was no longer present at the site. I came away both puzzled and disappointed.

*

Hazlitt, though, wasn’t at all dismayed by the effect the Rembrandts at Burleigh House had on him. In fact, he seems to have given more importance to the image in his mind.

Was it a disadvantage, then, that for twenty years I had carried this fine idea in my brain, enriching it from time to time from my observations of nature or art, and raising it as they were raised; or did it much signify that it was disturbed at last? Neither. The picture was nothing to me: it was the idea it had suggested. The one hung on the wall at Burleigh; the other was an heir-loom in my mind. Was it destroyed, because the picture, after long absence, did not answer to it? No. There were other pictures in the world that did, and objects in nature still more perfect. This is the melancholy privilege of art; it exists chiefly in idea, and is not liable to serious reverses.

And he goes on (Hazlitt always goes on) to make this comparison:

If an old friendship is broken up, we cannot tell how to replace it, without the aid of habit and a length of time. But a picture is nothing but a face; it interests us only in idea. Like the possessor of a splendid collection, who is indifferent to or turns away from common pictures, we have a selector gallery in our own minds. In this sense, the knowledge of art is its own exceeding great reward.

I have reflected on Hazlitt’s fine phrase, ‘a gallery in our own minds’. Is this the place, then, where art – or at least the enjoyment and appreciation of it – chiefly resides? In our heads?

*

Barnes also finds consolation in his experiences but follows a slightly different route in his thinking. He says,

Perhaps the prospect of revisiting a great work of art makes the memory tremble, as if you are going to have to sit an examination paper. And is it, finally, a bad thing if memory lets us down? Not necessarily. It might confirm some ongoing, organic relationship between ourselves and the work in question.

Unlike Hazlitt, who is happy to contemplate his own mental gallery, Barnes sees the interplay between mind and object and the way it shifts over time as perhaps one of the keys to how art can work its varying effects on us.

*

In the autumn of 2003, newly arrived in Shanghai as head of the British Council office there, one of the first major projects I was involved in was the installation of Antony Gormley’s magnificent Asan Field. This work was a vast collection of tiny terracotta-clay figures fashioned under the artist’s guidance by a community in Guangdong province in southern China. Asian Field was also shown, each time at a different scale, in Beijing, Guangzhou and Chongqing. But the Shanghai edition, held in the decommissioned Shanghai Number Ten Steelworks, was the biggest (Shanghai, in my experience, always wanted to be the biggest or the best). 2

There were other colleagues, much better qualified than me for the task, who actually supported the coming together of this colossal, dizzying work. 3 However, I was impressed by what I saw of the compelling process of the installation of the figures and the preparation of the highly industrial and unpretty venue. My sense of acute interest in the process was despite (or partly because of?) the behind-the-scenes disputes that often seem to accompany such major works.

The scale and majesty of Asian Field, in its suitably gritty and curiously atmospheric setting, stayed with me for years. For someone who had just arrived to live in this vast country with a population of over one billion people and a city at the vanguard of China’s astonishingly rapid economic development, Asian Field seemed tonally perfect. The artwork seemed to embody the energy and expectation I felt at being in Shanghai at that time.

Eighteen years later, I was in Hong Kong at the time of the opening of its magnificent new M+ gallery. One of the inaugural exhibitions was Asian Field. I was excited at the prospect not only of viewing the wonderful collection of modern Chinese art on display at M+, but also of reacquainting myself with Gormley’s remarkable work.

The massive collection of tiny figures (though smaller in number than in Shanghai) still created a silent gasp when I saw it and remained impressive. The work in its essence hadn’t changed.

And yet. Whether it was the smaller scale, the polished gallery setting or the dampening effect that Covid was still wreaking on our lives, the work now lacked for me the vitality that it had pulsated with in the Shanghai Number Ten Steelworks nearly two decades before.

Or was it that I had changed over the course of those eventful years and was less receptive to the grandeur of the work?

Or perhaps, as with Barnes, my more muted reaction to the work was just part of “some ongoing, organic relationship between the two of us and the work in question”.

Or, in echo of Hazlitt’s words – “the melancholy privilege of art exists chiefly in idea” – could it have been that the teeming wonder of Asian Field in Shanghai, no longer physically housed in the long-demolished Shanghai Number Ten Steelworks, had taken up permanent residence in my mind and resisted all further occupation?

1

In his essay On the Pleasure of Painting (1820), which looks back on an earlier period in his life, Hazlitt had written, “I had seen an old head by Rembrandt at Burleigh House, and if I could produce a head at all like Rembrandt in a year, in my lifetime, it would be glory and felicity and wealth and fame enough for me! The head I had seen at Burleigh was an exact and wonderful facsimile of nature.”

It doesn’t change the basic argument by Hazlitt, but it appears from the research I have carried out that it’s possible that what he saw at Burleigh House (now written as Burghley) were paintings that had been misattributed to Rembrandt (there had apparently been an earlier lucrative craze of attribution). In any case, the modern online catalogue of BH contains no paintings by Rembrandt but some by his followers. I have included one of them above.

Below is a genuine Rembrandt which Hazlitt knew and wrote about in his 1820 essay On the Pleasure of Painting:

Summer has only just begun for me in Tokyo. After a mild June (compared to recent years), it’s been hot for a couple of weeks, but it was only today (as I write this), in the second half of July, that I heard my first cicada piercing the quiet of the early morning with its song. Then I felt the palpable presence of summer.

Growing up in England, the sound of cicadas was unknown to me. The one species native to Britain (which became extinct in the 1990s) used to be found in the county of Hampshire, where my father used to live in his days as a farm worker.1 Perhaps my father had heard them in his native country of Hampshire in his younger days as a farm worker. But I never asked, and now I’ll never know.

It wasn’t until I visited the coastal plain of Ecuador and travelled into the mixture of jungle and plantations on its fertile soils that I became aware of how these insects could dominate the soundscape. But don’t ask me which species I heard. I’ve read that “the currently known Ecuadorian cicada fauna is comprised of 98 species from 24 genera, nine tribes and three subfamilies.” 2 A whole symphony orchestra of cicada species.

Varying their orchestral forces according to the season, they seemed to thrum or chirrup all year round on the equator, though less in the rainy season, and seemed to me simply an incessant element in the coastal plain’s soundscape outside the city.

*

When I moved from Ecuador to Kyoto in the 1990s, I came across the strict seasonality of cicadas and their role in punctuating the passing of the seasons. And instead of being confined mostly to the countryside, their supersonic chorus of sound pulsed through every park or tree-lined street, like blades of sound. They were impossible to escape. The heat of a Kyoto summer, when I arrived in the late August of 1994, was the most challenging heat I’d encountered, worse than that of the equator in Ecuador, and the cicadas seemed to amplify the oppression of the brutal temperature and humidity.

Unlike in some parts of the world, the cicadas in Japan appear every year. It wouldn’t feel like summer here, whatever the temperature, without them. In Tokyo, the first cicadas to get going are the Nii-nii-zemi (ニイニイゼミ) cicadas, or Planopleura kaempferi. Their nii-nii call is incessant and monotonous – a background noise rather than an in-your-face aural event.

Next is the Minmin-zemi (ミンミンゼミ) or Hyalessa maculaticollis. The name in Japanese comes from its sound of min-min-min-min-mii. It’s perhaps considered the quintessential classic sound of a Japanese summer. It can be loud. You can hear its distinctive sound here:

Then comes the large brown cicada, or Graptopsaltria nigrofuscata. It’s known here as the Aburazemi (アブラゼミ). ‘Abura’ means ‘oil’, and the name refers to their sound, which is likened to the sound of food frying in a pan. You can hear it here.

There’s also a large black cicada (Cryptotympana facialis), known here as the Kuma-zemi (クマゼミ – ‘kuma’ means ‘bear’ but here just refers to it being big). You can hear it here.

The Higurashii (ヒグラシ – Tanna japonensis), or evening cicada, sings all summer but is often associated with early autumn because it prefers to sing in cooler weather, such as evenings or when the summer heat begins to wane and other cicada songs begin to disappear. Their more muted but melodic sound can be heard here.

Towards the end of summer, and taken as a harbinger of autumn, is the Walker’s cicada, Sinfonia opalifera, known here as the Tsukutsuku-boushi (ツクツクボウシ) because of its sound, which you can hear here.

*

Not surprisingly, given their importance as markers of the season, cicadas appear in Japanese haiku. Here is a famous haiku by Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694):

閑さや

岩にしみ入る

蝉の声

Shizukesa ya

Iwa ni shimiiru

Semi no koe

(Such stillness

The cries of the cicadas

sink into the rocks).

The poet was probably writing about the Nii-nii-zemi.

Another haiku by him about cicadas is less lyrical and confronts the tension between the energy and noise of the cicada as it sings and its short life and imminent death:

やがて死ぬ

けしきは見えず

蝉の声

Yagate shinu

keshiki wa miezu

semi no koe

(The cry of the cicada

Gives us no sign

That presently it will die.)

The references in Japanese literature actually go back a lot further. In The Tale of Genji (源氏物語, c. 1008) by Murasaki Shikibu, one of the first women to successfully resist the advances of Prince Genji is referred to as Utsusemi. When Genji sneaks into her room, she flees, leaving behind only a light summer robe.

Genji compares the discarded robe to a hollowed-out cicada shell, and she becomes immortalised as “The Lady of the Empty Cicada Shell”. The term ‘utsusemi’ is also used to refer to the fleeting nature of our lives in this world.

*

The cicada, though, has a rich cultural life elsewhere. Before I ever explored the rich coastal plain of Ecuador, I lived in Quito, high in the Andes (where I certainly don’t recall hearing any cicadas). One of the highlights of my time there was a concert by the legendary Argentinian singer Mercedes Sosa (1935 - 2009), whose music I had already grown to love.

And that night in Quito I heard one of her most celebrated songs, ‘Como la cigarra’, or ‘Like the cicada’ (1973, written by fellow Argentinian María Elena Walsh). The song opens with these stark lines

Tantas veces me mataron

Tantas veces me morí

Sin embargo, estoy aquí

Resucitando.

(So many times they killed me

So many times I died

Yet here I am

Rising again.)

Despite the direct and tragic nature of the lyrics, which could be taken to refer to the centuries of imperial and domestic violence suffered by the people of Latin America, Sosa’s delivery is gentle, poetic and wistful.

While Bashō and Murasaki Shikibu focus on the cicada as a symbol of the flitting nature of life, Sosa and Walsh present it as a symbol of an insistent resilience:

Cantando al Sol como la cigarra

Después de un año bajo la tierra

Igual que sobreviviente

Que vuelve de la guerra.

(Singing to the sun like the cicada

After a year underground

Just like a survivor

Coming back from war.)

You can hear Sosa’s extraordinary voice and delivery singing “Como la cigarra” via this link.

*

Together, Sosa and Bashō represent different visions of how the cicada’s extraordinary life cycle – so many years underground, followed by a manic summer frolic of singing – compares with our own lives.

The final look at the cicada in poetry brings me to a remarkable poem by Federico García Lorca (1898 – 1936).

If Basho and Murasaki Shikibu look at the shortness of a cicada’s life in the summer and Sosa and Walsh celebrate its resilience underground, Lorca’s 1918 poem ¡Cigarra! launches into an ecstatic hymn in praise of its life.

It begins with Lorca’s customary energy and lyricism.

¡Cigarra!

¡Dichosa tú!,

que sobre el lecho de tierra

mueres borracha de luz.

(Cicada!

How fortunate you are

To die on a bed of earth

Drunk with light!) 3

Then having lamented the silence that accompanies death for all living things, Lorca exalts in the exceptional fate of the cicada:

Mas tú, cigarra encantada,

derramando son, te mueres

y quedas transfigurada

en sonido y luz celeste.

(But you, enchanted cicada

pouring out your song, you die

and remain transfigured

into sound and celestial light.)

Lorca brings the life and death of the cicada together in a rapturous transfiguration. Perhaps more than the other writers we have looked at, he captures the frenzy of the cicada’s singing along with the brutality of its sentence to such a short life above ground.

Poetry can make us see the world with fresh eyes. For me, that’s exactly what happens here as the poem ends (and I will end this post with it). In a final rhetorical apotheosis, Lorca deploys an astonishing image which almost suggests the martyrdom of the insect by the summer sky:

¡Cigarra!

¡Dichosa tú!,

pues te hieren las espadas invisibles

del azul.

(Cicada!

How fortunate you are!

To be pierced by the invisible swords

of blue.)

In my school history classes, we studied in some detail (almost all of which I have forgotten) the 1830 wave of revolutions and rebellions across Europe that both looked back to 1789 and forwards to 1848, 1871 and beyond.

The revolutions were mostly constitutional and nationalist in focus, and the main countries affected were France and Belgium. In France, an important shift towards popular sovereignty brought about the so-called July Monarchy.

In England, no such revolution took place, but there were riots in the south and east of the country. The so-called ‘Swing Riots‘ got their name from the fictitious name used to sign threatening letters to farmers, magistrates and even a Cambridge college (see the image below).

These have been called the largest wave of unrest in 19th-century England, and as always with popular uprisings, the causes were many. One immediate cause and focus of anger, however, was the introduction of horse-powered threshing machines. These were able to do the work of many workers, and farm labourers understandably felt their livelihood threatened. In the short term, this fear seemed justified and added to the already very precarious nature of their existence. 1

These riots have come to mind at a time when there is intense debate about the rising use of AI in the workplace and the threat it seems to bring to many jobs. Usually, when economists look back on the changes of technology and their impact on jobs, they come to the conclusion that the net effect was ultimately positive. But this kind of analysis elides the realities of the transition – farmworkers and their families going hungry in winter – as the new opportunities work their way through the economy and society. This process can be seen as “churn” in cosy academic hindsight, but it would have led to real cases of hardship and despair.

It’s probably too early to see the picture clearly with AI. I note that the English newspaper The Economist changed from a rather sanguine view in December 2025 of AI’s effects on jobs to a rather more concerned tone just a few months later, in May this year.

Unlike England in 1830, however, the anger and disquiet I sense around the rapid adoption of AI hasn’t produced (as far as I know) any violence or the smashing of machines.

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Undoubtedly philosophers are in the right, when they tell us that nothing is great or little otherwise than by comparison.

From Gulliver’s Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift

Webster was much possessed by death

And saw the skull beneath the skin;

And breastless creatures under ground

Leaned backward with a lipless grin.

From Whispers of Immortality by TS Eliot

The exhibition rooms of the Mori Art Gallery, where I recently saw an exhibition of Ron Mueck’s work, seemed not only populated by his sculptured figures and spectators but also haunted by other presences.

The first imaginary presence was Hamlet, who I sensed lurking near the first exhibit, Woman with Sticks (2009 - see above image). Immediately, the words that came to mind when I saw the figure struggling with her heavy and bulky load were from that famous speech by Hamlet about life and death: 1

The curators pointed to the work’s narrative potential, its suggestion of a fairy-tale scene, but I took it as a reflection on the grunt and the sweat that life can represent at times. I’d arrived with an association of Mueck’s name with the Spanish word ‘mueca’, which means grimace. Maybe that’s why I immediately focused on the strained look on the figure’s face.

Exiting that room, I came across another realm where the presiding genius was now Lemuel Gulliver...

The immense size of the figure in Bed (2005) immediately made me think of Gulliver among the Lilliputians (and also of the 1960s sci-fi drama, Land of the Giants).

‘Get a sense of proportion,’ people used to tell me when I overreacted to seemingly trivial incidents earlier in my life. But Mueck’s work seemed to be inviting us to abandon our usual sense of proportion in dramatic or subtle ways, a shift in perception I found curiously invigorating.

In other works, the effect of disproportion came from something more subtle than a giant figure. The couple in Young Couple (2013) were a little below normal size, almost hobbit-like. This made them feel even more vulnerable and added power and poignancy to this oddly disquieting work.

And the teenage girl in Ghost (1998/2014) was a little taller than life, which combined powerfully with her gaucheness to lend the spectator/sculpture relationship at times a curious leering quality.

And just as disconcerting, it was sometimes hard to figure out who was looking at who. When I first encountered chicken/man (2019), apart from thinking of Barry Humphries’ cultural attaché alter ego, Les Patterson, my initial reaction was to wonder, probably along with everyone else, what the chicken was doing there.

But very soon, I began to wonder what the man was doing there. Finally, the questions in my mind changed to ‘What was I doing there? Who was looking at who? Was everybody looking at everybody else?’ 2

*

Mueck was born in Australia to German parents in 1958. The family business he grew up with was puppetry and doll-making. Having worked in TV and film, he first achieved prominence as a sculptor when his work Dead Dad was shown in the 1997 exhibition Sensation at the Royal Academy of Arts. He is now based in the UK.

*

This was a rare exhibition in which I wanted to keep other visitors in my photos to preserve a sense of scale. The art gallery, according to the critic Claire Bishop, can “invite a passive mode of reception” when compared to “the active co-production of collaborative art”. But here I almost felt as if we were co-producing, or at least active participants.

So I found myself wanting to include them in my gaze – I mean, other visitors, like me – as interlocutors of the figures by Mueck. The figure in Man in a Boat (2002), for example, who drifts into view, apparently marooned like Robinson Crusoe – who or what was he looking at? And why did I sense at times that he was just another visitor?

And as I wandered around the work, revelling in the generous space, I saw that from certain angles, the man in the boat was watching other visitors queue up to see the intense face sculpture hidden in a darkened room – Dark Place (2018). He seemed absorbed and almost jealous of the attention given to that other work.

The face in Dark Place had most of the intensity and even a hint of the horror of Francis Bacon’s Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953).

Bacon himself once said, “Great art is always a way of concentrating, reinventing what is called fact, what we know of our existence—a reconcentration…tearing away the veils that fact acquires through time. Ideas always acquire appearance veils, the attitudes people acquire of their time and earlier time. Really good artists tear down those veils.”

*

A particular feature of Mueck’s work is his striking attention to detail, which makes his sculptures appear almost hyperreal. This quality achieves a vertiginous effect in one of the most famous pieces in the exhibition, the early work, Angel (1997).

Other angels – for instance, those in Wim Wenders’ film Wings of Desire (1987), as well as an eternity of angels in the Western art tradition – seemed to hover over this figure.

But Mueck’s dejected angel, with a realistic (if small) human body, was directly inspired by a figure in An Allegory with Venus and Time by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (c. 1754–8 – see below). The painting features the winged embodiment of Time, who has the face (and beard) of an old man.

The winged figure inTiepolo’s work has a key role to play in the allegory. But Mueck’s angel looks curiously like an out-of-work actor or model, waiting for the next job offer to come along.

*

By the time I got to the rooms filled with giant skulls, a work that Mueck called Mass (2026-17), I was back with Hamlet (and the Land of the Giants) – this time, the gravedigger’s scene. 3 In the play, every skull tells a story, a rich human one, but they are excavated and then carelessly tossed aside by the gravedigger as he holds forth while digging a grave for Ophelia. 4

I understand that Mueck doesn’t generally say much about his work, but in this case the explanatory note on the wall of this room quoted a laconic commentary from him, apparently adapted from a dictionary.

Reflecting on the religious meaning of Mass, I thought of these words from the Dies Iraes:

Dies irae, dies illa

Solvet saeclum in favilla

(This day, this day of wrath

shall consume the world in ashes)

And I found the sheer scale and mass of the skulls almost overwhelming.

But I was more troubled when the thought of ‘mass graves’ came to my mind, and with it, marching through my head like Fortinbras’s troops in Hamlet, came images of terrible scenes of death – those abominable scenes of mass murder that haunt our memories of the 20th century.

In this way, it seemed to me, an exhibition that began evoking the burdens of life and then, with mournful playfulness, provoked reflections on our place in the world ended on a note – if such a thing is possible – of muted wrath.

*

The show had attracted many younger people, not the usual grey-haired crowd I see at exhibitions in the city. It turns out that Mueck’s photogenic works had been a social media hit, a “succès de IG”.

As I left, many of the younger members of the audience, for whom the terrors of the 20th century might seem very distant, were busy taking selfies as they walked among the giant skulls.

Turning to glance at the surreally massive graveyard scene one last time, I couldn’t help wondering what they’d made of it all and whether, for them, Mueck’s brilliantly disturbing sculptures had indeed torn down the veils of appearances, the thin skin of illusion that keeps at bay the lurking consciousness of our mortality.

Some people live in grand houses; others live in humble ones, while many of us live in modest apartments. But what almost of us have in common is the desire to have what the lawyers call “quiet enjoyment” of our homes. 1

It’s not always easy to remain undisturbed in this noisy world, but the problem is not a new one. Writing almost exactly two hundred years ago, the English essayist Charles Lamb bemoaned the disturbance of that quiet enjoyment in plangent terms. 2

*

There is yet another home, which we are constrained to deny to be one. It has a larder, which the home of the poor man wants; its fireside conveniences, of which the poor dream not. But with all this, it is no home. It is—the house of the man that is infested with many visitors.

*

Judging from the evidence of film and television, in some cultures people seem to drop in on eachother a lot (the latest example was in the drama The Boroughs). My life has never been much like that. As a child on the farm, interruptions were few. People would have had to travel a considerable distance just to get to the front door (which was never locked). And besides, the expectation on a dairy farm was that everyone was always busy. So casual visitors were few.

My period as a student – especially my first year – was probably the most sociable time of my life in that way. In the first year at least, not only friends (always welcome) but also acquaintances would drop in for tea and biscuits – the essential ingredients of socialising as a student. But even then the quiet and solitary enjoyment of my own room would gradually become more welcome as the day turned into evening.

*

May we be branded for the veriest churl, if we deny our heart to the many noble-hearted friends that at times exchange their dwelling for our poor roof! It is not of guests that we complain, but of endless, purposeless visitants; droppers in, as they are called. We sometimes wonder from what sky they fall. It is the very error of the position of our lodging; its horoscopy was ill calculated, being just situate in a medium—a plaguy suburban mid-space—fitted to catch idlers from town or country.

*

One of the most famous interruptions in the history of English literature was that experienced by Lamb’s close friend, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The now-legendary Person on business from Porlock (a town near where he was living) supposedly disturbed the poet from his trance-like state (probably a drug-induced trip) while he was writing that magnificent poem, Kubla Khan. As a consequence, or so the story goes, the poem was never finished. Lamb would surely have heard the tale from Coleridge himself.

Some cultures appear to tolerate casual interruption more than others. In Ecuador, I used to observe that people would feel quite entitled to drop in unannounced, especially in the coastal city of Guayaquil. And I remember my Chinese teacher, just before I went to live in Shanghai, unnerving me when he told me that Chinese had no word or concept for privacy. 3

Perhaps one thing I enjoy about living in Tokyo is that social visits to homes are rare and unplanned social visits – even here in what Lamb would call “a plaguy suburban mid-space” – are almost unheard of. Here, people meet frequently in public spaces, restaurants, cafes, and hired facilities. But usually not at home.

*

We are older than we were, and age is easily put out of its way. We have fewer sands in our glass to reckon upon, and we cannot brook to see them drop in endlessly succeeding impertinences. At our time of life, to be alone sometimes is as needful as sleep. It is the refreshing sleep of the day. The growing infirmities of age manifest themselves in nothing more strongly, than in an inveterate dislike of interruption. The thing which we are doing, we wish to be permitted to do. We have neither much knowledge nor devices; but there are fewer in the place to which we hasten. We are not willingly put out of our way, even at a game of nine-pins. While youth was, we had vast reversions in time future; we are reduced to a present pittance, and obliged to economise in that article. We bleed away our moments now as hardly as our ducats. We cannot bear to have our thin wardrobe eaten and fretted into by moths.

*

As I move into my mid-sixties and there are noticeably fewer “sands in the glass” left to me, I can certainly understand Lamb’s feelings that, as he got older, his spare time became more precious to him, and so he resented interruptions more.

Lamb was clearly happy to be in his own company. Perhaps he was also given to philosophical reflections when alone, something that Bertrand Russell, writing a century later, claimed would “enlarge our interests as to include the whole outer world” and take us away from the constant strife of “the private world of instinctive interests”. 4

I’m not sure I am much given to philosophical reflection of the kind suggested by Russell, but I’m relatively comfortable with being alone. When I was much younger, I was called – and it was almost an accusation – “self-sufficient”. I’m not sure that’s true. But I never much liked a crowd and preferred to choose my moments for socialising rather than having them thrust upon me. And these days I can certainly appreciate these words: “At our time of life, to be alone sometimes is as needful as sleep”.

*

Re-reading his essay made me wonder how Lamb, who worked for 33 years without a single promotion in the East India Company, in what he called his “official confinement”, dealt with disturbances at work. I doubt that he got much time during the day for solitude or philosophical contemplation.

When I worked in open-plan offices, I struggled to cope with interruptions and even to fend them off. I did manage, however, to perfect a slightly pained expression when turning to address a casual inquirer, which seemed to acquire a modest deterrent effect.

On those occasions when I was granted the luxury of an office to myself, I felt more at ease. My policy was to keep the door open so that anyone could come in and talk if they wanted or needed to. A closed door meant, obviously enough, “do not disturb”, though I rarely closed it except when in meetings.

Now that I work remotely, all that has changed. It’s made life simpler in a way. But the rise of remote work has created almost the opposite issue for some. According to this article, a result study suggested that “remote work is not simply a labour market innovation. It is a large-scale removal of an unpriced social good.” That social good is the company of others.

The article goes on, “Sociologists have long recognised that work structures time, generates shared purpose, sustains social contact, and anchors collective identity... The German sociologist Georg Simmel described a related phenomenon that he called ‘sociability’ – the low-stakes, unplanned encounters that sustain social life without explicit purpose, such as a conversation with a stranger in a hallway.”

I don’t miss working in an office any more than Lamb did when, to his great relief, he was finally able to retire. But for younger generations of workers, I can see the force of the researchers’ argument.

*

We are willing to barter our good time with a friend, who gives us in exchange his own. Herein is the distinction between the genuine guest and the visitant. This latter takes your good time, and gives you his bad in exchange. The guest is domestic to you as your good cat, or household bird; the visitant is your fly, that flaps in at your window, and out again, leaving nothing but a sense of disturbance, and victuals spoiled. The inferior functions of life begin to move heavily.

*

The telephone was the great interrupter in the early to mid-20th century. I well remember the tyranny of that loud ringing, unsilenceable apparatus in the corner of the room or the hall that would simply not allow you to ignore it. It had to be answered, and yet (in those days) we had no idea who would be at the other end. A good friend, an annoying acquaintance or just a wrong number?

These days, I basically ignore phone calls (my phone is on silent mode permanently). If you need to get hold of me, you’ll just need to find another way.

*

Over the years, some of the most persistent visitors I have received have been from missionaries or other people selling their versions of salvation. This seemed to happen most often in Guayaquil in Ecuador. The country is (or was) almost entirely Catholic, but Mormon missionaries, whose creased short-sleeved white shirts stood out almost as much as their blond hair and light-coloured eyes in the tropical city, would call from time to time. 5

At other times, it would be Jeohovah’s Witnesses who would call and try to trick me into a conversation. My only defence to their wiles was either to ignore the doorbell (as insistent as an unanswered phone) or feign inability to understand what they were saying (a trick known locally as “hacerse el sueco”).6

These days the role of the unannounced visitor is often performed by the emissaries of the attention economy – social media, especially. The unsolicited message, the eye-catching headline, the clickbait – they all lie in wait for us as we pick up our phones.

I struggle with these distractions at times, as the shiny screen of my phone glares at me from the corner of the room while I’m reading. But by keeping my phone on silent and almost entirely avoiding social media, I manage to keep the buzzing flies of Big Tech at bay, much of the time.

*

We cannot concoct our food with interruptions. Our chief meal, to be nutritive, must be solitary. With difficulty we can eat before a guest; and never understood what the relish of public feasting meant. Meats have no sapor, nor digestion fair play, in a crowd. The unexpected coming in of a visitant stops the machine. There is a punctual generation who time their calls to the precise commencement of your dining-hour—not to eat—but to see you eat. Our knife and fork drop instinctively, and we feel that we have swallowed our latest morsel. Others again show their genius, as we have said, in knocking the moment you have just sat down to a book. They have a peculiar compassionating sneer, with which they “hope that they do not interrupt your studies.”

*
When replying to ’s kind request last year for me to write about a favourite book, I chose a book by that eternal solipsist, Samuel Beckett. It’s a collection of stories called More Prick Than Kicks (1934), and one of my favourite scenes in it depicts the furious rituals of someone who is desperate to remain uninterrupted as he prepares his breakfast.

In the story Dante and the Lobster, the central protagonist, Belaqua, is fixated on his vision of a pungent and semi-cremated version of a cheese sandwich involving a nearly putrid hunk of Gorgonzola when he pops out to buy the main ingredient.

For me, dinner is sociable. Lunch can go either way. But breakfast, as for Belaqua, needs to be quiet. If it is not alone, silence is preferred....

*

Though they flutter off the next moment, to carry their impertinences to the nearest student that they can call their friend, the tone of the book is spoiled; we shut the leaves and, with Dante’s lovers, read no more that day. It were well if the effect of intrusion were simply co-extensive with its presence; but it mars all the good hours afterwards. These scratches in appearance leave an orifice that closes not hastily. “It is a prostitution of the bravery of friendship,” says worthy Bishop Taylor, “to spend it upon impertinent people, who are, it may be, loads to their families, but can never ease my loads.” This is the secret of their gaddings, their visits, and morning calls. They too have homes, which are—no homes.

*

These days we are besieged by the figuratively homeless – above all via social media, as mentioned above, but also by the whole structure of the world today that demands our attention; the relentlessly shifting news cycles, and the demagogues who bray at us from TV sets. And here in Japan, not a few loudspeakers from passing vans disturb our daytime peace, warning of online fraud, selling their political party or just announcing that their vehicle is turning left... Then there are the voices accompanying the never-ending sirens....

And there’s another feature of our online world that can bring interruptions to our day. As I was writing a draft of this essay at the end of a busy working day, relishing a few minutes after work and before dinner, I was interrupted by a delivery man from Japan’s iconic KuroNeko, or Black Cat, delivery service, bringing a package I’d ordered online (and then, of course, forgotten about).

I am not Coleridge; I wasn’t writing a great poem, and the interruption didn’t last long. Little harm was done.

But still, it was an unwelcome interruption of my solitude. Like Lamb, I often long in vain for quiet, for freedom from all disturbance and, above all, to be left alone in that sweet, refreshing sleep of the day.

*

Devastation has come to my little corner of Tokyo. A neighbour’s garden, whose bamboo grove I used to see swaying in the wind every day, whose plum tree delighted me with shade in summer and blossom in winter and which was home for a pair of charming mejiro, or warbling white-eyes, has been laid waste.

It started with a small gang of hired men and their rented chainsaw and continued with strimmers and pickaxes. All that’s left standing is a solitary pine tree.

All day the hireling engines charged the trees

This is Stanley Kunitz’s apt description of similar events in his poem The War Against the Trees, from which I take this post’s title. He continued:

I saw the ghosts of children at their games

And then,

I watched them disappear

Into the suburbs of their grievous age.

I have imagined the affronted mejiro departing like hungry ghosts to a nearby park. And I have heard the wailing of other birds, especially the hiyodori or brown-eared bulbuls. These are never quiet birds, but since the havoc wreaked upon the garden, their shrill voices have become louder around the apartment block I live in, and they have even visited our balcony. Are they looking for sanctuary, or have they come to berate our species for our crimes?

It’s hard to blame the workers – they presumably need the work. And even the owners are doing no more than to follow the sovereign logic of our society: when something is no longer useful, tear it down and sell it for development.

And no doubt I am selfish even to bewail the loss of the beauty of “The little O, the Earth”1 that this small garden represented to me. There I would see the snow accumulate like powdery wrapping paper on plum blossoms and thicken the bamboo leaves into swaying fans of green and white.

However, unlike the local botanical garden, which I support through my payment of local taxes, I did nothing to maintain that private garden now in ruins, and I could hardly expect it to be maintained for my benefit.

But now, in Kunitz’s words, that the “green world” has “turned its death-foxed page”, a sadness has settled over the neighbourhood, and the incessant cries of the bewildered hiyodori sound like the wailing of phantoms expelled from the sanctuary of their now-lost garden.

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I don’t like work—no man does—but I like what is in the work—the chance to find yourself. Your own reality—for yourself, not for others—what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899).

A couple of months ago, on what would have been the 72nd anniversary of my parents’ wedding, I dug out a digital copy of their wedding certificate. I’d kept a copy of the document, having handled some of the paperwork resulting from their deaths in 2020 (my father) and 2022 (my mother).

As I looked at their wedding certificate, this time I paused to look at the entries under the grand headings of “rank or profession”.

My father was listed first, and his “profession” was given as “Herdsman (Farm)”. I wondered why the word “Farm” was added in this way. What other kind of herdman was there than those that worked on farms?

My mother was listed as “Shop Assistant (Grocers”). Again, why the addition of the specific detail of “Grocers”?

The certificate also listed both my grandfathers’ “Rank or profession”. 1 My father’s father was listed as “Garage Proprietor” (he had a small petrol/gas station), and my mother’s father was listed as “Roofing Specialist”, a phrase I doubt he’d ever used. He was, for us, a roofer or builder or labourer. I don’t know who chose these terms, but what struck me here was how the language used seemed designed to give their occupations greater “respectability”. 2

Things were simpler on my birth certificate. Only my father’s occupation is noted, and there he is simply a “Farmer”. In his case, it’s a good summary. It’s all he ever wanted to be.

At birth, marriage and death – these seem to be the main times that occupations are officially recorded on certificates in England. It’s an odd paper trail, and noting just one occupation seems a haphazard way for our lives to be captured in the historical record. It can leave out a large part of our working lives (and, of course, lots more besides).

Reading these documents again also made me think how the work we do can often evade the terms we invent for them. We are bureaucratically preoccupied with and sometimes emotionally invested in certain job titles, but can our rough, administrative and fussy nomenclatures really capture the variety of jobs that we do?

*

The other day in the heat of the late spring sunshine, I was standing at a level crossing (railroad crossing) on my local railway line here in Tokyo, waiting for the train to pass, when I noticed a man with a clipboard gazing at a small black device in his hand and noting down some numbers into a table. I quietly edged closer so that I could see what he was doing.

It turned out he was measuring the sound of the level crossing’s warning signal – somewhere between a bleep and an alarm – and was writing down the decibels in his report. He must have been doing this at every level crossing on the line. Perhaps once he got to the end of the line, he’d go back to the beginning and start again.

Was this the only job he did? It was invaluable, potentially life-saving work which I didn’t know existed and couldn’t describe concisely. I don’t know if the railway company took people on as “level-crossing sound-level monitors” or as technicians who would then be assigned specialities.

I doubt if anyone listed such a job as their chosen profession as a child – though I’m tempted to list it now. And I’m curious about how he describes to family and friends what he does.

*

The existence of highly specialised or focused specialist jobs that carry out invaluable tasks almost out of our general awareness is nothing new. I recently came across this list describing common jobs in mediaeval Europe. It moves from some familiar ones – including roofer, farmer, and locksmith – to some less obvious ones, e.g., trumpet player, birdcatcher, and pewterer.

And this fascinating essay by historian Tom Johnson challenges the very definition of what work or occupation is. It seems that in early modern England, a lot of paid work was actually done while carrying out another paid or unpaid job and has escaped notice:

The essay is a review of a book reevaluating The Experience of Work in Early Modern England, 3 and the results of the author’s research are startling:

*

My mother, though, had a very different experience from that described above. She was a city girl who loyally moved to the countryside in the 1960s with my father when he bought his first smallholding in the depths of Devon. For her, it was always a slightly alien world. And with six young sons to look after and no neighbours or relatives nearby, I think that for years she spent most of her time on care work or domestic work.

Yet she also pitched in on the farm when she could or had to – for example, helping to rear lambs or calves. And in later life, as her sons grew up, she did voluntary work (adult literacy, the Samaritans, and charity shops). At other times she also worked in the kitchen of my brothers’ hotel and cleaned the holiday flats she and my father owned for a few years.

And yet when she died and I was asked by the friendly registrar in the local government office what occupation to put on her death certificate, I was momentarily perplexed. I hadn’t seen this question coming, and to me, my mother was, well, my mother.

My slightly flustered decision to enter “Homemaker” was both hopelessly inadequate and completely right.

It was wrong, because she had done so many things; how could I sum them up in a word?

Yet she made a home for her husband and six sons, and I knew she was always proud of that. She always said that was what she wanted to do with her life; for her, it wasn’t a job to be done – it was a role she wanted to perform.

*

In my previous work with the British Council, when giving speeches or commencement addresses, I used to use the following kind of statement, possibly borrowed from an OECD or WEF report: “Some studies suggest that 65% of children currently entering primary school will have jobs that do not yet exist and for which their education will fail to prepare them, exacerbating skills gaps and unemployment in the future.”

It paints a world of rapid change and of a dizzying array of jobs we barely have words for. It certainly complicates the picture for parents and educators preparing their young charges for the future.

But perhaps a world of a certain number of fixed professions that we can train or apprentice for has always been a fantasy. I suspect the world has always been more complex and messier than that.

Even my job title at the time of making those speeches – the faintly ludicrous “Country (or City) Director” – was vague to the point of meaninglessness. I was, among other things, a cultural diplomat, a bureaucrat, an office leader, some kind of consultant and a (rather indifferent) project director.

Following retirement, I created my new occupation online. I changed my LinkedIn profile and took some training in editing and writing copy. I now write and edit for a living. 4

And before I started work for the British Council, I was, at different times, engaged in selling ice cream, looking after pigs, running a hostel, house painting, dishwashing, ghostwriting…

*

I’m still on the mailing list of the association of former British Council staff, and via that list I occasionally receive the news of the death of a former colleague.

I feel sad to see these notices appear in my inbox, with the deceased’s various roles in the organisation carefully recorded. This catalogue of a former colleague’s working experience takes me back to my experience after my mother died, and I start to wonder: When my time comes, who will decide what will be written on my death certificate?

And, whoever it turns out to be, what will they decide to write? 5

One of the most quoted openings of all 20th-century poems in English is the start of Auden’s poem Musée des Beaux-Arts (1938):

About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters

But the first time I read the poem, in my teens, I wondered, who exactly were these Old Masters?

I’m not sure I really know now, though a broad definition seems to be painters who worked with a certain level of skill in Europe between about 1300 and 1800. It’s a geographically specific white male club. It seems to include many painters, though I wonder how many of them thought of themselves as masters.

These days things have changed a little. When we talk about modern masters, this includes women too.

But what about the rest of the world?

Averting my gaze from this eurocentric lens, I note that China had its own (male) masters. These were a more exclusive band, however. One example is 明四家; pinyin: Míng Sì Jiā or Four Masters of the Ming dynasty. The dynasty lasted from 1368 to 1644, so the period was thinly populated with masters.

The term ‘master’ also exists in the Japanese art world, though there is a division between masters of Japanese art, Nihonga Gahaku (日本画画伯) and masters of Western art (洋画画伯, Yōga Gahaku).

This bifurcation only came about after the Meiji Restoration as Japan opened up to the Western world. Before that, there was no such thing as Nihonga: Japanese art was all that was practised, and it was divided into “schools”.

The painter Takeshirō Kanokogi (1874–1941) was born into the rapidly changing world of the Meiji Restoration. In this sense, he was like author Natsume Sōseki (1867 - 1916), whose novels reflected the Westernisation and industrialisation of Japan.

At a recent major exhibition of Kanokogi’s work in Tokyo, I was struck by the painter’s commitment to learning his craft systematically. And while the exhibition was subtitled “Return To Realism”, what really cried out to me as I walked through the museum’s rooms full of his works was Kanokogi’s single-minded pursuit of one goal: to become a modern master of Western Art in Japan, a Yōga Gahaku.

*

I didn’t buy the typically expensive catalogue, and there is little detailed information about him online in English. But from what I could glean from the notes at the exhibition, he came from a privileged enough background to travel. In 1900, he travelled to the US, crossing from West to East by railroad and holding a small exhibition in Boston.

He then went to France to immerse himself in French art and its traditions for several years. He made at least two later trips, each one apparently with a view to improving within a particular genre.

He picked up his own mentor: Jean-Paul Laurens (1838 – 1921), a ‘romanticist’ French painter and sculptor who worked within the French Academic style. Laurens has been described as the last great exponent of history painting.

In following Laurens, whose work looked to the past both in content and style, you might think Kanokogi was backing the wrong horse. But cannily, he seems to have hedged his bets, making copies of Courbet’s work and creating his own powerful work in homage to Millet’s moving and moody L’Angélus.

I’m unable to show Kanokogi’s own painting in this style because photography was forbidden for most of the exhibits. But his work’s convincing transposition of Millet’s work into a Japanese context clarified the meaning of the exhibition’s subtitle as he progressively edged away from the grand historical art of his mentor, Laurens, focusing instead on creating his own form of grittier realism.

Kanokogi also studied with Émile-René Ménard, whose influence is clear in several of his paintings.

For example, his painting Girl with a white rose features a female nude in almost exactly the same pose as in the French painter‘s Spring (1850) with the same wry expression on the faces of the two sitters.

The exhibition displayed a large number of his early works, including landscapes and portraits. Some of his portraits, especially, it seems to me, of Euopean subjects, are rather gauche. However, the later portraits seem to gather real power. The poster of the exhibition features one example (as mentioned above, I couldn’t take a photo of the painting myself).

I enjoy paintings that immediately pose questions. I relish the mental back and forth, and it creates a dialogue between me and the work. In the case of this portrait, I found myself asking, ‘What’s the book in her hand?’ ‘Who or what is she looking at?’ ‘Why does she look so concerned?’

The portrait is painted in a modern house with modern furniture (the painting seems to be undated, but perhaps the late 1920s or early 1930s?). Yet the sitter is in traditional Japanese dress, a kimono, featuring a lovely obi (belt). When stood before this canvas, I found it hard to look away from her slightly startled gaze.

*

In the museum’s main foyer, before the start of the main exhibition, two large works were on display. Perhaps the curators thought of them as guides to our viewing of the rest of the exhibition. One was by Laurens, an example of his grand historical style:

Another was a monumental, dramatic work by Kanokogi himself:

This huge canvas was painted in the wake of that huge natural catastrophe. It shows the influence of Laurens in its scale and concern with historical events. Yet despite its specificity in terms of detail and reference to a single event, it has a timeless feel to it too – this could be the wake of any natural disaster anywhere.

But more than that, as I stood in Tokyo in 2026 in the knowledge that another massive earthquake is fully expected to happen within decades, I felt I was also seeing a rather horrific vision of the future. That’s perhaps one reason I felt that the power of this painting surpassed anything in the work by Laurens.

*

Finally, the exhibition also gave me the chance to see another large canvas which is considered Kanokogi’s masterpiece: Beach in Normandy (1907). It’s a compelling work seen at full scale.

I confess I initially found the faces of the adults a little unconvincing – the standing figure, dressed as a woman, seems rather masculine, for example. I wasn’t sure whether this was deliberate.

But the charm of the scene is generated by the depiction of the little children, with the girl tenderly looking after her sister amid the pots and fishing boats. I enjoyed, too, the blending of red and orange and yellow; the rough texture of hull and basket; and the green hue of the sea lapping on the pebble shore.

The humble scene brings us closer to real life than Laurens’s, taking me back to Millet’s realism and subject matter. And the painting took me all the way to the beach in Normandy, and I could almost smell the sea and the fishing boats as I gazed at it.

The painting also seems to have taken Kanokogi where he wanted to go.

On 26th March this year, the Japanese government’s Agency for Cultural Affairs announced that Beach in Normandy would be designated as an “important cultural property” of Japan. This is a very bureaucratic designation, and as such it will mean, among other things, restrictions or controls on the overseas use of the work.

But the importance of this move doesn’t lie in export restrictions or subsidies for restoration.

Rather, the message this sends is that Takeshirō Kanokogi, a century and a half after his birth, has become, in his own country at least, what he always strove to be: a modern master.

Dear Supporters,

Before I get into the topic of this short essay, the Finnish painter Ferdinand von Wright, I’d give an update about the English Republic of Letters.

About this time last year, finding my publishing schedule no longer in harmony with my available time or energy, I resolved to switch from weekly to fortnightly essays. In the event, however, I seemed to gather momentum as the year progressed and continued more or less with weekly essays.

However, as one or two of you may have noticed, I haven’t maintained that rhythm of work recently. Obligations of various kinds that I won’t go into here have meant that I am unable to write as much or publish as frequently as before.

So I am letting you know that you can expect two regular free essays from me per month for the foreseeable future. The Supporter Sidebar, such as this one, which comes out roughly once a month for paying subscribers, will continue as before.

I don’t expect these changes to lead to an outcry – our inboxes are all full of newsletters, and few people complain that they don’t have enough to read. But I thought I should let you know, rather than silently defaulting on the previous publishing arrangement.

As always, thank you for supporting and reading the English Republic of Letters!

While finishing off my essay Wagtail tales, I began to search for images to accompany the piece. I had hoped to use one of my own photos, but I find them difficult birds to photograph. For one thing, they never stay still for very long! So I looked online for images. I didn’t expect to find too many images of wagtails, but I soon came across a rather stunning image of a white wagtail by a painter whose name was unfamiliar to me: Ferdinand von Wright.

I found myself intrigued by von Wright’s vivid art featuring the natural world. It was a long way from the ethereal colouring of the world of von Wright’s approximate contemporary Claude Monet, whose work I’d seen in Tokyo earlier this year. And while looking through his work, if I didn’t fall into a deep rabbit hole, I did at least trip happily over the nest, or form, of a hare.

Read more

*

In 2024 I wrote a “ brief and incomplete cultural history” of quail. I planned at the time to follow up with a similar piece. It’s taken a while, but here’s a new and incomplete cultural history. This time, it’s about the pine.

*

Walking around my part of Tokyo, I don’t have to go far before finding a pine tree. Older houses will often have one at the entrance, often with a branch running across the top of the entrance. These are known as monkaburi no matsu (門被りの松, literally ‘gate-covering pine’.

I’ve written before of the three friends of pine, plum and bamboo. The pine represents longevity in Japanese culture. It’s evergreen and endures.

*

Waiting for the gods

But there’s another connection to time. The Japanese word ‘matsu’ (松) for pine is an exact homophone for the etymologically unrelated ‘matsu’, meaning ‘to wait’ (待つ). This “sacred pun” connects to Shinto belief: that these trees are yorishiro, or places where the kami (gods and goddesses) descend to interact with the mortal realm. So the trees are places to wait for the gods.

*

There’s a curious parallel with English. The noun “pine” is phonologically identical to the verb “pine”. And our pining for people and places can also involve waiting. Again, as with “matsu” in Japanese, there’s no etymological connection with the word for the tree, but the link is suggestive.

*

And now as I look back, the solitary Scots pine that grew on the family farm in my childhood seemed to have been waiting – pining, even – for centuries.

But waiting for what?

*

I love the traditional depiction of pines in Chinese painting and saw many examples of the genre when I lived in Shanghai.

Apart from being symbols of endurance and longevity, it seems there could also be a political dimension to such paintings. For Yuan-dynasty scholars living under the Mongols (1271 to 1368), depictions of ancient pines apparently became a metaphor for survival in the face of political discrimination.

*

English poet Peter Levi in his Five Ages of a Poet (1978) was possibly inspired by Chinese painting when he invoked the image of

“... the young scholar under a pine tree

with the thin inward meaning of pine trees”

This delicate poem continues:

“Later the impure smells of the moon.

The heavy scratch of brushes on canvas

then the faint scratching of a charcoal twig

the infinitely silent fall of snow

then the light silence of the fallen snow,

the young scholar studies the pine tree.

Daybreak is perfect, a quiet brush

silently painting the sky with light.”

*

Not long before Wu Zhen completed the beautiful painting of a pine tree shown above, Lady Nijō wrote one of the classics of Japanese literature, Towazugatari (C.1307) - literally “An Unasked-For Tale”. 1

Here, pine trees appear in their guise as symbols of longevity:

*

Classification

Pines sit within the larger conifer family, which includes firs, spruces, larches, cedars, junipers and yews.

*

Britain has only one pine (the Scots pine, like the one on the farm I grew up on) and just two other conifers – the yew and the juniper. The Scots pine is a source of timber and creator of a natural habitat for many other species. I associate yews, which are found in churchyards, with death. And junipers with gin, of course. But if we look at TS Eliot’s poetry, we find that junipers may have other meanings.

And yews seemed to have other meanings for Eliot, too. He ended his poem Dry Salvages (the third part of Four Quartets, published in 1941) with

We, content at the last

If our temporal reversion nourish

(Not too far from the yew-tree)

The life of significant soil.

And towards the end of Little Gidding the last part of his quartet, he observes, rather gnomically, that

The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree

Are of equal duration.

*

The tiny number of native conifers and single species of pine are now outnumbered by the many imported pines and firs in Britain, mostly cultivated for their timber.

Thomas Hardy, an acute chronicler of the English countryside, captures the displacement of native species by cultivated cash crops in his poem, The Pine Planters (Marty South’s Reverie), which is linked to his novel, The Woodlanders (1887).

In the novel, Giles Winterborne notes that “there was a thousand young fir-trees to be planted in a neighbouring spot which had been cleared by the wood-cutters, and that he had arranged to plant them with his own hands.”

The planting of these firs (or rather pines, as indicated by the poem’s title) is the setting for Marty South’s Reverie.

The scene in the novel and poem seems quite unlike that in Lady Nijō’s Towazugatari quoted from above. For one thing, the physically demanding nature of the work is emphasised.

We work here together
In blast and breeze.

I think it’s unlikely that the ex-emperors in Nijō’s story would have experienced the ceremony as physical labour.

The two scenes are united in one way. They both stress the pine’s longevity. But while the scene in Towazugatari invokes the image of the pines living gloriously for a thousand years, Hardy’s poem inhabits a bleaker universe. Marty imagines the pines in their grief at having to grow and suffer the “storm and drought” of nature:

Thus, all unknowing

For whom or what

We set it growing

In this bleak spot,

It still will grieve here

Throughout its time,

Unable to leave here,

Or change its clime;

Or tell the story

Of us to-day

When, halt and hoary,

We pass away.

Marty folds the story of her and Giles (for whom she has an unrequited love). The grieving here is ostensibly done by the tree but surely also by Marty. The tree is “unable to leave here” – rather like Marty, as it turns out. Adult trees are, after all, sessile – and so, in effect, is Marty.

*

The Pine Tree Riot.

In April 1772, the inhabitants of New Hampshire rioted against the British monarchy to protest the enforcement of the Broad Arrow Policy. This was a policy of the English government from 1691 to preserve tall trees in the American colonies, which were of critical use for the Royal Navy. It applied to Massachusetts from 1691 and was extended to New Hampshire in 1698.

A law was passed in 1722 but apparently it wasn’t strictly enforced until John Wentworth became governor of New Hampshire in 1766. It seems a rather barmy and authoritarian thing to do – a typical piece of authoritarian colonial rule.

I have to say I enjoyed Wikipedia’s summary card of the incident, especially the entries under “caused by” and “methods”.

*

I’m going to end, as I did in my essay on quail, with Shakespeare. This gives me an excellent excuse to quote from Richard II, which contains some of the poet’s most beautiful dramatic verse.

In Act 3, having been warned that his rival Bolinboke is gathering forces against him, Richard launches into this wonderful passage of verse:

Discomfortable cousin! know’st thou not

That when the searching eye of heaven is hid,

Behind the globe, that lights the lower world,

Then thieves and robbers range abroad unseen

In murders and in outrage, boldly here;

But when from under this terrestrial ball

He fires the proud tops of the eastern pines

And darts his light through every guilty hole,

Then murders, treasons and detested sins,

The cloak of night being pluck’d from off their backs,

Stand bare and naked, trembling at themselves?

So when this thief, this traitor, Bolingbroke,

Who all this while hath revell’d in the night

Whilst we were wandering with the antipodes,

Shall see us rising in our throne, the east,

His treasons will sit blushing in his face,

Not able to endure the sight of day,

But self-affrighted tremble at his sin.

Richard arrogantly and fatuously compares himself to the sun, cleansing the world of the traitor Bolingbroke (spoiler: he’s the future Henry IV).

But I find the image of that sun as it “fires the proud tops of the eastern pines“ to be simply wonderful.

And the choice of the trees may not be incidental: pines grow tall and straight – like his own (imagined) majesty.

Then in Act 5, Richard, now in custody and facing imprisonment and death, laments,

I toward the north,

Where shivering cold and sickness pines the clime;

My wife to France: from whence, set forth in pomp,

She came adorned hither like sweet May,

Sent back like Hallowmas or short’st of day.

Here we return to the other meaning of ‘pine’ mentioned above.

The word clearly no longer stands for the upright and sunlit tree he mentioned in his earlier glorious speech, dismissing Bolingbroke. The use of ‘pine’ here describes the huge change in Richard’s fortune and marks the passage from glorious sun king to sad prisoner, longing for better days on his way to his death.

It strikes me as remarkable how, through the changing use of this one word, ‘pine’, Shakespeare economically but powerfully traces the arc of his protagonist’s fate.

Not every journey is a pilgrimage. Not every search is a quest.

But spring has arrived in full bloom here in the northern hemisphere, and that is the time when the characters in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales set off to visit a holy site in the east of England:

In modern English: 1

When that April with his showers sweet

The drought of March has pierced root deep,

And bathed each vein with liquor of such power

That engendered from it is the flower,

When Zephyrus too with his gentle strife,

To every field and wood, has brought new life



Then people long to go on pilgrimage,

And palmers who seek out foreign strands,

To far-off shrines, renowned in sundry lands.

And this spring I have found myself setting out in search of something. In my case, it was a flower – the humble Japanese primrose (Primula sieboldii).

Here it’s known as the サクラソウ or ‘sakurasō’. The name is usually written in katakana, as above, but its Chinese characters add something to its attraction. 桜草 literally means “cherry-blossom grass” or “cherry-blossom plant”.

Unlike Chaucer’s assorted group of travellers, I have never thought of myself as a pilgrim. Even as a tourist I usually travel without much direction. I guess you’d say I’m an aimless rambler.

But this was a flower I had to track down.

*

I recently wrote of the AI man arriving in a blaze of speed down the lane of the Devon farm where I grew up in the 1960s. The tarmacked track was banked by solid hedgerows, and at the lower end near the farmhouse was a grassy bank where effervescent yellow was refracted through the bright dew of morning. The source of this enchanting light was the primroses (Primula vulgaris).

I was reminded of this sight when I recently came across Tom Disch’s poem, “Memories of a Primrose”, which begins,

Always the mornings

were miracles of delight

The English word “primrose” seems to derive from “prima rosa”, literally the first rose of the year. They were true harbingers of spring, and even my childish self recognised their special beauty. And I know they also meant a lot to my mother.

I think it was this childhood memory of the primroses that spurred me to set off in search of ‘sakurasō’, so many years later and with a distance of many miles.

*

My haphazard research first told me of a sakurasō festival at a park near the Arakawa River. So one afternoon, I took two buses through an industrial landscape along the edge of Tokyo and eventually found myself in the park.

Skirting a lake that used to be part of the river, I soon arrived at the site of the festival. It looked rather like someone’s garden or backyard had been shifted into the park, and it was covered in flowerpots. The “festival” was little more than a collection of potted garden sakurasō, which were cultivated by local enthusiasts and one or two local schools.

The volunteers on duty were friendly and apparently proud of their work, though they seemed most interested in chatting to eachother. They were all dressed in rather fine, matching 法被 or “happi” jackets, which proudly displayed their affiliation to the festival.

The flowers themselves were a disappointment, however. There were some striking variations from the standard pink of Primula sieboldii, but generally the primroses did not seem to be flourishing. And while plum blossoms, like sakura, always seem to gain in effect when many are seen together, the effect here of the collected plant pots seemed to be one of diminution.

And anyway, I wasn’t really looking for a collection of potted plants. What I really wanted to see were wild primroses. The plants growing in their natural habitat were central to the story that had led me to this part of Tokyo, going back to the beginning of the Tokugawa Shogunate in Japan.

*

None other than Ieyasu Tokugawa (1543 – 1616), the first Tokugawa Shogun and one of the great unifiers of Japan, came across these plants growing in their natural habitat along the marshy flanks of the river.

He was out hunting with hawks along the Arakawa River when he saw the primroses. He was enchanted by them and ordered some plants to be taken back to Edo Castle for cultivation. 2

It’s an incongruous image: fierce Ieyasu, the warrior who united his country by force, chancing upon these flowers with delight in the wet, marshy lands along this powerful river.

But it appears that his enthusiasm for the charming and vibrant pink flower in a landscape of dark green was genuine. And it set in motion a fashion for cultivating the flower that lasted right through the Edo era and into the 21st century. 3

The flower has also caught the attention of Japanese poets. This haiku is attributed to one of the most celebrated poets of the Edo period, Kobayashi Issa (1763—1828):

*

These days with the river rerouted and tamed and with warmer weather drying up the land, the flower’s natural habitat is dwindling.

Meanwhile, the spring was progressing. Was I too late to see any wild sakurasō this year? Or indeed, were there any left to see?

More hurried research led me to online reports of a small pink flower along the banks of the Arakawa a little further downriver. So the following Sunday I took a couple of trains to take a look for myself. It was a day of bright sunshine and heat that almost felt like the start of summer. Arriving at the river, I saw that, as so often in this area, part of the old river flood plain was given over to baseball fields, and games were in full, raucous swing. Along the banks I saw a rich carpeting of small pink flowers. Had I found the sakurasō?

Hurrying to investigate, I soon realised my mistake. These lovely flowers were not sakurasō but shibazakura (芝桜 - Phlox subulata). The Japanese name means “lawn cherry blossoms”. It’s not native to Japan but rather to North America and was introduced here during the Edo period. It creates some spectacular displays, and I enjoyed seeing it in full flower, but it was not what I was looking for.

I had only one more lead to follow. Upriver, there was, according to Google Maps, something called “Tajimagahara Sakurasō Habitat”. Perhaps I might find a wild sakurasō there?

A twenty-minute walk took me to the next station, and then two trains later I was walking again, this time for about 40 minutes, hoping to get to the park where this habitat was located before the light faded. Wandering through a landscape of pylons, flood barriers and embankments I recognised from a previous hike in the area, I was glad of my sunhat and water flask in the warm afternoon sun.

Reaching the top of a low hill, I finally saw it – an expanse of green in the distance, fenced off and signposted as Sakurasō Habitat, one of the ten Natural Monuments which had been the first designated under a new law in 1920.

As I approached, I saw signs mentioning a festival, and I could hear music in the distance. I hurried forward in expectation. As I got closer, however, I saw that the tall dark grass showed no specks of colour as I had expected. Were all the flowers gone?

And the music, though welcome, came from a brass band rehearsing in another corner of the park and from individual musicians who’d come to practise out of earshot of their neighbours’ apartments. There was no sign of a festival in progress.

I stopped in front of the fenced enclosure and peered hopefully into the grassy green depths. Nothing. Not a sign of the sakurasō either.

Tired, thirsty, and disheartened, I sat in the shade of a tree and despondently ate the snack I’d picked up at a convenience store near the station. Meanwhile, the music continued: I could hear the wistful sound of trumpets and horns through the trees at one edge of the park. A breeze sprang up – one of Chaucer’s spring zephyrs? And children were excitedly learning to ride bicycles guided by anxious fathers on the nearby paths.

And soon, despite my disappointment at not finding the flower I came to see, I felt myself relaxing, overcome not by tiredness but by calm enjoyment of the afternoon in the park. Maybe I had missed the sakurasō, but here I had found a welcome harmony, a gentle and relaxed scene that soothed away the frustrations and exertions of the day.

*

As the sun began to get lower, I set off for home, walking back past the green expanses of grass. As I did so, I noticed a man, a little older than me, with the tell-tale lanyard of a volunteer, walking along one of the paths that crossed the protected fields of green. He stopped and knelt to put something in the ground before getting up and moving on. I followed him and saw that he’d placed a simple wooden marker next to a pink flower almost entirely hidden by the long grass.

It was a sakurasō. At last I’d found one! I looked around and saw two (or perhaps it was three) others. A meagre haul for a day’s journeying, perhaps, just a few tiny pink flowers shyly huddled in a wide thicket of grass.

But the joy I felt on seeing them took me back to my days on the farm and those first twinkling lights of spring. As my spirits rose, I wondered if this was the same spot where the great Shogun had first lost his heart to the flower. I could now understand how he might have felt.

Unlike Chaucer’s motley crew of pilgrims, I hadn’t come in search of a holy site. But the sight of those tiny flowers in the fading afternoon did make this, in the words of the “Pardoner’s Tale”, its own “perfect glorious pilgrimage” and the ideal prologue to the arriving beauty of spring.

3

The great military leader’s delight in the primrose reminded me of Jocelyn Brooke's hauntingly beautiful series of novels, The Orchid Trilogy (1948-50):

“The Military Orchid had taken on a kind of legendary quality, its image seemed fringed with the mysterious and exciting appurtenances of soldiering, its name was like a distant bugle-call, thrilling and rather sad, a cor au fond du bois.

The idea of a soldier, I think, had come to represent for me a whole complex of virtues which I knew that I lacked, yet wanted to possess: I was timid, a coward at games, terrified of the aggressively masculine, totemistic life of the boys at school, yet I secretly desired, above all things, to be like other people. These ideas had somehow become incarnated in Orchis militaris.”

This passage is from page 3 of The Orchid Trilogy in my Picador edition. You can read about the trilogy here. Brooke’s beautiful image of the “cor au fond du bois” seems to come from Alfred de Vigny’s poem, Le Cor (1826), which begins,

J’aime le son du Cor, le soir, au fond des bois.

“I love the sound of the horn in the evening, deep in the woods”.

.

Dear Readers and Supporters of the English Republic of Letters,

Welcome to all new subscribers!

I’m currently busy with other projects – which include enjoying the spring weather and flowers in this part of the world – so I have no new writing to offer you right now. I hope there will be new posts coming along soon, however.

Meanwhile, here’s a post from the archive, originally published a year ago.

Thank you all for reading.

Jeffrey

I’d probably never have read Christopher Marlowe’s poem Hero and Leander if I hadn’t followed an old-fashioned English syllabus at university. Marlowe is mostly known these days as a writer of plays, a rival of Shakespeare’s, and, perhaps most of all, for being murdered. 1

I loved the poem, and I still have the book of his poetry and translations I bought all those years ago at university. If the story of Romeo and Juliet brought out some of the best of Shakespeare, the story of Hero and Leander, which has some similarities as a tragic love tale, inspired Marlowe to write some of his most beautiful verse.

Marlowe may or may not have been the poet referred to in Shakespeare’s sonnet 86 when he wrote “the proud full sail of his great verse", but he’d deserve those words of praise for this work alone.

Here he is writing with a deft touch about the first physical contact between the two lovers:

He started up, she blushed as one ashamed,

Wherewith Leander much more was inflamed.

He touched her hand; in touching it she trembled.

Love deeply grounded, hardly is dissembled.

These lovers parleyed by the touch of hands;

True love is mute, and oft amazed stands.

Marlowe’s readers would have been familiar with the original Greek myth and thus known that the two lovers cannot escape their fate. As Marlowe sums it up:

It lies not in our power to love or hate,

For will in us is overruled by fate.

Love is seen as a force that knows no degrees but comes at once with all its energy or not at all, as in the famous lines:

Where both deliberate, the love is slight:

Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?

However, the poem’s sumptuous and erotic language cannot disguise an undercurrent of violence. Marlowe uses, for example, an extended military metaphor as Leander tries to seduce Hero:

Yet ever, as he greedily assayed

To touch those dainties, she the harpy played,

And every limb did, as a soldier stout,

Defend the fort, and keep the foeman out.

And even Marlowe’s description of night falling is as powerfully violent as it is forcefully beautiful:

But he the bright day-bearing car prepared

And ran before, as harbinger of light,

And with his flaring beams mocked ugly night,

Till she, o’ercome with anguish, shame, and rage,

Danged down to hell her loathsome carriage.

*

In Romeo and Juliet, the lovers are separated by family allegiances. In Hero and Leander, the lovers are separated by water in the form of the Hellespont (now known as the Dardanelles). This stretch of water had long loomed large in the Greek imagination. The dividing point between Asia and Europe, it was previously the site of the famous crossing by the troops of Xerxes the Great in 480 BCE, an amazing feat of engineering and a pivotal point in the Persian Wars.

One mile wide at its shortest point, it’s a notoriously treacherous waterway, but Leander manages to swim across it often to spend the night with Hero.

At the time I came to read the poem, I was also discovering love for the first time. For the first year, the woman I loved was just a trip by bus and underground away. Later, a four-hour flight out to a small island in the Atlantic separated us.

Unlike Leander, I didn’t need to produce any heroics to bridge the gap but just save up for an airfare. I didn’t need to swim the “rising billows” of the “narrow toiling Hellepont” but simply get myself to Stansted Airport to catch a cheap flight to Tenerife.

The heroically determined Leander had to suffer being pulled down by the dangerous waters to meet his love:

Leander strived; the waves about him wound,

And pulled him to the bottom, where the ground

Was strewed with pearl, and in low coral groves

Sweet singing mermaids sported with their loves.

All I needed to do was sit in my seat and be jostled by turbulence over the ocean for a few hours in the charge of the unsinging cabin crew.

But at least I was travelling, to use Marlowe’s words:

Much like a globe ...

By which love sails to regions full of bliss.

And many times since, at the end of long journeys around the globe that he could barely have imagined, I have experienced the feeling that Marlowe captured so well when describing Leander’s return home after seeing Hero:

Home when he came, he seemed not to be there,

But, like exiled air thrust from his sphere,

Set in a foreign place.

*

Caught up in my own story as well as the sheer romance and beauty of Marlowe’s poem, I never imagined that one day I’d see the Hellespont (Dardanelles) for myself.

But in 2007 I found myself working in Turkey. And my duties took me to the town of Çanakkale on the Asian shore of the Dardanelles, to visit British artist Mark Wallinger’s ‘Sinema Amnesia’, part of an EU-funded arts project that my employer, the British Council, was managing.2

And viewing the swirling waters near this artwork, I realised that we weren’t far from where the ferocious 1915 battle for Gallipoli (Gelibolu Muharebesi in Turkish) had taken place. This bitter campaign between Ottoman and Allied forces led to the death of over 100,000 soldiers.

One of those killed was Jean Verdenal, a friend of the poet TS Eliot, who later dedicated his Poems 1909-1925 to his friend:

To Jean Verdenal

1889-1915

mort aux Dardanelles

Eliot also used an epigraph from Dante’s Divine Comedy, words spoken by the Roman poet Statius and addressed to his revered predecessor, Virgil:

Or puoi la quantitate

Comprender dell' amor ch'a te mi scalda,

Quando dismento nostra vanitate,

Trattando l'ombre come cosa salda.

(You may see the measure of the love which

warms me towards you

When I forget our insubstantiality

Treating shades as if they were solid and real)

(Translation by John Peter)

Some have also suggested that Verdenal’s death influenced Eliot’s most famous poem, The Waste Land (1922), and that he was the inspiration for Phlebas the Phoenician (“a fortnight dead”) in the Death By Water section.

But as I stood by those waters, I also recalled that Leander’s feat of swimming the Hellespont had caught the imagination of another poet, Lord Byron. On 3 May, 1810, he swam it himself in emulation of Leander’s epic journey and was very proud of the fact: “I plume myself on this achievement more than I could possibly do on any kind of glory, political, poetical, or rhetorical.”

Byron’s short poem about the feat is playful rather than full of vainglory, however:

For me, degenerate modern wretch,

Though in the genial month of May,

My dripping limbs I faintly stretch,

And think I’ve done a feat today. 3

*

Two years later, another adventurer came along, following in Byron’s footsteps (and his wake) around the Aegean: the actor Rupert Everett, who was making a documentary called The Scandalous Adventures of Lord Byron.

Keen to emulate Byron (and Leander), Everett bravely attempted to swim the Hellespont but had to give up; it’s now a busy shipping lane, with large cargo ships constantly ploughing through the straits, a real hazard to swimmers.

But the actor attempted less arduous feats, too. He attended a reception hosted by the consul general for a group of visiting ministers and officials. They were attending a conference regarding Turkey’s relationship with the EU. This was held in Pera House, which was constructed as the first purpose-built British embassy starting in 1844— a successor to the building that Byron had visited during his own visit to what was then called Constantinople. It’s a grand building, overlooking the waters of the Golden Horn, described to me, though, by one previous inhabitant as “sub-optimal for modern diplomacy”.

However, Pera House was a superb venue for this reception, and you can watch Everett attending it on this YouTube video. 4

*

Killed on 30 May 1593, Marlowe left Hero and Leander incomplete. The poem was finished by George Chapman, now most famous as a translator of the Iliad and the Odyssey (Odysseus, or Ulysses, also sailed through the Hellespont).

Like Marlowe, the fictional Leander met an early death. In his case, he drowned, “bruised and torn” – to use Chapman’s words – when the light from the lighthouse that used to guide him blew out on a stormy night.

O sweet Leander, thy large worth I hide

in a short grave

exclaims Chapman, before dispatching Hero with an even shorter grave of words:

And with Leander’s name she breathed her last.

Byron survived his swim across the Hellespont (despite catching “ague”), but, years later, he would succumb to fever while supporting the fight for Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1824.

*

The last time I left my current “foreign place” and travelled across the globe to London, I took a fast train down to the city of Canterbury. Leaving the station, I crossed the river (fortunately, there’s a bridge) and made my way to the city centre. There I visited the cathedral, the centre of the worldwide Anglican communion. I also found it to be, to a remarkable degree, a museum celebrating England’s history (Henry IV is buried there) and above all commemorating its wars. A striking number of individual and collective war memorials are on display there.

In this most official of English buildings, the repository of so much pageantry and pomp, it came almost as a surprise to recall that Marlowe, called by some a heretic or “magician”, was born in Canterbury. In the city, though, there’s a theatre and a moment in his honour. The other visible sign of him was the hollowed-out tower of the church where he was christened in 1564.

Apparently, Marlowe attended the King’s School, which is very near the cathedral, a building he would have known well.

According to one account, “Elizabethan schoolboys spent much of their time being told what they had to believe without ever being given intellectual reasons for doing so.”

At the same time, they were let loose on the pagan classics, which included Ovid, Catullus and, of course, Virgil. Perhaps it’s little wonder that Marlowe (who would be accused of atheism shortly before his death) seemed to relish the pagan theology around Hero along with her beauty:

So lovely fair was Hero, Venus’ nun,

As Nature wept, thinking she was undone.

As I stood amid the almost oppressive orthodoxy and gloom of the cathedral, it was difficult to envisage Marlowe’s deviation from dour Elizabethan religious norms. It was much easier, astonishingly, in the seat of the Archbishop of Canterbury, to imagine Marlowe’s brutal death, which the violence in his unfinished poem seems to prefigure.

Because the cathedral is, of course, famous as the site of the murder of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1170. He was killed by four knights keen to act on the intemperate words of their monarch, Henry II.

The king had apparently said, with reference to Becket, “What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and brought up in my household, who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born cleric?” The knights (along with a cleric) took this as a regal command.

TS Eliot, long after his friend Verdenal’s untimely death, wrote a play about Becket’s martyrdom. In Murder in the Cathedral (1935), written in the long run-up to the Second World War, the doomed Archbishop Becket muses at one point,

...from generation to generation

The same things happen again and again.

Men learn little from others' experience.

As I stood in the massive cathedral’s transept, these words seemed to express the crisscrossing patterns of history and legend ricocheting in my mind while I thought of Marlowe’s last poem and the turbulent waters of the Hellespont.

At that moment, surrounded by the stone tombs of kings and bishops and countless memorials to those fallen in war, I began to wonder if the dead weren’t beginning to whisper their own versions of history to me.

I even imagined I could hear Marlowe parsing the Latin of Virgil or Ovid while huddled over his desk at school in Canterbury, just a few hundred yards from where I stood. The vast building seemed to reverberate with the voices of the past.

But I shook my head at these unheard sounds and at my folly. Because I felt the danger of drifting too far into the shadows of antiquity, of becoming a captive to the unrelenting ghosts of history.

That’s what happened, after all, to the poet Statius in Dante’s Divine Comedy: about to leave purgatory, he declared he’d be willing to stay there a year longer, in defiance of the rules of the place, if only he could have lived in the time of his revered Virgil.

And I began to fear that if I stayed too long listening to those murmurs in the towering stone building, I could grow too warmly attached to them and that, like Statius, I might find myself “treating shades as if they were solid and real”.

MIRANDA:

O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O, brave new world
That has such people in ’t!

PROSPERO:

’Tis new to thee.

William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act V, Scene I.

You’d hear him before you saw him. The car in low gear, engine thrashing, the tyres whooshing over the cowpat-spattered farm lane.

Then the car would pull into sight and skid slightly as it passed the entrance to the house and headed to the lower part of the yard and the grey bars of the yard next to the milking parlour before sliding to a halt. This wasn’t an emergency; the hurry must have come from some innate sense of urgency in the work or perhaps just sheer joy of tackling the country lanes and farm tracks as a rally driver would. Out of the dark green Ford Escort (they all seemed to drive the same colour and make of car), heavily splattered with mud and dung, would jump Bill, or John, or Dave.

The AI man had arrived.

This was rural Devon in the 1960s. The word ‘computer’ was hardly, if ever, uttered. And though algorithms stretch back centuries in human history to perhaps the Babylonians, and the term derives from the 9th-century Persian scientist and polymath Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī, known as the “father of algebra”, the word was a stranger to those parts of rural England in the mid-20th century.

For us, AI meant one thing: artificial insemination of cattle.

The routine was always the same. Bill, John, or Dave would open the back of his car and take out what looked a bit like a coolbox for the beach. When he opened it, steam seemed to appear – actually CO₂, dry ice – but I didn’t know that then. He’d load up an impossibly long syringe and place an arm-length plastic glove on his right arm and head for the milking parlour, where one of the cows had been secured by my father. He’d then plunge his arm up to the shoulder inside the flinching cow, and very soon it was all over.

The artificial insemination man, or AI man, as he was known, had done his job. A brief signing of forms would follow, a quick chat with my father, and he’d be on his way again, engine roaring as he departed from the slippery yard at the Ford Escort equivalent of escape velocity. The honorary sire of entire herds of cows, he probably never gave a second glance at his progeny, who were glancing incuriously at his accelerating vehicle from the nearby fields.

Growing up on the dairy farm, I never saw a bull. Having heard my father’s stories about them – more than once as a young farm worker he’d had to take action to save himself from the ire of a Jersey bull – I was glad about this. 1

My father was very keen on selecting the right bloodlines for this milking herd. He was no scientist but a firm believer in the usefulness of science nonetheless. And no doubt he owed a debt to pioneers in selective breeding, such as George Coates, whose 1822 herd book for the Shorthorn breed was arguably the first pedigree herd book for cattle in the world.

My father was an heir, in a sense, to the Agricultural Revolution. His was a world that looked backwards to hundreds of years of labour and wisdom in the fields of England. But it also looked to the present and the presumed future of insatiable demand for more food for an ever-growing population. 2 Science was a part of that future.

Working on a small farm on mortgaged land and, for years, owning a healthy (read: terrifying) debt with the bank, my father needed to “maximise productivity” and get the best milking cows he could. It was a question of economic survival – and it was in sync with the then-current demands of the country, which demanded milk and, via the Milk Marketing Board, would guarantee to buy whatever you produced at a minimum price (that would all change within a couple of decades). My father was lucky – he lived in a time when he could make a living from the way of life he’d always wanted.

*

My father’s data repository, apart from his head, was not a spinning hard disc or even punched cards. They were the slurry-spattered paper records kept in the milking parlour with a bulldog clip and some string hanging from a hook screwed into the cement wall. These were the key genealogical documents he needed to preserve. Sometimes the records would appear indoors, awkwardly straddling the two distinct worlds of home hearth and farmyard, the latter normally kept at bay by a dim porch and a rarely locked wooden door. Here he might check records and measure results. Like the AI man, he knew his job.

Looking back, the visits of the AI man were an odd introduction to reproduction. Country kids are supposed to be acquainted with the “facts of life”, but the facts I learnt through the AI man’s ritual visits weren’t exactly the stuff of country lore or even natural biology. I confess that years later, when I read Aldous Huxley’s chilling novel, Brave New World, its depiction of the careful breeding of humans felt weirdly familiar.

These days, another kind of AI is plunging us into a new world with very few brakes being applied. A regular user of AI (the digital kind) for my day job, I’m sceptical of claims of its proximity to real intelligence. A tool that sometimes (in my experience, at least) doesn’t know what day it is doesn’t seem poised to take over the world.

But I am also a little unnerved by the way the field has swung from one of curiosity and caution to its current incarnation as a tempest sweeping up all available computer chips and memory, monopolising energy supplies and bringing abrupt and uncontrolled change and challenges to schools, universities and offices. 3

*

My father’s coveted brave new world, however, went no further than to have a thriving dairy farm, which had been his somewhat quixotic boyhood dream growing up in the naval city of Portsmouth. And although he used methods and techniques based on science, most of the success he enjoyed came from arduous manual labour, coupled with a deep understanding of animal husbandry gained from practical experience.

As Bill, John, or Dave drove off at 60 mph up the small farm lane for their next appointment, my father would already be turning his attention to shoring up the plastic covers on the silage pit or mending a broken fence. He’d plan ahead as far as he could, but the future event he’d mostly look to would be the birth of the calf in nine months’ time.

With luck, it would be a heifer, an excellent milker like her mother. She’d become a welcome addition to the herd that would help keep milk production high and the overdraft tolerably low. After a few summers grazing the green Devon pastures and a visit from the AI man, she’d give birth to her own calf from a carefully selected and invisible sire.

And the cycle would begin again.

Dear Supporters of the English Republic of Letters,

As I was drafting the essay which I eventually called Almost all songs are possible, I found that the connections between my experiences and essays I was reading began to proliferate quickly.

At first, I tried to make that essay the vessel for all the connected ideas. But eventually I realised I had on my hands what Amanda Bray has called a “ballooning” essay. So I decided to fill another balloon, cut the guy ropes, and tether it somewhere else.

The published essay was short, and the exhibition called For the sake of a single verse was at the heart of my reflections. But I didn’t want to completely lose sight of the other content, so I have untied the errant balloon, let about half of its hot air out, and pulled it gently into the confines of this Supporter Sidebar.

Read more

Dear Subscribers,

Here’s a post that I had a lot of fun researching last year. I hope you will enjoy reading it again or – for the many new subscribers since then – for the first time.

Thank you for visiting the English Republic of Letters!

Jeffrey

Arriving at the former house of Japanese writer Fumiko Hayashi (1903-1951) this winter, the first thing I noticed was the tall bamboo culms (stems) that dominate the entrance. Hayashi had enthusiastically planted a lot of bamboo, a plant she loved. It had apparently once covered much of the garden. Thanks to her, in the typically brilliant winter sunshine of Tokyo, I was able to enjoy the komorebi (木漏れ日, the Japanese word for the dappled sunlight filtering through the leaves of trees), which for me has a special quality seen through a bamboo grove.

Hayashi was proud of her garden, proud of the house she’d designed, inspired by residences she’d seen in Kyoto. It’s now a museum in her honour. The garden was a main feature, but unlike the poet Shiki, whose house I’d visited earlier in the year, she didn’t gaze at it much from her study – apparently her sight wasn’t very good, and she even had to press herself up against the paper to see what she was writing.

However, the room seemed cosier than that of Soseki and well equipped with a huge teapot. And while Shiki had his sister to look after him, Hayashi wouldn’t let anyone in her study, which she insisted on cleaning herself. I doubt if Shiki ever did a lot of housework.

The quiet calm of the house made me think of the one that features in her late story, Late Chrysanthemum (1948), in which a geisha’s former lover, Tabe, coarsened by war and the realities of post-war life in Tokyo, visits the geisha, Kin, to ask her for a loan:

Tabe was mystified by the way Kin lived, by the way the cruel world outside had, it appeared, left life in this house completely untouched.

*

Like Soseki, Hayashi had a difficult childhood. Hayashi faced rejection from her father, who refused to recognise her legitimacy, and then took a geisha mistress, causing Hayashi and her mother to leave home. Her mother then remarried, this time to a much younger man, and together they eked out a living as peddlers in the coal-mining region of northern Kyushu.

After finishing school, Hayashi relocated to Tokyo, where she supported herself working as a maid, a factory worker, and a café waitress while writing and seeking a literary career. Hayashi’s poverty in early life also sets her aside from Soseki, and her work, though well-known in Japan, is not, as far as I know, part of the school curriculum in the way his is.

Hayashi’s most famous work is Diary of a Vagabond (Hōrōki), a semi-autobiographical novel which was published in 1930. This work and some of her other stories, such as The Accordion and the Fish Town (1931), invite comparison with the George Orwell of Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) and The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). But unlike the Eton-educated Orwell, Hayashi had no privilege behind her. And nor did she turn to politics as a main theme, though it’s certainly present in her writing.

There is instead a definite lyricism in her work, and I find the light and shade combine beautifully in her writing, rather like a literary form of komorebi. For instance, in Diary of a Vagabond, the narrator is initially scathing about the conditions of the factory she’s working in.

Morning to night we daubed on primary colours, wriggling like earthworms in a warped factory hidden away from the sun. Slowly but surely, without respite, they squeezed from us long hours, youth, and health. Pity overwhelmed me whenever I looked at the faces of all the young women.

She then continues, however,

But wait. Just think of how the kewpie dolls and butterfly barrettes we made festively decorated the heads of poor children. It was probably all right to smile a little bit beneath that window. 1

The compassion of the writing shines through here, as well as a determination to see the brighter side of life, despite the darkness that surrounded her. Perhaps this was a survival strategy that drove her on through the hard times she had to endure.

I wrote in relation to Shiki and his friend Soseki about their troubled relationship with modernity. The critic Joan Ericson has written of Hayashi in terms of the impact of modernity too, but for her it’s not just a spiritual issue but a physical, even visceral one:

In my view the originality and power of her work are rooted in...the clarity and immediacy with which she was able to convey the humanity of those occupying the underside of Japanese society. She captured the resilience of people who existed on the margin and the ever-resurgent tenacity of those for whom modernity was an unrelenting catastrophe. 2

A moving example of this solidarity is from Diary of a Vagabond when the narrator describes the solidarity she finds in the women who, like her, are working on the fringes of society:

Despite its location at the exit of the red-light district, this shop was surprisingly quiet. I was able to become friends with the other waitresses right away. No matter how ill-natured or hard-boiled they might be at first, no matter how guarded and without the least inclination to be friendly or altruistic, at some point women working in a place like this open up to reveal their true selves. They suddenly lower this guard, and, as if they'd been fast friends for years, they're closer than sisters. When the customers had gone, we would often curl up like snails in a circle and talk. 3

An element of Hayashi and her narrators’ resilience is their love of poetry; not only poems but the magic and the wonder of the everyday. Diary of a Vagabond is full of quotes of poems from her or other writers, and amid the grimness of daily life, she’s determined to see the beauty in it too.

Hayashi will switch from realism to a kind of poetic lyricism in her descriptions of the world she observes.

In my two-mat room the earthen pot, the rice bowls, the cardboard rice bin, and the wicker clothes basket, together with the small desk all stood firm, as if my lifetime debt. The morning sun sparkled through the transom and streamed above my futon laid out diagonally, dividing the room. The dust danced in stripes over my head. Where exactly blew the wind of revolution? You Japanese radicals certainly knew many clever words. I wondered exactly what kind of fairy tales the socialists were inventing. Exactly how much longer did we have to separate newborn babies by class, babies puffier than brown rice buns, by choosing for them a silk or a cotton diaper? 4

The narrator’s emphasis on self-reliance and independence – from employers, from politics, from family and especially from men – extended even to religion. In one striking outburst in Diary of a Vagabond she says,

I could hear a faraway Salvation Army brass band playing, "Come to me, all ye who believe, to your Savior." What was this "ye who believe" stuff? If you couldn't believe in yourself, you couldn't believe in Jesus or Buddha. Poor people didn't have time to believe. What was this religion that they even advertised with a brass band? They didn't have to worry about making ends meet. So it was "Come to me, all ye who believe," huh? I'd had enough of such dour music. I wanted a spring song. I'd rather be retching my guts out, crushed by a nobleman's car on the beautiful streets of the Ginza, than listening to this. 5

*

Hayashi’s Diary of a Vagabond sold very well and was made into a film in 1935. The book’s success made her money and eventually allowed her to buy the plot of land in Tokyo where she’d build the lovely house she spent her last few years in. And the films made from her work and the success of a long-running play about her early life have helped to keep her name well known in Japan.

But she is relatively little known outside Japan. Her works are not readily available in English. We’re indebted to Joan Ericson for including Diary of a Vagabond in her excellent critical study Be a Woman. But it would be wonderful to see a collected works appear in English.

After the war, with mournful elegance, Hayashi captured the state of the burnt-down Japanese capital in her story Downfall (1947):

The most beautiful lights that civilisation had left behind flickered here and there in the devastated city. From somewhere came the sound of a steam train. The toot of the train’s whistle rang out mournfully over a scorched field and out towards the night sky. It was silent all around, except for the occasional passing car or train, as if declaring that Tokyo’s nights would remain desolate for all eternity. 6

*

Wandering around the grounds of her garden this winter, I imagined a writer who, despite the destruction she’d lived through, looked back with justifiable pride at how her work had brought her financial security and a reputation as one of Japan’s leading writers.

But having survived such hardships and the war, Hayashi did not live into old age to enjoy her hard-won tranquillity, dying of heart disease in 1951. Her friend, the Nobel laureate for literature Yasunari Kawabata, spoke at her funeral.

I don't have a record of what Kawabata said about her on that occasion. But from her own writings, the words that I think best sum up her remarkable life are the beautiful, buoyant words from The Accordion and the Fish Town as she considers the light and shades of life:

The moon wanes and the wild goose flies high, but no matter how miserable things get, as long as my body is in one piece there must be a way to get through it all. 7

“Sir, more than kisses, letters mingle souls.” This was how John Donne began one of his verse letters to his university friend Sir Henry Wotton, who later became English Ambassador to the Republic of Venice.

Wotton was himself a prolific letter writer and a polyglot. On his way to take up his post in Venice, he inscribed the words “Legatus est vir bonus peregre missus ad mentiendum Reipublicae causa” in an album amicorum, which was somewhere between a modern guestbook and a LinkedIn profile. The sentence can be translated as “the ambassador is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the sake of his country.” 1

Back in the 20th century, while in public service overseas (and, of course, never sent to lie to anyone), the letters home I would write to my parents probably didn’t allow me to “mingle souls” with them, but they were important to me. I hope they were for my parents, too.

Donne’s letter to Wotton would have taken some time to reach him at the turn of the 17th century. This delay was still a feature of letters at the time I was writing them, three hundred years later. It would sometimes be two weeks before my parents would receive a letter from Quito or Kyoto, and even if they replied immediately, I might not receive the reply for another two weeks. So if I’d asked a question, like “how’s X?”, I might have had to wait a month for the answer.

These days, of course, we are accustomed to the near-instant receipt of messages irrespective of distance. And we fret when things don’t arrive or are not read immediately. Perhaps we were more patient back then.

It’s likely that time delays will affect radio communications between astronauts elsewhere in the solar system in the future. But this would probably be nothing like that experienced by earlier human explorers and colonisers.

In the early 19th century, letters between Britain and its Australian colony could take six months or more to arrive. This kind of extreme delay in a correspondence was highlighted in typically brilliant and hyperbolic fashion by Charles Lamb. Writing to a friend in Australia, he said, “The weary world of waters between us oppresses the imagination.” 2

He goes on to ask, in frustration, at the time lapse between writing and receipt,

What security can I have that what I now send you for truth shall not before you get it unaccountably turn into a lie?

He continues:

It is difficult to conceive how a scrawl of mine should ever stretch across it. It is a sort of presumption to expect that one’s thoughts should live so far. It is like writing for posterity.

Even the language itself might change or fall into disuse, he says, during such a long passage:

My heart is as dry as that spring sometimes proves in a thirsty August, when I revert to the space that is between us; a length of passage enough to render obsolete the phrases of our English letters before they can reach you.

*

In reality, even if the language doesn’t change between dispatch and receipt of the letter, the correspondent’s own condition or feelings are likely to. I was reminded of this aspect of letter writing when I recently read Elizabeth Taylor’s novel, A View of the Harbour 3

Here the delay in transmission from a schoolboy at boarding school to his mother, Tory, leads to a result which is pathetically comedic as the mother reads out the letter from Edward to her friend, Beth:

‘Dear Mummy,’ Tory read, ‘I hope you are well I am. Please send envelopes. It is not very nice here. And stamps. I have a bad throat. Other boys have pots of honey. I am having a lovely time. Regards. Yours truly Edward.’

Tory’s friend, Beth, then comments:

‘Oh, dear,’ said Beth. ‘They just don’t think what they’re saying. They write what they can spell. I remember when Prudence went away once. She wrote: “I am in agony. I cannot say what.” When I telephoned, I discovered that she couldn’t spell diarrhoea — indeed, who can? — and was better anyway long before the letter arrived. I shouldn’t worry.’

The letters from Edward to Tory remind me of letters written by my father during the Second World War when he was briefly evacuated from the English naval port of Portsmouth. One of these began this way:

Dear mum,

Please send me some money and apples and other things to eat. I am not very happy here.4

*

Both the fictional Edward in A View of the Harbour and my father were disarmingly honest and straightforward in their communication. This sincerity can fade under the pressures of later life. Sometimes that might be for good reasons. For example, like many young adults writing to my parents, from university onwards, I aimed to carefully manage the story I gave of my life, editing out incidents that might cause concern, such as getting lost in bandit country on Christmas Eve. I didn’t want them to worry.

However, sometimes the reasons for editing or embellishing the story might be more self-serving. A classic example of this is Hernán Cortés’s letters to Charles V of Spain. As a soldier who had gone rogue and disobeyed orders but then found himself successful in his campaign to conquer parts of Mexico for Spain, Cortés strove to put himself at the centre of a narrative that served exclusively the greater glory of Spain and its king. The letters were crucial in his attempt to create a favourable narrative about his actions and save himself both from the king’s wrath and the machinations of his enemies.

However, one feature of Cortés’s letters that was perhaps less self-serving was his astonishment at what he saw in this (to Europeans) new and strange land.

Decades ago when I lived in Spain, I was struck by something I read in a magazine interview with Gabriel García Márquez. As usual, he was asked about the term ‘magic realism’. Part of his slightly weary response was to cite – almost as an early example of the genre – those five letters sent by Hernán Cortés back to Spain.

Unlike the creeping obsolescence of language that Lamb imaginatively thought he was battling against, Cortés’ challenge, as García Márquez saw it, was to discover or create new words to describe the new sights – the magical new reality – that he was seeing.

In his second letter, he wrote,

I am fully aware that the account will appear so wonderful as to be deemed scarcely worthy of credit; since even when we who have seen these things with our own eyes, are yet so amazed as to be unable to comprehend their reality. 5

A more poetic and political description of a similar episode was by Jamaica Kincaid 6 In her essay In History, Kincaid writes of Christopher Columbus, “He couldn’t find enough words to describe what he saw before him: the people were new, the flora and fauna were new, the way the water met the sky was new, this world itself was new, it was the New World.”

For Kincaid, though, this naming in this case was a form of erasure, ignoring what came before.

Less politically, but also eloquently, Hazlitt wrote, “There are more things in nature than there are words in the English language, and he must not expect to lay rash hands on them all at once.” 7

My own letters were probably not very “exotic” in their content. Though I may have written about cuy in Ecuador. Or even about coyote in Mexico. Both are words that entered Spanish from local languages, as the animals were not found in Europe. 8

*

I often found myself putting off writing a letter home, and not only because I was stumped for words to use but also because almost all writing, as we know, can be hard work. Japanese writer Natsume Sōseki, himself also a distant correspondent for part of his life, wrote about the difficulty of letter writing in his early novel Botchan (1906), where the eponymous hero baulks at writing home to his former maid and nanny Kiyo, who is like a mother to him.

Her request had been that I should write her a letter with more detailed news; so I must get it done with care. But as I took up the rolled letter-paper, I did not know with what I should begin, though I have many things to write about. Should I begin with that? That is too much trouble. Or with this? It is not interesting. Isn’t there something which will come out smoothly, I reflected, without taxing my head too much, and which will interest Kiyo. I grated the ink-cake, wetted the writing brush, stared at the letter-paper—stared at the letter-paper, wetted the writing brush, grated the ink-cake—and, having repeated the same thing several times, I gave up the letter writing as not in my line, and covered the lid of the stationery box.

Botchan sums it all up this way:

To write a letter was a bother. It would be much simpler to go back to Tokyo and see Kiyo.

I know what he means.

Sōseki’s hero gives up the idea of writing but is still wracked by guilt until he hits upon a useful bit of magical thinking:

Then I thought this way; If I am thinking of her from my heart, even at such a distance, my sincerity would find responsive appreciation in Kiyo. If it does find response, there is no need of sending letters. She will regard the absence of letters from me as a sign of my being in good health.

A distant correspondent like Botchan, I did at least commit pen to paper sometimes, though I was not as regular a writer as I should have been. There were perhaps times when I gave in to the weakness displayed both by Lamb and by Botchan and didn’t write for a few weeks at a time.

Botchan’s philosophy could be summarised as “it’s the thought that counts”. That’s often questionable wisdom. But I recall that my mother used to tell me that sometimes she would think through doing something (perhaps writing a letter to her son) and then somehow come to believe – really believe for a time – that the task was already completed. 9

There were, no doubt, months when no letter with a foreign stamp thumped onto the hallway carpet next to the front door of my parents’ house for a few weeks because the effort of writing across the “weary world of waters” had been too much for me.

But now I wonder whether, on such occasions, my mother – aware of her tendency to live her life in her own head – might have given me credit for following her practice – for having written marvellous letters in my mind just for her.

And if she did, perhaps the unhindered magic and the unchecked realism of those unwritten letters would echo in her heart just as much as – maybe even more than – any self-conscious or stilted missive I might actually have sent her.

Donne’s poem, from which I quoted at the start, continued in this way: “For thus, friends absent speak.”

Perhaps letters “mingling our souls” are not the only vessels to allow absent friends to speak. Maybe our thoughts, our hopes, and our solitary contemplations of love can also help us speak to those we love across the weary waters of the world.

As I stumbled from the Monet exhibition I wrote about recently, I found myself by chance in the middle of another.

I wasn’t really in the mood at that moment for more paintings. But somehow, the sense of the materiality and detail of life in For the Sake of a Single Verse 1 refreshed me after the ethereal paintings of Monet’s Water Lilies.

The painter was Ben Shahn, and he published this work in 1968, the year before his death at age 70. According to the exhibition notes, Shahn recalled encountering this novel during his stay in Paris after he moved there from America at the age of twenty-eight. He seems to have found an affinity with the following words from Rilke’s novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.

I think I ought to begin working on something now that I’m learning to see. I’m twenty-eight and virtually nothing has happened. Let’s go back: I’ve written a study on Carpaccio, which is poor; a play entitled ‘Marriage’, which seeks to prove something false by means of ambiguities; and poems. Ah, but poems written early in life don’t amount to much. One should wait and gather meaning and sweetness a whole life long –and as long a life as possible – then, at the very end, one might possibly write ten lines that are any good.

Rilke’s narrator goes on,

For poems aren’t, as people think, feelings (one has those early enough) ; they’re experiences. To write a single line of verse one must see many cities, people, things, one must know animals, one must feel birds flying and know the movements flowers make as they open up in the morning.

The narrator goes on to list, rather beautifully, other experiences that need to be had to create poetry:

Roads in unfamiliar regions, unexpected encounters, and partings which one saw coming long before; one must be able to think back to those days in one’s childhood that are still unexplained, to one’s parents whom one could not help offending when they brought a delightful gift and one didn’t appreciate it (it was a delight for someone else), to those childhood illnesses which arose so peculiarly and with so many profound and difficult changes, to those days in peaceful and secluded rooms, and to those mornings by the sea, to the sea anywhere, to seas, to nights of travel that swept along high above, flying with the stars;

But Rilke’s hero, however, is not equating poetry with autobiography; the memories don’t form a story. The following passage suggests experiences only become poetry later and indirectly: “For the memories themselves are not important.”

They become a good poem “only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves.”

Stahn seems to have spent decades preparing for this exhibition – simply by living. Having gained all the experiences of a full life, which was then near its end, Stahn painted the experiences listed by Rilke’s narrator. The full quotation he was working from – a poet’s manifesto of intent, perhaps – was also part of the show:

As I wandered around the exhibition, thinly populated compared to the crowded lily ponds upstairs in the main gallery space, I found an echo of my own experience in many of the works.

I recalled, for example, the “mornings by the sea” I spent while accompanying my mother on her last summer in this world in the English seaside town she lived in.

I also remembered the many “roads in unfamiliar regions” I have travelled, from Ecuador to Japan, China to Mexico and Turkey to Egypt.

And “The Gestures of the Little Flowers” took me back to my childhood and the primroses that lined the hedge of the farm lane, bright yellow sentinels waving their welcome upon our return home from school.

I thought some of the paintings were beautiful. I can’t share them all, but here are some of my favourites.

Rilke wrote, after the novel’s publication,

Poor Malte begins so deep in misery and, in a strict sense, reaches to eternal bliss; he is a heart that strikes a whole octave: after him almost all songs are possible.

It’s a beautiful description. 2

And for me, Stahn’s use of the passage from Rilke and the yearning quality in many of his paintings certainly “strike a whole octave”.

But I think ultimately the exhibition persuasively contradicts this line I quoted earlier from the novel: “For the memories themselves are not important.”

This may be true for the poet, or at least in Rilke’s case. But seeing the power of Stahn’s paintings in this exhibition reminded me that the experiences we remember do matter, very much.

Hi everyone,

As I have been busy with other things, this week’s post isn’t quite ready to be sent out. So I am sending this post from a year ago. It will be new to some and a second chance to read for others.

Thank you as ever for visiting the English Republic of Letters.

Jeff

The town where I attended secondary school in the 1970s was in rural Devon and far from being cosmopolitan. It had apparently seen migration from other parts of the country in its distant heyday as a manufacturing town, but I wasn’t aware of that then. London, just two hundred miles away, seemed to belong to a different country altogether. Even those of us brought up on farms in the area hardly saw the local town as an outpost of civilisation, more of a refraction of our own cultural backwardness. The most exotic thing about the place was probably the smell of hops simmering in the local brewery that would blow across the school grounds a couple of times a week.

But the state school I went to became a catalyst for change, even a beacon for hope for those looking to escape. I was only dimly aware of this at the time, but looking back, the teachers, many from other parts of England and holding what were then still rare university degrees, brought a different perspective to our lives. This showed in the curriculum and also in the pioneering series of international exchanges that the school would embark upon about the time I arrived.

A keen rugby player, I spent most of my time in practice or playing matches—we sometimes had two or three fixtures a week—and I didn’t have a lot of time for other pursuits. To be honest, I wasn’t hugely interested in exploring other cultures. There wasn’t a big athlete vs the rest divide in the school, but I didn’t feel I had much in common with the small band of talented artists and musicians in the school.

In my first year I’d resisted learning the basics of musical notation from a teacher who seemed as old as—and no more interesting than—the composers he mentioned—Mozart, Haydn, and Tchaikovsky—and whose names I quickly forgot. But by the time I reached the third year at the school, there were some keen and progressive music teachers who sought to stir our interest in the subject.

Under duress, I’d learnt to emit a few feeble sounds from the recorder and even blew along in a school concert, but I didn’t feel drawn to music as a subject or a practice. I’d grown up in a household where nobody played an instrument. The music on the radio was just occasional background to a life in which everyone—my parents anyway—was just too busy to pay much attention to such things. I remember just one classical record perched on the shelf without its original cover at home—Brahms's Piano Concerto No. 2, which my parents played once or twice. I know my mother enjoyed piano music, but I now wonder how that LP found its way into my parents’ meagre collection.

English state schools (they’d be called public schools in the US) aren’t famous for their wonderful infrastructure. Although this one had a fine old redbrick main building, many classes, including music and art, were taught in prefabricated cabins dotted around the school’s battered all-weather sports pitch. No doubt they were intended originally as temporary ways of dealing with expanded school numbers. Of course, they became permanent.

I think it was one day in early spring during the lunch break that I happened to be walking through the school grounds past one of these huts. Without any preamble, the sound of female voices floated out from inside the hut and stopped me in my stride. I don't remember if I was with anyone at the time, and almost certainly I wouldn’t have commented on the music. But it was without a doubt the most beautiful sound I’d ever heard.

We often talk of being transported by music, and this really did feel like a bodily experience, a kind of musical teleportation. I had no idea at the time what this music was or where it was from. But its beauty seemed like a new country being staked out in my heart.

I later found out that it was a section from Borodin’s opera Prince Igor, The Polovtsian Dances, sung by girls of the school choir. They were probably rehearsing for a concert I had no thought of attending. The Polovtsian Dances exist in various forms and arrangements, but if you listen to the opening of this version, you will hear the piece exactly as I remember it.

This moment of pure joy didn’t create an instant transmutation. I didn’t become a performer or even a concertgoer overnight. But within a year, I’d find myself taking part in a major school musical production, urged on by the new music teachers.

But most importantly, I would gradually find music beginning to take a central place in my life—not only the pop or rock I listened to at home on the radio but also classical music, which I’d go on to explore widely at university. As I look back, I see that that moment outside the music hut was the starting point for that. It was as if a chain reaction had been set in motion.

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I also see now that the inclusion of this music into the school repertoire was part of an enlightened way of teaching “integrated studies", where music and art combined with the history and geography of Russia and America, our main topics that year in school. Both these great countries captured my imagination for their huge expanses of territory and dynamic history so different (it seemed to me then) from the rather stolid evolution of the small land of gently rolling farmland that I lived in.

These varied and engaging classes stimulated my mind and began to make me yearn to see more of the world. And I believe that hearing the beauty in that music by Borodin also got me to appreciate the classes even more.

We would read, later that spring, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, published in 1962, as the first account of Soviet labour camps. 1 The book left a huge impression on me in its account of the loss of liberty but also about how people struggle to thrive even in the most inhospitable of environments.

We also learnt of how the people suffered under the Tsars and the ultimate demise of the Romanovs. What I didn’t know then was that Borodin (1833-1887) was an education reformer as well as a doctor and chemist. If I’d heard his name then, I’d have said it belonged in the periodic table, and indeed he made important contributions to organic chemistry.

But as I sat bored at the back of chemistry class later that day, stashing away unused chemicals with which to conduct my own aimless (and mercifully harmless) experiments, I had no idea that the man who composed such astonishing music was among the first chemists to demonstrate nucleophilic substitution, as well as the co-discoverer of the aldol reaction.

I can now almost imagine him clumping into our old chemical lab that reeked of ammonia to lecture us on the electrolysis of water while his music played in the background. These kinds of rich connections across the curriculum and across time are like the bonds of a new compound formed in a reaction; they could not have been planned or even foreseen by those in charge of our learning.

It makes me realise that only we can join up the dots of our own education, dots that then shape the journeys that we will go on. But it’s the wise alchemy of good teachers that provides us with the elements we need and which we will over time recombine into the substance of our lives.

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Borodin died before finishing Prince Igor, which is based on a 12th-century poem about the Russians’ battles with the Polovtsians, who were Turkic nomads of the Eurasian steppe. The famous song I listened to was a “song of the slave women", and to be honest, the whole piece feels to me now like a classic example of orientalism (a term I didn’t know then, of course). But still, it retains a special place in my heart.

Borodin wrote many other fine works in his spare time from the lab and medical practice and when not pioneering medical education for women in Russia. Among his other works that I’ve since enjoyed are his beautiful string quartets and the symphonic poem In the Steppes of Central Asia.

My school’s commitment to internationalisation—which I think was a new initiative in the state-funded school sector then—would take me on a life-changing school exchange to France later that year, where I’d spend two months at a school in the French Alps (a story for another time).

But, looking back, I think that my first international journey wasn’t that trip to France but was the earlier voyage of the spirit that Borodin’s music took me on.

Decades would pass before I was able to see in person the giant expanses of the steppes of Eurasia depicted in Prince Igor for myself from the window of the Trans-Siberian Express. But thanks to those teachers and the happenstance of hearing Borodin’s music outside that modest music room hut, when I finally gazed upon that majestic landscape, it felt like the music had already taken me there, that I was experiencing it for the second time.

When I lived in China, I was lucky enough to visit several beautiful gardens in Shanghai, Suzhou and Yangzhou, among many others.

Recently, I visited another Chinese garden – but this one was in Tokyo. It was Koishikawa Korakuen, which was first established in 1629 and is one of the oldest gardens in Tokyo. It was completed by Mitsukuni Tokugawa, one of the most influential “daimyo” (大名), or lords, of his time.

Mitsukini incorporated Chinese concepts into the garden's final design, guided by the exiled Confucian scholar Zhu Shunshui from China. For me, one of the most striking elements was the name of the garden.

The word Korakuen (後楽園) is derived from the famous prose work Yueyang Lou Ji (岳陽樓記), or "Record of Yueyang Tower," written in 1046 AD by the Northern Song Dynasty statesman and poet Fan Zhongyan. The park’s name means something like “Garden for Enjoying Later”, which is a compressed form of the original saying, 先天下之憂而憂，後天下之樂而樂.

In English it could be rendered: “Be the first to worry about the world’s troubles and the last to enjoy its pleasures.”

This represents the Confucian ideal of the leader putting the welfare of the people and the state before his or her own personal concerns and pleasures. It embodies a spirit of selfless dedication to public service.

In the park there’s also a rice field planted by Mitsukuni with the intention of teaching his family about the harsh realities and hard work of a farmer’s life. Brought up on a farm, albeit in a different era and another country, I found myself approving of this gesture.

As I walked around the beautiful garden, I was impressed that an atmosphere of calm and order – even moral order – still seemed to prevail there after all these years. Just as the trees and sky shone placidly on the still and bright surface of the pond, so the harmony and poise of the place found a reflection in my mind.

Rather than “worry about the world’s troubles”, I’d gone to the park to escape them. And, especially, I was looking to enjoy what is for me one of the world’s truest pleasures: to wander among plum trees as they come into full blossom and fragrance.

There are many plum trees in my own neighbourhood, including in many private gardens. But Korakuen has a special selection of beautiful varieties. And unlike many popular plum-viewing venues in Tokyo, where there might be a colourful but crowded plum blossom festival, all such frivolities are frowned on in this garden. The viewers were few and the blossoms many.

I won’t try to describe the joy I felt to see the wonderful petals of different colours and shades dappled with sunlight as I wandered around this “moral garden”. Instead, I leave you with some of the images I took that day, perhaps my last day of plum blossom viewing for this season.

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You can read my 2024 post about plum blossom here: