 |
Nicholas Poussin's painting, c. 1636,
gives its name to Powell's opus |
I fell into reverie yesterday evening while listening to the song of a finch in the back yard. I say "song"; it was unmistakably musical, as are the night-time ensembles of frogs and insects and owls, the sonar discourse of whales, grass swaying in a wind.
I say unmistakably musical, but how so? What
is music? The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's
entry on the philosophy of music reveals that the answer isn't so simple. One might pursue a doctoral degree in the philosophy of music.
And the interplay of human activity in time—would that too be music?
Yes, according to English novelist
Anthony Powell, who, after the painting of
Nicholas Poussin, titled his cycle of twelve novels
A Dance to the Music of Time (1951-1975).
Powell's work was dramatized for television in 1997, in four parts of an hour and a half each. My wife and I watched them again recently (by way of
Netflix download).
A Dance to the Music of Time (TV 1997: Alvin Rakoff, Christopher Morahan) [Nick Jenkins reminisces, recalling the people he met over the previous half-century, his encounters with the great and the bad] [G] 5-15,16,17,18-2012
The narrator of the story, Nick Jenkins, describes the painting early on. He and a companion have happened onto it in a museum (its location is the Wallace Collection, London). In the first book, apparently (according to Wikipedia), Nick simply reflects narratively on the painting:
These classical projections, and something from the fire, suddenly suggested Poussin's scene in which the Seasons, hand in hand and facing outward, tread in rhythm to the notes of the lyre that the winged and naked greybeard plays. The image of Time brought thoughts of mortality: of human beings, facing outward like the Seasons, moving hand in hand in intricate measure, stepping slowly, methodically sometimes a trifle awkwardly, in evolutions that take recognisable shape: or breaking into seemingly meaningless gyrations, while partners disappear only to reappear again, once more giving pattern to the spectacle: unable to control the melody, unable, perhaps, to control the steps of the dance. [emphasis mine]
I don't recall that the dramatization makes use of
the italicized words, although maybe it does, for it had already occurred to me (that is, before seeing this passage) that the title could be a metaphor for history as controlled by no one, but simply unfolding, one moment determined by the preceding moment, as Sam Harris seems, in
Free Will, to be saying of our lives (of his life and of yours and mine). We
witness our life happening with no more than the
illusion that we are freely choosing the sequence of our thoughts and feelings and actions, for each of our thoughts and feelings and actions has actually been formed in our brain prior to our becoming conscious of it. I often only discover what I think, for example, in the course of writing something, answering a question, essaying on a provocative topic.
The reason we watched A Dance to the Music of Time a second time (I'm not sure it merits it) was that I had recently read in Christopher Hitchens's last book of essays (
Arguably, 2011) his 2001 review (in
The Atlantic) of Anthony Powell's memoirs,
To Keep the Ball Rolling (an abridgment of the memoirs' four original volumes).
If you've read Wikipedia on Anthony Powell, you know that "Powell" does not rhyme with "towel," but is pronounced "pole." However, according to Hitchens's review ("Anthony Powell: An Omnivorous Curiosity"), it is pronounced as though an American Southerner were saying "pole"—in the drawn out, two-syllable Southern way:
To get one question out of the way before we begin:
At one of these public interrogations (I am not sure which college) a professor prefixed a question by saying—rather archly—that he was uncertain how to pronounce my name. As an inspiration of the moment I replied that like the Boston family of Lowell I rhymed it with Noël rather than towel. [emphasis mine]
Here Anthony Powell was describing an incident on his tour of New England in the early 1960s....[p. 311]
Comparing Powell to Proust, Hitchens writes that, "Like Proust, Powell was not exactly pithy (I can't offhand recall any 'quotations' from Powell, as one can from his great contemporaries Wodehouse and Waugh)...." [
p. 315]
Googling, though, did find me a few good ones:
- Growing old's like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven't committed.
- He fell in love with himself at first sight, and it is a passion to which he has always remained faithful. Self-love seems so often unrequited.
- Parents are sometimes a bit of a disappointment to their children. They don't fulfill the promise of their early years.
- Books do furnish a room. [I've browsed a used-book store of that name in Durham, although I have now given up the practice of using books to furnish rooms.]
In Stylized: A Slightly Obsessive History of Strunk & White's The Elements of Style, I learned this morning how E. B. White (1899-1985) knew he had chosen the right woman to marry:
Well, it wasn't hard. My wife of almost forty-four years was good-looking and intellectual. How could I resist someone who appeared in our very first conversation to be enthusiastically interested in what I was telling her about a book I was then reading [Gestalt Psychology, by Wolfgang Köhler (1887-1967)]? We were wed six weeks later.
