Cambridge University is celebrating its 800th Anniversary this year. There are various ways of viewing its contributions to society. You could see it — as the university’s leading security expert Ross Anderson does — as 800 years of creative destruction.

If you want physical objects destroyed, the army can do that. As for badly-run companies, they get trashed when the economy goes into recession; the economist Joseph Schumpeter taught us that this ‘creative destruction’ is vital for progress as it clears away the deadwood and creates space in which new businesses can grow. And it’s just the same in ecosystems: from 1911, the USA put a lot of effort into stopping forest fires, but then discovered that although they saved individual plants and animals they were destroying the environment. A forest with a fire brigade is a sad old forest; a lot of plants from sequoias to proteas reproduce only in the aftermath of a fire.

Just as fire regenerates the forest, so a great university regenerates human culture – our view of the world and our understanding of it. We incinerate the rubbish. And Cambridge has long been the hottest flamethrower; we’re the most creatively destructive institution in all of human history. And big new things come from that. The ground we cleared made us the cradle of evangelical Christianity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, of science in the seventeenth and eighteenth, of atheism in the nineteenth, and of all sorts of cool new stuff since – including the emerging sciences of life and information…

Read on.

Some lovely pieces by his New Yorker colleagues in the current issue. For example, this by his editor, Roger Angell.

As a contributor, he was patient with editing, and pertinaciously involved with his product: an editor’s dream. My end of the work was to point out an occasional inconsistent or extraneous sentence, or a passage that wanted something more. Almost under his breath over our phone connection, while we looked at the same lines, he would try out an alternative: “Which one sounds better, do you think?” Sighing, he would take us back over the same few words again and again, then propose or listen to a switch of some sort, and try again. All writers do this, but not many with such a lavishly extended consideration. He wanted to see each galley, each tiny change, right down to the late-closing page proofs, which he often managed to return by overnight mail an hour or so before closing, with new sentences or passages, handwritten in the margins in a soft pencil, that were fresher and more inventive and revealing than what had been there before. You watched him write.

This process sounds old-fashioned, but Updike was probably the very first New Yorker writer to shift over to a computer, back in the early eighties. “I don’t know how this will change my writing,” he wrote to me in advance, “but it will.” He was right, of course: the flavor was mysteriously different, the same wine but of another year.

And then this from Adam Gopnik:

It was part of the great good luck of this magazine that he needed, or indulged, us, and that his appetites and ambitions matched the dreams of the editors—which is only to say that several generations of editors tossed a bit less fitfully at 3 A.M., knowing that, if a book on some knotty modern subject had been sent out to Massachusetts, two weeks later there was sure to be, rebounding back, nine or ten pages of perfectly tuned prose—typo-free, full of cunning synopsis, serene judgment, big news (a generation got educated on Borges and Nabokov alongside him), bite without tooth marks, and always at the end a permanent turn of phrase or a metaphor, not a witticism merely but a benediction, a blessing, an insight that lifted it far above mere reviewing and into a form of witty personal poetry.

And, as those same generations of editors learned, the near-perfect thing was usually prefaced by a letter gaily outlining its supposed inadequacies, and all the reasons the editors might wisely prefer not to run it at all—a form of modesty that, given not just the quality but the heat and shimmer of what was enclosed, passed the edge of modesty to touch the edge of superstition: it was, one realized, Updike’s way of staying young, an outsider, pressing his face against a window, still the long-faced brilliant boy on a remote Pennsylvania farm turning the pages of a New York magazine and quietly deciding to be a cartoonist and a humorist and a parodist, while the loving and ambitious mother fretted and the weak but honest father listened to the radio (a family triangle that he inserted, again and again, into all our imaginations). He was still a kid from Shillington dreaming of being a New York wit, and feeling lucky that he had been allowed in at all.

“I’ve got to own up to my mistake, which is that ultimately it’s important for this administration to send a message that there aren’t two sets of rules. You know, one for prominent people and one for ordinary folks who have to pay their taxes.”

President Obama, commenting on his mistake in running Tom Daschle for a post in his Administration.

Wow! When was the last time you heard a prominent politician saying something like that — and meaning it?

From Thomas Friedman at Davos.

DAVOS, Switzerland — In its own unpredictable way, the Davos World Economic Forum usually serves as a crude barometer of the latest mood or mania on the world stage. This year did not disappoint. What has struck me is the quiet urgency that infused so many panel discussions and private conversations here between investors, politicians and social activists. To put it crudely: Everyone is looking for the guy — the guy who can tell you exactly what ails the world’s financial system, exactly how we get out of this mess and exactly what you should be doing to protect your savings.

But here’s what’s really scary: The guy isn’t here. He’s left the building. Elvis has left the mountain. Get used to it.

What do I mean? First, if it is not apparent to you yet, it will be soon: There is no magic bullet for this economic crisis, no magic bailout package, no magic stimulus. We have woven such a tangled financial mess with subprime mortgages wrapped in complex bonds and derivatives, pumped up with leverage, and then globalized to the far corners of the earth that, much as we want to think this will soon be over, that is highly unlikely.

We are going to have to learn to live with a lot more uncertainty for a lot longer than our generation has ever experienced…

Q: What is the capital of Iceland?
A: $25

It’s snowing — for the first time in years. The world is suddenly white — and quiet. Rush-hour traffic through the village has virtually disappeared. The children’s schools are closed for the day. (Yes, it’s Britain.) Looking out of the window late last night I was suddenly transported back to the 1970s, when a friend and I were driving back from Vienna and had left the city rather late — certainly too late to make it to Munich. As night came on it began to snow heavily and we left the autobahn and went looking for a village. We came on a small hamlet with an inn straight out of a fairy tale. Funny gothic lettering on the front, golden light spilling out through its windows. We parked and went in. It was warm, bright, hospitable. A few villagers were drinking and talking. We asked if we could have a room for the night, and an evening meal. Of course. We ate quietly (Weiner schnitzel, naturlich, washed down with beer) and turned in for the night, sleeping soundly under warm duvets covered in white covers.

In the morning, everything was eerily quiet. We had breakfast and then took our bags out to the car. The snow was up to the top of the tyres. But on the roads life went on. Business as usual (unlike Britain). We examined the map and found that we were near Berchtesgaden. “Let’s go and see where Hitler’s house was”, said my companion. We set off. It had stopped snowing. The road became steeper. About half-way up we passed a huge building that looked a bit like a country club. A sign proclaimed it as a US Forces R&R centre. My friend (who had been a Vietnam war draft dodger and hated everything American) made a rude gesture and shouted some obscenities out of the window.

Eventually we reached Obersalzburg, the spot where the Berghof — Hitler’s mountain retreat with the famous balcony — had stood. It was now just a cleared area with some remains of buildings — and a hut selling souvenirs. But the stupendous vista of the mountains remained. A party of middle-aged Germans arrived in a coach. They had a tour guide, who took them round the site, pausing from time to time at particular locations and speaking to them in a serious tone of voice. They listened intently. My companion opined that they were listening not just intently but reverently. He went very quiet. And all the way home — through Germany and past all the US bases that then littered the countryside — he never again uttered an anti-American sentiment.

My phone beeped at supper time last Tuesday. It was an SMS from one of my sons. “John Updike RIP” was all it said. Then my inbox pinged: a message from an old friend in Holland. Then a tweet from Steven Johnson appeared in my Twitter feed. All over the English-speaking world it was the same. People were registering the loss of a significant presence in their intellectual lives.

“The Updike opus is so vast”, wrote Ian McEwen in the Guardian later in the week,

“so varied and rich, that we will not have its full measure for years to come. We have lived with the expectation of his new novel or story or essay so long, all our lives, that it does not seem possible that this flow of invention should suddenly cease. We are truly bereft, that this reticent, kindly man with the ferocious work ethic and superhuman facility will write for us no more. He was intensely private, learned, generous, courtly, the kind of man who could apologise for replying to one’s letter by return of post because it was the only way he could keep his desk clear.”

The New Yorker, which was, in a way, the fixed point in his life as an essayist, had a nice feature in which writers remembered Updike. Julian Barnes, as usual, was spot on:

“Like many others, I’ve regularly taken Ruskin’s “The Stones of Venice” with me to Venice, and regularly failed to read a word of it there. That reader’s hoped-for matching of text to place frequently disappoints. But once, a dozen or so years ago, it worked miraculously for me. I was setting out on a three-week book tour, crisscrossing America. At Heathrow I bought “Rabbit, Run” and started it on the plane. All reading problems became reading joys for the entire trip. I picked up each succeeding volume in a new city, my bookmarks the stubs of boarding cards. The novels were a distraction from, and a glittering confirmation of, the vast bustling ordinariness of American life. When I managed to escape my professional duties and strolled the urban or suburban streets, I saw Rabbitland everywhere. Even those moments of stunned exhaustion in a new hotel room, when I had the energy only to turn on the television, interacted with my reading, since Updike loves to counterpoint national events (that is, national events as absorbed by Rabbit through television) against the private life of this archetypal twentieth-century American citizen. My book tour finished in Florida – which was perfect, since this was where the fourth volume found “Rabbit at Rest,” in geriatric condo-land. Poor old Rabbit died, the novel ended, and so did my trip. I flew home (and have no memory of what I read on the plane that time) not only convinced that the quartet is the great masterpiece of postwar American fiction but wondering whether I would ever again find such perfect circumstances in which to read it.”

Like most of his readers, I can remember how Updike’s writing fitted into my life. Couples, for example, coincided with my early married life in Cambridge, providing an insight into mores that we knew were — somewhere — in the air. (We used to hear rumours of parties at which — at the end of the evening — people would throw their car keys into a jar and then go home with whoever drew them out. Nobody ever invited us to such functions, so we relied on Updike’s chronicle of suburban adultery for circumstantial detail.)

Years later, in preparation for my first trip to the US, I embarked — rather as Julian Barnes had — on the Rabbit books, and found myself hooked. And enlightened. James Joyce used to say that if Dublin were destroyed, the city could be rebuilt by consulting the pages of Ulysses. My feeling about the Rabbit books was that they fulfilled much the same function for 1950s – 1980s small-town America. Indeed I remember once coming across a PhD thesis which examined the accuracy of Updike’s portrayal of social changes in suburban America and found it to be very perceptive. His decision for example, to make Harry Angstrom a used-car dealer was particularly astute: automobiles are pretty central to an understanding of American culture, and Updike spotted the significance of Toyota long before Detroit woke up to the danger that the Japanese car manufacturers represented. In one of the features marking his death, the Guardian ran a very nice audio interview in which he talks about the Rabbit series.

In other small ways, his experiences resonated with mine. I was intrigued to discover from his autobiography, for example, that his life had been shaped in some small but not insignificant way by the fact that he suffered, as I do, from psoriasis. And he wrote beautifully about golf, the only game I have ever loved.

I met him once. It must have been in the 1980s, on a wet winter’s morning in Cambridge. He was neatly attired in classic Wasp gear: button-down shirt and tie, subtle tweed jacket, grey trousers, nicely-polished shoes. He had come to Heffers to sign books, and for some reason very few people had turned up. So he sat at a table in the mezzanine which is now used for DVDs, courteously signed the odd book for passing customers, and chatted to me. I had my Leica with me and took some very nice pictures, including a striking one of him smiling, over his spectacles, at a customer. But the print and the negative are locked away somewhere in an attic and I haven’t been able to summon up the courage to go rummaging for them. Sigh.

For anyone who aspires — and struggles — to write, Updike was an exasperating phenomenon: unbelievably prolific, and yet never shoddy. When the news came of his death I pulled down my copy of Odd Jobs (see picture) — a collection of reviews and essays written over a few years in the interstices of writing a series of major novels. It runs to 914 pages! But it’s the title that really rankles, implying as it does that this is stuff he did before breakfast.

“He said he had four studies in his house”, wrote Martin Amis in Wednesday’s Guardian,

“so we can imagine him writing a poem in one of his studies before breakfast, then in the next study writing a hundred pages of a novel, then in the afternoon he writes a long and brilliant essay for the New Yorker, and then in the fourth study he blurts out a couple of poems. John Updike must have been possessed of a purer energy than any writer since DH Lawrence.

I’ve seen it suggested that such prodigies suffer from an enviable condition called ‘pressure on the cortex’. It’s as if they have within them an underground spring which is always on the point of eruption.”

I benefited from being drenched by that spring. Not many writers have such a capacity to get under one’s skin and into one’s consciousness. “Several times a day”, wrote Amis,

you turn to him, as you will now to his ghost, and say to yourself ‘How would Updike have done it?’

You do indeed. May he rest in peace.

I’ve been to Davos once — long before the ‘World Economic Forum’ turned it into a synonynm for nonstop ego-massaging and billionaire-worship. It was in the late 1970s and I was walking in the Alps. I stumbled on the town more or less by mistake on a day that was too foggy to walk. I remember a drab place in which I bought — of all things — a Swiss Army knife and a walking stick that I still possess.

The event itself is nauseating enough. But what is even worse is the creepy sycophancy of the journalists who manage to cadge an invitation to the event. These are creatures who have apparently lost sight of the ancient investigative principle that behind every fortune lies a crime. One expects little better from the old-media print and broadcast crowd, of course. But what’s been increasingly depressing in the last two years is that they have been joined by a tribe of bloggers and twitterers who also seem to have lost their capacity for detachment. At any rate, their schoolgirlish excitement at being allowed into the hallowed precinct seems to have lobotomised their detachment.

So it was nice to open the Guardian this morning and find Julian Glover’s lovely dispatch from the benighted Swiss resort.

Perhaps it was the party at the end of the universe. Just as a neutron bomb destroys life while leaving structures intact, so Davos goes on, while the culture that supports it is dead. As collective belief was what propelled this global elite, one person’s self-importance feeding another’s, the mood has been broken as badly as the banks.

But

Alarm is not the same as contrition, and few people here will admit to have done anything personally wrong. The boss of JP Morgan Chase, James Dimon, is an exception: “I take full blame, yes. God knows some very stupid things were done.”

There is no real sense of collective guilt, or serious consideration of what to do next, other than rebuild the world that has just been lost. Davos has the air of a crash inquiry into an airline that intends to keep on flying. One hero, alone among thousands, suggested that the bankers should simply be jailed until they give the money back.

The problem with that is that most of them have no money to return. The ocean on which the global boom floated has evaporated.

[…]

The shock is real, the grief has hardly begun, but no one in Davos seems to think that means they should be less important or less rich. Yet for many the modesty is a temporary veil, to be worn until the good times return.

It is hard to tell who has really suffered, and who is only pretending. In a dark corridor at the centre of the concrete congress building billionaire surnames still flash past on white badges. This is a town where the men have the telltale signs of the seriously rich. Their hair has been blow-dried into implausible waves and layers; coiffures disciplined, even if the markets are not.

Great stuff!