As I was reading, my gaze wandered from the page of text and out through the upstairs window, where on a clear day I can watch the Atlantic sweeping in towards the beaches of County Donegal. That day, grey mist and drizzle blurred the horizon line, the sky and the sea lost in vaporous obscurity: not unusual for Ireland in July. My attention briefly returns to my book until my phone alerts me that a text has arrived. It is from my friend who, like me likes to read. We often talk books together.
Fit
The gymnasia are closed, as are the sports centres and swimming pools. People are taking exercise in the parks: they are walking, running, cycling, skipping, lifting weights, boxing, dancing, stretching, and playing football and cricket. It is good to see children and adults – of all ages and sizes – trying to keep healthy, in body and mind, by working their muscles and their lungs. The spring and summer months, even in London, are conducive of outdoor activity most days.
The Empty Plinth
Smashing objects precious to others has a long and illustrious history.
Show, don’t tell
The standard advice given to aspiring writers of fiction is that they should concentrate on describing as best they can the characters, the settings, and the events, but should allow their readers to draw for themselves inferences about what this all means. Long before Roland Barthes pronounced la mort de l’auteur, teachers of good style had made clear that the novelist should not try to make explicit the significance of their books, but should trust their audience to join the dots, in their own time and in their own way, to complete the picture. The obligation of the novel, wrote Javier Cercas, more recently, is not to answer the question it poses but to formulate it in the most complex way possible.
My Philosophy: On staying busy being born
According to Michel de Montaigne (Essays I: xix) Cicero was right to say that to study philosophy is to learn to die. He suggests this might be true in two different ways. First, the act of studying involves us distancing our thinking minds from our unthinking bodies, which is in some ways a precursor to the experience of death. Second, wise reflection about death teaches us not to fear it, better preparing us to face the end of life. Both are interesting ideas, although not fully developed in the chapter. This is not one of Montaigne’s better essays, for he quickly becomes distracted from recounting his own acute observations in favour of the citation of endless classical sources. In this instance, the wisdom of the modern is squandered owing to unmerited respect for the wisdom of the ancients.
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