Category: Living

Playing Monopoly as a child, I soon learned that being sent to jail was disadvantageous early in the game, since it prevented me from landing on unowned sites and taking the opportunity to buy them and build up my property empire.  By contrast, spending time in jail was highly advantageous later in the game since it offered me a safe-haven from where I could avoid the risk of landing on property sites – heavily developed with houses or hotels – owned by my competitors.  Being in jail, from time to time, was just part of playing the game, there was no shame involved.

Later in life, I learned about people who had gone to jail for reasons of principle.  Nelson Mandela spent twenty-seven years in prison for his opposition to the Apartheid regime, more than half of which were spent on Robben Island where he was forced to undertake hard labour in a quarry, and where he was allowed one visit – for thirty minutes – per year.  Martin Luther King Jr. wrote an open letter from Birmingham Jail in 1963, which became a key document of the American Civil Rights movement.   Mohandas Gandhi, one of King’s role models, had been a regular guest of British jails in South Africa and India, deliberately breaking unjust laws and accepting imprisonment as the consequence, to draw attention to the iniquities of colonial rule.  In 1846, Henry David Thoreau, from whose writings Gandhi would draw inspiration, spent a night in Concord jail for refusing to pay his taxes, which he feared would help to fund the American war against Mexico, to which he strongly objected.  If we assume that the laws are just and that the courts follow due process, then imprisonment is badge of shame, but there are occasions when the laws are not just and the legal processes are faulty, and in these cases, I came to understand, being sent to jail might be considered a badge of honour. 

Continue reading “Go to jail”

Here in the states, there’s an insurance company called GEICO – the Government Employees Insurance Company – which is owned by Berkshire Hathaway (Warren Buffett’s investment vehicle). They’re known for their tongue in cheek advertisements, one of which currently involves a motivational speaker who teaches people to “not become their parents” when they become homeowners. The conceit is that once you buy a house, you’ll start wearing Members Only jackets, buy throw pillows with embroidered trite expressions, and stop knowing how to interact with wait staff at restaurants without speaking too loudly and asking embarrassing questions. It works, although how it relates to bundling auto and homeowners insurance does escape me. In any event – I’ve come to realise lately that I’ve descended into post-middle age crankiness: I’m writing on the local newspaper’s comment section.

Continue reading “Monopoly”

Not far from where I live in London there is a small museum dedicated to modern Italian art.  It was founded to display the collection of Erik and Salome Estorick, who lived in England for some years in the late 1940s and early 1950s, from where they travelled regularly to Italy to meet with artists and buy paintings and drawings.  In the museum’s permanent collection there are several works by Giorgio Morandi, the greatest European still-life painter of the twentieth century and, whenever I visit the museum, I like to spend some time in the room where his work is on display.  His etchings achieve a wonderful sense of depth by means of simple variations in the density of the lines, while in his paintings, with their narrow range of creamy blues, greys, and whites, he generates a curious combination of calmness and vitality. 

The English term “still-life” refers to paintings that portray neither the human figure nor the landscape, but everyday household objects: vases, glasses, and pots in Morandi’s work; other painters have included cutlery, bowls, dishes, flowers, fish, vegetables, fruit, musical instruments, pens, ink, manuscripts, and books. Still-life painting draws attention to the technical skill of the artist – the ability to represent light and shadow on a wide variety of shapes and surfaces – while also drawing attention to everyday objects to which we often pay little heed.  One of the best books of art criticism that describes the history and characteristics of the genre, by Norman Bryson, is called Looking at the Overlooked, which nicely captures the sense that these paintings are designed to remind us of what is familiar but routinely neglected.  Sometimes these artworks include hourglasses or clocks, to signal to the viewer the importance of the passage of time, and in other cases they include human skulls, to signal that life is finite.   The French name for the genre, nature morte, translates literally as “dead nature”, which make this point rather more bluntly than its euphemistic English equivalent: inert matter might sometimes be overlooked in its stillness, but organic matter is always in transit from birth to death.

Continue reading “Selfie”

So June 19 is the anniversary of something important in American history – it’s the day that, officially, the abolition of the legal institution of slavery was promulgated in the last rebel state to lay down arms in the Civil War, Texas. There had been the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 but that was a bit of a con job: Lincoln announced that slavery was outlawed in those states that had rebelled against the Constitution and the Union, but the Union largely had no control over the regions affected – and in states that had not rebelled, slavery remained legal. The 13th Amendment to the US constitution declared slavery illegal in all of the United States in December of 1865, but with the military defeat of the rebel states in April of 1865, the Union government had the power and the authority to enforce the Proclamation of 1863, and it was finally promulgated in that last large bastion of slavery on June 19, 1865. Given that both Mexico and Canada had long since eliminated the peculiar institution, we can thus celebrate June 19 – Juneteenth, as it came to be known by the newly freed black in the South – as the last day of chattel slavery in North America.

And as we all know, it was not the last day of racism in continental North America. Or anywhere.

Continue reading “Juneteenth”

I started to write this text on Bloomsday, famously the calendar day on which James Joyce’s great novel Ulysses is set.   Joyce borrowed the title and structure of his book from Homer, although Odysseus (to give him his original Greek name) took ten years to travel from Illium to Ithaca after spending ten years fighting at the siege of Troy, whereas Leopold Bloom wanders around Dublin for fewer than twenty hours.  Joyce is said to have chosen to set his story on 16^th June 1904 because that was the day of his first romantic outing with Nora Barnacle, whom he later married, although it is not clear to me whether this act of homage was to celebrate her loyalty to him, as Penelope to Odysseus, or her disloyalty, as Molly to Leopold.   

I have been re-reading Ulysses at a leisurely pace, enjoying its jokes, provocations, and digressions, alongside its description of the many ways in which we are prone to self-deception but also capable of moments of self-enlightenment, and for its sympathetic reminder that during the journey of life youthful ambition often develops into mature disappointment.  Along with several other lengthy novels published in the 1920s and ‘30s – Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, Mann’s The Magic Mountain, Musil’s The Man Without Qualities – Joyce’s work invites a slow pace, allowing the reader to savour the complex meanderings of plot and explorations of character.   For all my enjoyment of his work, I had not been planning to write about Joyce in this text, the theme of which is our sense of a persistent identity through the passage of time.  Then, a day or two ago, I came across this incident in Ulysses, which acted as a catalyst for my thoughts.

Continue reading “Backwards and forwards”