Newsletter 41 (18 September 2019) Ekphrasis is a term for the vivid description of an object, often a work of art. Often it is a verbal representation of a visual representation. Images and objects, however powerfully they appear to express an idea, are mute and unknowable. Words can make them speak in many voices, attach […]
Newsletter 40 (26 April 2019) Waking in Camigliano I can hear buzz-saws snarling down in the valley. A team of woodcutters, probably Albanian, is at work thinning down the trees of the macchia, mostly the tough Mediterranean holm-oaks, Quercus ilex. The logs will be left to mature and then piled up in huge lorry-loads, to
Squaring the Circle Read More »
Newsletter 39 (25 January 2019) In a former newsletter I wrote of the particular pleasure in leaving behind rooms in an art gallery full of religious paintings, however wonderful, to come across portraits of ‘real’ people. Such an experience has been recently available at the National Gallery. The exhibition exploring the relationship between Giovanni Bellini
Newsletter 38 (9 July 2018) Waking at the dawn of an early summer day, I committed myself to trying to get back to sleep, with little hope. There was a Cuckoo calling, and a Hoopoe, and I don’t remember ever hearing them call at the same time before. A deer was barking a long way
The Endurance of Things Read More »
Newsletter 37 (8 February 2018) Some time after conducting a rather sudden parking manoeuvre outside our house, I discovered I had flattened a rat in the gravel. I reported this to Katie: “What are you going to do about it?” she asked, with the ‘you’ heavily underlined. What indeed does one do with such an
What is past, or passing, or to come Read More »
Newsletter 36 (11 October 2017) Feeling myself sometimes (indeed, often) groping around for names or words, I came upon this analysis of the process in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (Volume IV Cities of the Plain).A lady… came to greet me, addressing me by my name… I tried to recall her own name as
À la recherche du mot perdu Read More »
Newsletter 35 (27 March 2017) Forty or so years ago seeing a Buzzard used to be a special thrill, only to be experienced in mountainous areas of Britain, but now these birds are ubiquitous. I see them frequently flying over my home, two miles from Oxford city centre. Even more common are Red Kites from
Newsletter 34 (27 December 2016) My grandchildren move through Units of Enquiry. They start with a ‘provocation’ in which the teacher finds out what they already think and know. Nia’s unit was ‘Sameness and Difference’. She came home and set about her own self-provocation: a picture, a debate and a meditation. There are two
No Ideas but in Things Read More »
Newsletter 33 (13 November 2016) Sometimes I can see a picture in a gallery and make a successful guess as to who painted it. It’s not always a top-flight artist who is instantly recognisable. They often develop and change in relation to new movements and styles. The B-team are liable to be more repetitious, and
Seeing is Believing Read More »
Newsletter 32 (20 July 2016) I started re-reading Robert Graves’s Count Belisarius before the June trip to Ravenna, but only finished it recently. The following sentence from the Introduction (by John Julius Norwich) intrigued me: ‘The narrative is a perfect blend of scholarship and imagination, its effect rather like that produced by a brilliant portrait
