'After a while your mind's a macédoine...'

 When John Ruskin first visited the Alps, at the age of fourteen, his father took care to entrust him to a reliable and expert guide, Joseph Marie Couttet, with whom the young Ruskin soon formed a close bond, which lasted throughout Couttet's life. The Alpine guide even accompanied Ruskin to Italy, to attend to practical matters and generally take care of him. 
  Ruskin recalled their first Alpine venture, an ascent of Mont Buet, with Couttet on foot, leading his young master on a mule. Despite suffering from migraine, sunburn and painful eyes, Ruskin found the experience magical, and was instantly captivated by the Alpine scenery – a taste he never lost; he visited the region around thirty times in his life. When he heard that his old guide was dying, Ruskin made a detour to visit him, and afterwards wrote: 'I am tired, full of anguish and sadness. The death of my old Couttet weighs on me like all the snows of Chamonix. How lonely I am at his passing. My dear old guide of Chamonix. He who said he would give me just nine sous a day to herd cows, because, according to him, that was all I was good for...' A few years later, Ruskin wrote about Couttet again, recalling how 'after the meal, once he'd had his half-bottle of Savoy wine, it wasn't unusual for him to give me a philosophical lecture as we drove up a peaceful valley in the afternoon light. And after I'd tired him out and provoked him with my views on the world, my joys and his own, he would slide down to my valet beside me and murmur, shrugging his shoulders: 'Le pauvre enfant, il ne sait pas vivre.' The poor child doesn't know how to live. He was right: life for Ruskin seems to have been a relentless struggle, driving him constantly to the edge of nervous collapse, as his ferocious work ethic, and who knows what demons, drove him to a level of overwork and over-commitment staggering even by Victorian standards. 
  Couttet's perceptive remark appears as the epigraph to this poem by Dick Davis (from Belonging), in which the poet considers once again the possibility, or impossibility, of living happily –


'Live Happily'

'Le pauvre enfant, il ne sait pas vivre' 

After a while your minds a macédoine 
Of muddled poems, stories, paintings, music,
And pointed admonitions by the dead
Who seemed to know what they were saying meant. 

In all this incommodious welter one
Phrase comically recurs to me, the flourish
With which Domenico Scarlatti ended
The dedication of his published work –

'Vivi felice' ... 'Vivi felice',
Which I've not done yet, or seen clearly how
I'd manage to. Time's running out, his bright 
Arpeggios remind me ... running out ...


Which surely calls for a little Scarlatti – here's the ludicrously talented Yuja Wang playing the Sonata K455. Enjoy.