Darwin: Voyage of the Beagle

The Voyage of the Beagle
Charles Darwin
(Penguin Classics, 1989) [1839]
432 p.

When Charles Darwin was yet in his early 20s he signed on as ship’s naturalist aboard the Beagle, bound on a circumnavigation voyage. The purpose of the journey was to chart the coastlines of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, and to survey the coasts of Chile, Peru, and several Pacific islands, including the Galapagos. Of course, it turned out that this young scientist’s observations would, in time, overshadow everything else about the enterprise, but that was still several decades away. Upon returning home to England, Darwin published this charming account of the journey and the things he saw along the way.

He seems to have been a born naturalist, with a passion for knowledge of living things that few of us possess. At every opportunity he would make excursions inland, collecting specimens as he went, and reporting on them with winsome excitement: “This day I found a specimen of a curious fungus, called Hymenophallus“. He reports that during occasional bouts of illness he would nonetheless stagger from his bed to pursue his researches. And with each new discovery his wonder at the richness of it all comes shining through:

The number of minute and obscurely coloured beetles is exceedingly great. The cabinets of Europe can, as yet, boast only of the larger species from tropical climates. It is sufficient to disturb the composure of an entomologist’s mind, to look forward to the future dimensions of a complete catalogue.

He remarks also on the surprising tameness of many of the animals found on remote islands unfrequented by men. On the Galapagos islands he found that he could hunt hawks using his gun in an unorthodox fashion: “with the muzzle I push a hawk off the branch of a tree”. And on the little island of San Pedro (now called South Georgia Island) he went fox hunting:

A fox (Canis fulvipes), of a kind said to be peculiar to the island, and very rare in it, and which is a new species, was sitting on the rocks. He was so intently absorbed in watching the work of the officers, that I was able, by quietly walking up behind, to knock him on the head with my geological hammer. This fox, more curious or more scientific, but less wise, than the generality of his brethren, is now mounted in the museum of the Zoological Society.

For most modern readers his reflections on the history and diversity of life is a principal attraction of the book. We sometimes forget that Darwin’s eventual contribution, in On the Origin of Species, would not be to argue that life on earth evolved, but to propose a particular kind of process — natural selection — as the principal means by which it did so. That species changed over time, and that the earth was of stupefying antiquity, was already well-known before he came along, and he himself is, of course, well aware of this. (He mentions Lamarck on one occasion.)

Nonetheless, he was a keen observer, and his reflections on what he saw retain their interest. He notices, for instance, “in two distant countries a similar relation between plants and insects of the same families, though the species of both are different,” and that although the species one observes change from place to place, proximate regions often have similar species occupying particular ecological niches; this was for him an important fact that deserved explanation:

The Tinochorus is closely related to some other South American birds. Two species of the genus Attagis are in almost every respect ptarmigans in their habits; one lives in Tierra del Fuego, above the limits of the forest land; and the other just beneath the snow-line on the Cordillera of Central Chile. A bird of another closely allied genus, Chionis alba, is an inhabitant of the antarctic regions; it feeds on sea-weed and shells on the tidal rocks. Although not web footed, from some unaccountable habit, it is frequently met with far out at sea. This small family of birds is one of those which, from its varied relations to other families, although at present offering only difficulties to the systematic naturalist, ultimately may assist in revealing the grand scheme, common to the present and past ages, on which organized beings have been created.

Darwin was, even at this young age, an able geologist, and he makes frequent, detailed observations about the geological formations and history that he observes. Naturally he is also interested in the fossils in the rocks. He meditates on the temporal analogue of the regional variation of species — namely, that in a particular place the life-forms have varied over time — and that this temporal variation seems to follow no evident logic. Indeed, he concludes that “no fact in the long history of the world is so startling as the wide and repeated exterminations of its inhabitants.”

It was only when the voyage was reaching its final stages that it visited the Galapagos islands; it was, for most of the ship’s crew, something of an afterthought. But it was here that Darwin was confronted with puzzles of speciation and geography in a particularly clear way. He first noticed that although many of the species found on the Galapagos are unique to those islands, the overall impression one receives is that the creatures are similar to those found on mainland South America, rather than those found on neighbouring island formations:

It was most striking to be surrounded by new birds, new reptiles, new shells, new insects, new plants, and yet by innumerable trifling details of structure, and even by the tones of voice and plumage of the birds, to have the temperate plains of Patagonia, or rather the hot dry deserts of Northern Chile, vividly brought before my eyes.

But after visiting several of the islands in the group he noticed “the most remarkable feature in the natural history of this archipelago”, for not only were the forms of life on the islands different from those found elsewhere, but “the different islands to a considerable extent are inhabited by a different set of beings”. Each island had its own species of tortoise, of lizard, of finch, and of various plants. This he found very remarkable:

We have the truly wonderful fact, that in James Island, of the thirty-eight Galapageian plants, or those found in no other part of the world, thirty are exclusively confined to this one island; and in Albemarle Island, of the twenty-six aboriginal Galapageian plants, twenty-two are confined to this one island, that is, only four are at present known to grow in the other islands of the archipelago; and so on…

He finally described the islands of the group as “physically similar, organically distinct, yet intimately related to each other, and all related in a marked, though much lesser degree, to the great American continent”, and the effort to understand how this state of affairs might have come about would be an important influence on his writing of On the Origin of Species two decades later.

*

Apart from his observations of the flora and fauna, he also made interesting remarks on the peoples whom he encountered. I was delighted, for instance, to learn of a charming custom then current among the Catholic people of Uruguay:

On approaching the house of a stranger, it is usual to follow several little points of etiquette: riding up slowly to the door, the salutation of Ave Maria is given, and until somebody comes out and asks you to alight, it is not customary even to get off your horse: the formal answer of the owner is, “sin pecado concebida”—that is, conceived without sin.

He also experienced the amazement of less technologically advanced people at their first exposure to unfamiliar technology:

I possessed two or three articles, especially a pocket compass, which created unbounded astonishment. In every house I was asked to show the compass, and by its aid, together with a map, to point out the direction of various places. It excited the liveliest admiration that I, a perfect stranger, should know the road (for direction and road are synonymous in this open country) to places where I had never been.

At the southern tip of South America, in the region called Tierra del Fuego, the Beagle encountered a people who had little contact with the outside world and who lived what appeared to Darwin to be a life that barely provided for their material needs, with no intellectual or moral culture that he could discern. One reads his account with a kind of horrible fascination at the spectacle of a truly wild human tribe, of a kind that can probably no longer be found. Interestingly, he attributed their state in part to their lack of government or social hierarchy, remarking that “the perfect equality among the individuals composing the Fuegian tribes must for a long time retard their civilization”, which is perhaps not what we, for whom “equality” is a master word, would have expected him to say. And though it might be easy to dismiss his comments on these matters as merely the prejudices of a Georgian-age gentleman, we note his fierce condemnations, elsewhere in the book, of slavery and all it stands for. He seems to have had no patience for claims of natural human inferiority (or superiority), but had no qualms about calling a spade a spade when it came to social and cultural achievements.

*

The voyage of the Beagle lasted about five years, and although of course much of that time was spent on the ship, Darwin took every opportunity to go ashore and explore, often under quite unpleasant conditions. He seems not to have minded. Oh sure, he complained that “a light stomach and an easy digestion are good things to talk about, but very unpleasant in practice”, and he had bad experiences, as when he was set upon by insects in his sleep:

At night I experienced an attack (for it deserves no less a name) of the Benchuca, a species of Reduvius, the great black bug of the Pampas. It is most disgusting to feel soft wingless insects, about an inch long, crawling over one’s body.

But as I read, I was repeatedly impressed at the hardiness of this astute young naturalist, who was happy to sleep outdoors, go without food, and walk long distances over difficult terrain in search of his treasures. And I, at least, am glad that he went to all the trouble, because even apart from its obvious interest as a prelude or an adjunct to his more famous book, The Voyage of the Beagle is a consistently enjoyable work of natural history and exploration.

Baa Baa Land

Two of the films I most enjoyed last year were Fog Line and La La Land. Imagine my delight when I discovered an unlikely mash-up called Baa Baa Land:

Yes, it’s eight hours long, and, yes, it’s in slow motion, and, yes, it’s nothing but grazing sheep. I have to see at least some of it.

Cato the Elder: On Agriculture

On Agriculture
Marcus Porcius Cato
[c.180 BC]

Cato the Elder’s De Agricultura is, I believe, the oldest complete surviving work of Latin prose, and on account of this distinction I have included it in my Latin history and literature reading project. Were it not for this accidental distinction, it is probable that I would not have read it, for it is not the sort of thing one — not this one, anyway — normally takes up for either business or pleasure. And yet I found, to my surprise, that I read it with some appreciation, both because it put me in contact with a great man in an unusual way, and because it provided a glimpse of a side of history that is not often seen by non-historians: the normal, daily life of ordinary people going about their ordinary affairs.

The great man is, of course, Cato himself; he was one of the leading Romans of his generation, serving terms as both consul (195) and censor (184) and maintaining for decades a place at the centre of Rome’s political affairs. Rome’s political leaders in this period were also her military leaders, and Cato won glory leading a successful campaign in Spain during his term as consul. But he was best known for his role in Rome’s domestic politics, in which he earned a reputation as a formidable moralist. He famously opposed the repeal of the Oppian Law, which forbade Roman women owning jewellery and fancy dress, and he likewise opposed permitting Roman women to inherit family wealth. He was the political counterweight to, and critic of, the great but unconventional Publius Scipio Africanus. These commitments, and others, have not universally endeared him to modern readers — in his Roman Women (London, 1962), J.P.V.D. Balsdon described him as “that self-confident and boorish embodiment of austere moral rectitude”, but the ancients were kinder; Livy called him “a man of acknowledged integrity and purity of conduct” (XXXII, 27), and then went on to praise him in a passage that is worth citing at length:

“So great powers of mind and energy of intellect were in this man, that no matter how lowly the position in which he was born, he appeared capable of attaining to the highest rank. No one qualification for the management of business, either public or private, was wanting to him. He was equally skilled in affairs relating to town and country. Some have been advanced to the highest honours by their knowledge of the law, others by their eloquence, some by military renown; but this man’s genius was so versatile, and so well adapted to all things, that in whatever way engaged, it might be said, that nature formed him for that alone. In war, he was most courageous, distinguishing himself highly in many remarkable battles; and, when he arrived at the highest posts, was likewise a most consummate commander. Then, in peace, if consulted on a point of law, he was the wisest counsellor; if a cause was to be pleaded, the most eloquent advocate. Nor was he one of those whose oratory was striking only during their own lives, without leaving after them any monument of it. On the contrary, his eloquence still lives, and will long live, consecrated to memory by writings of every kind. His orations are many, spoken for himself, for others, and against others; for he harassed his enemies, not only by supporting prosecutions against them, but by maintaining causes in opposition to them. Enmities in abundance gave him plenty of employment, and he never permitted them to lie dormant; nor was it easy to tell whether the nobility laboured harder to keep him down, or he to oppress the nobility. His temper, no doubt, was austere, his language bitter and unboundedly free, but his mind was never conquered by his passions, his integrity was inflexible, and he looked with contempt on popularity and riches. In spare diet, in enduring toil and danger, his body and mind were like iron; so that even old age, which brings all things to dissolution, did not break his vigour.” (XXXIX, 40)

It is extremely rare, and even singular, for Livy to grant such a lavish encomium, and it speaks to the strong impression which Cato made on his imagination nearly 200 years after his (Cato’s) death.

In the passage above, Livy praises Cato in particular for his skill in management of private affairs and his knowledge of country life, and this is pertinent to De Agricultura, which is a kind of manual for the successful management of a Roman farm.

It is a very practical guide, full of down to earth advice on procurement of farm equipment, good practices for working with cattle, advice on caring for olives and grape vines, methods for producing good wine, instructions for medicinal uses of farm crops, and recipes for a variety of things. We learn how to make a wine press, how to best fertilize the fields, and what kind of soil is best for various kinds of crops. Although we do receive counsel on buying and selling the goods the farm produces, one gets the strong impression that this farm is independent, producing and making what it needs to continue operating.

For a modern reader it is interesting to see how closely intertwined farming, and, by extension, ordinary daily life, was with religion. The practical guidance includes a good deal of instruction on the religious aspects of farming: “Make an offering of cakes to Janus, with these words,” we are told; we are reminded that the spring ploughing should be preceded by a sacred feast; the prayers and sacrificial rites to be observed prior to thinning a grove are prescribed; times when the workers should fast are noted. There seems to be no clear distinction in Cato’s mind between this kind of advice and the other kind; for him, religion is a practical matter.

Advice that sounds to us superstitious might have been, from his point of view, just “tried and true”. We are told, for instance, that “Figs, olives, apples, pears, and vines should be grafted in the dark of the moon, after noon, when the south wind is not blowing”, or that, in order to prevent chafing when travelling, we ought to “keep a small branch of Pontic wormwood under the anus” (which, on first blush, I’d have thought would have the opposite effect).

Perhaps the most endearing section of De Agricultura is that in which Cato lauds the virtues of cabbage. He notes that it promotes digestion, is an excellent laxative, can produce an effective purgative, cures colic, makes a good poultice for wounds, treats boils, dislocations, and contusions, heals headaches and eye-aches, restores health to the liver, the lungs, and the diaphragm, remedies arthritis, and cures insomnia, among many other wonders.

As I said at the top, this is not the sort of document I would normally be inclined to read in my personal time, but certainly my other readings in Roman history have been nothing at all like it, and in that sense the time has been well spent.

[Virtues of farmers]
It is from the farming class that the bravest men and the sturdiest soldiers come, their calling is most highly respected, their livelihood is most assured and is looked on with the least hostility, and those who are engaged in that pursuit are least inclined to be disaffected.

[Waste not, want not]
Remember that a farm is like a man — however great the income, if there is extravagance but little is left.

Musical anniversaries in 2018

Every year I like to plan a few listening projects around composers who will be marking significant birthdays and memorials in the year ahead. From a very thorough list (Thanks, Osbert) I have culled the following set of those that pique my interest:

Memorials

50 years

• Healey Willan

100 years

• Hubert Parry
• Claude Debussy
• Lili Boulanger

150 years

• Gioachino Rossini

450 years

• Jacques Arcadelt
• Robert Carver

500 years

• Loyset Compère
• Pierre de la Rue

600 years

• Matteo da Perugia

***

Birthdays

100 years

• Leonard Bernstein
• George Rochberg

350 years

• François Couperin

Obviously the big ones in the wide world will be for Debussy and Rossini, and with good reason, but personally I’m most excited about taking some time with the music of three of the lesser-known names: Healey Willan, a composer who lived and worked for most of his life in the same city where I live and work, and whose music I much admire; Robert Carver, a Scottish composer whose few surviving works are good examples of the spectacular polyphony that was sung in those lands before the Reformation; and especially my beloved Matteo da Perugia, whose alluring music is one of life’s choicest pleasures. I’m also interested in getting to know the music of George Rochberg, an important figure in the gradual overthrow of serialism as the de rigueur style of twentieth century music.

For an envoi, let’s hear Healey Willan’s lovely motet “Rise up my love, my fair one”, sung by Flos Campi:

 

Favourites of 2017: Film

This was another year in which I made an effort to get to know older films. The nice thing about older films is that there are so many of them, and, among the many, many good. But my tastes continued to skew recent, and the 10 films I’ve selected as my favourites from among those I saw this year are, mostly, of relatively recent vintage.

For want of a better method, I shall proceed alphabetically.

***

A highlight of my year was undoubtedly Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival, a surprisingly beautiful meditation on maternal love and sacrifice disguised as a nerdy puzzle about linguistics dressed up as an alien invasion movie. I loved the slow, atmospheric pacing, and how the film used familiar film conventions to surprise us with an unexpected story. I’m giving my personal Best Actress award to Amy Adams.

As usual with science fiction movies, there were some not quite coherent ideas at play, but by the time that become clear the film had become so rich and moving that it hardly mattered. My wife and I talked about it for a long time afterwards, and our conversation eventually came around to a discussion of the inner life of the Blessed Virgin. Any alien invasion flick that can do that earns top marks from me.

**

Some years ago I was at the National Gallery in Ottawa, wandering through the modern art section, looking at a pile of carefully laid out Cheezies, and at boards of plywood propped against the wall, and entertaining sobering thoughts about the end of civilization. For a respite I ducked into a small room in which a film was showing. There was one chair; I sat down. I watched some cows grazing in a field. I stayed about twenty minutes, until the film looped, and when I left that little room I was restored, and my faith in the continuance of civilization was revived. Indeed, more than that, I felt I was seeing the world with new eyes. That film of cows grazing in a field did it.

I was reminded of this experience as I watched Fog Line, a short film made by Larry Gottheim in 1970. It’s about 11 minutes long, and consists of one unbroken static shot of a valley in which fog is slowly drifting. At first one doesn’t see much, but almost imperceptibly the view changes. Trees are revealed and then concealed again. One sees grass, and notices, in time, a little shrub in the foreground. After a few minutes of this one’s thoughts begin to fasten on firmer fare than merely drifting fog. The world is a beautiful place, is it not? This valley scene has unfolded countless times before, without my knowing about it, and is no doubt unfolding still, and it’s all wonderfully, stupefyingly real, and new every morning. And bit by bit one’s mind trips up the ladder of being until it runs headlong into the gratuitous, unfathomable mystery of being itself. And that same mystery confronts us everywhere.

And all this on the strength of a simple, admittedly not very cinematic, just barely moving picture. Even so, I am grateful for the experience. Oh look, here it comes again:

**

Last year I praised La Sapienza, from director Eugène Green, as one of my favourites of the year. I liked it so much that this year I set about tracking down as many of his other films as I could. He had a new film in 2016, Le Fils de Joseph, and I also contrived to see Toutes les Nuits (2001), Le Pont des Arts (2004), and La Religieuse portugaise (2009). These are not yet all of his films, but they have given me, I think, a better idea of what he does.

I have had to revise, for instance, my interpretation of La Sapienza to some extent. In my reflections on that film, I placed particular thematic significance on the oddly unnatural acting style characterized by flat affect and muted intonation. It turns out that this same acting style is common to all of Green’s films, and so is probably not meant to convey all of the meaning I ascribed to it — unless the same significance is intended in all the films, which seems unlikely. In fact I’ve discovered that many of the directorial peculiarities I encountered in La Sapienza recur in his other films: symmetric compositions; a reliance on the gaze directly into the camera; an interest in architecture; patient filming of actors’ feet, which strikes me as a wry jest (and, perhaps, a self-depreciating reference to the comparisons made by critics between Green and Bresson, who showed a particular interest in hands); a cameo by the director; a musical flourish at the film’s opening and closing.

I’ve selected two of his films for this year-end discussion. Since they are not alphabetically adjacent, I would here run afoul of my alphabetical ordering, were I not cunningly grouping them together under G, for Green.

*

St Augustine said, “My love is my weight.” It is my love that carries me through the world; it is my love that determines where I will go, and where I will end up. We can love the wrong things, or love the right things in the wrong way, and end up where we do not want to be. This is the condition of Julie, the lead character in La Religieuse portugaise (The Portuguese Nun), as it is your condition and mine. Julie is a French actress who is in Lisbon making a film. She has a series of encounters, mostly ephemeral romantic entanglements with men, but also, crucially, a conversation with one woman; these encounters first chart her spiritual topography, and then help her find her way out of the dark wood in which she has been lost.

In Lisbon she is drawn at night to a candle-lit church where a young nun sits quietly through the night before the tabernacle. When she finally speaks to the nun, who is already, in a way, her second self (for Julie is playing a nun in her film), she encounters a kindred soul of depth and understanding. What the nun, Sister Joana, says to her is essentially the Gospel: to find one’s life one must lose it; unless a seed falls into the ground and dies, it brings forth no life; love means giving oneself away until there is nothing left, and only then does one find happiness.

It is notable that religion seems to be important to Green; I know nothing about his personal piety, but I think that all of his films (that I have seen) have at least one scene in a church, and Christian imagery and ideas permeate his work. This is particularly true of this film, in which the key scene takes place not only in a church, but actually at the altar, where a kind of spiritual marriage takes place between our actress and the nun. How many films even try to address a question like, “How can I receive God’s love?” And how many fewer can do so without being trite?

What is wonderful is that this elevated spiritual drama fits comfortably into a movie with a sense of humour. The film in which Julie is acting is directed by a man played by Eugène Green himself, and though the film is clearly not the film we are watching (this is not Adaptation), it bears a sufficiently close resemblance to permit Green to make good-natured jests about his own films: that they are intellectual, and boring, for instance. In the film-within-the-film the characters hardly say anything to one another, which is a nice foil for Green’s rather talky pictures. And a disco scene in which Green’s attempts at hipness fall flat is hilarious. “It’s so tiring to be hip,” he says the morning after. This must be why he avoids it.

*

Le Fils de Joseph (The Son of Joseph) is in some respects reminiscent of La Sapienza inasmuch as it explores relationships between older and younger people and is interested in the role of fathers, and father-figures, in the lives of young men. We follow a teenaged boy, Vincent, who lives with his mother but has only recently discovered the identity of his father, whom he then proceeds to try to meet. It’s a film in which Green’s peculiar combination of delightful wit, semi-metaphorical abstraction, and stylistic oddness come together in a particularly successful way.

Distinctive about this film are the Biblical motifs that pop up: the sacrifice of Isaac, the flight into Egypt, Mary and Joseph, the golden calf. Vincent finds himself, perhaps not quite entirely without his contrivance, enmeshed in a story saturated with Biblical typology. He is in the role of Issac, sacrificed by his father; in the role of Abraham, ready to sacrifice; as Moses, I suppose, observing the hedonism of those who are without God; and, finally, as the Christ-Child. What is going on? Is this a kind of metaphor for Providence, in which God reveals his presence in Vincent’s life using, as it were, tried and true signs? Is there something mystical at work in this film, which is stylistically so highly controlled and rational? Or, given Green’s penchant for whimsy, is it just that the director enjoyed dressing up an ordinary and sometimes tawdry tale in grand clothing? I admit I’m not sure; it is a film I’d definitely like to see again.

One last note: There is a scene in the middle of the film, of a performance of an early Italian opera in a church, that has a remarkably powerful numinous quality. It lasts maybe 5 or 10 minutes, and of course I cannot predict how it would affect anyone else, but for me it was like the rending of a veil, through which I caught a glimpse of an immense and powerful beauty. It was the best 5 or 10 minutes of cinema I saw this year, hands down. Eugène Green is a very good filmmaker.

**

My notes on La La Land were brief: “I need more films like this in my life.” It was the critical darling of 2016, and I think the plaudits were largely deserved. We can agree that it’s not in the same league as Swing Time, but it is refreshing to have a little song and dance in a big-time Hollywood picture.

The film has been criticized on the grounds that the protagonists, Sebastian and Mia, are both selfish and shallow. This is true, and is part of the point. The film’s epilogue, especially, is far from being a whimsical addendum, but is crucial to clarifying and completing the character arc of Sebastian, who sees, at last, what his selfishness cost him. I found the film quite touching, and I’m keen to see what Damien Chazelle does next.

**

With the possible exception of Chaplin’s City Lights — a very different film — I have never enjoyed a silent film more than F.W. Murnau’s Der letzte Mann (1924), which has, for some reason, been given the English title The Last Laugh. It tells the story of an older man who loses his job as doorman at a luxury hotel, and thereby loses the one thing that, so he thinks, gives him dignity.

The film is remarkable because it has essentially no dialogue, and therefore none of the intertitles that normally appear in silent films. Instead, the story is told entirely through visuals, and so feels less like a technically-deficient movie (as silent films sometimes feel to me) and more like an avant-garde experiment, immersing the viewer completely in the visual medium — or nearly completely, because the film does have an incredibly beautiful score, one of the best I’ve ever heard, led by a warm cello, tragic and noble in the best late Romantic mode. I loved it. I have tried to discover the composer, and based on the IMDB page I believe it was probably (because, like many silent films, this has more than one score) Giuseppe Becce.

The film gradually moves toward its tragic finale, but it has a surprising epilogue in store. An intertitle appears, not to convey dialogue, but to inform us that though “the story should end here” it will instead take an implausible turn in order to provide the audience a happy ending. Our tragic hero suddenly inherits vast wealth and proceeds to indulge to excess, turning into a glutton and buffoon. The score follows suite, abandoning its solemn gravitas for superficial ditties. I don’t know why Murnau decided to include this epilogue — was it under pressure from the producers? If so, it’s a startlingly acerbic swipe at them, which, naturally, one can appreciate, but also at the audience, which one can tolerate, but also at his character, which flirts with misanthropy. It’s witty, in its way, but I think the film would have been better without it.

**

I’d not have thought that Bergman, who gave us this scene and this scene, would have the right temperament to direct a film of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, but I stand corrected. He brings out the joyful playfulness of the piece alongside its (also joyful) fearfulness, and the results is the best opera film known to me. The recognition scene with Pagageno and Pagagena, which was the only section I’d seen previously, is still my favourite part, but I enjoyed the whole thing thoroughly, as did my kids (8 yo and 6 yo), who watched with me. Excellent singing throughout.

**

It is true that Manchester by the Sea was among the best films I saw this year, but it hits like a punch in the gut. The story is about Lee, a man crippled by grief and regret who is, nonetheless, haltingly and partially, trying to overcome them and live again. The troubles he faces are formidable and probably finally permanent, but still he labours to stay afloat. There are no easy answers, no easy roads back.

A reason to prize this film is Kenneth Lonergan’s direction; it was important that he find a way to tell this story without cheap emotional manipulation, and, given the nature of the story, the manipulation-meter had a hair-trigger. I expect he did it about as well as it could be done.

Something should be said about the music, which, for such a bleak story, is surprisingly warm and rich. Lonergan’s decision to use Handel’s “He shall feed his flock” at a crucial juncture struck me as a bold one, but it worked. The music said that all was not lost.

**

My liking for slow, quiet films brought me to Paterson, Jim Jarmusch’s 2016 homage to the slow, quiet life. Paterson, who lives in Paterson, NJ, is a bus driver for Paterson public transit. He is husband to Laura, a quirky, earnest woman whom he loves with all his heart. And he is a poet, pausing each day, at bus stops or on breaks, to write poems in his notebook.

Paterson is something like Kierkegaard’s “knight of faith”, a man whose exterior life looks thoroughly ordinary but whose interior is dramatically alive. Unlike Kierkegaard’s knight, Paterson is basically content, appreciative, and patient, bearing his burdens humbly and grateful for the good in his life.

The film is about contentment, and is itself mostly content to be contented. Absent a great conflict, Jarmusch gives the film shape by following Paterson for a few days, and making the sequence of days analogous to a sequence of stanzas, each different from the others, but following a similar structure. It’s a nice example of unity in the manner and the matter of a story. At one point a calamity besets him; true, it might seem a small thing to an outsider — indeed, his wife is the only one to whom it would mean anything at all. (Bless her, she knows it.) But then he is visited by something very like providential grace, and a new beginning.

It’s a lovely film; quiet, observant, and gentle at heart, let down only by the rather poor poetry he writes. A formalist he is not. But it doesn’t really matter.

**

Good movies about religion are uncommon, and great ones are rare indeed. Werner Herzog’s little — at just 18 minutes long — and little-seen documentary Pilgrimage, from 2001, is somewhere in that range: not truly great cinema, for it makes limited use of cinematic resources, yet all the same it is one of the best films about religion that I’ve seen.

A mercy is that Herzog stays out of the way; we get no commentary or questions from behind the camera. Instead, the film consists entirely of shots of pilgrims at the tomb of St Sergei in Russia and at the Basilica of Guadalupe in Mexico. We see them at their devotions, praying, weeping, crawling on their knees; we see faith in its agony and ecstasy; we see humanity at its vulnerable, determined best, longing for the transcendent and willing to suffer and sacrifice just to touch the hem of that garment. The film showed me how very complacent and self-satisfied I am myself.

Of course the hazards of religious devotion are real and evident here, as a subtext, and why not? There is danger whenever we love something greatly.

There is a striking scene in which Herzog shows us pilgrims stopping, looking up, and making their devotions. Their faces are engrossing, their devotion beguiling. But he never shows us what they are looking at. (I have a guess.) Is it because he thinks it doesn’t matter? If so, we have here a notable and, I suppose, poignant example of a film about transcendence that is itself trapped in immanence.

***

As for films actually showing in 2017, I saw only a handful. Among those, I liked Spider-Man: Homecoming the most; it had the rarest of rare things in superhero movies — a good villain — and, anyhow, I have a weakness for Spider-Man. David Lowery’s haunting fable A Ghost Story was a close second. I saw Get Out, which is emerging as the critical favourite of the year, but I didn’t much care for it. I was greatly disappointed by Malick’s Song to Song, and I wish somebody could take away my sorrow.

***

Concluding Trivia

Shortest films: The Wizard of Speed and Time (1979) [3m]; Father and Daughter (2000) [8m]; Begone Dull Care (1949) [8m].

Longest films: Les Enfants du Paradis (1945) [3h11m]; Toni Erdmann (2016) [2h42m]; Silence (2016) [2h41m].

Oldest films: The Phantom Carriage (1921); Girl Shy (1924); Der letzte Mann (1924).

Best re-visits: The Tree of Life (2011); In the Mood for Love (2000); There Will Be Blood (2007).

Favourite animated film: Your Name (2016).

Favourite literary adaptation: Coriolanus (2011).

Favourite feel-good movie: Queen of Katwe (2016).

Most films by the same director: 4 (Eugène Green); 3 (Malick, Kubrick, Bresson); 2 (Scorcese).

Watched, but not remembered: Sullivan’s Travels (1941); Ninotchka (1939); My Man Godfrey (1936).

Disappointments: Close-Up (1990); Dr Strangelove (1964); Blade Runner (1982); Song to Song (2017).

Favourites of 2017: Music

It seemed this year that I was treated to an avalanche of excellent music — much more than I could listen to with adequate attention. Of those recordings I devoted the most time to, I have selected for praise an even dozen. I proceed roughly chronologically.

***

Ars Elaboratio
Ensemble Scholastica
(ATMA, 2017)

In his short story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”, Borges imagines a writer who has become so immersed in the style and the world of Cervantes that he is able to reproduce, as an original work, a word-for-word replica of Don Quixote. This story has been brought irresistibly to mind as I’ve been listening to this truly wonderful and extraordinary recording from Ensemble Scholastica. What this all-female ensemble, based in Montreal, has done is perform newly composed elaborations of medieval plainchant in an impeccably medieval style. These elaborations include adding new monophonic material to the original, or adding additional voices, or instruments. Something like this past-meets-present concept has been done before, but usually the past and present are distinguishable to the ear as modern dissonances or cadences wander into the frame. What makes the music on Ars Elaboratio so intriguing is that there really is nothing modern to hear; for all we can tell, these could be original medieval compositions.

I can imagine someone wondering about the point of doing this. Just as with Menard and his Quixote, context matters, and a modern medieval composition has different resonances than a medieval original. Such an experiment might, for instance, be a way of poking the eye of the notion, current in music circles as elsewhere, that originality is rooted in self-expression; or, to deny the idea that history moves and we have to move with it; or, as a spiritual exercise in humility, wherein musicians enter fully into the imaginative and aesthetic world of another time and place; or, as a way of honouring the beauty and wisdom of the texts by creating music that would have pleased and delighted their medieval authors; or, simply as an expression of love for the beauty of medieval music. In the notes accompanying the recording, the ensemble states their purpose as follows:

“We wish to share with listeners the true beauty and intricacy of medieval music, in particular medieval liturgical traditions, the very roots of Western music. Our audiences thus have the chance to experience the remarkable joy and complexity of medieval spirituality and culture.”

I, for one, thank them for their efforts, which have greatly delighted me.

Here is a brief advertisement for the disc, in which one can hear excerpts:

*

Matteo da Perugia: Chansons
Tetraktys
(Olive, 2016)

The number of people whose hearts go pitter-patter at the thought of a collection of music by Matteo da Perugia ought rightly to be legion, but is in fact probably somewhat closer to minuscule. This is just one of the numerous hardships which we must bear on behalf of our beleaguered times. I remember well the first time I heard one of his pieces, at a concert by the Huelgas Ensemble in Toronto; the music was so exquisite, so expressive and beguiling, that an audible gasp escaped the audience when the final note was sung, as though we’d all been holding our breath. Matteo was writing around the year 1400 and was a practitioner of what was then, and is still now, called the ars subtilior style — the subtle art — which is one of the most delightful of the medieval artistic byways awaiting discovery by listeners whose wanderlust leads them off well-beaten trails. His compositions belong to the courtly love tradition, being primarily settings of secular love poetry. Despite his name, he worked in and around the Duomo in Milan, and all of the music we have from him survives in a single manuscript.

His music pops up now and again on early music recordings, but this is, to my knowledge, just the third recording devoted entirely to him, the earlier two being by the Huelgas Ensemble and Mala Punica, both of them superb interpreters. But Tetraktys have nothing to fear from the comparison. They have chosen to perform these pieces as vocal solos with instrumental accompaniment — not a mandatory choice, if comparisons with the other recordings are anything to go on — and much of the appeal of this recording lies in the singing of Stefanie True, a Canadian soprano who is otherwise unknown to me, but who earns high praise for the beautiful purity of her voice. Instrumental accompaniment from a trio of musicians includes medieval fiddles, harp, and organetto. The result is one of the more alluring and gorgeous discs of early music I’ve heard in a long while.

Here is a brief excerpt of the ensemble during the recording process. It gives the flavour of what they are doing, but the sound on the CD is superior to what you hear here:

*

Secret History: Josquin / Victoria
John Potter
(ECM New Series, 2017)

Years ago I drew up a list of my favourite music of the first decade of the 21st century, and near the top of the list I put a CD of music by Victoria, sung by Carlos Mena, in which the familiar intricate polyphony had been adapted for a single voice with instrumental accompaniment. I loved, and still love, everything about it — Mena’s creamy voice, the clarity of the musical texture, the limpid beauty of the vocal line. I’d never heard anything quite like it before — nor, for that matter, since.

But now this new disc from John Potter and friends revisits the same musical territory, with marvellous results once again. Potter tells us in his notes that it was a fairly common practice in the 15th and 16th centuries for sacred polyphony to be adapted into tablature for lutenists and vihuelists, and even that the music of some composers, including Josquin, survives mostly in these intabulated sources. He is here joined by three vihuelas and a viola da gamba, as well as by the soprano Anna Maria Friman (of Trio Medieval) in performances of these intabulated versions of Victoria’s Missa surge propera, a collection of motets by Josquin, a motet by Mouton and another by Victoria again, some Gregorian chant, and some preludes for vihuela by Jacob Heringman, one of the musicians.

It all sounds terrific. Once again, hearing the clarity of the vocal line pulled from what would normally be a dense polyphonic texture is a real delight, and there’s a wonderful intimacy about the whole affair, as though this sublime music were being re-imagined in one’s living room. For me, the recording as a whole doesn’t quite rise to the level of that earlier one by Carlos Mena, and this mainly because Potter, as good as he is (and, as a long-time member of the Hilliard Ensemble, he’s no slouch), simply doesn’t have the translucent voice that Mena does.

The recording was made at the famous monastery of St Gerold in Austria, long favoured by ECM’s engineers, and the sound is impeccable. It was recorded in 2011, so ECM sat on it for 6 years before releasing it. I can’t imagine why. This is my favourite recording of the year.

*

Palestrina: Missa Papae Marcelli
Odhecaton
(Arcana, 2017)

Of the making of records there is no end, and there can be few pieces of Renaissance polyphony that have been recorded more often than Palestrina’s famous Missa Papae Marcelli. One naturally wonders if it’s worth bothering to record it again. But, lo and behold, here comes Odhecaton to make us hear it again anew. This ensemble, which is new to me, has a truly wonderful way with this music: the singing is very assured, pitched low if I’m not mistaken, and it has a splendid gravitas — in happier times I could have called it masculine, and been understood to be saying something intelligible. I have listened to it with some amazement, because I’ve never heard Palestrina sung like this, with such stately grace, which we expect, and earthy texture, which we don’t. The disc also includes a number of motets and Gregorian antiphons, and it actually opens with Sicut cervus, a motet that every mother’s son knows forward and backward; yet, again, not like this. [review]

Here is the whole of the Missa:

*

Monteverdi: Vespro della Beata Vergine
La Compagnia del Madrigale, Cantica Symphonia, La Pifarescha, Giuseppe Maletto
(Glossa, 2017)

2017 was a Monteverdi anniversary year, marking his 450th birthday. My plans to devote time to him largely failed, but I was able to hear this glorious new recording of his Vespers. This is a piece for which my appreciation has gradually grown over the years; it’s a sprawling, multi-faceted work that takes time to get to know, and as yet I feel that I’ve only begun to explore its many nooks and crannies. The musicians on this disc are an ace crew who will be recognized by early music aficionados. I must say that it is nice to have Italians performing the music of their countryman, and, quite in contradiction to the sometime-stereotype of period ensembles being rather dry and thin, they bring a stirring, full-bodied sound to their interpretation. The instruments, especially, are recorded with nice bloom, blending beautifully with the voices. I’ve long been fond of William Christie’s recording of this Vespers, with French forces, for its beauty and gentle tenderness, but this shows another side of this wonderful music.

This video takes us behind the scenes at the recording sessions:

*

Bach: De Occulta Philosophia
Emma Kirkby, Carlos Mena, José Miguel Moreno
(Glossa, 1998)

Here is a disc that would appear to have been produced just for me: my favourite soprano, Emma Kirkby, and my favourite counter-tenor, Carlos Mena, joining together to sing chorales of J.S. Bach, my favourite composer, over a performance of the Chaconne, my favourite composition (or, at least, having a fair claim), in an arrangement for the lute, my favourite obsolete instrument in the guitar family! You might remember the recording the Hilliard Ensemble made some years ago, in which they, following a purported “discovery” by musicologist Helga Thoene, did the same experiment: singing chorale fragments over the Chaconne, which was, allegedly, subtextually quoting them. I confess I don’t put any great faith in these musicological claims, but it hardly matters: as musical experiments go, this one is a winner. I liked the Hilliard’s performance, but I like this one even more: the intimacy of the lute, and the purity of the two voices, is entrancing. The Chaconne, mind you, only lasts a quarter-hour. The rest of the disc is filled out with Bach’s Sonata (BWV 1001) and Partita (BWV 1004), played on the lute by José Miguel Moreno. It’s all good, but it’s the chorale-laden Chaconne that is sublime.

*

Mozart: Don Giovanni
Music Aeterna, Teodor Currentzis
(Sony, 2016)

Like everyone else, I have long been wedded to Giulini’s 1959 recording of this, the greatest opera, so much so that I’ve never felt any real desire to acquire another. But nothing in this veil of tears is perfect in every respect, and there was always a possibility, however slim, that somebody might come along and do the thing well enough, and differently enough, to give us, not so much a rival, but an alternative reading. And then along came Teodor Currentzis and his mad cadre of musicians in a bid to do just that.

I say “mad” partly because of the conditions under which the recording took place: Currentzis had his singers and orchestra come to the Russian hinterland, where they stayed for weeks on end, living together, eating together, performing Don Giovanni hour after hour after hour, doing experiments, taking risks, going mad. The Guardian ran a nice feature that described the highly unusual working conditions.

And I say “mad” also because of the results. Currentzis plays this score with ferocious energy; the strings slash, the brass blares, the timpani thunders. There is nothing at all genteel about it. The sound engineering is impressively vivid. The singing is fine, but for me it is the orchestral playing that is the real draw. That might seem an odd position to take on an opera recording, but we are in the realm of the odd.

I understand the argument from those who say that this is an abuse of Mozart, who wrote at a time when elegance was prized and who could out-elegance anybody when we wanted to, but, on the other hand, this is Don Giovanni! If any opera can take this idiosyncratic, unrestrained treatment, it’s this one. An iconoclastic version could never replace Giulini, but considered as a compelling alternative view of this great music, this one is a success.

Here is a ten-minute featurette on the making of this recording:

*

Mozart – Piano Concertos 20 & 27
Evgeny Kissin, Kremerata Baltica
(EMI, 2010)

I admit I’ve had a prejudice against Evgeny Kissin, whose status as a child prodigy led me to suspect that there was more of sentimentality behind his fame than solid musical achievement. But this disc was recommended to me in glowing terms, and I decided to listen mainly because of the orchestra, Kremerata Baltica, whom I have long admired. It’s a corker! These concerti are old chestnuts, and they are often played with grace and politeness, but Kissin and his band tackle them with thunderous excitement. The sound is big, the orchestra plays with sharp attacks and tight rhythms, and Kissin is terrific at the keyboard. The performance has verve and sparkle. I don’t know if this is typical of Kissin or not, but, if so, I stand corrected.

Here is Concerto No.20:

*

Wagner: Arias and Duets
Birgit Nilsson, Hans Hotter, Philharmonia Orchestra, Leopold Ludwig
(Testament, rec.1957/8)

Birgit Nilsson has a claim to being one of the great Wagnerian sopranos of the twentieth century, and Hans Hotter can make a similar claim among bass-baritones. They were both in their prime for these recordings, made in 1957/58 in glowing sound that belies their age. Nilsson, especially, is majestic; her voice gleams, like a shaft of light penetrating the gloom. The sheer beauty of it is awe-inspiring. Hotter sings with tremendous gravitas as well, and he is a superb match for her in the long Act III duet from Die Walküre. The other selections are from Wagner’s earlier operas: Elsa’s Dream from Lohengrin, a long excerpt from Der Fliegende Holländer, and a soprano solo from Tannhäuser. This same music has been previously issued on EMI; probably this Testament release has been remastered but I’ve actually listened to both and I can’t hear any substantial differences. In either case, this is one of the best Wagner recordings I’ve ever heard. [review]

Here is the opening of Die Walküre, Act III, Scene III. Hotter is Wotan and Nilsson is Brünnhilde:

*

Brahms: Piano Works
Arcadi Volodos
(Sony, 2017)

If, like me, you love those last, late piano pieces Brahms left us in his Op.116, 117, and 118, then I cannot recommend more highly these superb renditions by Arcadi Volodos. Volodos is a pianist I haven’t followed very closely (though I love his account of Liszt’s virtuosic transmutation of the Wedding March!). His playing is muscular, and he makes a big, well-rounded sound. You might not think that would work all that well with these elegiac masterpieces, but these are winsome performances that I have greatly enjoyed. This is elite playing, not just technically but artistically, and this is a great disc. [review]

*

Messiaen: Turangalîla-Symphonie
Steven Osborne, Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, Juanjo Mena
(Hyperion, 2012)

Messiaen described this gigantic musical explosion as “a song of love, a hymn to joy”, and the joyous feeling he sought to capture as “superhuman, overflowing, dazzling, and abandoned”. Perhaps no better description of the symphony is possible. It is among the biggest, boldest, most outrageous, wildest examples of musical excess in the repertoire, and, as such, not the kind of thing I would normally be drawn to, but it’s the symphony’s spirit of unadulterated, supercharged love of life that wins me over. I’ve a few recordings in my collection, but this one from the Bergen Philharmonic, with Steven Osborne handling the difficult piano part, has delighted me to no end. The orchestral sound, which is the be-all and end-all of this piece, is wonderfully alive and vivid. A ravishing sonic experience. [Audio excerpts]

*

Weinberg: Chamber Symphonies
Kremerata Baltica, Gidon Kremer
(ECM New Series, 2017)

For the past few years my year-end list of favourites has usually included something by Mieczyslaw Weinberg, and I have something this year too. Gidon Kremer has become a high-profile champion for Weinberg’s music, and in 2017 he, with Kremerata Baltica again, issued a two-disc set of Weinberg’s four chamber symphonies and the Piano Quintet. The Quintet is an early work (Op.18) that has become quite popular, having now been recorded more than any of Weinberg’s other music. Kremer and his crew give it a good hearing, and of course ECM’s sound engineering is outstanding. But for me the chamber symphonies are the real draw. They are late works (the earliest being his Op.145), and, as always with Weinberg, I feel they put me in touch with a man of great musical intelligence, overlooked for too long. Music to treasure.

***

In years past I have written twice about my favourite music of the year: first classical and then popular. This year there were pop music records that interested me from Bob Dylan, Joan Osborne, Van Morrison, Sufjan Stevens, Joe Henry, Josh Ritter, Justin Townes Earle, Taylor Swift, Lee Ann Womack, and Neil Young, and some others too, but I either didn’t get around to hearing them, or didn’t hear enough of them to form a judgement. Maybe next year.

Favourites of 2017: Books

All things considered, 2017 was a pretty good year for reading. Long, difficult books were mostly off the table — there’s that volume of Kierkegaard I’ve been seeping through for 8 months — but I found some quite good, short, easier books that were worth reading.

For this year-end reflection, I’ve selected ten good books from among those I read this year. I list them randomly, or nearly so. Links, where present, usually go to my more extensive notes on the book.

***

I’ll begin with Livy, whose writing was a thread that ran through my whole year. I began the first volume of his great Roman history Ab urbe condita in January or February, and I finished the fifth and last volume in December. This was a great book with which to kick off my Roman reading project; although it breaks off in the 160s BC, with much of the greatest drama still ahead, my understanding of the history of Republican Rome has improved greatly. I now feel I have context and at least some depth when I see a reference to Cincinnatus, or Camillus, or Hannibal, or Scipio, and a much better sense of how Rome grew from an Italian city among other, comparable, Italian cities to a superpower of the ancient world. I wrote fairly extensively about this history as I was reading. I am looking forward to continuing this reading project in 2018; I expect that much of the year will be spent in the company of Cicero and Julius Caesar.

*

I was given as a gift a huge volume of Anglo-Saxon poetry this year, and I expect that it will be the center of gravity of my medieval reading in 2018, but this year my favourite medieval literature was The Song of Roland, a splendid heroic poem about a battle between the rearguard of Charlemagne’s army, led by Roland, and the Islamic army besetting them as they pass through the Alps. Although not a scrupulously historical poem, it does teach us about the attitudes of Christians toward Muslims a thousand years ago, gives us an intriguing example of the medieval effort to baptize the military virtues, and presents us with a wonderful portrait of Roland, a figure who loomed large in the European imagination for centuries.

*

With my son I have been reading Thornton Burgess’ books about the inhabitants of the Green Forest and the Green Meadows. Beginning with Old Mother West Wind and continuing through the adventures of one little friend after another — Old Man Coyote, Paddy the Beaver, Chatterer the Red Squirrel, Sammy Jay, Jerry Muskrat, Grandfather Frog, and others — we have gradually come to feel quite at home in those woods. Though he is certainly less mercurial and virtuosic than, for example, Kenneth Grahame, Burgess nonetheless has a fine talent for diverting tales with memorable characters and moral weight. He wrote, I believe, about 100 of these books, and so our explorations are far from over. So long as my son is content to continue, I am as well.

*

This year I continued my habit of reading — or seeing staged — one Shakespearean play each month. I ventured off the beaten trail and read “Pericles”, a late-ish play (probably c.1608) that was new to me. It was a very pleasant surprise. It has something of the character of a fable, complete with riddles, a beautiful princess, an evil king, miraculous events, and a happy ending. For some time I’ve been interested in the relationship between Shakespeare’s art and medieval literature and drama (I’ve been meaning to read this book, for example), and in no other Shakespeare play have I had such a powerful sense of being on medieval terrain, as though he had adapted a story from The Canterbury Tales. In fact the play is based on a poem of John Gower, Chaucer’s contemporary, and Gower himself appears in the play in a role something like that of a Greek chorus, commenting on the action. It’s delightful. Thematically the play is about, among other things, what it means to be a good father, and in particular about the relationships of fathers to their daughters. The final act has a reunion scene that brought tears into my eyes. Highly recommended.

*

Over the past few years I’ve been reading the Aubrey-Maturin sea-faring novels, and greatly enjoying them, but this year I also read The Voyage of the Beagle, a real-life account of a circumnavigation voyage in the 1830s, and I enjoyed it at least as much. It is true that Charles Darwin, the ship’s talented young naturalist, doesn’t tell us much about life at sea, but this particular voyage landed ashore at numerous locations along the Argentine and Chilean coasts, as well as at a few island archipelagos in the Pacific, and I found his many observations on natural history fascinating. The same author went on to write a number of other books on related topics, and it would be interesting to look into those some day as well.

*

Perhaps because I spent a few months this year homeschooling our kids, I read several books on education. Among these the best was Stratford Caldecott’s Beauty in the Word, a remarkably rich and thoughtful exploration of the classical educational trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Some descriptions of classical education merely correlate these three subjects with the developmental capacities of children (as Dorothy Sayers did in an influential essay), but Caldecott goes much further, digging deeply into the relevance this general schema has for the child’s intellectual, moral, social, and even metaphysical formation. His organizing question is “What kind of education would enable a child to progress in the rational understanding of the world without losing his poetic and artistic appreciation of it?”, and it leads him to rewarding discussions of tradition, drama, technology, and liturgy, among many other things. If you think that education ought to be richly human, concerned with what kind of persons we should be rather than just what sort of things we might do, calling for the best and wisest counsel we can muster, this is a book for you.

*

The conversion memoir is a genre with a distinguished history stretching back, for English speakers, to John Henry Newman, and further back, to St Augustine, in the wider tradition. These memoirs tend to have certain elements in common, and perhaps the most distinctive thing about Sally Read’s Night’s Bright Darkness is that it doesn’t follow the usual patterns at all. It’s an account of her conversion from comfortable atheism to astounded Catholicism in which, instead of passing over the ground between the two, as a normal person would do, she somehow tunnelled or teleported from one side to the other. This is a poor metaphor for the real substance of her story, which is grace. The other distinctive feature of this book is how beautifully written it is; Read is a poet, and brings a literary sensibility to the manner in which she tells her story.

*

English speakers continue to receive, in translation, by dribs and drabs, literary crumbs that fell from the table of the great German Thomist and intellectual historian Josef Pieper. This year I sat down with a volume that appeared, a few years ago now, under the title The Silence of Goethe. As is so often the case with Pieper, the slender profile of the book belies its rich content, which consists of meditations on the value of reticence and silence for both public and private life, as culled from the voluminous writings of Pieper’s great countryman. Counsel to the effect that “You live properly only if you live a hidden life” has particular value for those of us living in the age of social media, in which the temptation to live even our private lives in public is seductive. That this, and allied, advice comes from a man who was himself one of the best-known figures of his age gives it a certain tried-and-true authority.

*

I read a handful of Wodehouse’s Jeeves novels this year, and Thank You, Jeeves can stand in, on this list, for the lot of them. Published in 1934, it was the first of Wodehouse’s full-length Jeeves novels, and is a delightful tale about Bertie’s retreat to a country cottage in which to practice the banjolele. Jeeves is unable to abide the instrument, and so enters the employ of one or another of the characters circling around Bertie throughout the story, being replaced by a homicidal, drunk valet called Brinkley. Among the most pleasing characters in this mélange is Pauline Stoker, an American girl possessed of a “pre-eminent pulchritude”, to whom Bertie was briefly engaged on a prior trip to America, and for whom he now tries to play matchmaker. At stake are the sale of a run-down manor house and the future married happiness of several of Bertie’s friends. As usual with Wodehouse, the writing is superb and the invention never flagging. Some might take offense at the plot element involving Bertie and the “loony doctor” Sir Roderick Glossop wandering the grounds in black-face, but we are not so censorious.

*

This was yet another year in which I did not read much theology or philosophy, but I did manage one of the early classics of Christian theology in St Athanasius’ On the Incarnation. The aim of the book is to provide a defence of the fittingness of the Incarnation, death, and Resurrection of Christ against those who contended that these centerpieces of the Christian story had an arbitrary or even blasphemous character. Athanasius brings out beautifully the drama of Christ’s saving action as a descent into the world, a battle against evil, and a triumphant elevation of all things into the everlasting and unconquerable life of the Holy Trinity. It is a book that has become a touchstone for a Christian metaphysics of the good, in which Creation itself is caught up into the mystery of Christ.

***

As in past years, it is fun to look at the original publication dates of the books (or plays) I read this year. Here is the histogram:

I skewed modern, as usual, but not so severely as in past years, and the classical and medieval books can at least be said to have made a decent showing. The 20th century was the big winner, as might be expected, but even there it was the early 1900s which got much of my attention, with the average post-1900 publication date being 1955.

Finally, a bit of trivia:

Most books by a single author: Thornton Burgess (12), Shakespeare (12), Terence (6), Wodehouse (5).