Author: Mark Hannam

For a long time, I have enjoyed reading the work of Marcel Proust, who died one hundred years ago this week, in November 1922.

Proust’s most famous book, À la Recherche du Temps Perdu was initially translated into English as Remembrance of Things Past and then later as In Search of Lost Time, and both titles describe something important about the content of the work, that it is concerned with the operation of memory and that we experience the passage of time as loss, although neither English title quite captures the ambiguity and élan of the original French, and which tells of the perpetual struggle to keep fixed in one’s mind that which is forever fading away, and the paradoxical truth that as we grow older we have more experience of life to draw upon but we have also more that is forgotten, either partially or wholly, and this personal experience of the accumulation of knowledge that is never fully accessible to us – and, as Swann was to discover and Marcel was to repeat, such knowledge often takes the form of wisdom after the event – is also replicated in society at large, where we are surrounded by evidence of previous eras, accumulated over many generations, in the form of church spires, the names of towns, the great aristocratic families with their distinctive lineages and estates, the famous artworks of earlier periods hung in galleries or frescoed onto walls, and the culinary customs passed down within families that specify how asparagus should be cooked or that madeleines might permissibly be dipped into the tisanes with which they are served, all this social and cultural history both grows and fades at the same time, indubitably present in shaping our lives while often bereft of the values that once attached to it, simultaneously in and out of our conscious reach, and that consequently both our individual and our collective lives are conducted in a world that is saturated with meanings many of which we are no longer aware of, unless or until some accidental moment or event – unintended and involuntary – jolts our memory and brings back to our recollection something from our past that casts light upon the present, and suddenly – miraculously – we gain or regain insight into the true meaning of our lives.  

Continue reading “Marcel”

There is a familiar storyline in classic European novels, in which a young man from a wealthy family wastes his inheritance through foolish behaviour.  In Russian examples this generally involves running up massive losses at gambling tables, whereas in the most famous German example – Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks – it occurs when the northern virtues of diligent labour and prudent trading are abandoned in favour of the southern vices of impulse and the cultivation of an artistic temperament.  The reckless squandering of great wealth that had been carefully accumulated by one’s ancestors is presented to the reader as an evident sign of personal irresponsibility and, more widely, social decline.  It is far less common to read of older people of modest means, whose ethical failing consists in indebting their great grandchildren.  I find this surprising, since duties, presumably, should run in both directions, up and down the family tree.

One of the many achievements of the welfare state, which became the dominant socio-economic model in the Western world in the second half of the twentieth century, was that it replaced the lottery of family inheritance with a safety net that guarantees a minimum of goods and services to all citizens, regardless of what might be passed down by their families.  Irrespective of what kin supplied, kith ensured a decent standard of living for all.  That was the basic idea.  Lately, as the cost of goods and services continues to rise – due in part to a steady expansion of expectation as to what might be included in the baseline package – and widespread resistance to higher taxation grows, Western societies have all – to a greater or lesser extent – decided that their welfare state should be partly funded by future citizens.

Public debt is deferred taxation; spend now, pay later.  There are all sorts of reasons for thinking that this a sensible way of managing the mismatch between the appetite for services and the willingness to pay for them through the tax system.  Spreading costs over time has long been understood as a good strategy for individuals – using mortgage payments to buy a house, or insurance premiums to cover the risk of having to replace a major item that might be lost – and using borrowing to fund investments that will improve future profitability is well understood as a rationale for corporate leverage – the increased productivity achieved by upgrading machinery or premises, or the improving sales that follow from a large marketing campaign –  so it should come as no surprise that a similar approach has been adopted by governments.  The national debt exists, so it is said, not to burden future generations but to increase their inheritance: it should not be thought of as a liability that we pass on, but as a mechanism for increasing the size of the legacy we leave behind.  Well, maybe.

Continue reading “No taxation without representation”

In 49 BC, on a cold winter night, the advanced guard of the 13^th Legion of the Senate and People of Rome reached a small stream that flowed towards the Mediterranean.  This was the Rubicon, a waterway of such little geomorphological importance that today no-one really knows where it ran from and to: its location has been lost.  Minor in physical terms, it was nonetheless major in symbolic terms, for the Rubicon formed part of the frontier between Italy and Gaul, between Rome’s domestic territory and its foreign dominions.  It the 13^th Legion crossed the Rubicon, they were in effect declaring the start of a civil war, a repudiation of the republican form of government that had existed in Rome for almost five hundred years, its traditions, its laws, its aversion to monarchy, and the clear separation between the violence used to suppress enemies abroad and the electoral process used to settle arguments at home.  The commander of the 13^th Legion – Gaius Julius Caesar – paused at the stream, contemplating the potential consequences of his next steps.  

Caesar was aware of the likely immediate impact of his actions, but perhaps not even he could fully understand the historical significance of the symbolic act that he was about to undertake.  A contemporary British historian notes that, in Europe, because of Caesar’s action, a thousand years of civic self-government were brought to an end, and not for a thousand years and more, would it become a living reality again.  (Tom Holland, Rubicon, 2003.)  Caesar overthrew the Roman republic and inaugurated two millennium of monarchic and imperial government, the legacies of which remain today in Europe: the designations ‘Kaiser’ and ‘Czar’ are both derivations of Caesar’s name, and while he might call himself the President of Russia, it seems clear that Mr Putin considers himself an heir to the form of militarist dictatorship that Gaius Julius established at Rome. 

Continue reading “Crossing the Rubicon”

Shoreditch – where I happily live – attracts large crowds on Friday and Saturday nights, dressed in a variety of colourful but wholly impractical costumes, spilling out onto the streets from the cocktail bars, clubs, and restaurants: clothes for show: circus wear.  Early the following morning the streets are cleaned by men and women in heavy boots, overalls, and thick gloves, who remove the vast amounts of debris – glasses, bottles, discarded food containers, and nitrous oxide canisters – and sweep-up and wash the pavements and kerbsides.  The Sunday morning crowd is dressed for work, not pleasure: function trumps style: industrial wear.   

Our attire is a sign of our standing, of our place in the world.  If I were to wander through an art museum, looking at figurative paintings from, say, Bruegel onwards, it would be easy to distinguish those who must work to live from those who lived off the work of others.  It is said that the clerical class in ancient China grew their fingernails long, to make it obvious to others that they worked at desks rather than by manual labour.  In Hans Holbein’s portrait of Erasmus, painted in 1523, the nails are short but the fingers inky: scholarly hands.

If the style of our clothes tells a story about who we are and how we live, the fabric from which our clothes are made tells a different but equally important story about the trade in raw materials and manufactured goods.  Whereas once most people wore clothes that were made locally from materials that were gathered locally – whether animal skins or plant products – today’s clothes are manufactured in places where labour is cheap and transport links are good, from a wide range of natural and synthetic materials that are often sourced far away from where the garments are sold.  What we wear today reflects our position in a complex global trading system.  While economists tend to focus on the processes of manufacturing and distribution, quantifying the financial value of goods made, transported, and sold, it is artists who are best able to help us think about what this means for both makers and buyers, to consider the symbolic value of the fabrics within which we wrap ourselves.

Continue reading “Art and commerce”

There is a beautiful passage in Anna Karenina (part III, chapters 4 and 5) which describes the pleasure to be found in demanding physical work.  Konstantin Lévin, a landowner, spends a day with a group of forty muzhiks – peasants who work for him on his land – harvesting the summer grass.  They work in a long row, each man with a regularly sharpened scythe, cutting a swathe through the meadows under the heat of the sun. The day is long and hard, especially for Lévin who is unused to hours of repetitive physical work, but he finds happiness in belonging to this collective endeavour, seeing the large fields of his property transformed around him.  At some moments, he loses all sense of time and place, the rhythmical movements of his arms and legs becoming automatic, his mind at ease, as if his blade acted upon its own will: In this hottest time the mowing did not seem so hard to him.  The sweat that drenched him cooled him off, and the sun, burning on his back, head and arm with its sleeve rolled to the elbow, gave him firmness and perseverance in his work; more and more often those moments of unconsciousness came, when it was possible for him not to think of what he was doing.  The scythe cut by itself.  These were happy moments.  

Agricultural workers around the world would have cut grass together each year in a similar way for hundreds of years.  However, in 1877, when Tolstoy’s novel was published, machines were routinely supplanting human labour: the novel ends – famously – with a woman’s suicide assisted by a train.   The process of automation of work has continued ever since.  The modern farmer no longer has need of forty men to cut the grass of her fields: instead, she will have a tractor driven perhaps by a computer.  She will have other machines to bale the hay and transport it to where it will be stored for the winter.  Today, work is more about controlling machines than swinging scythes, which means much less sweat but much greater productivity. 

Continue reading “Hard work”