Acorn

This fell on to the pavement in front of me the other day. Funny to think that from such a tiny, beautiful seed a mighty oak might grow.

Quote of the Day

”Did you know that Mozart had no arms and no legs? I’ve seen statues of him on people’s pianos.”

• Viktor Borge

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Beethoven | Mandolin Sonatina in C

Link

Just in case you thought that Beethoven was always serious!

Long Read of the Day

Against historic normalization. 

Or why AI is not the Manhattan project and why we must challenge ourselves to think the radically new.**  Very timely Substack post by the historian Adam Tooze.

Given the extremity of our moment there is an understandable desire to look to history as a possible source of orientation: hegemonic succession, fascism, the nuclear arms race, Cold War 2.0, middle-income trap, Japan 1990s etc are all commonly invoked.

In each case the motive is understandable and the discussion is often fruitful, but more often than not the effect is comforting and to that degree also misleading.

Fascism was a political force that was defeated.

If we are in an interregnum then there is a new order to come.

The nuclear arms race was managed and the “West won the Cold War”.

If there are middle-income traps, then China’s growth must ultimately end and the “natural order” of world hierarchy will reassert itself. 

To my mind each of these analogies follows a similar pattern. You start with uncertainty, reach for history and arrive at a narrative which, even if it is not fully spelled out, actually has a reassuring conclusion. The fact that the conclusion remains tacit contributes significantly to the consoling effect.

To put it the other way around, if any of this chosen repertoire of stories had truly nightmarish conclusions would we really be invoking them so light-handedly?

To avoid that vertiginous turn involves subtle shifts of focus…

I admire thinkers like Tooze (and others like Henry Farrell) who manage to put our current fears and obsessions into a wider context. This is worth your time.

Books, etc.

My mention on Friday of C.S. Lewis’a book A Grief Observed struck a number of readers, and prompted me to download a more recent edition, which has the original text plus a number of thoughful essays on it by a panel of distinguished writers, including Francis Spufford and the late Hilary Mantel.

Opening the new edition I went looking for a passage that had seared itself on my memory when I had first read it. It’s about Lewis’s reflections on what kind friends had sometimes said to him — that he would eventually “get over it”. Here’s the passage:

“But the words are ambiguous. To say the patient is getting over it after an operation or appendicitis is one thing; after he’s had his leg cut off is quite another. After that operation either the wounded stump heals or the man dies. If it heals, the fierce continuous pain will stop. Presently, he’ll get back his strength and be able to stump about on his wooden leg. He has ‘got over it’. But he will probably recurring pains in the stump all his life, and perhaps pretty bad ones; and he will always be a one legged man. There will be hardly any moment when he forgets it. Bathing, dressing, sitting down and getting up again, even lying in bed will all be different. His whole way of life will be changed. All sorts of pleasures and activities that he once took for granted will have to be simply written off. Duties too. At present, I’m learning to get about on crutches. Perhaps I presently be given a wooden leg. But I shall never be a biped again.”

Linkblog

*Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

From Quentin:

My favourite new verb is “coddiwomple”, which apparently means “to travel in a purposeful manner towards a vague or unknown destination.”

Nobody quite knows its origin — it’s relatively recent — but it’s a good way of describing quite a few of my holidays since we purchased a campervan.

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