Author: Mark Hannam

A few nights ago, I went to my local theatre to see a production of a recently composed opera, based on an old Italian fairy tale.  The libretto was both light- and warm-hearted, the singing and playing were both competent, and while the evening was enjoyable, nonetheless I left the theatre dissatisfied.  The narrative structure in Act One hinted at Greek tragedy, but the concluding Scene in Act Two was pure Hollywood.  Reflecting on my disappointment, I concluded that there is good reason why fairy tales tend not to work well as the source material for opera.   In the best opera, most, if not all the principals lie dead on the stage by the time the curtain falls.  By contrast, the best fairy tales conclude with the narrator’s assurance that the main characters will now live “happily, ever after”.

I do not intend to say more about opera, at least not in this text.  Instead I want to write about living happily ever after: what would that be like?

I remember a poem by C P Cavafy, titled “Monotony”, written in 1908 and here translated from modern Greek by Aliki Barnstone:

From one monotonous day, another day
follows, identically monotonous. The same
things will happen. They will happen again.
The same moments find us and leave us.

A month passes and brings in another month.
We easily guess what is to come:
the same boring things from yesterday.
Then tomorrow no longer looks like tomorrow.

One reason I like this poem is for the way Cavafy generates tension between form and content: there is repetition as day follows day, month follows month, and the same things happen again and again.  But he is careful to tell us that the days are monotonous, and that the things are boring.  It is not their repetition that is the problem but their intrinsic uninterestingness.  Boredom is a feature of the events themselves not their repeated recurrence.  From which we might infer that a life of repetition could potentially be an interesting life – a happy life, a life in which tomorrow truly looks like tomorrow – even though this particular exemplar, the life about which Cavafy writes, is neither interesting nor happy because what is endlessly repeated is by nature dull.

Many of the moments of our lives, which find us and leave us, do so daily.  For most of the days of the rest of my life, however long that is, I will eat: which means that I will also buy ingredients, cook food and clear away the utensils after consuming what I have prepared.  For most of the days of the rest of my life, however long that is, I will go to sleep: which means that I will also brush my teeth, wash my face and make the bed after rising in the morning.  For most of the days of the rest of my life, however long that is, I will read: which means that I will also browse my shelves for material, sit for an hour or more in my chair and return my glasses to their case after perusing the chosen book or magazine.  For most days of the rest of my life – not the unusual days, the extraordinary days, but the normal days – it is these habitual activities that will determine whether my life is lived happily, ever after.

(I take it that “ever after” in this context means “for a good while”, and not “for time without end”.  For immortals, the problem of monotony will be harder to resolve).

One part of the secret to living a happy life comes from avoiding war, famine, or the premature deaths of those we love, but success in these cases mostly remains beyond our control.  We cannot always avoid adversity, however much we try, and unluckiness can surely be the enemy of happiness.  Finding satisfaction in the quotidian is, I think, another part of the secret: if we can adjust our sense of pleasure to focus on the enjoyment of the everyday, we increase the likelihood of a happy life.  Many facets of our daily lives can be thought of as tiresome chores which distract us from greater, more meaningful activities, but I suspect that thinking in this way makes the achievement of greater things less likely.

Which brings to my mind another poem, titled “I Want” and written in 1933 by Ricardo Reis, one of the anonyms of Fernando Pessoa, here translated from the Portuguese by Jonathan Griffin:

I want – unknown, and calm
Because unknown, and my own
Because calm – to fill my days
With wanting no more than them.

Those whom wealth touches – their skin
Itches with the gold rash.
Those who fame breathes upon –
Their life tarnishes.

To those for whom happiness is
Their sun, night comes around.
But to one who hopes for nothing
All that comes is grateful.

Chasing after wealth and fame is foolish, for all the obvious reasons, but so too is chasing happiness as an end-in-itself.  Enjoying what we have, what is given to us – the daily repetitions that structure our lives – can bring pleasure enough, and anything additional should be treated as a gift.  Reis (Pessoa) wants no more from life than his days of life: they suffice; living itself is good enough.

Pessoa’s poem echoes the writings of Benedict Spinoza, whose Jewish ancestors had left Portugal for Holland, rather than accept forced conversion to the Christian faith.  Spinoza was himself expelled from the Jewish community in Amsterdam for refusing to abjure his radical theological views.  He was a man denied the security afforded by membership of a strong national or religious community, a man who depended on the kindness and discretion of a small group of like-minded friends, themselves at the margins of Europe’s emergent Republic of Letters.  He was a man who, though he might think as he pleased, needed to be very careful about saying what he thought; he was a writer whose caution led him to remain unpublished in his lifetime.  Yet, he was also by all accounts a happy man.

At the start of his Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect (written in the late 1650s), Spinoza writes that experience had taught him that “all the things which regularly occur in ordinary life are empty and futile”.  This might be taken as a wholesale rejection of my suggestion that happiness can be found in the enjoyment of the quotidian.  But while he dismisses the pursuit of wealth, honour or sensual pleasure for their own sake as routes to happiness, Spinoza is careful to note that these three need not be obstacles to happiness, so long as they are considered only means to a greater end.  That end – true happiness – he describes as “the knowledge of the union that the mind has with the whole of Nature”.  To understand what Spinoza means by this enigmatic statement would require extensive commentary on his great philosophical treatise, The Ethics (published in 1677, shortly after his death).  However, for my present purposes I want only to draw attention to a claim that he makes – emphatically – in the fourth chapter (paragraph 42), where he writes that “cheerfulness cannot be excessive, but is always good”; or, as another translation puts it, “there cannot be too much joy”.  Spinoza is sometimes portrayed as a man who lived an austere life and developed an austere philosophy.  On the contrary: he was a man who found great joy in both his life and his thought.

Whether we find the things that regularly occur in ordinary life to be empty and futile, depends less on their intrinsic nature and more on the way we think about them.  If we chase wealth, fame or pleasure as our goals, we are likely to find the daily routine to be no more than a daily grind.  By contrast, if we take pleasure in small, repeated actions – the daily making of coffee, a weekly swim, tending a garden through the seasons – our happiness can be founded upon these well-loved routines.  Should some wealth, fame or pleasure appear in our lives – by effort, merit, or accident – they may bring us supernumerary joy.  But we are more likely to be happy if we do not depend on the extraordinary as the source of our happiness.

Which is another way of saying that whether we are happy – or not – is consequent more on how we think about our lives and less on what happens to us during our lives.  If we understand, as Spinoza did, the union of the mind with the natural world, or if we learn, as Pessoa did, to hope for nothing, then we can enjoy the routines of daily life cheerfully because such a life can be lived with joy.  What once were considered obstacles can, in practice, become vehicles to true happiness, if only we adapt our minds to the reality of the world.

I do not mean by this that happiness if only to be found by withdrawal from the world, escaping into a sheltered, scholarly or poetic renunciation of public life.  Spinoza spent much time thinking and writing about politics and science: his retreat into domesticity was forced upon him by the lack of intellectual and social freedom of his time.  And he is the most materialist of all philosophers, denying the existence of a separate realm of spirit, mind or ideas, distinct from the physical universe.   His approach to happiness is not founded on an abandonment of the material world, but on the whole-hearted embrace of it.  And for him, as for most of us, for most of the time, this embrace is centred on the repetitive daily tasks that form the bones of our lives, the skeleton upon which all else we do hangs.

In classic fairy tales, the hero and heroine live happily, ever after, once the dragon has been slain, or the wicked witch/wizard has been defeated, or the enemy’s attacks have been thwarted, allowing the protagonists to enjoy many, many days in peace and quiet.  Happily, ever after, implies a time of calm, a time of wanting no more than the days themselves.  Does this sound monotonous?  Maybe so, but only if we choose to find days of peace and quiet to be dull.  If we learn to take pleasure in them and their sufficiency, we need not think of them as empty and futile.   And, in addition to the great pleasure we obtain from eating, sleeping and reading – over and over, time and again – we can also go to the opera once in a while, to enjoy the spectacle of der Lieberstod, content that it is others, not us, who chose death in ecstasy over repetitious daily life.

When my daughter was about eighteen months old, we bought her some painted bricks to play with.  Cubic in shape – around 5cm long in each dimension – and numbering just over thirty in total, they were sufficient to build a tall tower, or two or three smaller towers.  Coloured red, green, blue and yellow, they were ideal for constructions that were aesthetically appealing for someone – like me – more attracted to the Bauhaus than the Gothic.  Made of wood, they were pleasingly tactile in the hand and when they fell to the floor, they produced a mellow marimba-tone that no plastic brick could hope to emulate.

They were the source of much fun.  I would build towers, of different sizes, colours and architectural designs, which my daughter would delight in knocking to the floor.  I would re-build and she would re-knock.  Build-up, knock-down; build-up, knock-down, build-up, knock-down; repeat ad infinitum.    I came to understand that there were two reasons why she preferred to destroy my carefully constructed towers rather than build with me.  First, the manual dexterity required to stack small cubic bricks is harder for a child than an adult, so for her the building process was much more like work than play.  Second, there is pleasure – great pleasure – to be had in the immediacy of a simple act of destruction.  What took me several minutes to build up, she could knock down in one second.  Thus, our division of labour became institutionalised: I would build-up, she would knock-down: work for me, pleasure for her.

As we grow up, our motor functions become more controlled and our architectural sensibilities more refined, increasing our willingness to take on the role of the builder in such games.  Our sense of time also changes, and we come to attach value to our expected future states as well as our actual present state.  We become capable of taking pleasure in construction as well as destruction, because we learn to be patient, taking satisfaction from the achievements of slow and steady work, not just the thrill of instant impact.  At least that’s the theory.  Personally, I have always been wary of the value of patience, suspicious of its status as a virtue, sceptical of the need to cultivate it as part of my character.   If something needs to be done, do it now and do it fast is my default philosophy.  Patience is often an excuse for dissembling, procrastination and general inefficiency in life.

Which brings me to a famous story about Alexander of Macedon, a figure from ancient history to whom I feel a bond, of sorts, since my middle name is Alexander, although I doubt we have much else in common, as I am neither Greek nor Great.     I draw my story from Flavius Arrianus Xenophon – known to posterity as Arrian – whose history, The Campaigns of Alexander is one of the principal sources for our contemporary knowledge of the adventures and achievements of the young imperialist.  In Book II, Arrian tells the story of the “untying” of the Gordian Knot.  Gordius was a poor man, but his son Midas became king of the Phrygians.  (It’s not a long story, but irrelevant to my purposes in this text, for which reason I pass on without comment.)  As a thank-offering to Zeus, Gordius’s wagon was parked on the local acropolis, its yoke tied to the wagon by a cord made from the bark of the cornel tree.  The Knot which kept the yoke in place was so designed that no one could see where it began or ended.   It was considered near impossible for the yoke to be untied: indeed, local myth suggested that he who managed to undo the Knot would become the ruler of the Persian Empire.

When Alexander arrived in Gordium at the start of his military expedition, it was clearly incumbent upon him to try to solve the puzzle of the Knot, in order to demonstrate his credentials as a conquering hero.  Arrian reports two different accounts of what Alexander did, when confronted by the refractory cornel bark.  One story says that he removed the wooden peg that held the shaft of the wagon to the yoke, around which the knot was tied; another story says that he cut through the knot with his sword.  Either way, as Arrian notes, “when he and his attendants left the palace where the wagon stood, the general feeling was that the oracle about the untying of the knot had been fulfilled”.  Now Alexander was ready to conquer Persia; and then India.  His solution to the problem of Gordian Knot – don’t procrastinate by trying to find the elusive solution to a complex problem, rather act speedily and decisively, thereby showing the problem to be misconceived – has long seemed to me a vindication of my distrust of the so-called virtue of patience.

Except, of course, that not all problems have a “quick” solution that can be revealed by a dash of élan and a rhetorical flourish; not all Gordian Knots can be unravelled by sleight of hand, or slash of sword.  Alexander’s impatience –or rather, his impetuosity – did not work out so well in the long-run, however impressed his immediate audience on the acropolis might have been by his audacity.   Knocking brings easy pleasure, but it requires that someone else is willing to rebuild, otherwise all that remains is rubble.  Defeating the enemy in battle is one thing, governing a newly won kingdom effectively is quite another.

Speaking of which, I write this text after a bizarre week in British politics, during which the smallish electorate that comprises the paid-up membership of the Conservative Party– mostly old, white and wealthy – have selected a new leader for their party, who – by quirk of constitutional tradition – also becomes the new Prime Minister.  For reasons known only to themselves, they have selected a man renowned for his laziness, dishonesty, irresponsibility and shamelessness; a man who, like me, disparages patience, but, unlike me, thinks the current challenges of British politics can be dealt with as if they were knots of cornel.

Two of the three principal challenges facing Boris the Great are shared by all developed democratic societies: first, how to design an electorally acceptable fiscal policy that provides sustainable funding streams to pay for the ever-growing demands on public services that support our aging populations; second, how to persuade the public to adjust their lifestyles by making significant changes to energy and food consumption, necessitated by global climate change.  Neither of these two challenges will be easy; not least because very few politicians are willing publicly to acknowledge the scale and urgency of the remedies that are required; not least because a central element of the solutions to both problems involves immigration into developed democratic societies on a significant scale, which is poorly understood and widely disliked.   I think it is reasonable to predict that Boris will make little if any progress towards serious solutions to either of these challenges, although in this regard, his record will be no more dismal than that of most of his contemporaries in other states.

His third challenge – in one sense more immediate, given treaty deadlines, but ultimately far less urgent, because it is wholly avoidable, what one might call a “fake challenge” – is to deal with the problem of how to exit the EU while not admitting to the electorate what is obvious to most dispassionate observers, namely that the economic and social costs of this foolish policy are enormous and will last for a generation; maybe longer.   As a leading proponent of “Brexit” it is highly unlikely that Boris will ever acknowledge publicly the amount of harm that the policy has already caused and will continue to cause for years to come.  But that cost is now likely to rise significantly, and to become much more obvious to the electorate, because of his propensity to treat the problem of disentanglement as if it were a knot to be sliced through.   Rather than concede that there is a high price to be paid for the gradual untying of relationships between Britain and the EU, Boris appears to believe that it would be clever for him to mimic Alexander at Gordium.

He is wrong – very wrong – as we are all soon going to discover.  Brexit only become a problem because some people insisted on the need to find a solution.   If we were to stop the frantic search for a way to untie the knot that yokes Britain to Europe, we might give ourselves the space to see that we are tied not by cornel bark, but by shared history, culture, genetics and economics.  Much as I dislike monarchy, both in its substantive and its decorative formats, it is sobering to remember that for the past two thousand years (approximately), since we rid ourselves of Roman (i.e. cosmopolitan Mediterranean) rule, British monarchs have come from Spain (Celts), Germany (Anglo-Saxons), Denmark (King Knut etc.), France ( William the Conqueror), Wales (Tudors), Scotland (Stuarts), Holland (House of Orange) and various German principalities (including Hanover and Saxe-Coburg).  The idea that we are different (and special) compared with continental Europe is ridiculous; the idea that our history demonstrates our separate identity is a preposterous self-delusion.   But it is one that Boris has nurtured.

It is impossible to unravel the Brexit Knot and it is irresponsible to try.  We are not cutting through bark, but flesh: we are kin with the rest of Europe.  We are not severing cumbersome and restrictive commercial ties that constrain our growth, but the very blood vessels of our economy.  For the past three years we have been engaged in a protracted bout of national self-harm: we are a country that should be on suicide watch.  How many pointless sword slashes will it take before Boris understands this?  It’s hard to say, but I predict that it won’t be a small number.  He is committed to knocking-down not building-up and he intends to hit an artificial deadline for no reason other than to try to disguise his own character weaknesses: namely, his laziness, dishonesty, irresponsibility and shamelessness.

As I have grown older, I have come to understand that some tasks take much longer to complete than others.  But when the task is long and complex then, I want to say, loudly and clearly, let’s start straight away and make progress as quickly as we can.  The harder the problem the more our tendency to hesitate, and every day of delay makes it harder to achieve a favourable outcome.   We have not improved our ability to adapt to climate change by waiting years to adjust our consumption of fossil fuels, nor have we made the funding of public services easier by piling up sovereign debt, the interest on which needs to be serviced out of current revenues.   The longer we wait the worse the problems have become.

By contrast, at other times, inactivity is the secret to success.  There is a segment of British society that dislikes the EU and dislikes immigration.  Their voices are loud, but they have no credible plan for managing an economy that is disconnected from its major trading partners and running short of labour.  Boris is committed to cutting the Brexit Knot, but has no clue what to do once the wagon and yoke are separated.  He offers a cure that is worse than the disease.  Like a small child, he will delight in knocking-down, but as yet, there is no-one ready at hand to start re-building work.  In times like these, the best policy is to do nothing, to stick with the status quo, to learn to live with the problem rather than try to solve it, to not rush in like a fool when an angel would fear to tread.   It might not be a virtue – I am still convinced that it is regularly an excuse – but I am now old and wise enough to know that sometimes patience is the best policy.

In the autumn of 1998, I departed from the asset management division of one global bank and arrived at the asset management division of another global bank.  I didn’t know for sure at the time, but it later turned out – as I hoped it would – that I had moved to a much better job at a much better firm: a spring in the fall.  After a couple of weeks, I was asked to travel to San Francisco to meet some of my new colleagues at the US headquarters.  Thus, it came to pass, just over twenty years ago, very early on a Monday morning in mid-December, on a trading floor high up on Fremont Street, I was first introduced to Peter Freilinger.

I think it is fair to say that during the first months of our acquaintance there was an element of caution from both parties.  In part this was due to some irritating but humdrum office politics, in particular the behaviour of a member of the senior management team, who proved to be an obstacle to the development of a constructive working relationship between us and, in due course, sabotaged each of our careers at the firm.  However, in part this was also due to the hesitation that is all but inevitable when the formerly precocious meets the currently precocious: we circled each other, mostly respectfully but also a little warily.  Time passed, we both changed jobs, Peter moved from one country to another, the financial crisis came and went, and as we become older, we also grew wiser: eventually respect won out over wariness, and we became friends.

Over the years, I discovered that he is a good banker in both senses of the word “good”: technically, he exhibits a very high level of proficiency across a wide range of skills and tasks; at the same time, he reflects carefully on the ethical dimensions of his work and takes his responsibilities – to colleagues, clients and wider society – seriously.  This combination is rare; not as rare as some of the lurid representations of the financial services industry served up by Hollywood might lead one to believe, but nonetheless rare enough to be prized when we stumble across it.   I saw in Peter the combination of competence and conscience that I admire; and, I suppose, he saw something similar in me: let’s call it elective affinity.

I want to say more about the importance of skill in the financial services sector, but first a short digression.  While it seems straightforward to distinguish the two different senses of the word “good” – one meaning highly proficient, the other meaning morally commendable – I find myself repeatedly drawn to the view that someone who demonstrates high levels of skill at a given task should also be expected to behave well, to treat others with respect, to honour the highest values of the culture of which they are part.   I find myself drawn to this view despite the wealth of evidence to the contrary.   I know that Maradona is one of the most gifted footballers in the history of the sport and, at the same time, was a cheat and a tax evader, with a drug habit and some unpleasant political views.   I know that Richard Wagner’s music is glorious, but that his opinions were odious.  I know that the sublime often emerges from the slime.  Despite what I know, I am tempted to think that someone being good at something creates a justifiable expectation of their being a good person too; that excellence in the particular should be accompanied by excellence in general.

There is a contrary view, namely that those who expend significant emotional and physical energy becoming very good at certain skills or tasks, can’t also be expected to have the capacity to invest in being a good person; that the pursuit of excellence in sport, or the arts, or at work, necessarily breeds a certain selfishness and competitiveness, which sit uneasily with the cultivation of good character.  This view would claim not just that being very good at something is perfectly consistent with being a bad person, but that being very good at something is more likely than not a predictor of bad character.  I find this idea troubling, not least because it seems to provide some people a ready-made excuse to indulge the less admirable aspects of their personalities.

It might be that there just is no correlation between the two senses of “good”, that one’s being very good at some skill or activity is not consistently indicative – one way or the other – of the quality of one’s character.  In “Science as a Vocation”, Max Weber makes the point that today there is no credible reason for us to assume a common source for the values of truth, goodness and beauty.  It is the fate of those who live in the modern world, Weber suggests, to be forced to acknowledge the reality of the “evil genius”, the “ugly truth” and the “flowers of evil”.  Kant, we should remember, wrote three critiques, not one.  Even so, despite all that I know, I remain attracted by the idea that excellence, at its most excellent, forms a unity.

End of digression.  Back to banking.

The financial services industry is not popular.  The scorn and loathing its practitioners attracted a decade ago, in the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis, has waned somewhat but there is no sign of the emergence of affection or admiration for bankers from among the non-bankers.  Rather, they continue to be portrayed as greedy and irresponsible, over-paid and unrepentant, privatising the upside gains while socialising the downside costs.  I do not want to deny that there is an ugly side to the industry: during my career in finance I have met – and sometimes worked with – people who were dishonest, mean, selfish, vindictive or cowardly.  What I do want to deny is that this is the main problem with the financial services industry.   What makes banking truly disreputable is not that some of its practitioners have moral failings, but that large numbers of its practitioners are inept: mediocrity, not malevolence, is the dirty secret of the sector.

Let’s put moral judgement aside and focus instead on competence.  Within the financial services industry there is a wide range of roles, which require a wide range of skills: some are fairly technical, requiring high levels of numeracy or analytical ability, others call for skills in communication, team leadership, project management, technology and operations management.  Almost all roles require a good level of interpersonal skills, not least to ensure that risks in one part of the business are well understood by people working in other parts of the business.  Given the generous levels of remuneration that are widely available in the sector, firms should be able to hire and retain individuals who can evidence one or more of these skills, and who are willing to work hard to improve their skills-sets in some of the other areas.  From the point of view of capability, then, the financial services industry should have a reputation for technical excellence: good bankers should be plentiful.  But they are not.  There are some individuals who are outstanding but, in my experience, they are notable for their rarity.  In the financial services industry, the mean, median and mode for technical quality are all lower than they should be.

Further, those who rise to the top tend not to be the best: merit is a less reliable predictor of career success than endurance, combined with patronage.  The route to advancement in many firms is to hang around for long enough – and to hang out with the right people – rather than to demonstrate consistently high performance.  Some of this can be attributed to office politics, of the kind that Peter and I suffered from back in the day.  But much is due to the growing role of regulation in the sector.   The more rules there are to follow the more the industry becomes fixated on compliance rather than excellence: making sure things are not done wrong, rather than making sure they are done well.  Being compliant is mostly a low hurdle, but it quickly becomes the standard beyond which there is little reward for effort: the sector congregates just above the regulatory line, and the excellent is crowded out by the acceptable.  The good-enough has become the enemy of the best.

There is, for sure, an important role for regulation in the financial services industry.  Banking needs rules as much as do baseball and cricket.  Unlike team sports, however, there is a strong tendency in corporate life for rules quickly to become norms rather than constraints.  By which I mean, in sport the players take account of the existing rules and are forced to adapt their playing style quickly to changes in the rules, but no-one thinks that they should be rewarded just for following them.  In banking, following the rules is sometimes regarded as good enough because it has become the new standard of performative assessment: “we didn’t get fined by the regulator this year” is viewed as a more important measure of success than “ we did a really good job for our customers”.

There are people working in finance who care about the quality of their work, who want their customers to be pleased by the quality of the service they received and the level of price they were asked to pay for it; who want their colleagues to be well-trained, well-motivated, well-treated and well-compensated for their work; who think hard about how they can improve the products they provide, to the benefits of all the stakeholders of the business (shareholders, for sure, but creditors, clients and other partners, broadly construed, too); who consider the wider social impact of their company’s activities and practices, and who care that their firm is making a sustained positive contribution to the well-being of the community; and who, for reasons of personal pride, like to challenge themselves to work harder and achieve better results, day-by-day, month-by-month, year-by-year.  There are some good people working in finance, but often they get disheartened, swamped by the preparedness of many of their colleagues to settle for far less, for just about good enough, for the complacency of being merely compliant.

What is true finance is probably true of many other sectors of the economy, especially those that have recently undergone a significant increase in the volume and complexity of regulatory oversight.  This is not just a problem for bankers.  But it is a problem – a very real problem – for bankers, and for everyone else too because, as we learned a decade ago, what goes on in the banks ends up impacting us all.  Ever more regulation leads to an ever greater focus on compliance, which leads in turn to the abandonment of excellence in favour of acceptability; those who get ahead are those who keep their heads down, instead of those who take on the risk of leading their teams into new and better values and practices.

There are ugly people everywhere – that is, people whose behaviour is morally ugly – who deserve to be exposed and held to account.  Finance has its fair share but, in my experience, it is not unique in this regard.  However, if we want the financial services sector to work better we need to pay less attention to these miscreants, and to focus instead on rooting out the lazy and the mediocre; and we need to identify and celebrate the good bankers, who work hard, with skill and conviction, doing a good job for their customers and for society more widely.  All of which is a long and roundabout way of saying, that while we must continue to recognise that the word “good” has two separate and equally important meanings, we should also acknowledge that in some spheres of life, such as banking, the pursuit of technical proficiency – that is, the development of products that are reliable and effective, delivered to customers in a professional and responsible way – is at the same time a moral good.

Today, I made madeleines.  In the past I have always used a recipe by Clair Ptak, which reliably produces delicious results, but I thought I would try an alternative, by Sabrina Ghayour, with an additional Persian flavour: finely chopped pistachios.  They turned out reasonably well, which is to say, they were a pleasure to eat although perhaps not as visually impressive as in the past.  Now I must consider whether to repeat the new recipe a few times, improving my technique as I get used to the slightly different ingredients and instructions, or whether to revert to the former recipe with which I am more familiar.

This is a recurrent problem, as in cooking so in life: there is comfort in repetition but there is excitement in variation: what is new, innovative and unusual, keeps us engaged and alert, but what is old, traditional and habitual keeps us secure and calm.  Some of us cope better with disruption, but all of us need it from time to time, not just in our diet but also in the way we feed our minds: what we read, listen to, look at, where we go and with whom we talk.  Finding the optimal mix of theme and variation is one of our great challenges in the quest for happiness and fulfilment.

Even though I prefer to consume them with a short-black coffee rather than a tisane, eating madeleines invariably reminds me of reading Proust: not the famous scene at the start of the first volume, Du côté de chez Swann, but the sequence of involuntary memories which occurs in Book III of the final volume, Le temps retrouvé.  The narrator – now ageing, infirm and despairing of ever starting, let alone completing his great literary work – returns to Paris after the end of the First World War, and heads to a social event hosted by old friends.   He slightly loses his footing and regains his balance on uneven paving stones; he hears a spoon knocked against a plate; he wipes his mouth with a starched napkin.  In each case, something very ordinary, albeit unexpected, creates a connection with a moment in his past, a moment that is remembered as one of significant pleasure for the place where it occurred and delight at the feelings to which his mind returns.

Proust writes, in characteristically lengthy, complex and insightful prose:

Yes, if a memory, thanks to forgetfulness, has been unable to contract any tie, to forge any link between itself and the present, if it has remained in its own place, of its own date, if it has kept its distance, its isolation in the hollow of a valley or on the peak of a mountain, it makes us suddenly breathe an air new to us just because it is an air we have formerly breathed, an air purer than that the poets have vainly called Paradisiacal, which offers that deep sense of renewal only because it has been breathed before, inasmuch as the true paradises are paradises we have lost. 

Thus the great paradox of the novel is established at its conclusion: the narrator has been motivated to start writing the text that we are now reading only because he has been jolted out of his lethargy by the provocation of memory, but what he has just remembered, and the joy it brings him, was always, as he lived it – over seven long volumes – more a source of disappointment than of pleasure.

Milton’s portrayal of Adam and Eve in Eden reads as dull and uninspiring by comparison with his description of Satan leading the rebel angels into civil war in heaven.  It is Satan who first lost his place in paradise but, unlike Adam, he did so with great panache.  By contrast, Proust fails to make the narrator’s life exciting, except in those moments when he unexpectedly stumbles across residues of lost time: the rediscovery of his past generates greater excitement than he experienced during the living of his life.

Was our past truly a paradise, or do we choose to remember it that way because what we have lost is our sense of its reality?

History is said to be written by victors; likewise, memory is accessed by survivors.  When we go to the archives of our minds, we mostly find what we want, what we like, what we hope to remember.   Like the waves of the sea as the tide comes in, creeping up the beach  metre by metre, removing the hollows and peaks, the undulations formed by wind, by footprint or by spade, smoothing the sand like icing on a cake, so too we supress evidence of our former unhappiness and dissatisfaction, and deep down below the placid, even-tempered surface of the past we bury the ugly debris of our lives.  Our memory functions like a picture post-card, a snap-shot idealisation of a former world that was never quite as good as we later seek to persuade ourselves.

The madeleine, therefore, is not the key to a locked door, which when suddenly flung open, grants us access to distant, long-forgotten truths; rather it is an amuse bouche, the tantalising first taste in a feast of nostalgia, of embroidery, of fabrication, of indulgence.  We can, if we wish, vary the recipe – add pistachios! – but we cannot avoid our perfidious predisposition to misremembering.

At least we cannot if we choose to remember alone.   One of the great benefits of good friends is that they don’t allow us to get away with complete self-deception: to use the argot of youth, they help us to “keep it real”.  They are a necessary corrective against our deep-seated tendency to embellish our past, to accentuate the positive, to hide away the detritus that we have accumulated through life, to forget.  They force us into a more honest engagement with our former lives and, thus, with our true selves.  When we remember the “good old days” they force us to calibrate more accurately: they are mirrors, lie-detectors, weighing scales.  They insist on the re-telling of times past as they were, not as we would like them to have been.  Good friends make for more honest memories.

One of the notable features of contemporary Western societies is the mass self-deception of older people: not everyone, for sure, but for many.  We see very large numbers voting for politicians who are irresponsible and irrational, for policies that are unobtainable and unsustainable.  Rather than wisdom, the defining characteristic of the average older voter is credulousness.   Why?  Not fake news, but fake recall.  As we grow older, we tend to romanticise the times in which we came of age; we tend to forget the hardships of the past and dwell only on the achievements; we repudiate the optimism of youth in preference for the complacency of the superannuated; we endorse heritage and disavow progress; we look back, as we say in England, through rose-tinted spectacles.  In short, we gild the past and trash our grandchildren’s futures.

Whether we read Hesiod or Moses, the idea that the modern world has emerged through a process of steady decline – from an Age of Gold or from a Garden of Eden – remains a dominant cultural meme, regardless of all the evidence to the contrary.  Decade by decade, life gets better for most people, but most people continue to believe that life gets worse.  Progress is slow, costly, tentative and reversable; nonetheless progress occurs, and lives improve.  In his celebrated novel, Soldiers of Salamis, Javier Cercas gives one of his minor characters these lines, which have always struck a chord with me:

People today are much happier than they were in my day, anyone who’s lived long enough knows that.  That’s why, every time I hear some old man fuming about the future, I know he’s doing it to console himself because he’s not going to be able to live through it …

Older people, in general, like to believe that the past, which they were part of, was far more desirable than the future, in which they will play no part.

For which reason, not only do we need friends to remind us of who we were and, thus, who we are; we also need friends with a good mix of ages to protect us from the conceit of imagining that the years of our prime were indeed a Golden Age; that we were born in Eden, from which our children, and their children, and their children’s children, even unto a hundred generations, have been duly expelled.  As I grow older, I have learned to value my friends of long-standing who can remind me how I came to be as I am.  I have also learned to value new friends, younger friends – my daughter’s friends – who cannot remind me of anything, but who continue to insist that this is their world and they will do a better job of running it than my generation managed.  A well-diversified portfolio of friends helps us to be more honest about both the past and the future.

Friends have another important role to play too: they help us to make good memories by helping us to live good lives.  Friends are our collaborators, our accomplices, our company.  They see what we see, whether in the gallery, the street, or from the summit of a mountain; they read the books we read and help us to think about them; they listen to the same sounds, in the concert hall or on the wind-swept dunes, and feel with us the tingling sensation on our skin, from the sun and the rain; they eat and drink with us, sharing their favourite tastes and exploring new flavours, unusual combinations, different varietals.  With friends, our sensory experience is widened, deepened and intensified.  We engage with the world more fully and more rewardingly when we do so together.

The education of the senses represents a challenge, a demand on our limited resources of time, energy and concentration.  Yet, to taste, smell, hear, touch and see the world in all its richness is not possible without the cultivation of our sensory faculties.  The harder we work at opening our minds to the widest range of life experience, the better able we are to enjoy the world and its diverse possibilities.  And memory is the key to maintaining the consistency of our identity through our lived experience of the world: each new experience is valuable in the context of the experience that comes before; each judgement – of preference, of comparison, of quality – is grounded by its relation to other, prior judgements.  We accumulate and we sort; we develop dominant themes and we entertain variations upon them; we take pleasure in the old and the new, because all our experience is ours.  And when we are tempted to believe that madeleines always tasted better in the past, we need our friends to remind us that they were there too, and that we are wrong.

I am in a gallery in Shoreditch, having just listened to a talk given by an artist friend.  Soon he and I will go for a drink, but meanwhile he continues to network, so I wait for him.   There are around twenty people in the gallery, mostly chatting with each other in small groups of two or three.  I turn my gaze once again to his paintings and drawings, one of which I now own.  I notice a woman who is not talking but looking: she looks at the artworks from a distance and then from close-up; she looks carefully, thoughtfully, actively; she is an engaged observer.  I wonder: Will she also look at the world as attentively she looks at art?  Will she also hear the roar of the wind and the ocean?  Will she also train her palate to appreciate the taste of good food and wine?  Will she also understand the value of investing in the deep friendship that helps us to regulate the ambivalence of memory and to construct the elements of a happy life?   There is only one way to find out.

 

Visitors to the ‘Van Gogh and Britain’ exhibition, currently at Tate Britain, are welcomed to the show by a painting of a middle-aged woman, wearing a white blouse and a black dress, seated at a dark green table with two pale green books in front of her, against a rose coloured background.  She stares back at the viewer, her head resting on her left hand, her left arm resting on the table, her expression neutral but engaged.   This version of L’Arlésienne, painted in 1890, is on loan from the Museu de Arte de São Paulo.  There is a similar painting, also made in 1890, held by the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome, in which Madame Ginoux smiles.  In another version from the same year, now in a private collection, the wallpaper is pale yellow with a floral pattern, the blouse is pale green, the dress pale pink and the books on the table are red.

In June 1912, Robert Walser saw yet another version of l’Arlésienne, this one painted in 1888 and now held by the Metropolitan Museum in New York.  Madame Ginoux, in three-quarter profile, stares ahead, avoiding the viewer’s gaze; a black ribbon falls from her hair onto the back of her chair; the wall behind her is bright lemon-yellow.  A book lies open on the table before her and she appears lost in thought: but what is she thinking?

In a short article, published in Kunst und Künstler, Walser struggles to find anything substantive to say about the painting, despite his obvious admiration for it.  It is, he says, “just a picture of a woman in everyday life”, but the mysterious quality of the brushwork has a “grandeur that grips and shakes you”.   Six years later, in an article published in Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Walser remembers the painting and his reaction to it.    He thinks at first that we should “pity the artist who had squandered such great industry on so low and charmless a subject”, but then says that the painting is a sort of masterpiece: “The colours and brushwork possess the most extraordinary vitality, and formally the picture is outstanding.”

Then Walser imagines Madame Ginoux speaking to him, telling him about her childhood, her family, her schooldays and her friends.  He considers her life: ordinary activities, quotidian experiences and emotions, the passing of the months and years.  And then, he continues:

One day a painter said to her – himself just a poor working man – that he would like to paint her.  She sits for him, calmly allowing him to paint her portrait.  To him she is not an indifferent model – for him, nothing and no one is indifferent.  He paints her just as she is, plain and true.  Without much intention, however, something great and noble enters into the simple picture, a solemnity of the soul it is impossible to overlook.

Walser’s process of creative imagination – what Madame Ginoux’s life was like, what van Gogh saw and felt, which he tried to capture in his portrait – is one form of active looking, one form of sensory engagement that fine art, at its best, provokes.

There are other ways of seeing.  Writing in the Bulletin of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1935, Daniel Catton Rich described the influence of Japanese print makers on van Gogh’s painting style.  He says: “Van Gogh’s greatest work in the Japanese manner is undoubtedly the startling portrait of Mme. Ginoux…” and goes on to describe the version of this portrait that had so impressed Walser, noting the probable influence of Sharaku’s work:

Sharaku, through his heightened simplifications, his distortion of feature for emotional effect may easily have suggested similar qualities for “L’Arlésienne”.  At any rate the use of a vivid background (here yellow; in Sharaku yellow, mica or silver) which, instead of absorbing the figure thrusts it forward; the brief strokes for eye, deliberately lengthened nose, and mouth – all these altered in proportion to gain new power – the angular, rhythmic silhouette, the play of flat masses of colour (note the expanses of black and white, visibly stressed) all suggest that the Dutch artist may have consulted one of Sharaku’s amazing prints.

When Catton Rich looks at the painting, he does not imagine Madame Ginoux’s childhood experiences; instead, he sees how techniques characteristic of one form of image making in one culture, have been borrowed and adapted for a different form of image making in a different culture.

Walser and Catton Rich both admire the version of L’Arlésienne that now belongs to the Met. despite the very different ways in which they describe their experience of looking at the painting.  Their interpretations are not rivals but complements and, taken together, they illustrate an important truth about looking – both looking at art and looking at the world – namely that “we live and move in what we see, but we only see what we want to see” (Paul Valéry).  Paradoxically, what we know about the world is principally determined by what we see in the world, but what we see in the world is principally determined by what we already know about the world.  All our visual perceptions are judgments and – just as in the best traditions of case law – each judgment is grounded upon a set of pre-existing beliefs and assumptions.  We never look unprecedentedly.

In the 1860s – around the time that large numbers of Japanese prints started to arrive in Paris and other European capitals – changing forever the way that Western artists saw the world, and changing the way they painted the world that they saw – leading British artists and art historians were almost universally dismissive of the work of Sandro Botticelli: “puerile ostentation”; “bad drawing and worse painting, and such revelling in ugliness”; “coarse and altogether without beauty”.  Walter Pater, whose collection of essays, The Renaissance (1873) is seen as a landmark of modern aestheticism, devotes a chapter to Botticelli and writes that, “his name, little known in the last century, is quietly becoming important”, but even he describes him as “a secondary painter” (see Frank Kermode, Forms of Attention, 1985).   One hundred and fifty years later this all seems to be nonsense.  Botticelli’s place in the premier ranks of Italian Renaissance artists seems assured: but only because tastes have changed, and because few of us think about the history of the canon.  Standards of beauty are not timeless: what we see is mostly what we are taught to see.

It would be easy – but wrong – to assume that Catton Rich looked at van Gogh’s painting only from the point of view of an art historian, whereas Walser looked only as a storyteller; easy – but wrong – to think that scholarship is an obstacle to emotional response.  Knowledge of art history helps us to contextualise a painting – the visual content, its symbolism, the structural features of the image and their meaning for the artist’s contemporaries – and this in turn allows us to judge both its success in formal terms and its merits compared against the wider canon.   So too, our emotional responses to paintings are always – yes, always – conditioned by what we think we know about the object in our view, by our upbringing, our culture and our prejudices.  We can change the way we look at art, just as we can change the way we look at the world, but to do so we must educate our sense of sight: we must train ourselves to see better.

Two years ago, I sat in a room in the Kunsthaus, Zürich with my oldest friend (by which I mean, the person who has been my friend longer than anyone else).  We were looking closely at two Claude Monet ‘water lily’ paintings, both very beautiful.  It was a weekday in February and the gallery was quiet.  We sat, undisturbed, for many minutes, staring at the huge canvases.   We talked about how we each felt when we first discovered Monet’s painting when we were teenagers; about the way in which the popularity of impressionism and the ubiquity of its most famous motifs have jaded our reception of them; and about the thrill or our unanticipated re-discovery of them – their complexity and grandeur – in this room, together on this day.

Art is a shared pleasure: we learn to look more carefully when we look in company, drawing on the insights and emotional response of others, whose judgments and honesty we trust.  It is not possible to educate our sense of sight alone, because the world that we see is a shared world, it’s objects and their meanings – and their representation, directly or abstractly, in painting – themselves the product of collective undertakings by many people over many generations.  There can be no solitary, private visual language because paintings are full of signs, and “every sign supposes a code” (Roland Barthes).  And what is true of painting is true of the world: it can be seen truly only when in company.

Recently I have visited exhibitions of work by Patrick Heron (at Tate St Ives) and Pierre Bonnard (at Tate Modern), both of whom painted gardens as a way to test the possibilities of the dissolution of form, the abandonment of perspective and generation of pictorial intensity through the adjacencies of colour.  Some of this I know because I read the catalogues, some I understand because of what I see when I look attentively at their canvases; some I remember from gardens I have visited, when the light is clear and sharp, but the borders of the flower-beds are not.  In each exhibition, I was reminded of that day in Zürich – of a shared experience of beauty and of a long and valued friendship – because Monet’s presentation of the water lilies in his garden pond at Giverny, seems to me to be a significant harbinger of colour field painting.  And, in consequence, a significant contribution to my understanding of and emotional response to the natural world: as painted forms dissolve, so the physical world manifests its complex reality.

The education of the eye is not just about the accumulation of art historical knowledge and cultivation of aesthetic taste; it is also the foundation of ethical judgement.  By learning to look carefully at the world we can teach ourselves and others to see the social world differently, leading us to treat people better, with greater sympathy, with more respect.   I think of Lucian Freud, the preeminent portrait painter in recent British art history, whose quest to capture ‘the truth’ of those who sat for him in his studio was legendary, and whose large canvases present the human form with candour, without illusion.   He is rightly admired for his work.  But …  but when I remember his major retrospective at Tate Britain in 2002, when I look through art books devoted to his work, I do not see my social world: I do not see London, I do not see Notting Hill, where Freud lived.  I see only pale flesh.

Next summer Tate Britain will host a major show of work by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, also a British portrait painter.  Her paintings are of fictional people in neutral nondescript spaces.  What makes her paintings ‘true’ is not the resemblance of the image to the person, for there is no person to resemble.  Rather they depend on the plausibility of the image: the look, the stance, the gesture, the colours of face, clothes and background.   All her portraits that I have seen are of people of African heritage, and in this sense her work challenges the dominant aesthetic of British art galleries, and the dominant ethic of British society.  She paints people who are mostly unseen, unrepresented, unheard and unwelcomed.  She is less acclaimed than Freud for her technical prowess, and I think this assessment is fair: her work at its best is very strong, but the quality is mixed.  But she presents a truth of our society that Freud shied away from, for which reason I look forward to her show next summer and the chance to look and learn more about the people who populate my world, my London.

Van Gogh was commercially unsuccessful, suffered from mental illness and killed himself in his late thirties but he changed the way we see the world: not just how sunflowers look in a vase, or how stars shine in a deep blue Mediterranean sky – although he helped us to see both of these natural phenomena anew – but also what an ordinary working woman might look like as she sat at a table, reading and thinking.  He died poor but he has enriched our view of our natural and social worlds, if only we take the time and trouble to see.