Timeless Moments

In this world, life and time are intimately entwined. "To try to imagine disentangling them," as Michael Clune observes in the Chronicle Review, "is like trying to imagine a melody of one note." And yet we all have, at one time or another, if only for a moment ― a moment that seemed much longer. The effort to counteract time, by poets or lovers, is twofold: a sensed slowing of time accompanying an intensely vivid perception and the persistence of that intensity. To achieve what Schiller called "annulling time within time" may elude us in the end, but isn't that is true of almost every worthwhile pursuit? Clune's essay is entitled "The Quest for Permanent Novelty," but, as in the search for the Holy Grail, what we seek is not new but eternal. ❦

The True Ice Age

The world's oldest portrait has arrived in Britain. Dug from the earth of Moravia, she is carved from a mammoth's tusk and 26,000 years old. “Her long slender face, with its almond eyes and hint of a dimple, is straight out of Modigliani,” writes Laura Cumming in a review almost too poetic for a London daily. “One of her eyes is lively, but the other droops downwards as if injured or sad, and there is rueful twist to her smile.” Dolorous too is our contemplation of the draconian and Darwinian drive against the arts, which leads us to ask ourselves, “Which is the true Ice Age?” 

Carnival of the Animals

As Mardi Gras nears, what better time to celebrate a carnival? Composed in 1886, While French composer Camille Saint-Saens was vacationing in Austria, Le Carnival des Animaux, a suite of 14 movements, remained unpublished until his death. From an era when cartoons were also classics. 

 

Garbage In, Culture Out

While the musical proclivities of more affluent youth in developed countries often turn towards trash, in a rubbish dump on the south side of Asunción, underprivileged Paraguayan youngsters have found an innovative means to make music. Using instruments crafted from discarded oil tins and other refuse, their orchestra, known locally as Los Reciclados, and in English as the Landfill Harmonic, has performed in Brazil, Panama, and Colombia, and has journeyed as far as Europe to play Mozart and Beethoven. As the orchestra's founder and director, Favio Chavez, a music teacher and environmentalist, aptly notes, “The world sends us garbage. We send back music.” And the world is richer for it. Landfill Harmonic 

From Culture to Kitsch

"High culture is the self-consciousness of a society," social critic Roger Scruton notes in Aeon. Its works of art, literature, scholarship, and philosophy establish a shared frame of reference among educated people. A precarious achievement, high culture "endures only if  it is underpinned by a sense of tradition, and by a broad endorsement of the surrounding social norms." When these "evaporate," to use Scruton's understated euphemism, "high culture is superseded by a culture of fakes."         The Great Swindle  [audio]