“Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse.”
—Sophocles
Kate Winslet: A Huge Increase In Roles For Women My Age
“I do feel proud that as a woman in the film industry in her mid-40s, having been doing this job since I was 17, that I’m being given this space to fully embrace all of these changes that life’s years have left my face and body with.” – BBC
A First Look At Stratford’s New $70 Million Theatre
Its physical beauty is a far cry from the rough-and-ready look of the previous Tom Patterson Theatre: a converted curling rink. – Toronto Star
'Fools Rush Into My Head, and So I Write'
Last week, somewhere online, after a long absence, I encountered probity. I can’t remember when I first learned the word but I’ve always liked the sound of it. Prob- echoes probe musically, not etymologically, and -ity, which sounds like babytalk in isolation (as in itty-bitty), turns the verb into a noun. (This is my idiosyncratic analysis, the way I play with words in private.) Probity shares a root with prove. (Who remembers P.J. Proby?) Johnson in his Dictionary defines probity as “honesty; sincerity; veracity.” Probity has gravity. It’s more than cash-register honesty. A judge ought to rule with probity.
Over the weekend, as often happens, I encountered the word again, in Jonathan Swift’s“A Dialogue Between an Eminent Lawyer and Dr. Swift” (1729). The poem is a loose adaptation of Horace’s Satire 1.1:
“Since there are persons who complain
There’s too much satire in my vein;
That I am often found exceeding
The rules of raillery and breeding;
With too much freedom treat my betters,
Not sparing even men of letters . . .”:
The opening is disingenuous. Swift would never apologize for his “savage indignation.” He asks his friend, the lawyer Robert Lindsay, for advice. Lindsay, the voice of gutless sensitivity, replies: “You should withdraw from pen and ink, / Forbear your poetry and jokes, / And live like other Christian folks.” He suggests Swift champion the thought of Thomas Woolston, a free-thinking deist who was convicted of blasphemy and died in prison:
“To Woolston recommend our youth,
For learning, probity, and truth;
That noble genius, who unbinds
The chains which fetter freeborn minds;
Redeems us from the slavish fears
Which lasted near two thousand years;
He can alone the priesthood humble,
Make gilded spires and altars tumble.”
Many have noted the impossibility of satirizing our age, as the age has already satirized itself. When humorless people adopt silly, hateful ways of thinking and acting, they have immunized themselves against satire. Like his friend Swift, Alexander Pope also translated Horace’s Satire 1.1:
“Not write? but then I think,
And for my soul I cannot sleep a wink.
I nod in company, I wake at night,
Fools rush into my head, and so I write.”
A Terrible Thing, Time, Nevertheless'
In 1928, Max Beerbohm distilled all that I know about the conversations conducted on most social occasions:
“I stood talking to this lady about the weather, inwardly hoping that she was thinking how kind it was of me to talk down to her level, and that she was not guessing that I would have liked very much to dazzle her if I had known how.”
Not all but most conversation has what some call a “subtext.” Our words are veneer; our meaning, the heartwood (“inwardly hoping”). This is not news to our better novelists (see Ivy Compton-Burnett). To switch metaphors in the Beerbohmian fashion, conversation is choreography with both partners attempting to lead. Beerbohm is recalling a conversation from 1896 on the occasion of his first meeting with Andrew Lang, at the home of Edmund Gosse. Some would be offended by Beerbohm’s “cynicism.” The rest of us acknowledge his discernment, especially as he expresses it so succinctly. His two clauses address most of our conversational gambits, especially those between the sexes: 1.) Praise sought for condescending to speak with another person in the first place. 2.) Hope that our conversational partner is sufficiently “dazzled.”
Beerbohm’s observation is incidental, nearly a throw-away line in his essay. He hasn’t yet even met Lang (1844-1912), a prolific writer whose substantial reputation during his lifetime has evaporated. I know him only as the author oftwenty-five collections of fairy tales I didn’t read as a child. I became friends in 1975 with a couple who had a five-year-old daughter. She loved the books. They bought the Dover paperback reprints, and when visiting I would read the stories to her. This was my first adult experience of spending time with a young child, years before I had kids of my own. I liked it.
Beerbohm’s portrait of Lang – as usual, when dealing with a sufficiently complex or conflicted character, one adapted to Beerbohm’s elastic sense of irony – is both clinical and amusing. The essayist reflexively includes himself in any sardonic summation while making a larger point – in this case, about the relationship between critics and writers:
“[V]ery few critics get on well with creators. There is, no doubt, a point at which criticism does merge into creation, and it is always hard to say just where this point is—to determine whether this or that piece of fine criticism may or may not truly be called creative. But to this point, assuredly, Lang was never near. With all his gifts, he had of imagination not one spark. Fancy and wit he had in his earlier work; and grace he never lost; but for the rest he had only an immense quantity of that ‘cleverness’ which to the creative artist is of all qualities the most repellent. And this cleverness, which was always at the disposal of the classics, was never used in service of any great contemporary writer.”
One of the chief appeals of Beerbohm’s work is the seeming casualness of it. Mediocre writers start snorting and stomping on the ground before unloading their precious insight. Beerbohm casually whispers before moving along. Without comment, he reproduces Lang’s lisp when quoting him. Beerbohm was congenitally incapable of formulating Grand Truths. Humans are much too silly for that. Beerbohm can’t quite bring himself to damn Lang. He is too human for that; too sad and pathetic. As usual, Beerbohm is good at conclusions: “A terrible thing, Time, nevertheless.”
Do I think we’re solving the world’s problems? No. Do I think that, by making small tweaks through product and technology, we have the potential to shift behaviour in a more positive direction? Yes. And do I think that there are long-term positive implications from that? I do believe that is true, yes.”
Most importantly, treat people with kindness and dream big. #BumbleIPO #BMBL 🐝
