Self Portrait with Red Braces, 2003

1 - He failed his exams deliberately. At his Bradford secondary school in the early 1950s, academically promising boys were required to drop art as a subject. It was the serious stuff that awaited them. So Hockney, already certain at fifteen that he was going to be a painter, sat his exams and underperformed on purpose. The plan worked; he was allowed to keep studying art. I’ll go out on a limb and say that this was a good thing. I wish I could report on an updated attitude towards the arts in the secondary schools of 2026.

2 - He described his early paintings as “homosexual propaganda.” He came out publicly at twenty-three, in 1960, when homosexuality was still a criminal offence in England. His early canvases featured naked men, lovers in beds, and figures drawn from physique magazines. They were produced at a moment when virtually no visible queer imagery existed in British fine art. Works like We Two Boys Together Clinging (1961), titled after a Walt Whitman poem, made male intimacy explicit at a time when such things were genuinely illegal.

3 - He stole a book of poems from Bradford Public Library. As a teenager, Hockney discovered C.P. Cavafy in his local library and liked him so much that he pocketed the copy and never returned it. In 1966, living in California by then, he produced Illustrations for Fourteen Poems by C.P. Cavafy: etchings depicting young male couples, tender and unashamed, in bed together. He was making explicit what the poems only hinted at. He even travelled to Beirut that year in search of the atmosphere of Cavafy’s Alexandria.

4 - He invented a “Wagner drive” along the Pacific Coast Highway. He once said he didn’t merely love Wagner; he was addicted to Wagner. He attended the Bayreuth Festival three times, and at his Malibu beach house he began plotting driving routes along the PCH timed to specific Wagner selections. He called this his “Wagner Drive,” a private audiovisual artwork performed for guests in his red convertible Mercedes. “You’d come around a corner,” he said, “and as the music rose you’d see the setting sun suddenly revealed.”

Pacific Coast Highway and Santa Monica, 1990

5 - He cast Picasso as the teacher and himself as the model. His admiration for Picasso was the deepest artistic attachment of his life. He said once that he found in Picasso a kindred spirit in the relentless pursuit of “transformation.” In 1973 he made an etching called Artist and Model in which Picasso is depicted seated as the artist and Hockney himself appears as the subject: a witty, generous act of homage that was also a frank admission that he, in some sense, had been made by the great Spaniard.

6 - He spent two years trying to prove that Vermeer cheated. This is an odd one. In 2001, Hockney published the book Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters, arguing that painters including Vermeer, Caravaggio, Holbein, Hals, and Velázquez had used lenses and mirrors to project images onto their canvases, which they then traced. This was, and still is, a controversial point of view.

His evidence was partly visual: the transition toward photographic naturalism in Western painting around 1420 was too abrupt to be explained by new habits of seeing alone. It suggested, for Hockney, a technical breakthrough. He pointed to foreground objects in Vermeer’s paintings that appear slightly out of focus, and to the fact that Vermeer was close friends with a lens-maker. Art historians were not uniformly persuaded, and the debate has never been fully settled.

Illustration of a “portable” camera obscura studio in Kircher’s Ars Magna Lucis Et Umbrae (1645)

7 - He was painting every day until the end. In 2020, locked down in his Norman farmhouse, he began making daily iPad paintings of the seasons arriving in his garden. He sent them out to friends with a note reading “Spring cannot be cancelled.”

A few years later, in an interview, he said “I assume I’ll die soon, so I want to work every day.”

8 - Lastly, a poem, which I happened across on the same day, 11th of June 2026, that I heard about Hockney’s death. The parallels seemed too neat to ignore.

Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year,

I felt a door opening in me and I entered

the clarity of early morning.

One after another my former lives were departing,

like ships, together with their sorrow.

And the countries, cities, gardens, the bays of seas

assigned to my brush came closer,

ready now to be described better than they were before.

I was not separated from people,

grief and pity joined us.

We forget—I kept saying—that we are all children of the King.

For where we come from there is no division

into Yes and No, into is, was, and will be.

We were miserable, we used no more than a hundredth part

of the gift we received for our long journey.

Moments from yesterday and from centuries ago—

a sword blow, the painting of eyelashes before a mirror

of polished metal, a lethal musket shot, a caravel

staving its hull against a reef—they dwell in us,

waiting for a fulfillment.

I knew, always, that I would be a worker in the vineyard,

as are all men and women living at the same time,

whether they are aware of it or not.

Late Ripeness by Czeslaw Milosz, Translated By Robert Hass & Czeslaw Milosz

May he rest in peace.

All the best until next time.

There’s a painting by Paul Klee that Walter Benjamin liked to talk about. He had bought it in Munich when he was twenty-eight and kept it with him through his exile from Germany, through Paris, and through the increasingly desperate years of the late thirties. It isn’t obviously beautiful. It’s small (you could cover it with both hands) and shows a figure that might be an angel, though it has none of the serenity the word usually implies. Its eyes are wide, its mouth is open, its wings are spread awkwardly to either side and it appears to be looking intently at something the viewer can’t see.

Angelus Novus (New Angel), Paul Klee, 1920

Benjamin wrote about this painting in a room somewhere in Paris in 1940. It would be among the last things he ever wrote. The Nazis were already in the city and the Soviet pact had collapsed whatever remained of the left’s consoling narrative. Benjamin was fifty-one, stateless, and running out of options. He’d soon take his own life.

What he wrote, under those circumstances, remains one of the most interesting essays I’ve ever encountered. It’s hard to explain exactly what it is. Part philosophy of history (that’s the title he chose for it, after all), part theory of time, part story about what history does to the people living inside it. It’s written, if I haven’t confused you enough already, in eighteen fragments: less like an argument and more like a series of images laid out carefully on a table. There’s revolutionaries shooting at clock-towers, a chess-playing puppet with a hunchback inside it and, at its centre, the angel, painted by one of the greatest hands in twentieth century art, owned by one the greatest minds in twentieth century thought, illustrating for us the way in which we’ve been wrong, catastrophically wrong, about what time is and what history is for.

The opening fragment tells a story. In the eighteenth century, there was an automaton, known by some as the mechanical Turk. He (it) was dressed in robes and sat before a chessboard upon which it would take on, and beat, any human opponent. Famous across Europe, the machine had defeated, apparently, Napoleón Bonaparte and Catherine the Great, operating, it was thought, by pure mechanism, by the clean movement of cogs and levers and calculated probability. The trouble was that it was all a fraud. The catch, when it was eventually exposed, was that there was a tiny hidden grandmaster folded up inside the cabinet, pulling the strings. The machine might have looked like it was thinking, but it wasn’t. Something else was doing the thinking, and was keeping very quiet about it.

A cross-section of the Mechanical Turk, imagined by Joseph Racknitz

Benjamin’s point is about the nature of historical thinking in the twentieth century. The puppet, he says, is “historical materialism,” whilst the hidden player turns out to be theology. His argument is that Marxist historical analysis, however powerful, is built on a similar lie to the famous mechanical Turk. It appears to win its arguments by rational analysis alone, shunning God in favour of economics, class, and an argument about material conditions, but the real operator of the engine is cramped up inside the box. When fully exposed, historical materialism has secretly always depended on a kind of theology, a quasi-religious sense that history has meaning and is pointing in a certain direction.

Benjamin, in that Parisian room in 1940, prized Angelus Novus hanging over his desk, on a continent that was crumbling all over again, could see with all too much clarity how wrong this belief had been.

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“Every artist keeps within himself a single source that during his lifetime nourishes what he is and what he says [...] I know that my source is the world of poverty and sunlight I lived in for so long, whose memory still saves me from two opposing dangers that threaten every artist: resentment and self-satisfaction.”

That’s Albert Camus, writing about his childhood in French Algeria, a place halfway between poverty and sunlight.

This photo from 1920 shows 7-year-old Albert Camus (centre, wearing black suit) in the workshop of his Uncle Etienne in Algiers

2 - Eugène Fromentin was the most sustained artistic chronicler of Algeria across the 1840s–60s. He was a master of capturing the light, dust, and the specific weight of desert air. Here’s a few of his Algerian scenes Camus would have recognised.

3 - Camus’ treatment of envy finds company in the words of Francis Bacon, who writes in Of Envy (1625) that:

“Envy is the vilest affection, and the most depraved; for which cause it is the proper attribute of the Devil, who is called The envious man that soweth tares amongst the wheat by night.”

4 - But it’s the sunshine that will save Camus from envy’s grip

“Among my many weaknesses, I have never discovered that widespread failing, envy: the true cancer of societies and doctrines. [...] The sun that reigned over my childhood freed me from all resentment.”

5 - I happened, this week, upon Bill Fay’s self titled debut album rummaging through a charity record crate, and was touched by his modesty in the following passage featured on the sleeve notes. His story about the last time he dared show someone his creative output is a blunt reminder of the responsibility of educators coming into contact with something tender, unfinished, and not yet sure of itself...

6 - The general mood of the album is captured brilliantly by Rob Young in Electronic Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music. He writes

“Bill Fay is peopled with characters from an England still in its post-war throes, valiantly soldiering on, living with their dreams, memories and private griefs. Mundane exteriors can shelter deeper hurts, stranger notions. Old May lost her boy in the Great War, but could still belt out sentimental tunes down the boozer, the ‘ones we know so well’. Stan, ‘an innocent soul in a vastly changing world’, scuttling home from the allotment at night with only a watering can to protect himself from being abducted to Mars, ‘or was it Jupiter?’ And Gentle Willie, who went to war, deserted his platoon, built a tower to protect himself, and found himself on his battlements with a ringside seat over even more carnage. These were the damaged, who had fought to preserve England’s green and pleasant land, but felt excluded from the Aquarian Age.”

7 - A few pages earlier he had delivered a veritable who’s who of early seventies British folk influenced singer-songwriters. If this is your bag, then this is some list:

“In Britain, Anne Briggs, Jansch and Renbourn, Bridget St John, Roy Harper, Donovan, Al Stewart, Sandy Denny, Cat Stevens, Ralph McTell, Al Jones, lan A. Anderson, Andy Roberts, Shelagh McDonald, Steve Ashley, Keith Christmas, John Martyn, Kevin Ayers, Marc Brierley, Beverley Martyn, Gillian McPherson, Kevin Coyne, Van Morrison, Meic Stevens, Linda Peters, Bill Fay, Nick Drake, Tim Hollier and Robin Scott delivered songs reporting on the state of the world or the vagaries of their own interior lives, from the political harangue to the intimate confessional.”

8 - I’ll leave you with some Buddhist wisdom, courtesy of Śāriputra as interpreted by Thich Nhat Hanh in The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching

Śākyamuni Buddha with his two principal students, Shariputra (right) and Maudgalyayana (left). Image courtesy of Himalayan Art Resources

Right View is, for Śāriputra, the ability to distinguish between wholesome roots (kushala mula) and unwholesome ones (akushala mula).

“In each of us, there are wholesome and unwholesome roots or seeds in the depths of our consciousness. If you are a loyal person, it is because the seed of loyalty is in you. But don’t think that the seed of betrayal isn’t also in you. If you live in an environment where your seed of loyalty is watered, you will be a loyal person. But if your seed of betrayal is watered, you may betray even those you love. You’ll feel guilty about it, but if the seed of betrayal in you becomes strong, you may do it.”

Until next time, then, keep those wholesome roots watered

I hope I’m not too niche this week, but I’ve been wanting for a while to cover a topic which, as a linguist and father of young children, is very close to my heart. It involves chimpanzees, a sparrow on a windowsill and an argument for why the most important thing your child ever did was something you probably didn’t even notice. Here’s hoping I’ve built enough trust that at least some of you will come along with me.

Let’s start with the sparrow. I think it was a sparrow. It came and went rather quickly and my knowledge of garden birds, truth be told, isn’t quite where I’d like it to be. It had that sort of brownish tone to it, which makes it either a male sparrow or a female chaffinch. I think. Anyway, it made its presence felt on my windowsill something close to eighteen months ago, remaining for little more than a few seconds, before looking me in the eye and speeding away as quickly as one of my college students with outstanding coursework.

The important part of this story hasn’t got much to do with the sparrow, but rather what my little boy, who was around about 9 months old at the time, did when he noticed it. It was a really simple gesture, so much so that you’d be forgiven for barely registering it. He simply pointed at the bird. And, as he did so, he turned to look at me with what I can only describe as a sort of wide-eyed ‘ooooh’ face that he still does to this day.

The psychologist and linguist whose work we’re exploring today would argue that turn and look means almost everything. This was a little boy who did not want the sparrow, was not seeking for me to fetch it for him, as he had been with almost every other object he’d thus far been pointing at. He simply wanted me to see what he was seeing. To show me that he knew this remarkable thing was there and, perhaps even more importantly, to show me that he knew that I could know it too. This is something philosophically and biologically extraordinary. He had grasped that I had a mind, and that his mind and my own could be pointing in the same direction. He was sharing the world.

Michael Tomasello, the developmental psychologist and linguist who has spent four decades studying children and great apes at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, would have an awful lot to say about all of this.

The first thing worth noting is that there’s something in the sparrow story that the standard story of language acquisition doesn’t quite catch. The standard story, because we probably have to go there, goes something like this.

For most of the twentieth century, the question of how children learn to speak was really a proxy war between two larger ideas about what human beings fundamentally are. On one side stood the behaviourists, led by B.F. Skinner, who believed that language was learned the way they believed everything else was learned: through reward and repetition. The child says “mama,” said “mama” beams in wonder, and the child promptly says it again. Imitation meets with reinforcement which steadily morphs into habit. Language, on this account, was no different in kind from a rat learning to press a lever or a dog learning to associate meal time with the ringing of a bell. The mind, for the behaviourist, was a machine, input reliably producing output. Given the right environment, you could teach anyone anything with a little carrot and a big enough stick. Ding dong, yum yum.

In 1959, Noam Chomsky reviewed Skinner’s book on language and, in one of the most devastating book reviews in intellectual history, more or less destroyed this position. Children, Chomsky pointed out, don’t just repeat what they hear. They produce sentences they have never heard. They say things like “you’re the bestest mummy” or “doggy goed the park” and, if we allow ourselves the assumption that they’re mostly surrounded by literate adults, they won’t have heard anyone say this. The child who says “goed” cannot have simply imitated it, but instead seems to have extracted a rule and applied it (incorrectly on this occasion, of course). No amount of reward and repetition explains that. The stimulus, in other words, is too poor to account for the response. The child must be bringing something to the table.

What she brings, Chomsky argued, is Universal Grammar: an innate, species-specific set of abstract linguistic principles, hardwired into the human brain, that constrains the shape of all possible languages and gives every child the same basic grammatical toolkit at birth. Language, on this account, is not learned so much as grown, the way a child grows arms and legs; experience provides the trigger, but the structure is already there, waiting. It is an elegant idea, and for several decades it was close to orthodoxy.

Jerome Bruner, working in the 1970s and 1980s, felt that both sides were missing something obvious. Neither the behaviourists nor the nativists had much to say about the other person in the room. Bruner watched mothers talking to infants, watched the rituals of pointing and naming and shared attention that frame a child’s first encounters with language, and concluded that what children needed was not just input, and not just innate machinery, but scaffolding: a social structure, provided by caregivers, within which language could take shape. He called it the Language Acquisition Support System. The child was not a passive receiver, as Skinner had it, nor a solo operator unlocking an internal code, as Chomsky would have it. She was an apprentice, and language was something she learned in company.

This was closer, but it still did not quite explain the sparrow.

What Bruner had identified as scaffolding, Tomasello would reframe as something deeper. The social context of language acquisition wasn’t just helpful; it was the whole story. And the place to start, he argued, was not with words at all, but with that small gesture at the windowsill.

Shared Intentionality as Depicted in Mother and Child, Mary Cassatt, 1894

Tomasello spent years testing whether this capacity for shared attention showed up anywhere else in the animal kingdom, and in particular in our nearest relatives. The results were stark. Chimpanzees raised in language-rich environments, living alongside humans, immersed in speech and gesture from infancy, can learn hundreds of signs. They can manipulate symbols for reward with genuine sophistication. They can gesture toward objects they want. What they do not, reliably, do is point at the sparrow and turn to check your eyes. They do not, in other words, attempt to share a perspective. That’s something only we do.

Tomasello calls this shared intentionality: the ability to understand another person as a minded being whose attention can be directed, held jointly, and built upon. It is not, he is careful to say, simply a matter of being clever. Chimpanzees are extraordinarily clever. It is a matter of a particular kind of social cognition that appears, in its full form, nowhere else in the animal kingdom.

And it’s what our whole system of language is built on. My son pointing at the sparrow is doing something that no amount of vocabulary or syntax could occur without. He is establishing the conditions under which meaning between two minds becomes possible at all.

Language, when it arrives, is the elaboration of all of this. A word turns out to be more than a label a child attaches to a thing. It is a communicative act performed between people, in context, with a shared purpose. When my son pointed at that bird and then looked at me, he was already doing, in pantomime, what language would later allow him to do with sound.

From this foundation, Tomasello draws a conclusion that puts him at odds not just with Chomsky but with most of the assumptions that have governed linguistics since the cognitive revolution. Children, for him, learn language the way they learn everything else that is distinctively human: by cultural inheritance, through close attention to what other people do and mean, pattern by pattern, usage by usage, one communicative act at a time.

“Chunks” combining to make a whole as depicted in Marine la nuit, Nicolas de Staël, 1954

The technical name for this position is the usage-based approach, and at its core is a commitment to taking seriously what children actually say before they can be said to be speaking grammatically at all.

Let’s take one of the first two-word utterances a child is likely to make, something like “more milk,” and run it through a usage-based analysis. A Tomasellian (Tomaselloite?) would reject the Chomskian view that this child is accessing an innate grammatical module and slotting lexical items into pre-designated syntactic positions like some extraordinarily small and poorly-coordinated filing clerk, and would argue instead that “more-milk” has simply been understood to be the noise you make in the specific situation of wanting more milk. More milk is a “chunk,” a single unit learned whole and in context.

The abstraction comes later, slowly, as more and more such “chunks” accumulate and the child begins to notice the patterns that thread through them. More biscuit. More juice. More Daddy (unlikely). More Bluey (more likely). Gradually, from the sediment of usage, something like a category or a schema emerges, and the child starts to recognise “more” as being a discrete unit of meaning that can precede an almost infinite variety of words. The rule is constructed from the bottom up, forged out of the slow accumulation of enough “more X” constructions that something pattern-shaped begins to emerge.

It’s this faculty for pattern recognition that’s being put to work, too, in a sentence like “doggy goed park” or “I’m the goodest girl,” those over-generalisation errors that Chomsky thought finished off Skinner. He was right: they do finish off Skinner. Where Tomasello departs from Chomsky, however, is in his argument that, whilst the child has certainly done something generative rather than imitative, they needn’t have accessed anything innate in order to do so. The whole thing is perfectly adequately explained via this process of recognising the patterns in multiple instances of intention based communicative chunks. It’s less like a device pre-loaded the mind and more like a path worn into grass by enough people walking the same way.

There’s a moment in Tomasello’s The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition, the book that laid out much of this thinking in 1999, where he writes that what distinguishes human children from other primates is something he calls the capacity for cultural learning. A child learning to use a hammer doesn’t just copy the movement; she grasps that the hammer is for something, that it stands in a relationship to a purpose, and that the adult wielding it knows this. She learns the hammer as a cultural object, saturated with intention.

Language, for Tomasello, is exactly this kind of object. Every word a child learns is inherited from a community of users who came before her; every grammatical construction she eventually internalises is a sediment of the communicative strategies of generations. Tomasello calls this the ratchet effect. Unlike every other species, we don’t just receive culture, we add to it, and the next generation inherits what we’ve built. Language isn’t a biological instinct. It is, in the deepest sense, a form of received wisdom.

Growth of knowledge is like the turning of a ratchet, as depicted in The Blackboard Paintings, Cy Twombly, 1966-71

This changes what we think learning to speak is. It’s a child being initiated into a practice, not so different, when you look at it that way, from learning to play music, or to mourn, or to pray. The forms precede the individual; they carry the history of everyone who has ever used them; and in using them yourself you enter a conversation that has been going on, in one form or another, for at least a hundred thousand years.

If another sparrow landed on the windowsill tomorrow my son would probably say “look at that” (“look at dat”) or words to that effect. What changed between then and now, if we believe Tomasello, was not a device switching on. It was a hundred thousand small acts of shared attention, pattern by pattern, one communicative act at a time.

I'm limited here by the email size, so you can (perhaps) expect another installment of this at some point. Anyway, the second rule is to keep things brief, so with that in mind…

Victor Hugo

Sylvia Plath

Kurt Vonnegut

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Harmann Hesse

William Faulkner

D.H. Lawrence

Jack Kerouac

Franz Kafka

Let’s begin this week with an amusing little mental image of Leo Tolstoy standing in his living room, cloth in hand, staring at the sofa. He had meant to dust it, but then again, as he reports in his diaries, perhaps he already had? At this point, there was simply no way of knowing. The action, if it had indeed occurred, had occurred without a witness. His body had been apparently present, moving through the space, performing the actions (or was it not performing the actions?) but his brain had been elsewhere, possibly on other matters, possibly daydreaming, possibly on autopilot, allowing the morning to drift gently past him.

We. Have. All. Been. There. My wife would accuse me, in fact, of spending most of my waking hours in a state not dissimilar to Tolstoy’s. It’s the familiar feeling you get when you arrive somewhere, maybe work or the school gate, and realise you have no memory of the steps you took to get there. It’s the feeling you get when you forget, whilst in the process of completing a domestic task, what the domestic task you should be completing actually was. If you’ve never stood in the doorway of a room asking yourself what on earth you came in here for then, I’m sorry, I simply cannot hope to understand the way your brain works.

When Tolstoy wrote about his moment with the sofa later that evening, on 1st of March 1897, he was faintly alarmed by his own passivity. Could it be possible that enormous stretches of his life, of any life, were being lived at precisely this level of non-registration? The body moving, the days passing, but none of it really felt or experienced? “If the whole complex life of many people is lived unconsciously,” he wrote, “then it’s as if this life had never been.”

Walter Sickert, Ennui, c.1914

The problem here isn’t really distraction, or perhaps we should say it isn’t always distraction. The human mind is a ruthlessly efficient machine for reducing the cost of the already-known. Once a thing has been encountered and categorised, it need not be genuinely encountered again. Instead, it can be recognised, which is a very different thing and requires almost no cognitive effort at all.

It’s a bit like what happens when you say a word out loud fifteen or twenty times. By around the seventh or eighth repetition, the word begins to dissolve and its meaning just sort of evacuates. Psychologists call this semantic satiation. Its a phenomenon that proves that meaning is not a fixed property of words but something the mind actively generates. And the mind, like any labouring thing, can tire of its task.

What is true, then, of a word said twelve times is true, at a slower tempo, of nearly everything. When that drive to work is encountered repeatedly, it is genuinely encountered less and less, becoming instead filed, processed, and almost completely discarded. It is, like Tolstoy said, quite worrying to think of how much of life is lost in this way.

In the early 1920s, a Russian Formalist critic named Viktor Shklovsky sat down to write about this problem. His topic was the slow erosion of experience by habit, and what, if anything, could be done about it. The essay he produced is called Art as Device, and it makes for the opening chapter of a larger work called Theory of Prose. The essay is twenty-five pages long and offers its readers a reliable weapon against this very particular kind of blindness, something that he claims will restore the sensation of the-thing-itself, which habit has stolen from you without your noticing.

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1 - Romain Rolland, winner of the 1915 Nobel Prize for Literature, once wrote to his friend Sigmund Freud about that particular sensation that comes over us when we look out to sea. Freud recalls the letter in Civilization and Its Discontents (1929):

“[The true source of religion] consists in a peculiar feeling, which [Rolland] himself is never without, which he finds confirmed by many others, and which he may suppose is present in millions of people. It is a feeling which he would like to call a sensation of ‘eternity’, a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded — as it were, ‘oceanic’. This feeling, he adds, is a purely subjective fact, not an article of faith; it brings with it no assurance of personal immortality, but it is the source of the religious energy which is seized upon by the various Churches and religious systems, directed by them into particular channels, and doubtless also exhausted by them. One may, he thinks, rightly call oneself religious on the ground of this oceanic feeling alone, even if one rejects every belief and every illusion.”

Felix Vallotton, Yellow and Green Sunset

2 - The Greeks knew a thing or two about the power of contemplating the ocean.

“But Achilles, weeping, moved off apart from his comrades, sat down on the shore of the grey, salt sea, eyes fixed on the boundless deep and appealed to his mother, arms outstretched”

Homer, Iliad, translated by Peter Green

3 -

“But great-hearted Odysseus he did not find within there, for he, as usual, was seated out on the seashore, weeping, rending his heart with tears and groans and sadness, gazing out through his tears at the unharvested sea.”

Homer, The Odyssey, translated by Peter Green

Paul Nash, Winter Sea, 1925-37

4 -

“The edge of the sea is a strange and beautiful place. All through the long history of Earth it has been an area of unrest where waves have broken heavily against the land, where the tides have pressed forward over the continents, receded, and then returned. For no two successive days is the shoreline precisely the same. Not only do the tides advance and retreat in their eternal rhythms, but the level of the sea itself is never at rest. It rises or falls as the glaciers melt or grow, as the floor of the deep ocean basins shifts under its increasing load of sediments, or as the earth’s crust along the continental margins warps up or down in adjustment to strain and tension. Today a little more land may belong to the sea, tomorrow a little less. Always the edge of the sea remains an elusive and indefinable boundary

The shore has a dual nature, changing with the swing of the tides, belonging now to the land, now to the sea. On the ebb tide it knows the harsh extremes of the land world, being exposed to heat and cold, to wind, to rain and drying sun. On the flood tide it is a water world, returning briefly to the relative stability of the open sea.”

Rachel Carson, The Edge of the Sea, 1955V

Vanessa Bell, Studland Beach, c.1912

5 -

“Nature seems to be important to people.”

Rachel and Stephen Kaplan wrote this in 1989, as the opening gambit of a twenty-year research programme.

Their Attention Restoration Theory proposed that the mind fatigues under directed effort and recovers through what they called “soft fascination,” which is their term for the effortless, involuntary attention drawn by gentle movement of things like leaves, clouds, or water. The sea is perhaps the purest instance of this.

Restoration, the Kaplans argued, requires being away, sufficient extent, compatibility with your purposes, and fascination without demand. The sea offers all of this simultaneously, and has done so, presumably, for as long as people have stood at its edge. Ask Odysseus or Achilles.

A shot from where I'm currently sat in North Wales.

Baruch Spinoza is having a moment.

In an age when Descartes is a philosophy undergraduate’s meme and Leibniz is barely a name outside specialist circles, Spinoza, the third of the holy trinity of seventeenth century rationalists, keeps turning up. He gets quoted in environmental manifestos, he turns up in therapy culture, he’s somewhere hidden in the vague spiritual yearnings of people (not unlike myself) who describe themselves as “not religious but definitely something.” He is the enlightenment thinker who most consistently sounds like he is talking about right now, and the question of why that should be is the one we’re asking this week.

The answer, as we’ll see, has everything to do with what Spinoza had to say about the nature of things. About who or what we are and how we fit into a grand system we did not choose and cannot, in any final sense, control. What all of this means is that we’ll have to, I’m afraid, dive into his metaphysics. See you on the other side; I’ll try to make sure it’ll be worth it.

Spinoza came from a community of Sephardic Jews who had fled the Inquisition in Portugal and settled in Amsterdam, a city tolerant enough, by seventeenth-century standards, to let them practise their faith openly. His father was a merchant of moderate means and some standing. Spinoza was educated at the community’s school, showed obvious gifts, and then left early to help run the family business. He read widely, encountered Descartes, fell in with a circle of free-thinking Protestants, and then began, apparently, to say things out loud that a man in his position ought to have kept to himself.

We do not know exactly what he said, but he was issued, aged twenty-three, with the harshest writ of excommunication the Portuguese-Jewish community of Amsterdam had ever produced. The document accused him of monstrous deeds and abominable heresies. It cursed him comprehensively and told everyone in the community to have nothing to do with him: not to speak to him, do business with him, read anything he wrote, or even stand within four cubits of him (roughly six feet, if you’re interested).

All of his crimes were unspecified, but familiarity with his later writings allow us to make some educated guesses. He denied that God was a personal being who intervened in history (more on that later). He denied the immortality of the soul in any personal sense. He denied that the Torah was literally delivered by God or that its commandments were still binding. What was left of orthodox Judaism after these denials is not much, and the elders of the synagogue drew the obvious conclusion.

So, banned, by a community that was itself banned by most of Europe, he took the hint and moved to a series of small Dutch towns, ground lenses to pay the rent (he was very good at lens-grinding, reportedly) and spent his spare time writing one of the strangest and most radical books in the history of Western philosophy, which he then declined to publish, perhaps because the world was not ready for it. If that was his reason, then he was right. When his friends published the Ethics after his death two years later, it was banned throughout Holland.

It’s worth a comment or two about the form of the Ethics, before we dive into the content. It is not, and this is an understatement, an easy book to read. It begins with definitions and axioms, as Euclid’s Elements does, and proceeds through numbered propositions, each demonstrated from what has gone before. It’s a way of mirroring, I think, his belief that the universe operated by strict logical necessity, that things could not have been otherwise than they are. Knowing this might explain the form the book takes, but it doesn’t make it any more fun.

Bridget Riley, Study for ‘Shuttle, 1964

Ok, let’s stop putting this off. Spinoza starts by defining three things:

1. Substance: something that exists in itself and is understood through itself. It doesn’t need anything else in order to exist or to be explained.

2. Attribute: what the intellect perceives as constituting the essence of a substance.

3. Mode: everything else. Things that exist not in themselves but in a substance, as modifications or expressions of it.

From here, we get his argument for monism: the claim that there is only, and could only ever be, one substance. The claim runs, in simplified form, like this. No two substances can share an attribute, because then you couldn’t tell them apart as separate substances. God, by definition, is a being of infinite attributes. There is no attribute God does not possess. If any other substance tried to exist, it would need an attribute, but every attribute is already God’s. Therefore, (are you still with me?) no other substance can exist. There is only one substance, and that substance, for want of a better word, is God.

Everything in the universe, then, every rock, every human being, every thought and every feeling, is a mode of that one infinite substance. No thing is a separate thing, only a modification, an expression, a way in which the single Godly substance takes a particular, finite form.

What does it mean to call this substance God? Well, certainly not what the tradition meant. Spinoza’s God is not the God of the Bible. This God does not answer prayers, perform miracles, get angry when people eat shellfish, or have any particular investment in how things turn out. Spinoza’s God does not create the world by an act of will, standing outside it and choosing to bring it into being. The world does not follow from God’s will in any way at all. It follows, in this view, from God’s nature in the same way that “the angles of a triangle sum to 180 degrees” follows from the nature of triangles, not from triangles choosing to work that way. God couldn’t have made a different world any more than a triangle could decide to have four sides.

This is where we get to the famous Deus sive Natura — God, or Nature. God and Nature, in Spinozian metaphysics, are one and the same thing.

George Inness, Sunset at Milton, 1885

He does distinguish between what he calls Natura naturans (literally nature naturing) and Natura naturata (nature natured). This is the difference between nature in its active, generative aspect, the infinite substance churning out the world so to speak, and nature as the produced system of things, the world of finite stuff that results. The first is God, I think, whilst the second is everything God expresses.

The implications of this are enormous and mostly unpleasant for anyone who was hoping God had a plan. There is no teleology, no purpose, no end toward which things aim. Nature has no goals. Things do not happen because they are meant to happen. When a stone falls off a roof and kills someone, there is no meaning in it, merely causes. The wind, the structural integrity of the wall, the unfortunate positioning of the person below. To look beyond those causes for divine intention is, Spinoza says, superstition. It is what happens when people can’t tolerate the fact that there is no one in charge.

So where does this leave us? We are, in this scheme, nothing but modes. We are finite, temporary expressions of the one infinite substance. And there is no free will. This is the bit people hate. Our choices, our thoughts, our feelings, all of it follows from prior causes, which follow from prior causes, which follow from the necessity of God’s eternal nature. We are not exempt, in any respect, from the causal order.

What this produces, when you don’t understand it, is what Spinoza calls bondage. You are driven by external things like the desire for status, for approval, for security, for all the things that circumstance can give and circumstance can take. You love things that are perishable and fear their loss. You pin your well-being on outcomes you can’t control and wonder why you feel terrible. You are, as Spinoza elegantly puts it, like waves on the sea, driven by contrary winds, not knowing your outcome or fate.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, c. 1560

The only way out is through amor intellectualis Dei: the intellectual love of God. Which, given what we’ve already stated about how to perceive God within this system, looks more like understanding than piety. To understand things as they necessarily are, to see them sub specie aeternitatis (under the aspect of eternity), is to stop being flung about by them. This produces what Spinoza calls blessedness, and what a contemporary person might call not being completely at the mercy of everything.

Which brings us full circle to the question we opened with. Why is all this resonating now? Let us count the ways.

First: there are more people than ever who want something that functions like religious meaning but cannot bring themselves to believe in the religious machinery. They don’t want a personal God to whom they might light a candle and pray, certainly not if he’s going to pry into their sex life. But they also reject the bleak materialism that says there is nothing but atoms and whoever dies with the most wins. Spinoza offers a third option which offers nature itself as the sacred and awe as a rational response to being a finite expression of something infinite. The feeling you get in a forest or looking at a sky full of stars is validated by metaphysics.

Second: the ecological argument is almost uncomfortably neat. The Western tradition, broadly speaking, put the human being at the top of nature, set above it, tasked with managing it, entitled to use it. This has all worked out Quite Badly. Spinoza’s monism makes that hierarchy conceptually impossible. The arrogance that has produced the current situation has a philosophical root, and Spinoza’s system is one of the most thorough available antidotes.

Third: the psychology. The analysis of the passions, of the way in which we make ourselves miserable by staking our well-being on things we cannot control, is not unique to Spinoza. The Stoics said something similar. So, in their way, did the Buddhists. But Spinoza’s version is grounded in a complete account of what a human being is and what the world is, and this grounding gives it a rigour that popular self-help can only dream of. The contemporary literature on anxiety, on the damage done by the pursuit of status and approval, on the therapeutic value of acceptance, all of it is, in a loose and often unacknowledged way, Spinozan.

And so, despite being almost absurdly deterministic, the Ethics turns out to be, in its conclusions, a guide to freedom. The freedom is not from causation, for that is impossible, but from the particular form of unfreedom that consists in being driven by causes one does not understand, in being tossed by passions one has not examined, in staking one’s happiness on things that circumstance can take away.

You might still be a mere wave, but freedom comes from understanding you’re part of the ocean.

1 - What's with the knocking at the gate in Macbeth? King Duncan is dead, the guards have been framed, the audience is waiting for the discovery of the body and then... A drunk porter appears on stage, and he begins to hear a repetitive knocking. Why? Has Shakespeare lost his mind?

In 1823, Thomas de Quincey offered an answer to this question because he'd been plagued by it himself since his childhood. For him, Shakespeare's problem was that he had to somehow express the "retiring of the human heart" of his murderers and its replacement with a heart that was "fiendish." How? This is where de Quincey locates the significance of that knock...

"In order that a new world may step in, this world must for a time disappear. The murderers and the murder must be insulated -- cut off by an immeasurable gulf from the ordinary tide and succession of human affairs locked up and sequestered in some deep recess; we must be made sensible that the world of ordinary life is suddenly arrested -- laid asleep -- tranced -- racked into a dread armistice; time must be annihilated; relation to things without abolished; and all must pass self-withdrawn into a deep syncope and suspension of earthly passion. Hence it is, that, when the deed is done, when the work of darkness is perfect, then the world of darkness passes away like a pageantry in the clouds: the knocking at the gate is heard; and it makes known audibly that the reaction has commenced: the human has made its reflux upon the fiendish; the pulses of life are beginning to beat again; and the re-establishment of the goings-on of the world in which we live, first makes us profoundly sensible of the awful parenthesis that had suspended them."

2 - It’s a wonderful interpretation, one I always lean on in my teaching of that scene, and a brilliant illustration of Shakespeare’s art. Sometimes you just have to shake your head in baffled appreciation of true genius, which is exactly how de Quincey wraps up his essay:

“O mighty poet! Thy works are not as those of other men, simply and merely great works of art: but are also like the phenomena of nature, like the sun and the sea, the stars and the flowers; like frost and snow, rain and dew, hail-storm and thunder, which are to be studied with entire submission of our own faculties, and in the perfect faith that in them there can be no too much or too little, nothing useless or inert but that, the farther we press in our discoveries, the more we shall see proofs of design and self-supporting arrangement where the careless eye had seen nothing but accident.”

3 - The whole thing is available here and is really digestible of you need something to read with your next cup of tea.

4 - Have you ever watched footage of the infamous Milgram experiments?

In 1961, psychologist Stanley Milgram, who was fascinated by German obedience to Nazi authority in the second world war, set out to discover whether he could answer the question of how ordinary people can become capable of extraordinary acts of evil.

He recruited ordinary Americans for what they were told was a study on learning and punishment. They were instructed to administer electric shocks to a stranger every time the stranger gave a wrong answer, increasing the voltage with each mistake. The shocks were fake. The stranger was an actor. But the participants didn’t know that.

His findings were genuinely astonishing. 65% of participants administered what they believed was a potentially lethal 450-volt shock, showing how, in the right context, faced with the right white coat, the right calm instruction that “to continue is essential,” and most of us will do things we would never believe ourselves capable of.

5 - It’s amazing to me that footage of this still exists on YouTube. You see the moment the participants realise what they’re doing; the hand on the forehead, the nervous laugh. And then, mostly, they continue.

6 - The connection to the work of Hannah Arendt, who attended the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961 (the same year Milgram ran his first experiments, though neither knew the other existed), is obvious. She expected to find a monster, but in actuality found a bureaucrat, fussy, precise, and proud of his organisational efficiency. Her phrase for it, “the banality of evil,” became one of the most contested in modern thought.

“For when I speak of the banality of evil, I do so only on the strictly factual level, pointing to a phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial. Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth, and nothing would have been farther from his mind than to determine with Richard III ‘to prove a villain.’ Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all… He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing… It was sheer thoughtlessness—something by no means identical with stupidity—that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period. And if this is ‘banal’ and even funny, if with the best will in the world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann, this is still far from calling it commonplace… That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man—that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem.”

7 - All of this shines a light on our own idea of our own decency. We’re good people, we tell ourselves. We’d behave differently to these others if the universe presented a genuine test of our morals. But what if our morality had less to do with our personality, our upbringing, or influences, our faith, our way of thinking through ethical problems etc. and more to do with plain circumstance?

In 1973, psychologists Darley and Batson ran an experiment at Princeton Theological Seminary. Students were asked to prepare a short talk, then walk across campus to deliver it. Some were told they were running late, some were told they had plenty of time. Along the route, a man was slumped in a doorway, visibly in distress. The single biggest predictor of whether someone stopped to help was not their personality, not their faith, not even the subject of the talk they were about to give (several were preparing to speak on the parable of the Good Samaritan). It was whether they were in a hurry. Situation, again, swallowing character whole.

8 - Switching gears entirely now, to the work of an artist I’ve been wondering at this past week since I featured her in the main article about William James and consciousness after death.

Emma Kunz was a Swiss healer and researcher who, from the 1930s onwards, produced large-scale geometric drawings on graph paper using a pendulum. She never called them art, thinking of her work as something more like research. Her sessions with pencil and pendulum, which often lasted through the night, guided her toward answers to questions she was asking about energy, proportion, and the nature of the human body.

9 - Did I mention that they’re beautiful?

10 - I was caught in a downpour on Sunday evening, which had the pleasant effect of bringing to mind these words from Anne Carson, which is where we'll leave things this week:

"Sunday evening, evening gray. All day the storm did not quite storm. Clouds closed in, sulked, spat. We put off swimming. Took in the chairs. Finally (about seven) a rumbling high up. A wind went round the trees tossing each once and releasing arbitrary rivulets of cool air downward, this wind which came apart, the parts swaying out, descending, bumping around the yard awhile not quite on the count then a single chord ran drenched across the roof, the porch and stopped. We all breathed. Maybe that’s it, maybe it’s over, the weatherman is often wrong these days, we can still go swimming (roll call? glimpse of sun?) when all at once the sluices opened, broke a knot and smashed the sky to bits, which fell and keep falling even now as dark comes on and fabled night is managing its manes and the birds, I can hear from their little racket, the birds are burning up and down like holy fools somewhere inside it—far in where they keep the victim, smeared, stinking, hence the pageantry, hence the pitchy cries, don’t keep saying you don’t hear it too.”

That's everything for this week. All the best until next time!

We are back, then, on the subject of death. I am aware of how this looks. This is the latest in a series exploring whether a robust, secular case can be made for the survival of consciousness beyond the body, beginning with Plato, and working through, so far, Descartes and Aquinas. Is it possible that the whole enterprise is an elaborate piece of self-reassurance? Perhaps it does not matter. William James, who delivered the lecture I want to discuss today, was similarly candid about his own motivations, and it did not stop him being useful.

El Greco, The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, 1586

William James, then, was a Harvard professor, psychologist, and, by his own admission, a man who had been asked to lecture on the immortality of the soul primarily because nobody else was available. The university needed a speaker, James was a university official, and, to put it bluntly, it was his turn. As he says:

“I have to confess that my own personal feeling about immortality has never been of the keenest order”

Which is refreshingly honest, to be honest. James doesn’t burn with passionate conviction on the subject, instead finding it moderately interesting, sort of in the way that a good plumber finds a tricky boiler moderately interesting.

And this is his conundrum. By 1898, the materialist case had been made. The physiologists had done their work and established, beyond all credible doubt, that consciousness is a brain thing. If you took a blow to the head, it could abolish memory. Damage to specific regions of the brain produced specific losses of function. Stimulants and poisons altered thought. All of this had by now been demonstrated with the patient, accumulating weight of scientific evidence; and the implied consequence, which most educated men accepted without quite saying so aloud, was that death was the end. The mind is what the brain does, and when the brain stops, the mind stops with it. Game over.

You’ll be pleased to know that James did not dispute any of the science. He’s not got is fingers in his ears declaring, with nothing but foolish belief, that the scientists have got it all wrong. He did, however, dispute some of the logic of their conclusions. He spends the lecture arguing that the scientific argument against immortality contains at least two important logical errors, which he was more than happy, “all uninspired and official as [he was],” to clear away on our behalf. By the end he would tell his audience they now had permission to “hope,” and I, for one, will take permission from wherever I can get it.

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1 - This week we read from Giambattista Vico’s The New Science for the main newsletter article and, reading around him and his life in the process, I came across some rather wonderful curiosities. Which is a warning, basically, that we’re Vico-heavy in this week’s scrapbook because the guy honestly fascinates me.

Let’s start with his autobiography, and the remarkable way that he opens it. On the very first line he states his birth date as 1670, which is remarkable only for the fact that this wasn’t the year he was born (the true date is 1668). It would, even in those times, have been very easy to access his baptism records, which has led scholars to the conclusion that he was being deliberately imprecise, perhaps as a way of forewarning his readers that the autobiography that follows would also be rather imaginative with the truth.

2 - Even more interesting, however, is the reading of this error as a deliberate attack on his greatest antagonist Rene Descartes. These two disagreed on just about everything. Where Descartes said we can only truly know what we can prove through reason, Vico said we can only truly know what we ourselves have made (the verum factum principle). God knows nature because he made it. We know history because we made it. Anyway, if the mistaken birth date is in fact a deliberate mistake, could it be as a dismissal of Descartes’ calls for certainty?

3 - Vico, of course, was far less well known in his time (and any other time, for that matter) than Descartes. He is supposed to have had to sell a family ring to pay for the publishing costs of his masterwork The Scienza Nuova. His rediscovery is credited to Jules Michelet (who would go on to write the great history of France and coin the word “Renaissance”) who translated him into French in 1827. Michelet later described reading Vico as a thunderclap, a revelation that remade how he thought about history and the collective life of peoples.

4 - Vico’s lack of fame, at least in comparison to leading philosophers of his time, is something of a suprise given the amount and significance of those who cite his work as an influence. Vico counts as fans not only Karl Marx, but Jürgen Habermas, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Max Horkheimer, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Alasdair MacIntyre and, most interestingly, James Joyce. I say most interesting because Joyce is said to have structured Finnegans Wake around Vico’s four ages (divine, heroic, human, and the return). The famously unfinished last sentence loops back to complete the first, enacting the cycle.

“riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.”

Joyce references Vico throughout, for example:

“The Vico road goes round and round to meet where terms begin”

5 - A break from Vico, then, to enjoy some Finnegans Wake. I’ve never been able, I’ll confess, to enjoy it in anything more than fragments of around this length. This is genuinely beautiful, though. Maybe I’ll get through the thing one day...

“Be happy, dear ones! May I be wrong! For she’ll be sweet for you as I was sweet when I came down out of me mother. My great blue bedroom, the air so quiet, scarce a cloud. In peace and silence. I could have stayed up there for always only. It’s something fails us. First we feel. Then we fall. And let her rain now if she likes. Gently or strongly as she likes. Anyway let her rain for my time is come. I done me best when I was let. Thinking always if I go all goes. A hundred cares, a tithe of troubles and is there one who understands me? One in a thousand of years of the nights?”

6 - Last Vico-themed entry now, I promise. One of the most fascinating sections of The New Science is his treatment of Homer in the third chapter. Here, he completely revolutionises literary criticism by arguing that Homer was not a single historical individual, but a collective, “ideal” poet representing the imaginative, heroic consciousness of the early Greek people. Vico made this argument in 1725, while serious Homeric scholarship didn’t catch up for another hundred years. He was, as usual, almost entirely ignored.

Homer Dictating his Verses, Rembrandt, 1663

7 - Whilst we’re on the ancient Greeks, this one is more than worth sharing if you haven’t heard it before.

The word galaxy comes from the Greek gala — milk. Which means the Milky Way is literally the Milky Way, and has been since the Greeks named it, but that’s not even the good bit.

The story goes that Zeus, who was always in some kind of trouble, had fathered Heracles with a mortal woman and needed the infant to feed from Hera’s breast to make him immortal. Hera, understandably, was not going to agree to this. So Zeus waited until she was asleep and held the baby to her. Heracles, who was already preternaturally strong, latched on hard enough that when Hera woke and pulled away, her milk sprayed across the sky.

And there it has been ever since; our galaxy, and every galaxy, named for a goddess’s startled recoil.

Tintoretto, The Origin of the Milky Way, c.1575

8 - At my age, it’s normal (I think) to ponder on the different lives that could have been lived, and to worry about the amount of time left to pursue different paths. One of the more striking transformations of this sort can be found in the biography of Arthur Rimbaud.

Rimbaud wrote all of his poetry between the ages of fifteen and twenty. Then he stopped, completely, and never wrote another word of literature for the rest of his life.

What he did instead was go to Africa. He traded coffee and hides in Abyssinia. He learned Amharic and Oromo. He mapped uncharted regions. He may have run guns. He sent long letters home to his mother, almost entirely about money and the heat.

All the while, back in France, the Symbolists were treating his teenage poetry as holy scripture. I’ve never known what to make of all this.

Arthur Rimbaud at seventeen

Arthur Rimbaud in Harar, Abyssinia (Ethiopia), 1883

9 - Here is Rimbaud, aged seventeen, assigning colours to vowels and, in the process, generating more interpretation than almost any other in the French language.

10 - I’ll leave you with this, from Andrei Platonov, whose short stories I’ve been dipping in and out of for a few months now. On grief and the strange shift that takes place after the loss of a parent, even one you live miles away from. From The Third Son, 1936. Beautiful...

That's everything for this week. All the best until next time!

[A version of this article first appeared as part of issue 13 of the newsletter]

You don’t need to be a historian to feel that something has gone very badly wrong. Without being able to state exactly where or when or how, the institutions and certainties we grew up assuming were permanent all seem to be independently losing their grip. We might point, guided by our separate tribes, towards different causes, different villains and (certainly) towards different solutions, but the one thing that seems constant is the vague and unsettling feeling that we’re living through something, that it might not be an altogether good something, and that it might actually be a rather massive, existential, catastrophic, civilisational-collapse level something.

My personal favourite barometer of the cultural mood (I’m a linguist, after all) is the annual word of the year shortlists released by the major dictionaries. Recent years have defined our times with terms like “permacrisis,” “polarization,” “brain rot,” “broligarchy,” “enshitification” and “slop,” and the 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer found that, in developed countries, just one in five respondents see a better future for the next generation. There’s always been grumblings about the state of the world, but none of this is remotely normal.

My generation’s landmarks were new bypasses, leisure centres and out-of-town retail parks, the sort of incremental, slightly boring progress that felt like it would simply continue forever. My children, by contrast, are growing up in a world where the machines are teaching themselves to think and microplastics have been found inside human brains.

It’s tempting to look for the wrong turn, to believe there’s a way back to the right road, but my suspicion, increasingly, is that there was no wrong turn, that the road was always going to lead us here.

There is, as it happens, a thinker who saw all of this coming, and he was writing about it (whilst being largely ignored) over three centuries ago.

There was a reason Giambattista Vico, a Neapolitan philosopher writing in the early 18th century, was mostly ignored by his peers. He had the misfortune (as did so many ignored thinkers) of being right too early. Writing at the height of the Enlightenment’s confidence in reason and perpetual progress, his ideas were profoundly, almost comically, unfashionable.

Vico rejected practically all the prevailing beliefs of his time, arguing that history moved in cycles, not straight lines, and that every great civilisation, no matter how advanced, would eventually collapse under the weight of its own sophistication.

Where Enlightenment thinkers saw a future of rational governance, scientific mastery, and endless improvement, Vico saw a more unsettling pattern. Societies, he argued, begin in a state of myth and poetry, where traditions and shared beliefs create unity. Over time, they develop laws, institutions, and systems of knowledge that bring order and progress. But as these structures grow more abstract, more detached from real life and real human concerns, they become brittle and unresponsive. Bureaucracy multiplies, language becomes jargon, politics devolves into endless debate, laws become so convoluted they are meaningless, culture fragments into competing ideologies, and society drifts into what he called the “barbarism of reflection”—a state of paralysis, cynicism, and decay. The result is alienation (my own choice for word of the decade, if the lexicographers would accept me into their tribe) and ultimately — the scary bit — the return of chaos.

Vico’s insights seem eerily relevant today, his warnings feeling less like a relic of the past and more like a prophecy unfolding before our eyes, so it’s worth unpacking what he has to say.

Vico’s great work, The New Science, proposed that history followed a cyclical pattern, one in which societies moved through distinct stages of development. At the dawn of civilisation, in what he called the “Age of Gods,” people lived in awe of the natural world, crafting myths as a way of making sense of forces they could not control.

This was an era of thunderbolts and prophecies, of sacred law handed down from above. Think Zeus atop Olympus, or the Old Testament God thundering commandments from a mountaintop. To Vico, myth was a lot more than an arbitrary collection of stories or a set of primitive superstitions waiting to be outgrown. They were a vital and necessary mechanism through which human societies understood themselves.

William Blake, The Ancient of Days, 1794

For Vico, the origins of these myths lay in fear. The first humans were isolated, brutish, barely conscious of themselves as a species. They lived in a world that must have seemed vast and terrifying. The sky cracked open with thunder, the earth trembled with unseen power, and in their ignorance, they assigned these forces human-like intentions.

As Vico put it, they “pictured the sky to themselves as a great animated body,” calling it Jove, the first and greatest of gods. This projection, the impulse to ascribe human traits to non-human things, was not a failure of reason but an instinctual response, a necessary fiction that allowed early societies to impose some kind of order on a chaotic and unpredictable world.

Here, Vico prefigures later thinkers like Ludwig Feuerbach, who would argue that gods are not discovered but invented, shaped from human fears and desires. Mythology, thought of in these terms, becomes the foundation of civilisation itself. Fear of divine retribution, Vico claimed, was the first step towards law and social order.

“Providence gave to savage and brutish men the impulse toward humanity and the creation of cities,” he wrote, by awakening in them “a confused sense of divinity which in their ignorance they ascribed to beings unsuited for it.” The gods of myth, then, far from arbitrary superstitions, were the first regulators of human behaviour, the earliest form of law.

With time, the myths evolved. Human figures replaced divine ones, and so began Vico’s second phase, the “Age of Heroes.” Here, aristocratic warrior-kings took centre stage, ruling through a mix of brute strength and rigid hierarchy. The gods still loomed large, but now they worked through men like Achilles, Odysseus, and Romulus. These figures, Vico argued, were not purely fictional. They were expressions of real historical developments, stylised through the lens of collective memory.

Consider King Arthur. Archaeology and early chronicle suggest something real beneath the legend: a Romano-British warlord, most likely, holding the line against Saxon incursion somewhere in the turbulent fifth or sixth century. What collective memory did with that man over the following centuries (the round table, the sword in the stone, the whole gorgeous apparatus of chivalric myth) tells us less about Arthur himself than about the societies that needed him, each age refashioning the legend to carry its own anxieties and ideals. This is exactly what Vico means. Myth, for him, was always a translation of reality, distorted but not detached, and the hero at its centre was never merely a character. He was a civilisation’s way of understanding what it valued, what it feared, and who it thought it was.

Edward Burne-Jones, details from The Last Sleep of Arthur in Avalon, 1881–1898

Then comes the “Age of Men,” which, although it sounds like the chilling title of a yet-to-be-released eco-blockbuster, doesn’t begin in an entirely bad place. Rationality creeps in, Law replaces custom, democracy pushes aside the warrior-elite, and societies begin to see themselves in legal codes rather than heroic epics. If this sounds awful, I really don’t mean it to: I approve of basically all of the above.

What’s lost by these processes is something more subtle about our relationship to the stories we tell. We look, in the “age of men,” at stories from the outside rather than as something we live inside. Mythology has faded into literature, leaving only the remnants of old stories fossilised in poetry and drama. What had once been a living, breathing cultural force is now an artefact, a relic to be studied rather than believed.

The trouble is that reason, having successfully dismantled myth and replaced the warrior-king with the legislator, doesn’t settle into comfortable governance. It keeps relentlessly going. Laws multiply until only specialists can navigate them. Politics becomes a performance staged for competing tribes rather than a means of reaching agreement. Language, freed from the direct, embodied force of the mythic age, curls back on itself into abstraction and jargon, until the gap between what is said and what is meant grows too wide to bridge. Culture, no longer able to hold its differences within a common frame, splinters into competing ideologies, each with its own vocabulary, its own set of villains, its own version of events (even, dare I say, its own hats).

Vico called this terminal phase the “barbarism of reflection.” What he means by it is that society, if anything, has become too sophisticated. Cynicism replaces belief. Scepticism, which began as a necessary tool for clearing away superstition, turns on everything, including the shared assumptions that hold a civilisation together. The result is a society that has, functionally, lost the capacity to believe in itself, and a population that has, consequently, lost the capacity to trust the society that surrounds it.

So far, so much diagnosis. But what we’re really here for, living in a society that seems to mirror so much of what Vico outlined, is the story of what happens next. Where does a fractured, complicated, sclerotic society turn?

Vico’s answer is the most unsettling part of his theory. It turns back, through the slow logic of historical necessity. He called it ricorso: the return. The elaborate architecture of the Age of Men begins to hollow out, and into the space it leaves comes something that looks, to Vico’s eye, familiar: the hunger for strongmen, for simple stories, for clear enemies, for the kind of mythic certainty that reason had spent centuries carefully dismantling. This is the barbarism of people who know better but have stopped caring, who have watched the institutions fail often enough that the promise of a new hero, however crude, feels less like regression than relief.

He had seen it happen before. The collapse of Rome, in Vico’s reading, didn’t produce a dark age so much as a reset: medieval Europe, with its feudal hierarchies, its warrior-nobles, its divine kings and sacred authority, was simply the Age of Heroes running again on different terms, the cycle completing itself and quietly beginning once more. Providence, he believed, operated not through straight lines but through spirals; and the fall of one world was always, somewhere in its wreckage, the foundation of the next.

It would be satisfying to end by suggesting that knowing the pattern exempts you from it, but of course it doesn’t. Vico doesn’t offer a way out, and it would be dishonest to pretend he does. What he does offer is a way of understanding where we are, and perhaps the comfort of knowing that all of this is survivable. Civilizations have stood at this juncture before and something has always grown from the wreckage, however slowly, however painfully.

1 -

“When Zarathustra was thirty years old, he left his home and the lake of his home, and went into the mountains. There he enjoyed his spirit and his solitude, and for ten years did not weary of it. But at last his heart changed,—and rising one morning with the rosy dawn, he went before the sun, and spake thus unto it:

Thou great star! What would be thy happiness if thou hadst not those for whom thou shinest!”

Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by Thomas Common

2 - It’s interesting to note that Zarathustra is thirty when he leaves for the mountains. Jesus, too, begins his ministry at thirty. The Buddha leaves his palace at twenty-nine. Alexander had conquered most of the known world and wept, supposedly, because there was nothing left, when he was thirty-two.

Do I have a point here? Maybe not, but there’s an article in there somewhere about that age and transitions, new starts or maybe even the recognition that something is already over. You have my permission to write it.

3 - For the main article this week, I was looking at Federico García Lorca's lecture titled Play and Theory of the Duende, his famously difficult to define quality that labels the dark, urgent force that separates the performer who moves you from the one who simply impresses you. He uses many examples in the lecture to illustrate his point, so I thought it would be fun to collate some.

“duende-haunted Velasquez” (Aesop, 1638)

Martínez Montañés' “duende with the head of an Assyrian bull” (The Adoration of the Shepherds, 1609-13)

Duende “tears apart El Greco's clouds” (View of Toledo, 1596-1600)

Pedro de Mena "duende weeping tears of blood" (Ecce Homo, 1673)

Duende "makes Goya paint with his knees and fists in terrible bitumen blacks" (Witches' Flight, 1798)

4 - Lorca said that in Spain, when death appears, they open the curtains. Medieval Italy built it a separate door.

Wandering the cobbled streets of Bergamo or Gubbio, you’ll notice narrow, walled-up doorways set slightly above street level, usually beside the main entrance. These are porte del morto — doors of the dead.

Behind these doors is a long staircase leading, without any corners, directly to the living quarters. There are practical explanations for the existence of these doors and staircases - security, for example - but over time they took on a new significance.

Upon the death of a family member, the straight staircase offered a convenient route for a coffin to be carried unimpeded from living space to the waiting funeral cart outside, thus avoiding the use of the main entrance, which was reserved for the living.

This separation became not just practical but steeped in superstition, reflecting a belief that the dead should not reenter through the same doorway used by those still among the living. After the funeral, the door would often be permanently sealed, leaving behind a wonderfully eerie architectural mystery.

5 - Reclusive and anti-social is probably my default state, but I do at least try to work on it. I recognise it as a character flaw and do my best to re-wire my brain and appreciate the beauty of social connections. Gwen John was a little more strong-willed about it all. Here are her Rules to Keep the World Away:

“Do not listen to people (more than is necessary); Do not look at people (ditto); Have as little intercourse with people as possible; When you come into contact with people, talk as little as possible.”

6 - We recognise, of course, this reclusive nature in her works, full of quiet interiors, muted greys, dusty pinks, a figure in a chair, a window with flat light coming through it, etc. A good excuse to share a few favourites:

7 - One of my favourite stories about Gwen John is one that captures the closeness and respect in her relationship with her brother Augustus who was an artist himself. Despite being much more famous and admired in their own time, he apparently once wrote:

“In fifty years I shall be known as the brother of Gwen John.”

He was right, and the fifty years were generous.

8 - Time for a fun story. On the 6th of January, 1953, a comedian called Stump Cross sat on Dizzy Gillespie’s trumpet at a party. It was an accident, but the damage done was obvious: the bell had bent upward at forty-five degrees. Dizzy picked it up and played it anyway, and liked what he heard.

The bell was pointing up toward his ears now instead of out at the audience, which meant he could hear himself differently. He had a custom version made and played it for the rest of his life, creating in the process perhaps the most recognisable silhouette in jazz history.

9 - Sometime after Malcolm X was shot dead in the Audubon Ballroom in February 1965, James Baldwin sat in a hotel room in Tacoma, Washington, and tried to think it all through. He did so on a notepad, which survives. He was planning a play about the Autobiography at the time, one he never managed to finish. The note itself is tantalisingly cryptic, but a little difficult to decipher, so I’ll re-type it below:

MX’s question

To Be A Citizen Of the nation?

the world?

the race?

A/ to confront:

Religion/Race/Power

B/ The questioning Identity

C/Involving = History

D/ Identity is History being synonyms: being the Present/

E/ Attempting to make the past /[?]/

That's everything for this week. All the best until next time

It’s always struck me that the history of aesthetics is, in large part, a history of avoiding the most interesting question. Thinkers have given us beauty, catharsis, mimesis, the sublime, defamiliarisation. It’s an impressive arsenal of concepts, each with its own literature, academic sub-specialty, and generations of refinement.

What almost none of them address directly is the question you (I) actually want answered, which is why on earth one performance of a song, let’s say, might leave us unsatisfied despite it’s technical proficiency whilst another, less polished on a technical level, might leave us in bits.

Federico García Lorca, arguably the greatest Spanish poet of the twentieth century and certainly its most dramatic casualty (he was shot by Nationalist forces in 1936 at the age of thirty-eight) was interested in precisely this gap.

He starts, in a famous lecture delivered in Buenos Aires in 1933, by introducing (to non-spanish speakers, anyway) a Spanish folk term in common use among Andalusian singers and performers to describe something they recognised in a performance. The word is duende.

El Jaleo, John Singer Sargent, 1882

In ordinary Spanish it means something like a goblin or a household spirit. If you can imagine the kind of folkloric creature that moves your keys and sours your milk, then you’re not too far off. But there’s an older, more interesting usage as well. Duende, more traditionally, means the owner of the room, the presence that, by virtue of being in a space, possesses it (you can see how it came to be reapplied to those busy little sprites).

Lorca borrowed the term and did something with it that would become one of the most famous analyses of artistic worth of the last century. And if you’re still worried that this sounds dull, Lorca, no stranger to the stuffy lecture hall himself, has anticipated your concerns and promises to do what he can to entertain:

“I don’t want that terrible blowfly of boredom to enter this room, threading all your heads together on the slender necklace of sleep [...] I want to see if I can give you a simple lesson on the buried spirit of saddened Spain.”

The rest of this piece — including a close look at Lorca’s three-way taxonomy of creative forces and how no art worth the name is possible without the presence of death — is for Humanities Library members. Click below if you feel inclined to join our little club.

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1 - In 1990, a physician named Frank Meshberger published what must be one of the more unexpected papers in the history of the Journal of the American Medical Association — a piece of Renaissance art criticism, arguing that Michelangelo had hidden something in the Sistine Chapel ceiling that had gone unnoticed for nearly five hundred years.

His claim: the crimson cloak billowing around God in the famous Creation of Adam panel is an anatomically precise cross-section of the human brain. The bulging mantle is the cerebrum. The green scarf trailing below traces the vertebral artery. Once you've seen it, it's genuinely hard to unsee.

Michelangelo is known to have dissected corpses and studied anatomy obsessively. Whether he encoded a secret argument into the most famous ceiling in the world is, of course, impossible to prove. But if he did, it's a remarkable one: God does not reach down from heaven to give Adam life. He reaches out from inside a human mind.

2 - I was unsuccessful, this week, in my attempts to convince the family to pitch up with me in the garden to observe the Lyrid meteor shower. Which was for the best, really, as the 90 or so minutes of watchfulness I was able to muster in the early hours of the morning yielded very few sightings. The one shooting star I did see, however, was lent greater weight by the thought that I was looking at something people have been looking at for at least 2700 years.

The Lyrids are the oldest recorded meteor shower in human history. In 687 BC, a Chinese observer noted in the Zuo Zhuan: "

“On day xīn-mǎo of month 4 in the summer, at night, fixed stars are invisible, at midnight, stars dropped down like rain."

3 - A particularly strong storm occurred in 1803, observed by a journalist in Richmond, Virginia:

"Shooting stars. This electrical [sic] phenomenon was observed on Wednesday morning last at Richmond and its vicinity, in a manner that alarmed many, and astonished every person that beheld it. From one until three in the morning, those starry meteors seemed to fall from every point in the heavens, in such numbers as to resemble a shower of sky rockets ..."

4 - I'm endlessly amazed at the wealth of things I don't know. It turns out, Thomas Hobbes (the actual Thomas Hobbes, the one who wrote Leviathan) once wrote a book called De Mirabilibus Pecci: Being The Wonders of the Peak in Darby-shire. In it, he sets out what he regards as The Seven Wonders of the Peak District (I feel a camper van rental holiday coming rising into view).

"Of the High Peak are seven wonders writ. Two fonts, two caves. One pallace, mount and pit."

Here they are, for any interested parties:

1. Chatsworth House — the palace

2. Mam Tor — the shivering mountain, whose southern face perpetually crumbles and slides

3. Eldon Hole — the pit, a great open chasm in the limestone plateau that terrified locals for centuries

4. Peak Cavern — the cave at Castleton, whose entrance was once home to an entire community of rope makers

5. Poole's Cavern — the second cave, at Buxton, with its extraordinary mineral formations

6. St Ann's Well — the warm spring at Buxton, one of the two fonts

7. Ebbing and Flowing Well — the second font, at Tideswell, a spring that appears to rise and fall with the tide despite being entirely landlocked

5 - Mary Queen of Scots visited three of the seven. She was held prisoner at Chatsworth House by order of Elizabeth I several times between 1569 and 1584 (her rooms are still called the Queen of Scots Apartments). Elizabeth granted her permission to take the waters at St Ann's Well in Buxton for her rheumatism, and so she made the journey, under guard, for up to a month at a time, most years between 1573 and 1584. In 1582 she visited Poole's Cavern. And then, before leaving Buxton for what she perhaps sensed would be the last time, she etched these words in Latin on the window of her room:

"Buxton, whose fame thy milk-waters tell, Whom I, perhaps, no more shall see, farewell."

She was executed three years later. Unfortunately, the window is gone.

6 - Last week I wrote about Elaine Scarry’s argument that beauty, by virtue of its symmetry, holds the idea of equality visible when justice cannot make itself seen. But there’s a thinker — one we’ve also covered here — whose ideas run somewhat contrary. Pierre Bourdieu argued in Distinction (1979) that the capacity to experience beauty has almost nothing to do with equality. Quite the opposite. Beauty, for him, is not a human universal but a class privilege, learned rather than innate, and distributed as unequally as anything else in society. If he’s right, the whole of Scarry’s case wobbles.

“Taste classifies,” he wrote, “and it classifies the classifier.”

7 - I've also been prompted to follow another tangent off last week's article, by a reader who pointed out a connection to Plotinus, the third century Egyptian-Roman philosopher whose Enneads are just one of the many important philosophical works I've never got around to reading.

For Plotinus, the experience of beauty is the soul recognising its own affinity with the whole of existence and catching a glimpse of what it actually is. This is why beauty undoes us.

"The soul," he writes, "taking no help from the organs, swoops to that which is most dear... and is carried out of itself in a kind of loving transport."

You are never more fully yourself, Plotinus suggests, than in the moment you are most taken out of yourself.

8 - Thanks to , who writes here, for making the connection.

9 - A current obsession is the drawings of Federico García Lorca. They tend to get elbowed aside by the poems, which is understandable, but they're more than worth a look. They're small, strange, dreamy little things, and I'm very much a fan.

10 - Lastly, I was tickled this week to come across this letter from Gertrude Stein, who has just read The Great Gatsby and isn’t holding back in her praise, writing to Fitzgerald to tell him it is "good."

Hotel Pernollet Belley (Ain) Belley, le 22 May, 192- [1925]

My dear Fitzgerald:

Here we are and have read your book and it is a good book. I like the melody of your dedication and it shows that you have a background of beauty and tenderness and that is a comfort. The next good thing is that you write naturally in sentences and that too is a comfort. You write naturally in sentences and one can read all of them and that among other things is a comfort. You are creating the contemporary world much as Thackeray did his in Pendennis and Vanity Fair and this isn’t a bad compliment. You make a modern world and a modern orgy strangely enough it was never done until you did it in This Side of Paradise. My belief in This Side of Paradise was alright. This is as good a book and different and older and that is what one does, one does not get better but different and older and that is always a pleasure.. Best of good luck to you always, and thanks so much for the very genuine pleasure you have given me. We are looking forward to seeing you and Mrs. Fitzgerald when we get back in the Fall. Do please remember me to her and to you always

Gtde Stein

That's everything for this week. All the best until next time

In my other life (my actual life), I earn my vast income bossing children around a high school English classroom. And it was put to me recently, in one such classroom, with the particular force conjured by fifteen year olds, that it was said bossing around that was the entire appeal of the profession. The way the young lady put it was more linguistically creative, let’s say, but the argument was essentially this: that teachers become teachers because of the pleasurable vibrations that result from being the one in the room whose word carries respect. The one whose instructions must be followed. The one who must. Be. Listened. To.

I am still thinking about this several weeks later for two reasons. The first is that it runs so contrary to the story I tell myself about myself that whatever truth is in it has been incessantly burrowing ever since. The second is that this week’s reading brought it back to the fore.

There’s undeniable truth, after all, that positions of authority tend to attract people who find authority pleasurable, that the experience of being listened to, deferred to, looked to for the answer, produces a satisfaction that goes some way beyond the merely professional. One of the most reliable correlations, it seems to me, in all of human experience, is that found between pleasure and power. And it isn’t just teachers. Tell me you didn’t get a tingle of excitement the last time you got a promotion?

The inverse of all this is equally reliable: being sidelined, overlooked, treated as peripheral to the story that matters, carries a sting that we tend to describe as wounding, as diminishment, as a kind of theft. The self, it seems, has a strong prior about its own position. It expects to be at the centre of things and when it isn’t, it suffers.

This may be an obvious outcome from the simple fact that experience is always experience from somewhere, and that somewhere is always, inescapably, here. The philosopher Thomas Nagel called this the “view from nowhere” problem in reverse: we cannot help but have a view from somewhere, and that somewhere tends, over time, to feel like the only somewhere that fully counts.

Which makes it all the stranger that there exists a category of experience (crikey I’ve taken my time to get to the point this week) that breaks this rule entirely. It does so not by suppressing the self, or disciplining it, but by making the lateral position, the position of the non-central, the adjacent, the one-among-many, feel, for a brief and exhilarating moment, like the most pleasurable place to stand. That category is beauty, and the philosopher and literary theorist who got me thinking about it this week deserves a little more mainstream attention.

Elaine Scarry is Walter Cabot Professor of Aesthetics at Harvard, and her 1998 Tanner Lectures, later published as On Beauty and Being Just, put forward a case for beauty that I hadn’t heard before. Scarry goes beyond the usual arguments about how looking upon the beautiful can be nourishing for the spirit, and argues instead that it can actually be an important building block towards the creation of a just society, but more on how she gets to that point later.

Her argument draws heavily on an idea from Simone Weil, so I should say something about her first. Simone Weil was a French mystic and political activist who spent the 1930s working on factory floors and fighting alongside anarchists in the Spanish Civil War, who later, during the German occupation of France, refused to eat more than the ration available to those living under Nazi rule, and who died of tuberculosis and starvation in 1943 at the age of thirty-four. Not, as you can see, your typical candidate for an aesthetician. But Weil wasn’t really writing about beauty, she was writing about justice, which makes her a perfect fit for the case Scarry wants to make.

Weil’s claim is that, at the moment we encounter something beautiful, we undergo what she calls a “radical decentering.” We are required, by the experience itself, to “give up our imaginary position as the center.” Weil insists this is not a metaphor. It happens, she says, somatically, in the body and the nervous system.

“A transformation then takes place,” Weil writes, “at the very roots of our sensibility, in our immediate reception of sense impressions and psychological impressions.” The self becomes displaced. You are still present, of course, but you’re no longer at the middle of things. The beautiful object has become the central figure and you have become, for a moment, peripheral to your own experience. Simone Weil never had children, but it strikes me that, if she had, she’d have doubled down on all of this.

Two Men Contemplating the Moon, Caspar David Friedrich, ca. 1825–30

The most astute long term readers may have noticed, at this juncture, that this doesn’t sound like completely new territory for us. We’ve been here before when we explored Iris Murdoch’s concept of “unselfing.” The vocabulary is different but the essential point is the same: an honest encounter with the beautiful does something that takes us away from our ego.

Where Weil, however, is interested in what beauty does to the body, Murdoch is interested in what it clears away. Her famous example is a kestrel, spotted from a window at a moment when she had been, as she puts it, “anxious and resentful, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige.” Something about the beauty of the bird did something to her spirit to remove all of her grievances, and this, in her framing, should be understood as an ethical event. Her argument is that anything which moves consciousness in the direction of unselfishness must be connected in some way to virtue.

Beauty, then, for each if these three brilliant thinkers, operates in something of a unique position. Many things make us feel peripheral (lord knows) and many things produce pleasure, but beauty is unusual in producing both simultaneously.

“[Beauty] permits us to be adjacent while also permitting us to experience extreme pleasure, thereby creating the sense that it is our own adjacency that is pleasure-bearing.”

Let’s get back to Scarry, then, and follow her in the direction she’s going to take this argument. We’ll be helped, in our pivot from aesthetics to politics, by some etymology, and regular readers will know we love some etymology around these parts.

Scarry draws our attention to the English word “fair,” which she points out carries two meanings. It means beautiful (a fair face, a fair morning etc.). And it means just (a fair hearing, a fair share, etc.). In so far as I’ve ever thought about this I’ve probably assumed this to be a coincidence, but Scarry disagrees, and the etymology backs her up. She weaves a story, a little too long to recount here in full, that connects both meanings back to the same ancient root. Through Old Norse, Gothic and Sanskrit, “fair” originally meant something like fitting, or well-placed: things being in accord with one another’s shape and size.

Beautiful and just, she’s arguing, were never two separate ideas. The most consistently identified attribute of beautiful things, across cultures and centuries, is symmetry: balance, proportion, equal weight on all sides. And the most consistently identified requirement of justice, particularly distributive justice, is exactly the same thing. John Rawls, the twentieth century’s most important philosopher of justice, defines fairness as “a symmetry of everyone’s relations to each other.”

Scarry notes that when she told the economist and philosopher Amartya Sen what she was working on, he immediately recalled being a child in India, baffled by Aristotle’s claim that justice was a perfect cube, equidistant in all directions, but knowing instinctively it had something to do with equality. Another philosopher, Stuart Hampshire, heard the same pitch and agreed, citing what beauty and justice share: “balance and the weighing of both sides.”

Sonata of the Stars, Allegro, Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis, 1908

Augustine, in his De Musica, goes further. Equality, he argues, is the moral heart of beauty.

“The higher things are those in which equality resides, supreme, unshaken, unchangeable, eternal.”

The soul, in the presence of beauty, is always looking, it seems, for the same thing.

Scarry’s conclusion is that beauty and justice are not simply analogous. “An analogy,” she writes, “is inert and at rest only if both terms are present in the world; when one term is absent, the other becomes an active conspirator for the exile’s return.”

What I think she means here is that justice, even when it exists, is rarely something you can see. It is dispersed across too many places, too many simultaneous actions, to be perceived as a whole. You cannot look out of your window and see that a law is being applied fairly on the other side of town.

Beauty, however, is always directly available to the senses. And so when justice is absent, or simply invisible, beauty keeps the underlying idea — that things should be equal, that weight should be distributed evenly — in plain view. It will not let us forget what we are supposed to be working toward.

Let’s wrap up with a concrete image as a last ditch attempt to convince you of all this. Historians have long argued that Athenian democracy emerged, at least in part, from the spectacle of the trireme, the warship powered by 170 oarsmen pulling in rhythmic unison. It is here that equality was made visible and audible, compressed into a space small enough for the eye to take it all in at once.

And doesn’t that just make Scarry’s point quite beautifully? Justice is abstract, dispersed, and impossible to see whole. Beauty is concrete, present, and immediately available. And when the two share the same underlying logic of symmetry, equal weight, and things being in accord with one another’s shape and size, beauty does something that justice cannot do for itself. It keeps the idea alive. It makes equality something you can sense.

1 - In English, we look forward to things and we put bad memories behind us. The past, as our language conceptualises it, is in our wake and the future is what lies ahead. The metaphor is so embedded it barely registers as one at all.

George Steiner, however, when cataloguing the world’s languages in his book After Babel (1975), found cultures in which the arrangement is reversed. Certain nomadic peoples, says Steiner, place the past in front of the speaker, and what’s remarkable is that it actually makes more sense this way around when you stop to think about it. The past, after all, is visible and mappable - it’s the thing we can be said to ‘see.’ The future, on the other hand, is completely unknowable. We can’t see it at all. Sort of like what’s directly behind our back.

2 - Bernard Knox makes a similar point about the ancient Greeks in Backing into the Future (1994). Knox draws the idea directly from ancient Greek texts — Sophocles’ Oedipus the King and Homer’s Odyssey — where the Greek word opiso (literally “behind”) refers not to the past but to the future.

“the Greek word opiso, which literally means ‘behind’ or ‘back, refers not to the past but to the future. The early Greek imagination envisaged the past and the present as in front of us–we can see them. The future, invisible, is behind us. Only a few very wise men can see what is behind them. (p. 11)”

3 - Treatise (1963–67) is a 193-page graphic score by the British composer Cornelius Cardew. It essentially consists of 193 pages of lines, circles, geometric forms, and abstract symbols, with no indication whatsoever of how they should be performed, or by whom, or on what. As he says himself:

“It is not the object of the composer to dictate an interpretation of the symbols but to encourage the interpreter to act on his own initiative.”

It's a work of art in its own right

4 - And a great video from the Lunatic Ensemble demonstrating just one way it could be interpreted. The music is synced to a video of the score which is faintly mesmerising.

5 - When researching the Heidegger piece for this week’s main essay, I found myself following a tangent into Pascal, who gets a passing mention in the Heidegger lecture. Heidegger notes that the thane (that ancient, gathered, all-gathering thinking) is older even than Pascal’s raisons du coeur, translating as reasons of the heart. Pascal’s point, made in the Pensées (1670) and aimed squarely at the mathematical rationalism of his contemporaries, was that the heart has its own logic, its own way of arriving at things that reason cannot reach by its usual routes. “The heart has its reasons,” he wrote, “of which reason knows nothing.”

6 - I also found time to veer off into a brief discussion of ancient Polynesian wayfinding, but it deserves a little more attention here. Before the compass or the sextant, Polynesian navigators crossed the open Pacific without instruments of any kind. Instead, they used the stars, the ocean swells, the wind, and the flight patterns of birds. One technique was to divide the visual horizon into thirty-two “houses,” each one marking where a celestial body rose or set.

7 - The tradition very nearly died. By the twentieth century it survived in only a few pockets of Micronesia, and was in danger of being lost entirely due to modernisation. Its revival is largely the story of two men: Mau Piailug, a master navigator from the island of Satawal, and Nainoa Thompson, the Hawaiian navigator he agreed to teach. Mau navigated the first modern voyage of the Hōkūleʻa to Tahiti in 1976; Thompson later became the first modern Polynesian to use traditional wayfinding for long-distance open-ocean voyaging. Here he is teaching the next generation to preserve the knowledge and skill for posterity.

8 - I’ve been thrilled that my two little boys have taken to the Frog and Toad stories in recent weeks, and I’ve taken the opportunity to discover a little more about the life of the author and illustrator Arnold Lobel.

In 1974, four years after publishing his first book about the close friendship between Frog and Toad, Lobel told his family he was gay. Lobel never spoke or wrote explicitly about his sexuality, but in this interview with the New Yorker in 2016 his daughter Adrianne speculates about another dimension to the Frog and Toad stories:

“[Frog and Toad are] of the same sex, and they love each other. It was quite ahead of its time in that respect. [...] I think ‘Frog and Toad’ really was the beginning of him coming out”

“They were two close friends sitting alone together.” The final illustration in Lobel’s Days with Frog and Toad (1979).

9 - Between 1853 and 1870, Baron Haussmann demolished around a third of medieval Paris. These works continued through to 1927. Twelve thousand buildings were taken down to lay the broad, rational boulevards Napoleon III had ordered. The city that came out the other side was airier, more sanitary, and considerably harder to barricade.

Before old Paris completely vanished, Eugène Atget started walking the streets (what remained of them) in 1898 with an 18×24cm view camera and a brass lens without a shutter. He would do this for thirty years, until a few months before his death in 1927, photographing shop fronts, courtyards, doorways, park benches, the interiors of brothels, the stalls of rag-pickers.

It’s said that he produced over 5000 negatives (Walter Benjamin apparently kept one on his wall). I’ve included a few below but something closer to the full collection can be found here.

That's everything for this week. All the best until next time

There’s a particular kind of despair in the world at the moment. It’s a despair that points towards the war in Iran, which nobody seems to have planned or be able to stop; towards the development of artificial general intelligence, which the people building it openly admit they don’t understand and cannot control; towards, I don’t know, take your pick, the climate, the endless carousel of summits and targets and pledges that have produced further summits and targets and pledges, most of which tend to get ignored while the world burns. It’s a despair that concludes, ultimately, with the creeping suspicion that nobody in charge of anything is actually thinking any more.

Let’s adopt this viewpoint, for a moment. If we were to do so, we’d find ourselves mourning a particular kind of thinking. The clear-eyed kind. The chain-of-reasoning kind. The here-is-the-problem, here-are-its-causes, here-is-what-follows-if-we-do-nothing kind. The kind that produced the Federalist Papers and the Beveridge Report and the NHS, which was designed by people who had just watched half of Europe destroy itself and thought, right, what do we actually do now, and then sat down and worked it out. That kind. The premise-leads-to-conclusion, someone-in-the-room-has-read-something kind. And when we look at the people currently steering things (I’m using “steering” very generously here) we feel its absence like a missing tooth.

Meditation, Eugène Carrière, c.1890

And yet. What if the thinking we’re mourning, the clear-eyed chain-of-reasoning kind, is itself, already, a kind of reduction? What if this thing we call thinking is actually a dramatic narrowing of something older and deeper? What if we’ve spent so long on the ground floor of a building that we’ve forgotten the upper stories even exist?

It was Martin Heidegger who noticed this, and in a series of lectures delivered at the University of Freiburg in 1951 and 1952 (it ought to be acknowledged, here, that these were the first he had been permitted to give after being banned from teaching following the war, during which his membership of the Nazi party had made his continued presence in academic life rather difficult to defend, to say the least) he posed what sounds, on the surface, like quite a simple question: what is it, actually, that we mean by the word thinking?

He’s not looking, here, for answers about what thinking should achieve, or how we should think better. Rather, he’s interested in what the word actually means, and what it has always meant. It turns out, if you’re etymologically inclined, that the word thinking is hiding something, something rather more important than anything we’ve been mourning.

The rest of this piece — including a close look at what Heidegger actually found when he examined the Old English etymology of thinking — is for humanities library members. Click below if you feel inclined to join our little club.

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