Author: Mark Hannam

In the spring of 2018, I went to the Royal Ballet in London to see a performance that celebrated the centenary of the birth of Leonard Bernstein, the American composer and conductor.  One of the three items on the programme was a revival of The Age of Anxiety, first performed in 1950 with choreography by Jerome Robbins (who also collaborated with Bernstein on the musicals On the Town and West Side Story).  Robbins used Berstein’s second symphony as the setting for his ballet, which had premiered in April the previous year, conducted by the legendary music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Serge Koussevitzky.   (Here is an early recording of the symphony, with Bernstein conducting, from 1950.)  This score was Berstein’s musical reinterpretation of a long, book-length poem of the same name by the expatriate English poet Wystan Hugh Auden, written in America towards the end of the second world war, and published in 1947.

Auden’s poem The Age of Anxiety was immediately recognised as having captured something of the spirit of the age of those post-war years, but more for its snappy title than for its unperspicuous contents.  Today the poem remains better known for Bernstein’s musical adaptation and Robbins’s ballet – which Auden reportedly disliked – than for the ideas presented in verse.  It is structured as a discussion between four people who meet by chance in a New York bar, but this is no simple late night conversation or pub argument.  Rather, Auden offers his readers a sophisticated attempt to analyse the problematic spiritual condition of modern western societies, characterised by the loss of traditional faith and the loss of a sense of shared community.  The opportunity to exploit these absences for our own advantage, “the temptation to sin” – which, a few years earlier, Auden had described as “what the psychologist calls anxiety, and the Christian calls lack of faith” – is contrasted with the opportunity to establish community and solidarity with others, who share both our recognition of this loss and the sense of impossibility of recovering faith or community in their tradition senses.

Continue reading “The anxiety of age”

Last month, I travelled to a small industrial estate a few kilometres outside Reading, where I spent three hours undergoing a series of medical tests.  I am not ill, and I am not aware of any serious underlying health conditions or significant risk factors that I should be concerned about.  I was not being treated, instead I was participating in a medical research project, that aims to gather data about the health of a large number of people over a lengthy period of time.

Biobank was established in the UK between 2006 and 2010 and has a cohort of just over half-a-million volunteers, who were aged between 40 and 69 when they joined the project.  This makes it the largest and most detailed research study that traces the long-term health outcomes for people in the Western world, with vast amounts of data on biological, environmental, and lifestyle factors that impact the development of a range of diseases and health conditions.  I joined in 2009, and at the outset I went through a series of tests to get baseline data on my health.  These included blood and urine samples, measures of blood pressure, my weight and height, a series of online cognitive tests – the sorts of memory and pattern recognition exercises that teenagers now do for standardised testing – together with some lifestyle questions about diet, exercise, sleep patterns, and my own perceptions of my degree of social interaction or loneliness, and my levels of happiness.  Since then I have been asked several times to complete online questionnaires on various aspects of my health and my sense of well-being, and on a couple of occasions I have also worn a wristband containing a small tracking device for a week, which measured my movement and activity. 

Continue reading “Knowledge and human interests”

On a recent trip to Rome, I visited the Galleria Borghese where I stood for several minutes admiring Caravaggio’s David with the Head of Goliath (1609/10). It is an impressive painting.  David, young and lean, but not overly muscular, holds his enemy’s head away from his body with his left hand, his facial expression more meditative than triumphant.  In his other hand he holds Goliath’s sword, which he has used against his dead foe.  Blood flows from Goliath’s neck, suggesting his decapitation has only just occurred, his fixed final facial expression is of shock and surprise, in contrast to the dispassion of his conqueror.  This is a picture that portrays victory in combat not exultantly but with nuance and sympathy.

Caravaggio had painted this scene at least twice previously: there is a version from 1606/07, now in Vienna, similar in construction, with David’s upper body once again half-covered by a thin white shirt, although in this version the different position of his right arm (which is almost invisible in the Rome painting), holding the sword behind his head, draws our gaze away from Goliath.  I think the Roman version has a stronger compositional structure.   Another version of the scene, from 1598/99, now in Madrid, shows the moment at which David severs the head from the body.  Goliath’s face, in the bottom right corner, is less expressive than in the later paintings, but David’s face is partially obscured by shadow: it is almost as if Goliath’s head has fallen from David’s body.  All three paintings remind us of Caravaggio’s innovative and virtuosic use of light and shadow in his construction of the scene, and his delight in the portrayal of young male flesh.  Beyond his technical mastery, he also interprets the story for us, the victory of the young, unknown Israeli shepherd boy over the giant Philistine warrior.

Continue reading “Severed heads”

Last month, from the comfort of my London home, I watched the final stage of the Tour de France around the streets of Paris, as one-hundred-and-sixty brightly clad cyclists completed the last day of the  race, whose total course measured just over 3,300km.  After a processional ride into the city, the contest began in earnest with the final section of the route taking the riders three times up the narrow, slippery, cobbled streets of Montmartre, past the Basilique du Sacré-Coeur, and then down towards to the finish line on the Champs-Élysée.  It was a sporting spectacle of the highest quality, a hotly competitive finale – after three weeks of intense racing – set amidst the many famous monuments of the French capital, the whole route packed with enthusiastic spectators, despite the pouring rain.  I wish I could have been there in person, to see first-hand the culmination of the justly famous race in this justly famous city. 

It is hard to imagine anything comparable in London, except perhaps the five-day Test Match at the Oval that took place at the start of this month, in which India beat England by six runs, in one of the great games of recent cricket history.  It is not my intention to debate the relative merits of Tour cycling versus Test cricket, but rather to note that these great sporting moments took place in the two greatest cities of Europe, long time competitors, but nowadays more siblings than rivals: two cities that are slowly turning themselves into exemplars of modern democratic urbanism. 

Continue reading “A tale of two cities”

There is an ancient Indian story about a frog that lived in a well – Kūpamaṇḍūka – and for this frog the small well was all that was the case, it was the whole of the frog’s world.  When a visiting frog told of the vast size of the ocean, much greater than the little well, the frog in the well dismissed the story as a lie.  What the frog in the well did not know first-hand, the frog in the well could not conceive.  It is a good story, with plenty of contemporary resonance.   

We might describe the frog in the well as being provincial, meaning that it exhibited the character, and in particular the narrowness of view, that is associated with those who inhabit the provinces and lack the polish and sophistication of those who live in the metropole.  Along with conflict between the generations, this is one of literature’s great themes: the resistance of those who know very little of the world to the wisdom of those who know much more, and of the comfort that is to be had in living in a small well-like world in which everything is fixed and familiar.  Several books that I have recently read play with this theme, of the clash between those who are – or, at least, who think they are – sophisticated and cosmopolitan, and those who are –  knowingly or not – determinedly narrow and unpolished. 

Continue reading “Frog in a well”