Hello,
Welcome to Recommended Reading. In this week’s column I wrote about the challenges powerfully predictive and manipulative internet algorithms pose to our assumptions about free will. The last edition of Recommended Reading was on Dr Johnson. The one before that was on my favourite books of 2024. On Saturday I’m off to see the Whit Stillman film The Last Days of Disco. His first film, Metropolitan – about urbane, anxious, literate upper class Americans self-consciously going through long out of date coming of age rituals – is probably my favourite film.
This may be the final edition of Recommended Reading as I am toying with the idea of renaming it Cultural Capital. I wonder if Recommended Reading sounds off-puttingly bland and generic. Thoughts on the matter are welcome in the comments but if you receive a newsletter next week called Cultural Capital, it is just this one in a new guise.
Over Christmas I read Sylvia Townsend Warner’s superb novel about life in a fourteenth century convent, The Corner that Held Them. With the caveat that I am not much of a reader of historical fiction I think it is the best historical novel I have ever read: beautifully written and sensitively unsentimental. Above all I think it is the most convincing sustained attempt to inhabit the worldview of another age that I have encountered. Too many historical novels are either blunderingly unresponsive to the strangeness of the past (the genre is lavishly peopled with Tudors who share the moral assumptions of twenty-first century liberals) or they garishly over-emphasise it and have characters constantly remarking on astrological portents, the Aristotelian cosmos, infant mortality and the joys of lute music. What is hard to do is to capture the fact that the past was strange but that it did not seem that way to the people who lived in it. The strangeness once seemed ordinary; just as our world of aeroplanes and steel and glass towers seems banal to us. Warner’s detached, sympathetic, gently ironising style means she is able to register the strangeness of the past without insisting on it. The book absorbs lepers, friars, pseudo-saintly bishops, religious visions and scandalous priestly heresies so subtly that you really feel you have been offered a glimpse of what it would have been like to live at a time when those things were part of the accustomed landscape of reality. Perhaps it helps that Warner’s nuns belong to a remote, relatively impoverished convent and are therefore not constantly being confronted with history head on as in so much historical fiction. The black death is introduced as a rumour then as a tragedy before it fades away again and is forgotten. None of her nuns react as if they have encountered a historical event; it is just another part of life. In one of the book’s loveliest passages a young character encounters the ars nova music of Guillaume de Mauchaut. There is no heavy-handed exposition about the development of fourteenth century musical style or how this particular music found its way to England – desperately tempting themes for any historical novelist who has done their research. It is just a beautiful thing that has happened to turn up in his world – which is, of course just how music appears to us when we encounter it when we are young.
Medieval WorldviewsI’ve also been reading CS Lewis’s book The Discarded Image, which is an account of the assumptions about the universe that underlie medieval art and literature – what Lewis refers to as “The Medieval Model”. He is especially interesting on the medieval reverence for authority – where our world view is based on observation of the real world the medieval world view was based on reading ancient texts. Poets (who we wouldn’t usually treat as authorities on science) were taken as sources of infallible information about the universe. What on earth would Roman writers like Lucan and Apuleius have made of their off-handed comments about the natural world being turned into foundation stones of the medieval Christian cosmology? It’s an excellent and brief introduction to the subject. Here is Lewis on how differently medieval people felt about the universe – which to them was much smaller and much more ordered than the one we know.
You must go out on a starry night and walk about for half an hour trying to see the sky in terms of the old cosmology. Remember that you now have an absolute Up and Down. The Earth is really the centre, really the lowest place; movement to it from whatever direction is downward movement. As a modern, you located the stars at a great distance. For distance you must now substitute that very special, and far less abstract, sort of distance which we call height; height, which speaks immediately to our muscles and nerves. The Medieval Model is vertiginous. And the fact that the height of the stars in the medieval astronomy is very small compared with their distance in the modern, will turn out not to have the kind of importance you anticipated. For thought and imagination, ten million miles and a thousand million are much the same. Both can be conceived (that is, we can do sums with both) and neither can be imagined; and the more imagination we have the better we shall know this. The really important difference is that the medieval universe, while unimaginably large, was also unambiguously finite. And one unexpected result of this is to make the smallness of Earth more vividly felt. In our universe she is small, no doubt; but so are the galaxies, so is everything—and so what? But in theirs there was an absolute standard of comparison. The furthest sphere, Dante’s maggior corpo is, quite simply and finally, the largest object in existence. The word ‘small’ as applied to Earth thus takes on a far more absolute significance. Again, because the medieval universe is finite, it has a shape, the perfect spherical shape, containing within itself an ordered variety. Hence to look out on the night sky with modern eyes is like looking out over a sea that fades away into mist, or looking about one in a trackless forest—trees forever and no horizon. To look up at the towering medieval universe is much more like looking at a great building. The ‘space’ of modern astronomy may arouse terror, or bewilderment or vague reverie; the spheres of the old present us with an object in which the mind can rest, overwhelming in its greatness but satisfying in its harmony. That is the sense in which our universe is romantic, and theirs was classical. This explains why all sense of the pathless, the baffling, and the utterly alien—all agoraphobia—is so markedly absent from medieval poetry when it leads us, as so often, into the sky. Dante, whose theme might have been expected to invite it, never strikes that note. The meanest modern writer of science-fiction can, in that department, do more for you than he. Pascal’s terror at le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis never entered his mind. He is like a man being conducted through an immense cathedral, not like one lost in a shoreless sea.
It’s highly recommended. I’ve also been reading the Dutch historian Johann Huizinga’s book The Waning of the Middle Ages. I’m enjoying it a lot so far. It was nominated for a Nobel prize in the 1920s and is beautifully written and full of sweeping statements about how medieval people lived more intensely than we do, which no modern historian would dare to make. Perhaps it’s the subject of a future newsletter. Though this mustn’t turn into a medieval studies bulletin.From the Censer Curling RiseI have been playing this all week from Handel’s oratorio Solomon. I can’t think of another composer who does bombast as joyfully as Handel. A thought it prompts in me is the way different political systems produce different types of art. Handel was the product of a hierarchical and aristocratic society which took power and ceremony much more seriously than our own. In the eighteenth century reverence for power and hierarchy were emotions that naturally found expression in music. But feelings of unironic awe and celebration in the presence of power are not emotions that have a place in our more democratic culture. Perhaps they are rarely even felt. A good thing on the whole. Political systems produce their own emotional landscapes. The Handel is lovely nevertheless. P.S. In a typically conceited passage in Saul Bellow’s novel Ravelstein, the Bellow character’s girlfriend sings this to him while pushing him round the swimming pool on a lilo.Tessa HadleyA nice podcast interview with Tessa Hadley, who as I have mentioned previously is probably my favourite living novelist. Interesting that she says doing a PhD helped her discover a confident authoritative voice as a novelist as I can’t think of many writers who sound less like a PhD dissertation than she does. Things Have to Get Worse to Get BetterOne of the systemic advantages democracies are supposed to have over autocracies is that they are more flexible and better able to change course in the face of adverse events. Janan Ganesh is typically good here asking what it takes for a democracy to really change. He argues that until confronted with a real crisis, most democratic electorates would rather muddle along with an uncomfortable status quo than face the upfront costs of systemic change. Not a cheering thought.
Epiphany on Monday and therefore impossible not to mention TS Eliot’s Journey of the Magi. Its beautiful, spare style makes it quite different to any of Eliot’s other poems. He was so good in so many different ways – a reliable sign of poetic greatness. I especially like the first stanza of the poem. The Magi are travelling in
The very dead of winter.’And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,Lying down in the melting snow.
I have always loved the line about the camel lying down in the melting snow (crucially, not melted snow) which is at once believably specific and banal but also has a kind of stark archaic simplicity about it. I have to say that I find the religious symbolism ever so slightly hokey and self-important. The newly converted Anglo Catholic Eliot is enjoying his new membership of a special club with its own important codes and symbols rather too much. You get to congratulate yourself on noticing that “three trees on the low sky” is a reference to the crucifixion and that the “old white horse” galloping away in the meadow is Jesus (a reference to the book of Revelation, I think). Then you can go on and spot that the vine leaves over the tavern are a symbol of Christ (the true vine), the empty wine skins are a reference to the Gospel of Matthew (“Neither do men put new wine into old wineskins”). These too-specific symbols always seem disappointingly brittle and one-dimensional to me, lacking the mystery and ambiguity of the symbolism of The Waste Land. Still, it’s an amazing poem. You can read it online here.