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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My Philosophy: On other possibilities
One of my favourite pieces of orchestral music is Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. In my early teens, back in the days of vinyl long-playing records, which rotated on the turntable 33 times per minute, I was given a recording which I played regularly. The music is accessible and exciting, an ideal introduction to the classical tradition. The work had been written for piano in the 1870s, but fifty years later Maurice Ravel had produced an orchestral adaptation of the score, which was the music I knew. In 1986, I watched on television as Barry Douglas played the original version in Moscow, on his way to winning the Tchaikovsky Piano Prize. I still listen to his recording, released the following year.