Montaigne, Sculpture, Music

A busy day, yesterday. I started off with half an hour on the allotment, digging in manure and clearing. It had been wet overnight so just walking from the road up to the shed at the back of my site got my shoes soaked. Have resolved to keep the Wellington boots at home and change into them before setting off for the allotment.

Then back home to change and on my bike again to the University Library where there was to be a talk by Philip Ford, Professor of French at the university, on Montaigne's library. The UL has recently been given a gift of the collection of books collected by an industrialist, Gilbert de Botton. Montaigne had a library of some one thousand volumes, all of which were dispersed in the early sixteen hundreds at the death of his daughter. Now only 99 can be traced, most in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris or the Municipal Museum of Bordeaux. De Botton's collection, with nine of Montaigne's personal copies, is the third largest collection of them. He also owned many editions of the Essais, including copies which belonged to Napoleon, Ben Jonson, and Rousseau, and other related items. Professor Ford's lecture was on Montaigne's education, his attitude to books, the actual room the library was kept in, and the publication and reception of the Essais over the centuries. The lecture room holds fifty people and it was pleasing that it was almost full - deservedly so as we were well served by our lecturer.

My own interest in Montaigne stems from some years ago when my mother, visiting from South Africa, complained that she had lost her Penguin edition of Montaigne. So I bought her another. It turned out though that what she had owned was an earlier abridged Penguin edition, whereas what I had bought for her was the enormous and magisterial later Screech edition, and she didn't want this new one. So I read it myself, over many months, greatly enjoying it.

I came back to it, and started all over again, a month or two back, as a result of my reading of another book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a Lebanese writer. It is hard to try and summarise in a sentence but it is basically about how we fail to take into account the likelihood of the improbable happening, so leading to financial crashes because of blindly stupid bankers and economists. He even names Freddie Mac and Fanny Mae as likely to fail (and don't forget all this was written a couple of years ago before the present imbroglio). The book so fascinated me that as soon as I had finished it I read it again, from cover to cover, something I have never done before. Anyway, Taleb mentions Montaigne as one of his favourite authors and this inspired me to start reading him again. And so the interest in this talk. No time after the lecture to look at the exhibition of Montaigne's library, so that will have to happen another day.

It was then back home for a quick lunch and then set off for Ely for another lecture, stopping only briefly to donate some old books and bedlinen to our local Emmaus community. The lecture, sponsored by the Cambridgeshire Historic Churches Trust, was by Jeremy Musson, a BBC presenter apparently, though I hadn't ever seen him or heard of him. He was quite good on the subject of marble statuary in country churches, with many examples of places I don't know. His presentation was slightly marred by the fact that he isn't an awfully good photographer of church interiors, and his dark pictures were even further obscured by the too-dim projector he was using, so it often wasn't possible to see the details he was trying to point out. Anyway, we were quite edified, and after a quick foray into a hardware store we came home to Cambridge.

Then after supper it was on our bikes again to go into Trinity College in the town centre to hear a recital of operatic duets in the chapel by Clara and Nina Kanter, twins who are undergraduates at different colleges of the university. They both have ravishing voices, though I liked Clara's best as she is a contralto. Something of the quality of her voice brings to mind Kathleen Ferrier. I only ever heard her on recordings, though my parents heard her in Newcastle in the 1940s and gave me the taste for her.

She, Clara, and Nina (soprano - they aren't identical twins) gave us selections from Handel's Giulio Cesare, Rossini's Semiramide (no, I hadn't heard of it either) and Berlioz' Les Troyens, ending with a Brahms song, Die Schwestern, about two sisters so alike that they fall in love with the same man. It was forty minutes of sheer vocal heaven, heard, I am sorry to say, by a mere handful of audience.

And so home, where we had an argument about furniture to end the day. But that's another story.

An American Election

I was sad when the Democrats did not choose Hilary Clinton as their candidate. She would make a good president, and Barack Obama doesn't have the experience yet to make as good a president as she would have done.

It was also my opinion that choosing Obama would open the election up to a McCain win. I still think that. I am never usually a Republican supporter. That party appears to be one that does not care about the poor, or gun control or any of the other evils which in the eyes of outsiders so marr the US's claim to be a great nation. The present president must be one of the most incompetent, and quite frankly wicked, America has ever had. But McCain seems more decent than the rest of the Republican pack, and if we have to have a president from that party I'd rather have him than any of his rivals. Having said that, his choice of a running mate and some of his recent pronouncements have rather put me off.

The most likely outcome of the election is still, I reckon, that McCain will win. The polls say otherwise at the moment, but when it comes to the day there will be many who will not vote for someone who is not white, though they may not admit it to the pollsters now.

And if by some miracle Obama does get in, what is the betting that some racist fanatic won't assassinate him in the first few months?

It would be good to think that he could get elected and despite his inexperience be a good president. Someone who could sort out the social ills of the States, and solve the Israel problem would be wonderful. But will he ever get there, let alone deliver?