Feb 082013
 

Thanks to Dr Phillips (whom God preserve, of New Jersey) we now know the answer to the question at the end of last entry.

We talked of war. Johnson: “Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been at sea.” Boswell: “Lord Mansfield does not.” Johnson: “Sir, if Lord Mansfield were in a company of General Officers and Admirals who have been in service, he would shrink; he’d wish to creep under the table.” Boswell: “”No; he’d think he could try them all.” Johnson: “Yes, if he could catch them: but they’d try him much sooner. No, Sir; were Socrates and Charles the Twelfth of Sweden both present in any company, and Socrates to say, ‘Follow me, and hear a lecture on philosophy;’ and Charles, laying his hand on his sword, to say, ‘Follow me, and dethrone the Czar;’ a man would be ashamed to follow Socrates. Sir, the impression is universal; yet it is strange.

As to the sailor, when you look down from the quarter deck to the space below, you see the utmost extremity of human misery; such crouding, such filth, such stench!” Boswell: “Yet sailors are happy.” Johnson: “They are happy as brutes are happy, with a piece of fresh meat, –with the grossest sensuality. But, Sir, the profession of soldiers and sailors has the dignity of danger. Mankind reverence those who have got over fear, which is so general a weakness.” Scott: “But is not courage mechanical, and to be acquired?” Johnson: “Why yes, Sir, in a collective sense. Soldiers consider themselves only as parts of a great machine.” Scott: “We find people fond of being sailors.” Johnson: “I cannot account for that, any more than I can account for other strange perversions of imagination.”

Boswell, Life

Feb 052013
 

Back and refreshed after a summer holiday interspersed with  bushfire alarms. We all admire those bravely-smiling people who stagger out of the ashes and vow to rebuild having learnt that possessions are worthless. Good on them, but Goethe got it right: when we  are young, we value what we are; when we are older we value what we have. Besides, there are rarely follow-ups of survivors six months later; when there are, the picture is very different.  Yet . . . there is something appealing about facing the world with just a passport and a few photograph albums, especially if you are heavily insured. The lure of re-invention? The desire to face and pass some ultimate test?man-on-roof

Since Black Saturday, our bushfire survival policy has been straightforward: run away. But a couple of weeks ago I was at home on one of those trigger days. The rest of the family were safely elsewhere. Go, they said, so in the end I went. But I had to overcome a steady and mounting anger which made me want to stay and fight. Unlike the sort of anger that makes you shake and lose control, this variety is like a slow invigorating burn. You bastard, I won’t let you – that sort of feeling. I guess that’s the good ol’ adrenaline talking, and that must be what sustains the guys who stand on the roof in shorts and thongs with a garden hose. (Plenty of those in the Canberra fires.) This I have felt before when deeply menaced, and it’s good to know it’s there. How long it would last before stark terror set in I hope not to find out.

Who was it said every man as he ages wishes he had been a soldier or a sailor?

Sep 302012
 

Under this heading, a poster on pianostreet asks the forum:

Often devotional music is used in one breath with the ecstatic, what is it, and is the reason we lost it got something to do with the upcoming age of individuality? When it became more about the singer not the song? Is, to quote Glenn Gould, :”solitude a prerequisite for the ecstatic” and the ego-driven music of today antithetical to the self-reflective ecstatic music of the past?

Good questions. There’s only one response on that forum: No, it hasn’t been lost, and we find it in other kinds of music. Fair enough – it’s easy to imagine people making claims for experiencing ecstasy at a rock concert, listening to the minimalists, holy or otherwise, jazz. But the poster’s question is about a quality specific to devotional music of one period, and I’ll stick to that. Here’s a hostage: a cantata by Johann Schelle, one of Bach’s predecessors at Leipzig. (The glorious performance is by Robert King and The Kings Consort.)