Keeping the Faith

 Yesterday I accompanied Mrs N – who is rather keener on this sort of thing than I am – to an event in the cathedral titled 'Keeping the Faith: Can Christianity Save the West?' Three good guest speakers were lined up – Jamie Franklin, author of The Great Return: Why Only a Restoration of Christianity Can Save Western Civilisation; Bijan Omrani, author of God Is an Englishman: Christianity and the Creation of England; and Nick Spencer, author of Playing God: Science, Religion and the Future of Humanity – and each gave a good account of their particular perspective. It was all very well-mannered and good-humoured, but there was not much talk about saving the West, or what it needed saving from, and indeed the question was not explicitly asked by the chair until near the end, so there was not a great deal of time to explore it.
  One of the themes throughout was how deeply imbued our values, institutions and ways of thinking are with ideas that are clearly derived from Christianity, and it seems to me – without getting too Nietzschean about it – that it is precisely those ideas, as embodied in secular liberalism, that have sunk western civilisation and brought it to its present crisis. Love of neighbour, tolerance, openness, hospitality to strangers, compassion, empathy ('suicidal empathy', in Gad Saad's phrase) – all of these basically Christian values have been weaponised against us, and might in the end finish off our particular civilisation.
  Ah well, it was very pleasant to sit in the cathedral's lady chapel for an hour, admiring the intricate stone vaulting and those marvellous stained-glass windows, lit by mellow autumn sunshine. It will all last a while yet...

Latest

 Here's my latest piece in Literary Review – a round-up of recent books about death and longevity [the wording differs very slightly from the printed version]...

End of the Line

‘It is the strangest of all truths. We will all die. We all know we will die. But few of us truly believe we will die, few of us can imagine we will die.’ So begins Richard Coker’s Timor Mortis: How We Live With Death (New Modern Arcade 296pp £20). It’s a promising start to a wide-ranging study of the many dimensions of death, and how our understanding of it has changed over time. Coker describes his book as a ‘hybrid memoir’, and it draws heavily on his experiences as a physician and public health specialist, with something too of his personal life. He is clearly a humane and intuitive doctor, strongly opposed to the practice of medicine as ‘engineering without art’, which in extremis can lead to doctors becoming ‘torturers’. ‘Tenderness and truth’, he writes, should always trump ‘technological bravado’, particularly with patients who are nearing death. As for ‘assisted dying’, he knows from experience that ‘all good doctors have assisted dying’.
   In a chapter he describes as a ‘rant’, Coker gives the ‘wellness’ industry a well deserved kicking. It is, he writes, the domain of ‘grifters and charlatans’, a big-money business that fills the void left by the medical profession having failed those who fear dying, and those who are dying. Timor Mortis might have benefited from a bit more shaping and focus – and there are surprising omissions, for example in the chapter on ‘Legacy’ there is nothing on that increasingly difficult phenomenon, the digital afterlife. However, there is much to value in this book, not least his wise, unfashionable conclusion that ‘we should think about death every day – not to overcome our fear of it, but so that our fear brings greater fulfilment to our brief time on Earth’.
   Terry Eagleton claims that he intended A Death of One’s Own: Reflections on Mortality (Yale 296pp £18.99) to be published posthumously, but ‘publishers don’t much like dead authors, partly because they aren’t available for publicity events’. He describes the book as ‘more a montage of objects than a single unfolding argument’. It is a high-energy tour of various ways in which western culture has reflected on death, now philosophical, now literary, now personal, always richly rewarding, and often funny, especially in a section devoted to Eagleton’s years as a notorious academic drunk. He has a way with the throwaway gag, and his learning is always lightly worn. Referencing the title of his book and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, he writes that ‘to have a death of one’s own is as rare as one of Virginia Woolf’s housemaids owning a room of her own’. He sees death as, in his case, ‘the ultimate contrascriptive’, the thing that will finally put a stop to his writing.
  Death is ‘what falls down the crack’ between the living and the dead, neither of whom can actually experience it: it is, as Wittgenstein says, ‘not an experience in life but the limit of such experience’. ‘Not being alive,’ writes Eagleton, ‘is a lot more objectionable than being dead.’ He characterises death as ‘both unremarkable and inconceivable’. This is a book densely packed with such pithy insights – so densely packed, in fact, that it is best read a chapter at a time. It ranges far and wide over literature and philosophy, while taking enjoyable potshots at such enemies as postmodernism and smartphones. Eagleton is both a Marxist and a Christian, and the tension between the two gives his work a distinctive energy. A Death of One’s Own contains, rather surprisingly, an eloquent passage on what heaven might be like, and another in which he movingly writes of an aging father facing his coming death as he and his intellectually impaired daughter listen together to ‘Beautiful Dreamer’. There is a lot more to Eagleton than mere cleverness – though, heaven knows, he is clever.
   Death being what it is, many would sooner avoid it, or at least add decades to their lives – surely it wouldn’t be too much to ask of modern science, would it? Yes, it would, answers Saul Justin Newman resoundingly in Morbid: Debunking Modern Longevity Science (MIT Press 312pp £27), a blistering attack on the shaky science and wishful thinking that characterises the whole field of longevity research. The wishful thinking even extends into identifying the oldest living human beings. The 1979 Guinness Book of Records would have told you that it was 137-year-old Charlie Smith, a blatant fabulist who became a huge celebrity on the basis of absolutely no reliable documentary evidence. Now the official ‘oldest human being’ record is held by Jeanne Calment, who supposedly died at the age of 122, but this was probably a case of imposture (by her own daughter). When Newman began looking into such matters, he got a shock: ‘I had just discovered that tens of thousands of the world’s oldest living people were secretly dead’ – and more surprises were to come, including the non-existence of ‘blue zones’, parts of the world full of happy, healthy centenarians. When the Japanese investigated their supposed abundance of centenarians, over eighty per cent were found to be dead or untraceable, while in Greece, similarly blessed with centenarians, more than seventy per cent of them mysteriously disappeared.
  Newman moves on to junk the whole big-money longevity business, the supposed ‘cures’ for aging, the promises to reverse time, the morbid narcissism that fixates on the body and dreams of endless youth, the ‘venture-capital vampires’ homing in on this lucrative field of pseudo-medicine. There is something eye-popping on practically every page of this closely researched, vividly written book, which ends on a hopeful note – not about humans, but cereal crops, whose life has been extended dramatically in recent years: ‘I do not care to have an immortal, bilious billionaire, but I cannot wait for perennial wheat, maize or oats.’ Meanwhile, however, ‘the big-bang reproduction of bad ideas continues apace in aging research…’
  Seamus O’Mahony’s The Longevity Delusion: Money, Myths and Bad Science (Head of Zeus: Apollo 288pp £20) covers much of the same ground as the later chapters of Newman’s book, presenting an authoritative critical overview of the longevity industry. ‘Because we now live so long,’ writes O’Mahony, ‘we have never feared death so much’ – which is why many are so desperate to believe that science is on the verge of a breakthrough that will extend all our lives, despite the undeniable fact that ‘no intervention … has ever been shown to extend longevity in humans’. O’Mahony meets and interviews many of the leading figures in the field, including the charismatic Rasputin-like figure Aubrey de Grey and the ultimate scientist-entrepreneur David Sinclair, each of whom gets chapter to himself. The author also meets ‘biohackers’, those ‘devotees of a new religion, where the body – the self – is God’. And he reports from the Dublin Longevity Summit, where, ‘over the four days and countless talks and panel discussions, nobody made even a passing reference to the fact that the main limiters of healthspan [length of healthy life] and lifespan are poverty, lack of education and social inequality. Then again, why would they?’ Quite – that’s not where the money is.

Matthau

 Born on this day in 1920 was Walter Matthau (who was not, as he liked to claim, born Walter Foghorn Matuschanskyasky, but plain Walter John Matthow). 
With his hangdog face and wisecracking cynicism, he was the perfect foil to his friend Jack Lemmon, with whom he made ten films.
   Here is my favourite Matthau anecdote: 
Walter was staying with his wife in a hotel which he discovered was quite close to Auschwitz, so he asked the manager to fix them a car and driver so they could pay a visit. 'Certainly Mr Matthau, no problem at all, you go up to your room and I'll fix it straight away.' Half an hour later, Walter and wife still in room, no sign of car. He phones down. 'Ah Mr Matthau, I'm sorry for the delay. What it is, I'm getting you a very special car, we can't have a star like you arriving there in the village taxi', etc. OK. Another half hour passes. Same conversation. He's found a car and it's being valeted, won't be long, any minute now, etc. Matthau getting very annoyed. Another half hour and Matthau is pacing the room, fuming. At last, the call comes. 'Mr Matthau, I've got just the car for you – and it's outside the door right now.' 'OK, I'll take it', Matthau barks down the phone, 'but I want you to know – you've ruined Auschwitz for me!' 

   And here is Matthau in action, in the closing scene of Billy Wilder's The Front Page. Matthau's Walter Burns has finally relented and allowed his ace reporter Hildy Johnson (Jack Lemmon) to leave Chicago to start a new career and marry his beloved. Bidding Hildy a fond farewell, he presents him with a watch as he boards the train...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av-M1qRH3HE

Defoe's Civets

 From a book I'm reading for review (of which more in due course, no doubt), I learn of a surprising business venture undertaken by Daniel Defoe, a man full of bright ideas but entirely devoid of commercial nous. Finding himself broke and heavily in debt in 1692, having run through his wife's considerable fortune and lost money on one failed venture after another, he saw a wonderful chance to make big money fast – civet farming. Civets were highly prized for the pungent musk that could be extracted from a gland under the tail and used as a cure-all and, especially, in the making of perfumes. Defoe bought 70 civet 'cats' (they're not actually cats, but are related to mongooses and genets) and, installing them in cages on a farm at Newington Green, looked forward to making big money.  Unfortunately, one of his many creditors got wind of the scheme and had the sheriffs of London seize the civets in lieu of debt. Defoe appealed to his mother-in-law to ransom the money-making beasts by paying his debt, which she duly did – only to discover, when another creditor turned up, that her son-in-law had never actually owned them in the first place. Infuriated, and out of pocket by £400 (a six-figure sum in today's money), she sued everyone involved, including Defoe, who soon abandoned business in favour of something he was much better at – writing. I wonder if, had Defoe's civet farming proved a commercial success, we would never have had Robinson Crusoe...

Not Black and White

 Last night, roaming among the more remote and obscure outlying TV channels, I happened upon that greatest of all the Ealing comedies, Kind Hearts and Coronets, which I happily watched to the end – it never palls. Next up after that was another fine Ealing comedy, The Ladykillers, featuring another extraordinary performance by Alec Guinness, with the young Peter Sellers, still plump and rather sweaty, in his first major film role. As it got under way, I felt there was something wrong – why was it in colour, for heaven's sake? Had it been colorised? All my memories of The Ladykillers are in black and white, as befits a comedy noir, filmed in the smoky, grimy, soot-blackened city that was London in the 1950s. Why would anyone think it was a good idea to colorise it? Well, picture my astonishment when I discovered, this morning, that the film was made in colour, using the three-strip Technicolor process. My visual memories of it were entirely false. I guess they were coloured (or uncoloured) by the fact that all the other classic Ealing comedies are indeed in black and white (I checked). 
   Here's an appreciation I wrote some years ago of Kind Hearts and Coronets.

Rameau

Born on this day in 1683 was the great French composer (and music theorist) Jean-Philippe Rameau. His father was an organist in Dijon, and Jean-Philippe was taught music before he could read or write. It wasn't until he was nearly 50 that he began to compose the extraordinary operas for which he is best remembered today.
  As it's his birthday, let's celebrate with the roof-raising Danse du Grand Calumet de la Paix [peace pipe] from Les Indes Galantes. Be warned: if you haven't heard it before – or even if you have – you will probably have this insistent riff going round in your head for the rest of the day. 
Follow the link to a live encore performance by Teodor Currentzis's Musica Aeterna...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2O0gcSKqznk&list=RD2O0gcSKqznk&start_radio=1

  

The Marbles Stay

 I was delighted to learn that talks about returning the Elgin Marbles to Greece have collapsed, apparently because the Greek government is insisting the return must be permanent, and the British Museum is (fortunately) prevented by law from giving away its treasures. Of course the marbles should stay where they are, if only because they inspired this great sonnet by Keats – 

On Seeing the Elgin Marbles

My spirit is too weak—mortality

   Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,

   And each imagined pinnacle and steep

Of godlike hardship tells me I must die

Like a sick eagle looking at the sky.

   Yet ’tis a gentle luxury to weep

   That I have not the cloudy winds to keep

Fresh for the opening of the morning’s eye.

Such dim-conceived glories of the brain

   Bring round the heart an undescribable feud;

So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,

   That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude

Wasting of old time—with a billowy main—

   A sun—a shadow of a magnitude.