Golgonooza

I remember sitting on a beach with friends in Normandy.  One was reading a primer on the philosophy of religion, one was reading Karl Barth, another was reading a weighty tome on the future of Christian Democracy in Europe. I was reading Dostoyevsky - the Devils - which I subsequently threw across the room in a momentary frustration at the endless, spiraling emoting! Only Margaret appeared to be 'holiday sane' -she was reading Zadie Smith's 'White Teeth'! I was thinking on this as I pack for summer vacation in Montenegro. Somehow taking my new acquired 'kindle' feels like cheating. I do not have to sit down carefully thinking what to bring - except, of course, I am taking 'real' books as well. I am continuing to work my way through the works of Neil M Gunn - the next novel is 'The Key of the Chest'. I am haunted by his work with their blend of realistic evocation of Highland life, woven with the complexities of particular character, shot ...

The drama that is unfolding in Greece is an exemplar of that cliche, 'a slow motion train wreck'. Everyone 'knows' that a sovereign default is high likely but everyone is in denial. As you push back the likely default, it both becomes more likely and its consequences become more awful to contemplate; thus, you push it further back, trapped in a vicious circle or, more likely, a downwards spiral. I have every sympathy with the protesters at one level - this is not a crisis directly of their own making. The political class of all persuasions has conspired to have Greece live beyond it means and with entry to the euro make it less possible to escape the consequences through devaluation. But at another level methinks they protest too much - anyone who knows Greece knows the collective collusion of a bloated state and a tax evading public. If the British sin has been easy but expensive credit and a mass religion of shopping, Greece's has been imagining that you c...

http://www.forestofpeace.org/ Osage was founded by my friend, Sr Pascaline Coff, modeled after Shantivanam, the Christian ashram in India, established by Fathers Monchanin and Le Saux and carried forward by Father Bede Griffiths. Fr Bede christened Osage the 'Shantivanam of the West'. It is a located in a beautiful setting - acres of woods in rolling hills near Tulsa, Oklahoma. I fear my only image of Oklahoma, before I visited, was forged by Steinbeck's 'The Grapes of Wrath': all flatland and dust bowl. This landscape, however, was a delight. You live in your own wood cabin and can walk out into trees and bluffs that look down at a distant, quiet Arkansas river, green-grey in the distance. It has recently been reinvented as a lay community, after being a community of Benedictine Sisters, and I hope to visit in the autumn. The central building is a combination of library, communal space, kitchen and wonderful chapel that on three sides is window opening out o...

Wittgenstein once remarked that 'the difficulty was knowing when to stop'. He was referring to 'argument' - knowing what counts as an explanation and when that explanation cannot be improved upon. I was reminded of this when listening to Walton's First Symphony driving home from my mother's. Walton appears never to know when to end! Sir Michael Tippett once said of Walton that, 'he failed to renew himself'. I have always had a sense of what he meant. He does not have the depth or invention of Britten nor that capacity that Vaughan-Williams had to enter wholly new territory as he does in his 'bleak' later symphonies. Walton's music carries an instantly recognizable sense of itself including a certain sense of limit. Yet how glorious it is at its best, after the symphony, came the oratorio, Balthasar's Feast that must contain the most beautifully joyous explosion in music when the king falls, found wanting by God, and the Jews can ret...

One foot in Eden still, I stand And look across the other land. The world's great day is growing late, Yet strange these fields that we have planted So long with crops of love and hate. Time's handiworks by time are haunted, And nothing now can separate The corn and tares compactly grown. The armorial weed in stillness bound About the stalk; these are our own. Evil and good stand thick around In fields of charity and sin Where we shall lead our harvest in. Yet still from Eden springs the root As clean as on the starting day. Time takes the foliage and the fruit And burns the archetypal leaf To shapes of terror and of grief Scattered along the winter way. But famished field and blackened tree Bear flowers in Eden never known. Blossoms of grief and charity Bloom in these darkened fields alone. What had Eden ever to say Of hope and faith and pity and love Until was buried all its day And memory found its treasure trove? ...

By one of those happy coincides (or by synchronicity), the weekend after my first real experience of community after several years, I find myself reading Bishop Seraphim Sigrist's 'a life together: Wisdom of Community from the Christian East'.   http://www.amazon.com/Life-Together-Wisdom-Community-Christian/dp/1557258007/ref=cm_cr-mr-title   It is an extended meditation on the word: 'sobornost' that appeared, as he writes, newly minted in nineteenth century Russia and appears virtually untranslatable precisely because, as the Bishop suggests, it indicates a future hope yet to be realized and yet that lures us on. It was a word coined by that strand of thought called "Slavophil' that wished to demarcate a place of community that navigates between the twin poles of 'individualism' and 'collectivism'. It is a vision of community that delights in the difference of persons and sees in their journeying together those differences as complementa...

Reading biography is always an exercise in surprise. The first is usually to discover a biograophy that manages to strike the right balance between narrative and detail: modern biography apparently wants to drown the former in a tsunami of the latter until you expert the inevitably thick volume to be supplemented by appendices of laundry lists and itemized daily expenditures (I did have a chemistry teacher at school who did the latter - detailed notebooks of every expenditure, stretching back to the 30s lined his office)! The second that manages to meaningfully address the subject's inner life in ways that are illuminating (rather than merely speculative or, worse, psychoanalytic)! Anne Chisholm's life of Rumer Godden is achieving both though occasionally you would like a touch more depth... Reading today of the making of the film, 'The River' a transformation of her book of the same title by Jean Renoir, I discovered, incidentally, that it was Patrick White...