“the mobility of lighting”, or : Musings on wandering luminosity

 

“Il sole di Tiepolo”

“We love Tiepolo” - so Alpers and Baxandall state, almost apologetically, almost as a disclaimer, in the first chapter of their wonderful study on “Tiepolo and the Pictorial intelligence”(1) .  Because of course, one might disparage Tiepolo as a frivolous painter of pompous showy scenes at the service of rich local potentates.  But then, one cannot help but falling in love with Tiepolo, at the very first sight, and one keeps coming back to his paintings & frescoes, looking at them with delight.  It’s a pure aesthetic pleasure to try and make sense of his intricate jumbles of forms and figures; it’s pure bliss to savour his intense colours; to plunge into his delightful complexities of luminosity. 

Tiepolo clearly caters to our quest for light, our feeling for luminous patterns. His intense luminosities, often contrasted with dull colors, have rightly inspired rapturous comments : “il sole di Tiepolo”. 

Even mere reproductions still work wonders - when I wake on these dark late autumn  days, I rush to get up, to open the Tiepolo book and bask in its luminosity. Just like during lunch break, in my quest for light, I brave the chilly grey drizzle for a walk to the nearby square, where the garden paths are strewn with intensely gleaming,  yellow leaves.

 

“Negotiations with site lighting“

While the former paragraph evokes the internal lighting linked to the hues and tones of the painting itself (or, mutatis mutandis, linked to the yellowness of the autumnal leaves themselves)  - there is of course also always the question of the ambient light  (direct, reflected and refracted)  and of the changes in lighting according the position of the spectator.  

Alpers & Baxandall brilliantly analyse how a fresco painter, such as Tiepolo,  who paints in situ,  uses all his pictorial intelligence to make his frescoes engage with the ambient light on multiple levels.

 For works in situ, the artist can  to a certain extent control or at least negotiate with the effects of external lighting . To a certain extent only – because it is impossible for the artist to anticipate all possible light scenarios, let alone the idiosyncratic wanderings and viewpoints of the spectators. 

 

Curators’ lighting

As to paintings on panel or canvas,  on their journey in the world they will mostly meet lighting conditions unknown to the painter (unless he or she is also curator of the exhibition).  There’s an element of accidentalness there, which is quite moving, and which for any art lover is an integral part of the unique ephemeral experience of looking at a painting at a certain point in time & in space. 

Thus, in a museum with lots of natural light, one can stand in rapture in front of a painting, watching how the colours light up, glow and then fade away again, as clouds drift by.  

In galleries and museums with mostly artificial light and guided or tempered natural light, the curator may intentionally use lighting to create a sense of drama in the room, or to draw attention to specific paintings or elements of paintings.

In the newly re-opened museum of fine arts in Antwerp (2) , I suspect the lighting is used very intentionally indeed. Heavy purple curtains block the sideways natural light while a steady tempered light comes from above  and each room has its own atmosphere of light, including ample use of dramatic potential of spot lights.

It can turn a walk through museum rooms into an aesthetic experience in its own right, one can appreciate the atmosphere of each room, with the lighting contributing to the “mise-en-scène” of a story which features and contrasts different individual works.

The curators/”stage designers” of the renovated Antwerp museum have built a wonderful experience indeed (and it’s quite uplifting to see how many visitors now re-discover the museum). 

 

Wandering light

But please bear with me, if I still cherish the memory of another visit to the Antwerp museum, a very long time ago. The museum back then was old & stately, but ever so quietly decaying, with creaky floors and dusty corners.  Natural light fell in from above (through grimy glass)  and sideways.  The order of the rooms followed the age-old recipe of historical styles and national schools.

 In the Italian room hung forlornly an early Titian, so quietly glowing with Venetian luminosity, its importance signalled only by an old threadbare carpet in front of it. 

 In an ill-lit  room hung the early Ensor paintings of staid bourgeois interiors – so the spectator’s eye would focus hungrily on each subtly rendered gleam and fraying ray of light, on each refracted luminosity in the painting. 

But  what a magnificent moment indeed, when the variable ambient light in the museum room would suddenly intensify and bring to life the painting’s bourgeois interior, before the light dimmed again and one would feel the full shady oppressiveness of a dusty, cluttered interior.  (3)

the immobility of notes

(1)   Tiepolo et l’intelligence picturale (Gallimard 1996, Translation from "Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence", 1994 Yale University Press . Svetlana Alpers & Michael Baxandall)

(2)   What to see at the finally re-opened  Antwerp museum of fine arts : galleries restored  “to their former glory” and with seducing light effects & stories, great works of art brought back to the public; & much more  - see https://kmska.be/nl 

(3)    Now all the Ensors (the colourful ones in any case – where have the more sombre ones gone? ) hang in a brilliantly white room with glaring light everywhere, bringing out the full anarchy of glaring lights and gaudy colours.  

where to hide in the age of 'surveillance capitalism'

They all prey upon us, poor sitting ducks

Grim-faced under a hoodie (1), tapping nervously on the keyboard while watching intently what’s happening on the screen, I might resemble a hacker. But I ‘m merely a hapless computer user who is on high alert while setting up a new device (2).

One might naively assume that having acquired and duly paid for a new piece of hardware with accompanying software, one can insouciantly click through the standard set-up procedure.

But no, commercial harassment (3) is now hard coded into every device right from the start.  If you don’t pay attention the provider can share your data with X, Y and Z to sell you better services and products and blablabla.  And your device’s default browser comes of course pre-equipped with unwanted gaudy news-sites and commercial links.  Etc Etc

One might also naively assume that buying a premium anti-virus license, means you have a security provider who is henceforth on your side, defending your interests in the digital jungle. But no, also this paid-for anti-virus software does not miss an occasion to send various alarming messages only to persuade you to buy yet another multi-year subscription to yet another module you don’t really need. 

And when we go on-line, then of course we all know that really anything goes and no holds are barred.  From commercial tech firms to digital criminals, they all prey upon us, poor sitting ducks, from the moment we switch on our tech device and connect to the web. (4)  Let’s be clear, it’s not the technology as such which is stressful, it’s the whole commercially exploitative environment around it that is so disheartening.

Looking for safer spaces ... 

 By contrast …. ah, by contrast… Have you ever realised what a precious, disinterested realm you enter when reading a good book? For instance a lovingly researched art history book.  You can sit quietly with this book – leafing through it, reading, looking at pictures, thinking, … Nobody is preying on you! Nobody is tracking or trapping you! Within the covers of the book, nobody is trying to sell anything. The book is yours forever, on your own terms of engagement.  

And the book’s content, ah … the content … It has not been selected or engineered by an algorithm maximising and exploiting your attention for some product placement (5).  No, usually there has been an earnest writer at work, eg an art historian, who has done long and patient research, and then in turn tries to explain her insights to the reader. A writer who may actually love his subject, who may try to convey a genuine passion.  What a blessing indeed, to spend time, slow time, your own time, with a book that is only there to share knowledge and beauty.

Who knows, we may still witness a revival of the paper book, when too many people will have become exhausted and disgusted by the rowdy, always-on, always-being-tracked commercial hell which the digital world alas has become.

 

tracking notes instead of cookies

1.  hoodies are so handy to keep warm in times of energy wars, while sitting still in front of the computer 
2.  Not a new device because the old one failed (it’s running nicely with plenty of memory and remaining hard disk space) but because the near-monopolist Operating System provider keeps pushing menacing messages warning about the end of times (ie end of service cycle with security updates), insisting on the need to buy a new computer with the latest operating system.
3.  a commercial harassment to which one has alas become so accustomed when surfing the web, using social media, consulting on-line information. We all know today’s web services’ business model is one of free services in exchange for our data and for our attention to commercial messages.  But even providers of paid-for goods and services are now joining the race to aggressively squeeze as much as possible economic return from their unlucky captive customers.  “post-purchase monetisation” it is called.   Shoshana Zuboff wrote about it in great detail in “The age of surveillance capitalism”
4.  This is not a techno-phobe complaint  - the technology is impressive, its possibilities are exhilarating. But it’s the business model, or even the entire mind set,   of the on-line world, which reduces us to a bunch of sitting ducks.  Who doesn’t think back with longing to the good old early days of the internet, when disinterested communities and websites sprang up, when you could connect with people, find high quality information and educational resources, … ach.  II’s of course also our own collective fault – there is no such thing as a free lunch, and collectively we have ensured the failure of the earlier business models based on premium subscriptions, donations etc.  But maybe the non-mainstream digital world can still recover this better version of the digital world?
5. Just chronicling the latest harassment: Instagram aping TikTok, so you now have to wade through a heap of unsolicited silly video stuff and you can no longer just follow people you find interesting.  What ìs this obsession of our age with video? Is it a question of a collective horror of stillness, a variant of horror vacui?
6. But thank you Alphabet-Google, for your gracious free offer of Blogger! I wonder which data of mine were suited for monetisation?   

Autumn Greyness & City Colours

 

November has at last turned chilly & grey (for a few days at least). So instead of lounging at sidewalk cafés, reluctantly basking in unseasonably warm sunrays (1),  a flâneur can now again take to the streets for long brisk walks. 

For lack of golden sunlight and in the absence of autumnal luminosities, I point the camera to whatever artificial colour that strikes the eye : red street marks echoed in red graffiti, two intensely blue flaps of a sagging shop awning.

Or the flashy colourful letters on a ground floor window (not of a shop, rather a room possibly used for creative purposes) - speaking directly to the soul of a keenly observing, city-gold-digging  flâneur.

1.         How many years, before we’ll stop calling 25°C  end of October “unseasonably warm” -  how long before the veterans of harsh autumns past have become a minority?   

Autumn Luminosities

 

Always a car driving in or out the frame.  Always the autumnal slanting sunrays, reflecting as always on wet asphalt.  And always the leaves, the yellow autumn leaves. 

While Relishing Random Gifts

 

There are many good reasons to no longer write lengthy blogposts.

For one, they are not 15secs videos, so where’s the fun for the scrolling audience? Two, there’s  a war going on in Europe. Three, there are famines threatening in the world.  Four, this planet needs to be saved from climate change. Five, I’ve more pressing private issues to deal with. 

But then again, there’s no harm either in blogging & meandering melancholy musings.

And, right now, instead of dissecting the many perils of the human condition, I feel the strange need to count my blessings – and to evoke some unexpected gifts of harmony.   

 1) The un-solicited emergence of lovely little purple flowers 

“la vie ne fait pas de cadeaux “ : very true indeed!  And yet, these lovely purple flowers just popped up like that, one morning, spreading  their joyous colour & smell all over the small and not particularly well tended front-garden of our building. 

 2)  Finding essential books one didn’t even know that existed

“Rien sans peine” : definitely!  But I was just absentmindedly browsing the shelves in the music section of my beloved second hand bookshop Pêle-Mêle, when, without any merit,  I stumbled upon two  books – each in their way perfect to deepen the insights of a devout albeit unschooled classical music lover.   A small pocket book in perfect condition by Aaron Copland (indeed, the composer!) :  “What to Listen for in Music”. And a beautifully edited art book about “Flemish Polyphony” by Ignace Bossuyt.      

3 

 

3)  An impromptu cello-concerto in the museum garden – by a future winner of the Queen Elisabeth competition

"There’s no such thing as a free lunch” :  undoubtedly! And yet. It was a sultry Sunday summer afternoon in June last year and we had gone for a stroll in the rose gardens of the Museum van Buuren. A woman asked whether we wanted to attend a cello-recital, for free? It was given by a young German-Korean cellist, who was exploring some of the historical surroundings of this music- loving queen who gave her name to an eminent musical competition.  Hayoung Choi’s playing was dazzling.  And on a Sunday morning one year later, scrolling through the news on my phone, I could nod with smug satisfaction: the rose-garden cellist won the 1^st prize of the Queen Elisabeth competition.      

4.      4)  “Incident at Saint Guidon” and an unforeseen city walk

The plan was to efficiently insert a medical examination in the midst of the day, with a well-timed metro trip up and down to the hospital, all without causing so much as a ripple in my work performance.  Well, that didn’t go according to plan – on the way back, after only 10 minutes, the metro halted and all travellers were kindly requested to leave the train: because of an incident at the St Guidon station all metro- traffic was stopped.  

Above the ground people scurried around in all directions, trying to board overflowing buses or hailing already occupied taxis.  Right.  But, that’s when a Flâneur gets going.   Sunny, sweltering hot streets, a walk of about 1.5hours to get back to work.  It’s an unexpected gift to  just walk and walk, along the busy Chaussée de Mons, alongside an unexpectedly peaceful park with children playing, crossing a pittoresque square with a church, slaloming though groups of boys hanging around in Kureghem, traversing the canal, walking past illegal workers gathering behind the Southstation, dodging frantic shoppers at the Place Louise, overtaking strolling dandy’s with nifty dogs along the Toison d’or, speeding up a little, and yes there’s the office building.      

 

5.      5)  Youthful energy in the metro at 7.10AM

“metro-boulot-dodo” – not an uplifting prospect, now that for 3 weeks I have to join the daily commuters to get my treatment in a hospital at the edge of Brussels.   Most people in the metro are rather subdued at this early hour. Looking around I see rows of people uniformly bent over their smartphones. Others are dozing off, like that young slender man, carefully dressed (with red  shoes, red belt and red shirt) snuggling up ever tighter in his corner.  The school-going youth though, bristles with energy. When a girl spots a friend in the next car, she grins & phones :  “look around you!!” , laughing out loud when the friends turns around , surprised. The friend comes over, and until the final metro-stop they sit side by side, grinning & chatting & beaming & oh so happy about their unexpected encounter. 

6.      6)  Greeted by a friendly face at the Erasmus-metro exit

When Ieaving the metro at the ‘Erasmus’ station, apprehensive about the first of 15 radiotherapy –sessions, there is a familiar face that greets me amidst the crowd of commuters. On a bill-board there is Vivian Maier, intently gazing  in her lens, happily capturing her reflection in a mirroring surface, hair unruly, behind her a non-descript building and dappled summer light through tree-leaves -  a joyous reflected self-portrait.  As un-connected & isolated as she may have been – here she is, so many years later, on another continent – on  bill-boards announcing an exhibition of her photos.   

Reflections on human influence

 

I was intending to write a blogpost about "paideia" or “humanitas” – in the sense of seeking individual ‘salvation’ not in material riches, but in an ideal of self-education, in order to participate (however modestly) to the best that human culture has produced.  I was going to reach back 2000 years to bolster my confidence in the relative permanence of this humanistic ideal.  

But I was distracted from my nostalgic musings by the red alert of the IPCC : “Human influence has warmed the climate at a rate that is unprecedented in at least  the last 2000 years.”

“Human influence has likely increased the chance of compound extreme events since the 1950s. This includes increases in the frequency of concurrent heatwaves and droughts on the global scale (high confidence); fire weather in some regions of all inhabited continents (medium confidence); and compound flooding in some locations (medium confidence).” (IPCC August 2021_ AR6 WGI – p41))

 

 May human ingenuity (technological, behavioral) now help us to mitigate our influence, and to adapt to its consequences, lest we turn into pillars of salt, gazing, transfixed, at the unfolding disaster.  

Reflections on a Permanent Book

 

“with numerous music examples” - introduction

It was just an unassuming paperback I’d picked up some time ago for a mere €2 in the second hand bookshop : “Monteverdi – His Life and Work” (1)

The frontispiece carried the promise “with numerous music examples”, a bit like an art history book touting the number of colour illustrations. 

One of the joys of reading an art history book, is of course to have eye and mind happily consorting, creating meaning while making the joyful connection between descriptive text and visual image. (2) 

 It’s quite different for music – literary descriptions are either very general glorifications of music or else very subjective outpourings. And objective musicological descriptions, including score extracts with keys & notes, often scare off the un-initiated with their technical terms. (3)  

 

a small digression on learning music as an adult - 2021

As to myself, having never had a musical education, the connection between musical score and actual sounds used to elude me. So my listening (however intense, attentive and profoundly impacting) remained mostly intuitive, and in CD-booklets I routinely skipped paragraphs with technical music terms. 

Luckily, however, my book-buying has always been more ambitious, overreaching my actual abilities, and so not shying away from books including staves and notes  -  implicitly assuming that one day I could still teach myself how to read sheet music. 

Which has proved to be a self-fulfilling prophecy :  now at last, with the help of a limpid educational book (5) (which in 70 pages patiently explains the basic musical elements) and following many many hours of repetition, I’m now at a point that I can decipher (ever so slowly, ever so laboriously) what is happening on the lines of a musical score.  Ah, the joy of recognising a b flat! The pride  of identifying an augmented fifth! (4)  I’m like a former illiterate, painstakingly deciphering a sentence word by word, letter by letter.  

 

a modest meditation on the passing of time and the soul of a sentence - 1926

With my recently acquired humble musical knowledge I can now slowly read “Monteverdi – His Life and Work” and, for instance,  ponder the timeless meaning of  “ the frequent use of augmented fifths produce effects of voluptuousness and melancholy”.

But a rather casual, non-technical sentence sets off my melancholy musings, making me wonder about the passing of time and styles. The book’s author, musicologist Prunières, pays a tribute to Romain Rolland (his former music teacher)(6)  as follows: “With an intuition bordering upon genius, he has entered into Monteverdi’s very soul and defined synthetically the essential characteristics of his art.”

Who, these days, would still write a sentence like that? Where (apart from in self-help tutorials) does one still find words such as “intuition, genius, soul” used in one breath?  An entire world of   high art, of cultural reverence, of exquisite sensibilities, is evoked.  While reading  the historical/biographical notes or the musicological commentaries, I didn’t wonder about the date of writing of the book , but this one reflective sentence made me pause and realise that the book was written in another era, almost 100 years ago.      

 

permanent by design - 1972  

As mentioned in the opening paragraph – this book I’m blogging about really is just an unassuming paperback, published back in 1972 by Dover books (7).  But it ages particularly well, withstanding the vagaries of human use and of  the elements (8) for close to 50 years.

On the back cover I read that this longevity was indeed aimed at by the publisher, who devotes a full paragraph to their efforts to “make the best book possible”, from choice of paper to method of sewing and binding, firmly concluding with “This is a permanent book”. 

They were quite right to add a proud exclamation mark to the heading ”A Dover edition designed for years of use!” : their bold claim of permanence has held true so far. 

They were truly  ‘circular by design’ avant la lettre. Quite an achievement, because, just think of it, which TV-set produced in 1972 would still be used today? Which smartphone bought today will still be in use in 2071?      

 

 

Free Notes without a Stave

(1)    by Henri Prunières, Translated by Marie D. Mackie – 1972 republication of the original 1926 English language edition.

(2)    Ekphrasis,  “Greek for the written description of a work of art produced as a rhetorical exercise, often used in the adjectival form ekphrastic. It is a vivid, often dramatic, verbal description of a visual work of art, either real or imagined” (Wikipedia)

(3)    “Parrot may not learn to sing, but at least he’ll know what singing is” (J. Winterson)

(4)    When asking Google about “literary descriptions of music”  it  brings me to this very relevant blogpost : http://nachumschoffmanthoughts.com/?page=DESCRIPTIONSOFMUSICINLITERATURE

(5)    Ignace Bossuyt : ”Van noten en tonen – Wegwijs in muzikale begrippen”

(6)    When asking Google about ‘Romain Rolland et la musique’ :  https://association-romainrolland.org/image_articles13/Jeanneret13.pdf   « Le nom de Rolland, qui suffisait entre les deux guerres à évoquer un modèle littéraire et social est tombé dans l’oubli », « figure effacée de l’Europe  »   « le modèle d’écrivain-musicien »

(7)    Dover books still exists, but in a ‘restructured’ and slimmed down form, apperently focusing now on colouring books for adults. And I’m not the only one paying tribute to their former sustainable publishing ethos : https://contingentmagazine.org/2020/02/23/this-is-a-permanent-book/        

(8)    “the natural  elements” – we’d almost forgotten about them in our advanced societies. To our horror we now discover our fragility, our helplessness, for instance,  in the face of floodings. The human death toll, the destroyed houses and infrastructure of course command our first concern, but how pitiful, too, those muddy heaps of books and paper files spoiled by the water.

(9)    photo-disclaimer & additional book : this is a photo of two books, the Dover book (as mentioned) and another lovely book on Monteverdi by Actes Sud– published back in 2004, and bought second hand, still in great condition, 17 years later.  My PC from that the early 2000s is long in the scrap yard, and the ZIP drives on which I prudently  saved my back ups are inaccessible now.  

 

Landscapes on the Window Sill

 

Still lives and landscape paintings do have a lot in common.  For one, books about them amiably share space on my window sill, equally exposed to the spring light filtering through the curtains.

More to the point, they both do invite contemplation - not needing a story to unfold, nor showing a human character to be assessed. They just let the self quietly watch, observe and love its surroundings.

To my great joy I recently found another book on Jacob van Ruisdael ("Windmills and Water Mills" by Seymour Slive) to complement  the old The Hague catalogue (pictured) that  I once picked up in a second hand bookshop.    

I have vivid & happy memories of the spacious Van Ruisdael paintings I could see over the years in continental European museums. So in this new book I discovered with all the more wonderment  pictures of paintings in UK and US collections I had never seen before.

Look, how Van Ruisdael paints this man in a red jacket on a background of silvery greens,  anticipating Corot’s happy red & shimmering grey chromaticism. (see: Two Undershot Water Mills with an Open Sluice  )

 And there, what an amazing riverscape –  like a busy , industrious vedute painted by an Italian. (see: Panoramic view of the river Amstel looking toward Amsterdam )

murky harmonies (a feeling for snow)

I had even dreamt about it …. about thick layers of snow keeping us inside, about the whole world turned white.  So I woke, filled with expectation, not even minding the early hour which ruined my Sunday rest.  I pulled back the curtains, and … bof …. some white patches here and there – on rooftops, in gardens -  some melting snow flocks twirling in the light of the street lamps. 

But nothing like the avalanches of snow forecast the previous day.  The young woman in the bakery shared my disappointment:  “all that fuss and then that “, she said, while putting my croissants in a bag, and then pointing dismissively at the wet drizzle outside.

But in these muffled, restrained times, we collectively try to make the most of what little pleasures the weather does bestow on us. In the Bois de la Cambre, adults and children alike had decided that even a millimeter of snow allowed to slide down slippery slopes on a sled. Slithering & tumbling, their excited cries echoed amongst the trees. 

And I too came to appreciate this particular wintry & wet mixture – not the dazzling white of a snowy landscape, but the murky harmony of earthy browns & grey mixed with broken white.  The kind of scrambled dusky landscape the 19th century painter Guillaume Vogels was so keen to render.       

An Alchemy of Fragments

 

“As we know, the fragment, the never-ending promise of Romanticism, is still the influential ideal of the modern age.”

While aimlessly browsing in the bookshop (a recognised ‘essential activity’), my eye fell on a small hardcover book, quietly appealing with its hushed tones of black & silvery greys.   It had an old black&white photo on its cover - maybe of a 19^th century museum room, high-ceilinged and empty but for a man wearing a black coat & a hat, standing stiffly next to the entrance doorpost.  A greyish circle was superposed on the top corner of this photo, looking like the pitted surface of the moon (?), almost fully covering another brilliant silver circle underneath.  Enscribed in silvery letters within the circle,  the title stated dryly "Inventaris van enkele verliezen"  ( "Inventory of losses" ). 

The  author’s name (Judith Schalansky) was unknown to me - but somehow seemed to fit the aura of bygone erudition which exuded from the little book.

And what a treasure the little book proves to be! It’s a pleasure to handle, with its firm cover and its pages of a heavy, smooth paper. The chapters are marked by pitch-black pages, each showing a darkly shimmering ghostly picture evoking the chapter’s subject. While manipulating the book to catch the light under different angles, peering into the black, one can with some effort make out the picture of some ruin, or the fragments of some text, or the remains of an ancient map.

“Out of the revealing debris, the architect, who will not build a single house in his entire life, designs the floor plan of a dreamed past and at the same time the vision of an entirely new creation, which fascinates more people in its copper engravings than any structure chained to the ground and the soil ever would.”

The book feeds on the human fascination with past civilizations and long lost cultural artefacts, it cherishes how a few rare remaining fragments can nourish the imagination of generations to come.   Schalansky’s own imagination and dazzling command of language can resurrect a lost tiger species, minutely describing a fight during a Colosseum spectacle in ancient Rome (1) , she can lead us into the minds of 18th century engravers and painters of antique ruins (2), or vividly evoke the lost books & visions of a perished world religion (3).

“ Only the writing will be proved right and will survive, will weigh as much as the material which records it : a lump of black basalt, a table of burnt clay, the squeezed fibers of the papyrus plants, of the stiff leaf of a palm ”

The book embodies the human condition of transience, meditating on the sheer impossibility to remember everything forever  – not even when hewn in stone, nor when kept in bits&bytes, and not even in an archive on the moon (4).   But at the same time, her book is a tribute to libraries and museums and archives, noting how “on periods of extraordinary negligence follow phases of excessive care”.   Her book is also living proof of how the human imagination can travel through the ages and around the globe, only feeding on some lingering old texts & images,  without ever leaving one’s home town. 

Sharing the intrepidity of the explorers & philosophers of bygone ages, Schalansky does not eschew  eschatological visions, including the ultimate end of our universe (5). But for now, here on earth, Schalansky’s own writing, her playful gravitas (6) glimmering with wisdom & beauty, makes one hope that at least the language will remain, as an enduring repository of all human experience. (7)  

 

Fragmentary Notes

1.     Kaspische Tijger – Het Oude Rome / Caspian Tiger – Ancient Rome
2.     Villa Sacchetti – Valle Inferno (on Piranese, Hubert Robert)
3.     De Zeven Boeken van Mani – Babylonië / The Seven Books of Mani - Babylonia
4.     Kinaus selenografieën – Lacus Luxuriae / Kinaus selenographies - Lacus Luxuriae
5.    « het verre uur waarin de centrale ster zal opbranden en samen met de zon al de bij haar ingedeelde hemellichamen zullen verdampen » « the distant hour in which the central star will burn up and together with the sun all the celestial bodies around  it will evaporate”
6.    Schalansky’s melancholy evocations of losses remind one of course of WG Sebald – but her tone is more cheerful, because the losses are from a more distant past and therefore less laden with regret & guilt.     
7.    repositories of words brought to life in a conspiracy between writers & readers – together silently reviving entire lost worlds   
8.    all quotes are from the Dutch version “Inventaris van enkele verliezen”, shamelessly using Google  for the English translation.