A column I wrote about the advantages of being a beginner brought forth a memory from a restaurateur about the first cake she had ever made, at the age of eight, an orange cake baked one morning and presented to her startled parents. “In 25 years of managing restaurants and producing cakes I was never quite able to capture the elusive essence of that first one.”
Keys to who knows what
ByHarry Eyres
Published: December 30 2010 22:01 | Last updated: December 30 2010 22:01
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| ‘A View of Modern Rome During the Carnival’ (1838) by Samuel Palmer |
Contrary to appearances, this column is not produced single-handedly. I don’t mean that I have teams of assistants, researchers, physiotherapists and life-coaches occupying several floors of the Slow Lane Inc building. No, I do sit solo at my desk, pulling down books from the over-loaded shelves, listening to BBC Radio 3 or my old LPs or CDs, sometimes going downstairs to make a cup of coffee, or play the piano. Of course – as with most products of mainstream media – this column would get nowhere, and certainly would not reach you, without the valiant efforts of my editors, and beyond them the scores of unseen people, cutting the trees that make pulp, manufacturing ink, operating presses and webpages, going out on cold winter mornings to deliver newspapers.
Like all human efforts, whether visibly or invisibly, it is a team effort. And it is also a dialogue. Over the year so much encouragement, so many suggestions for reading and listening, as well as the occasional correction, come from readers.
EDITOR’S CHOICE
A poetic disappearance - Dec-23
Naples: a city in need of mercy - Dec-03
In praise of cultivation - Nov-26
Barred from freedom - Nov-19
How far back can we go? - Nov-13
Readers help to write this column and sometimes they give me insights into what it is about. A woman, by e-mail from America, tells me she sometimes cuts out my columns and stashes them away in a file marked, “Important Thoughts.” This file, she goes on, is rather like “an old pouchy one full of clunky keys my mother once had labelled, ‘Keys to Who Knows What.’ ”
I loved the idea of those “keys to who knows what” – not obviously practical, indeed quite likely entirely useless but just possibly capable of opening some half-forgotten door or window, or a garden shed full of jumble and forgotten treasure.
If I supply keys to who knows what, readers send me back keys that open other doors and windows. Responding to a column about my poor record as a practitioner of meditation, one reader offered the hint that I might be trying too hard. This was so obvious that it had to be right. I was delighted to come across the work of the fine Scottish nature poet Kenneth Steven through his stirring poem “Geese”, catching the northward migration that marks the end of winter.
Sometimes the offerings are not so much keys as vignettes. When the big freeze struck a year ago, I took the opportunity to thank the neighbours who brought my ice-bound, elderly parents essential supplies. An Englishman working in Singapore shared an e-mail sent by his 89-year-old father, full of laconic Blitz spirit, describing unavailing attempts to defrost his car. “Absolutely must get out tomorrow. Down to our last bottle of red.” When the son visited the father with a couple of bottles of the life-restoring fluid, he found 35 others stashed away under the sideboard.
A column I wrote about the advantages of being a beginner brought forth a memory from a restaurateur about the first cake she had ever made, at the age of eight, an orange cake baked one morning and presented to her startled parents. “In 25 years of managing restaurants and producing cakes I was never quite able to capture the elusive essence of that first one.”
And then there are the corrections. When I made the bizarre mistake of attributing Bulgarian nationality to the aristocratic Russian pianist Nikita Magaloff, I was put right, most courteously, by, among others, Magaloff’s grandson and Magaloff’s fellow pianist Mitsuko Uchida.
My piece on Poussin’s “Dance to the Music of Time” was illustrated, thanks to a system error, by the same painter’s “Shepherds in Arcadia”. Out of this embarrassment came lessons in art history. Erudite and usually kindly corrections flooded in from all quarters. I was informed that Samuel Palmer’s “A View of Modern Rome” contained a tribute to Poussin’s “Dance” – a connection I would never have suspected.
Most fascinating by far was a message from the son of an art history professor in California. He recalled a spring day in the 1970s on the shores of a lake when his father had staged a tableau vivant based on “The Shepherds of Arcadia”, centred on an old gold rush grave, in which students played “the shepherd and shepherdess roles, all naked, dancing about and such”. Ah, those happy, hippy days – and it sounds as if the tableau was an amazing hybrid of “The Shepherds”, “Dance” and Poussin’s unrestrained “Bacchanal”.
The communication that resonates most in my mind as we come to the end of another year is one I received at its dark, uncertain start. A man from North Carolina mused on the challenges of finding a balance in life, both personally and collectively. He had struggled as a student to combine interests in music, literature and world politics with a degree in engineering and computer science. More recently taking a course in biochemistry, he had been amazed at how long it took to grow protein fragments. His question was this: how do we, the slow “biological ones”, survive in a world that is “going too fast down the road of the bank account”?
More columns at www.ft.com/eyres
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