Break

Tomorrow morning, if all goes to plan, Mrs Nige and I will be boarding the Eurostar and heading, ultimately, for the city of Tours. We shall be there for a few days. Au revoir, mes amis...

A Tip from Thomas Woolner

Palgrave's Golden Treasury is probably the most famous poetry anthology of them all (unless it's the rather less widely read Greek Anthology) and is certainly the best to have come out of the Victorian age; it's still - after many revisions and updates - a very handy book to have around. The man who compiled it, Francis Turner Palgrave - born on this day in 1824 - was one of those Victorians who seemed to have the energy to live several parallel lives (as poet, critic, educator, civil servant and committee man) and who knew everybody who was anybody. He was a close friend of Tennyson, and an even closer friend of the sculptor and poet Thomas Woolner, with whom he shared a house (though Woolner, it should be pointed out, was a robustly heterosexual married man and father of six). The rather fey engraving on the original Golden Treasury title page is from a drawing by Woolner. An interesting figure with a forceful, by all accounts rather 'rough' personality, Woolner was, despite his strongly classical leanings, a founder member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood - the only sculptor among them - and his temporary emigration to Australia in 1852 inspired Ford Madox Brown's doomy painting The Last of England. Like Palgrave, Woolner too was a friend of Tennyson, and provided him with the scenario for the great narrative poem Enoch Arden. But it was his friendship with Darwin that bore the strangest fruit, when the two men discussed the formation of the ear of Woolner's sculptured Puck. Darwin identified this particular formation as an atavistic feature and gave it the name of the 'Woolnerian tip'. It is now known, more prosaically, as Darwin's tubercle - and my daughter and I both have a rather more attractive version of it. We call it our 'pixie ear'.

Drugs! Live!

I caught a bit of of Drugs Live: The Ecstasy Trial, Channel 4's much-hyped 'experiment' with MDMA, on TV last night. What a rum do - it was like stepping back into the Sixties, when recreational drugs were 'new' and this kind of thing was always going on. I kept expecting to see Malcolm Muggeridge any minute,  or that nice Michael Ramsay,  Archbishop of Canterbury.
The difference this time was that drugs are no longer 'new' and exciting (least of all Ecstasy) - but neuroscience is. That's why these unfortunate guinea pigs were undergoing their Ecstasy experiences in the confines of an MRI scanner - it's a wonder none of them went round the bend. The aim was, of course, to see what was going on in their brains as the drug got to work, though I'm not sure what this was supposed to tell the white-coated neuroscientists, or the notorious Prof David Nutt, who was one of two Profs sitting in elevated seats. Nutt was wearing a short-sleeved shirt with a tie - a look that only works on Andy Sipowicz - and sweating rather a lot. There was talk of finding potential medical uses for MDMA, perhaps in treating depression - a funny way to go about doing the research, in a TV studio, but there you go...
And one of the volunteers taking the drug was none other than Lionel Shriver, author of one of the worst novels I have ever attempted to read (We Need to Talk about Kevin). She came across as rather sweet, in a slightly nerdy kind of way, putting me in mind of Sheldon's girlfriend Amy in Big Bang Theory. I warmed to her... But I felt my time would be better spent sleeping than watching any more of this stuff. I went to bed.

The Strange Case of Max Ehrmann

Born on this day in 1872 was the American writer and attorney Max Ehrmann, one of those cases - like Joseph Blanco White - of a writer remembered for just one work. Or rather, in Ehrmann's case, forgotten, for the one work is usually described as having been 'found in Old St Paul's Church, Baltimore' and dating back to the church's foundation in 1692.
  Yes, it's the notorious Desiderata, as featured on countless posters, voiced by one Les Crane in a cringe-makingly cheesy spoken word recording that was a big hit in 1972 - and indeed recited by Leonard Nimoy in his legendary album Leonard Nimoy Presents Mr Spock's Music from Outer Space. It was only after all this had happened that authorship of Desiderata was finally asserted and the family of the long dead Max Ehrmann received some royalties.
  How had the confusion come about? Simply because Desiderata had been published in an anthology compiled in 1959 by the rector of St Paul's, Baltimore - an anthology that made much of the date of the church's foundation, 1692. Then, in 1965, Desiderata had been found by the bedside of Adlai Stevenson after his death - and he'd apparently been planning to use it in his Christmas cards. From there it a short step to the mass circulation of Desiderata as an inspirational prose poem discovered in an old (by American standards) church in Baltimore.
  Reading Desiderata again - and putting out of my mind the ghastly spoken word recordings and the calligraphic posters - what strikes me is how much sound wisdom there is in it. Yes, it's corny and hokey, it strains after the vatic tone (how did anyone convince themselves this was written in the 17th century?) and it seems at least partly tailored to the spiritual needs of a small-town American businessman - but pick the bones out of it and the message is pretty sound, isn't it? Just try not to hear Les Crane in your head when you read it...

'Go placidly amidst the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible without surrender be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story.
Avoid loud and aggressive persons, they are vexatious to the spirit. If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter; for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.
Exercise caution in your business affairs; for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals; and everywhere life is full of heroism.
Be yourself. Especially, do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is as perennial as the grass.
Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.
Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.
Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be, and whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul. With all its shams, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful.
Strive to be happy.'

Many versions of Desiderata swap 'Be cheerful' for 'Be careful', perhaps under the impression that 'Be cheerful' is restated in 'Strive to be happy'. But to be cheerful and to be happy are of course very different things.

Reasons to Be Cheerful. 3.

The sparrows are back! At least, they were this morning. I looked blearily out of the window at the dripping garden, and there was a fine male House Sparrow availing himself of the bird feeder with typical passerine gusto. A little later I looked out again and there were two on the feeder, and more waiting in the wings and fighting for access - maybe a party of half a dozen. This is surely a hopeful sign. I've been surprised how much I've missed the sparrows since they mysteriously disappeared - it felt like a real loss, a diminution of life's everyday richness. I hope that now they're back for good - I shall top up the feeders, scatter birdseed and breadcrumbs, and do all I can to make the garden a desirable neighbourhood for the discerning sparrow.

Chestertons and Humberts

I wouldn't swear to it, but I'm pretty sure there is only one case of an estate agent fathering a giant of English letters. Edward Chesterton, father of Gilbert Keith (G.K.), was that estate agent. He worked for the family firm, which was still trading until very recently as Chestertons. Now, I notice, it is Chesterton Humberts, a name that keeps the literary associations alive, not only via Nabokov's Humbert Humbert but by way of the oddly named Humbert Wolfe, a hugely popular poet in his day (the 1920s). His volume Requiem sold in such prodigious quantities that it is still a fixture on the shelves of charity and second-hand bookshops up and down the land. In a lighter moment, Humbert Wolfe wrote these still sadly apposite lines:
'You cannot hope to bribe or twist,
  thank God! the British journalist.
But, seeing what the man will do
  unbribed, there's no occasion to.'
Chesterton couldn't have put it better himself.

Quillet

It's always good to come across a new word, especially if it has some music in it, and depths of meaning. Today I happened upon 'quillet', which was a new one on me. Its earliest meaning is the obvious one of a small quill or something similarly tubular, but it then took off on a parallel course, Latin-derived, to mean a verbal nicety, a fine distinction, a quibble, apparently from 'quiddity' via 'quillity'. There it is in Love's Labour's Lost - 'Some tricks, some quillets, how to cheat the devil'. But from before Shakespeare's time comes the meaning of a narrow field or strip of land, the sense in which the word is still used in the West Country, especially Cornwall. There, the little sheltered fields of flowers - Cornish violets, pinks, daffodils, anemones, often grown commercially - still go by the name of quillets. This is somehow good to know. Or perhaps it's just me...