Forever 63 no.

In the early 90s I would open the batting for the 2nd XI of our age group at school. At 12 I set a high score of 52, and that year averaged about 26; a very respectable score for a young team of sloggers would often make under 100 in a whole innings. That year, 1993, was by far the high water-mark of my cricketing career.

Our practice nets were a row of 10 outdoor netted corridors, half astro-turfed, with an all-weather mat at the bowlers’ end, one at the batsmens’ end, and a patch of overgrown grass in between. During a routine practice session our opening bowler Sanjay Dindyal decided to emulate our heroes in the West Indian team, and bang one in short. The ball caught the far lip of the batsmens’ astro-turf where it was sunk into the soil, and spinning forward, the ball looped high up in front of me, and suddenly dipped down. I attempted something between an ambitious pull shot and an automatic facial self-defence. The result was closer to a 19^th century circus act as I instead opted to catch the ball with my teeth. That’s something you just can’t teach, you either have it or you don’t. I didn’t, and I remember to this day, 20 years later, the slow motion image of my tooth arcing out of my mouth as I span anticlockwise on my back foot and the little white missile floated serenely forwards, landing about 15 feet up the pitch. James Stern, batting in the next net, first in surprise and then laughing said “give us a smile Rob”, and I did, a big bloody toothless grin. I don’t remember it hurting at all. We were kids, up to high-jinx, and the whole thing was quite a laugh. I knew I would have a good story for life.

The damage was this: both front teeth were severed from my jaw. Pushing the defenestrated tooth back into the shrunken, in-pressing gum hole was at that time the most painful thing I had experienced. Both front teeth had deep root canal surgery and are now drilled into my jaw. Being dead, they gradually blacken and periodically they have to be dyed from the inside out. For many years I was extremely self conscious of my smile, as my front teeth will always be a slightly further off-shade than my already very off-beige English drinkers’ ivories. The much worse damage was that the school introduced the compulsory wearing of helmets for child-batsmen. I asked them not to, and instead to simply astro-turf over the whole length of the nets. We don’t play cricket on a pitch with two inch-deep ridges running cross-wise, so why were we made to practice on ones? A schoolboy does not, until they have developed physically, have the speed or power to fire down a proper bouncer, not without the aid of a ridged pitch. The school could see that rather than upgrading to inherently safer and more accurate facilities they could pass the expense onto the parents by adding equipment to little Timmy’s kitbag.

I played on for a few more years, never with a helmet as it felt cumbersome, uncomfortable, and above all unsportsmanlinke, and perhaps because of this I stopped at about 17 when the bowlers had become men, 6ft tall with furry faces and broad palms. They chucked down the ball too fast for me. Against full-size butch sportsmen I simply didn’t have the reaction time, let alone the physical or mental toughness, for cricket.

That’s not even the only cricketing accident we had. During a school match at 15 I remember seeing David Bloom, also playing for the under 16 2^nd XI, knocked unconscious in the field at short leg, when a misthrown ball from the outfield landed on the top of his head, rather than in the keeper’s gloves. He was felled for about a minute. It happened quickly and I don’t think it ever got mentioned again. Had the accident, god forbidden, been fatal, would we have introduced helmets for fielders? Now that an umpire in an amateur match in Israel has died after being struck by the ball in a freak ricochet accident, is umpire's safety to be regulated too?

Now when I see little batsmen of 10, keen, proud, lively, playing cricket wearing preposterously vast protective gear, helmets making them look like a team of sporty Frank Sidebottoms, I feel guilty. It would have happened anyway but at that moment it was my bad batting, poor technique and naturally slow reflexes that led to, in our little corner of London, the sudden advent of pampering over hardiness.

Cricket is a tough sport. The first thing you notice when you handle a cricket ball is how hard it is, like lightweight concrete. Mentally the game is tougher: even at the schoolboy level a game goes on all day. It is inevitable that someone will lose concentration at some point over the 7 hours. We play sports for health, but also for risk. A sport is a choice that each one of us makes to play. It’s fun, exciting, alive, to take risks, grow, strengthen, discover, and there must be setbacks and injuries as part of this process.

If Philip Hughes, and perhaps eventually Sean Abott, had known that their aggressive and exciting let alone normal style of play would cause future players to be made to play in riot gear, in an attempt to snuff out all physical risk, they would I hope be disappointed. They played because they liked the drama and excitement, and they were and are extremely tough men. Broken fingers are pretty regular in cricket. Taking it on the bonce, the chin, in the ribs, they don't like it up 'em. Out in the middle for hours on end. Sledging, taunts from around the bat. Heat, sweat, fear. I was neither tough nor particularly liked the risk, so I stopped playing. As a university student in Scotland, cricket didn’t really figure on the agenda and I took up golf, an excuse to get away from women for a stroll in the countryside with a side-issue of competition.

Parents hate their children sitting indoors playing computer games all day, but a boy playing cricket in an environment without risk is an open-air computer game. We have helicopter parents who endlessly protect their children from all forms of living risk, in a guilty bid to induce unbreakable dependence. I hope that cricket’s rulemakers don’t lose their heads and render this sport of tough bastards into, as Vic Marks put it, rugby without the tackling.

At the Musée Rodin, Cariatade tombée

Cariatid tombée portant sa piene, 1881-1882
Fallen Caryatid carrying her stone

Auguste Rodin




The fallen caryatid is serene and perfectly balanced, yet the conflicts inherent in her physical and psychological state create a study of vulnerability and a work of great tension. The young woman is seated on the ground with her legs half crossed. She is leaning her head to the right and resting it on her left hand, which is extended across her body. Her eyes are closed and her expression is placid. At the apex of the composition is her stone, rough and unfinished, supported by her right hand on the exposed left side of her neck and shoulder. Beneath the block her body is quite asymmetrical and is coiled into a complex, inclined, and delicate tangle, her drape fallen into her lap. Her equilibrium is only just maintained between her head, bent to the right extreme, and the fall of her left leg and her left-leaning back and hips. Overall she is reaching forward and down, in an unfurling foetal position.
The caryatid has fallen but we know not at first in what state she has found herself. She may be about to spring upwards with rediscovered strength, or she may crumple further under the weight of her burden. Above all, she looks vulnerable, certainly yearning for the safety and innocence of the womb. Her eyes are closed and her visage and her body are utterly still. The only sign of movement, or of any visible physical tension in her, is a curl upwards in the big toe of her left foot and the gentle grip of two fingers of her right hand in the locks of her hair.

The composition is run through with dynamic tensions. The pressure downwards of the stone battles against the potential upward thrust of her body. The block’s heaviness and substantiality draws attention to the intricacy of the caryatid’s posture and the space between her limbs. Its unsculpted texture and irregular shape upset the caryatid’s softly contoured musculature, her unusually undefined hair, her polished skin. Her humanised delicacy and the vulnerability of her position evoke a different world to that of the freshly quarried block whose roughness suggests the burden of her architectural, grandiose, duty. Her sleepy comportment, with her eyes closed and her head resting on her hand and shoulder, compromise her current task of supporting herself and a large block of stone. The taut vertical potential of the stone conflicts visually with the curved horizontal potential of her body, her elbows and knees dropping forward and to the side.
The tensions in the composition suggest that beneath her placid expression a tumultuous transformation is taking place. The index finger of her right hand is separated from the rest of the fingers and is holding back a lock of her hair, closely reminiscent of another sculpture whose enigmatic posture suggests the moment before or the commencement of an explosive and terrible act - the Moses of Michelangelo in San Pietro Vincoli in Rome*. The enigmatically serene and yet unsustainable position of the caryatid also suggests the onset of a new act, yet her act is not dramatic but intimate – it is the moment she will gain consciousness and be changed forever.

This caryatid has failed qua caryatid. She no longer holds her assigned entablature in place, she has given up her role amongst the male atlantes who support human creation and the world of men. She is inadequate for her place in the pantheon of human achievement and has crumbled under the weight of the made utopia on her shoulder. For this she looks down and away from us in shame. Yet she invokes our sympathy. She has rediscovered to herself and to us a greater purpose, a greater truism. She is not just an incidental flourish within the Neo-Classical vernacular, but a real flawed human; not just a butch atlantes, but a woman, sensitive, fragile, beautiful, shy, downtrodden, long-suffering, guilt-laden. Failed in her task she is still strong, still strong she is yet vulnerable, at once both defeated and on the verge of a powerful rebirth. We are witnessing her in the process of a momentous evolution, at the inception of her transformation from thing to being, the animation of the inanimate. Incarnated in this collapsed and beautiful image we see the profoundest of humanist moments: the instant before a consciousness emerges newborn in to the world. The energy implicit in the twitch of her toe will spread across her body and through her tensile limbs, and her eyes will open onto a new dawn, the beautiful indistinct mystery of consciousness. In her failure she has become human. She has revealed to us the beautiful broken honesty of her essence, beneath the imposed grandeur of her existence.

Art, progress, the dreams of a created utopia, manifested in the idiom of Classical architecture, are magnificent triumphs of human creation. Yet more truthful than these triumphs of mankind is mankind itself: the failure implied in the heroic acts. And it is this honesty that makes the work beautiful. Rodin has presented in a single image not just a technical study in the visual expression of dynamic tension, but a dialogue of humanity more direct than any philosopher could convey, on the consequentiality of defiance to failure, of failure to truthfulness, and of truthfulness to beauty.

* This work was beloved of Freud, who read into it the moment of inner conflict between Moses’ instinctive drive to destroy the golden idol [the destructive urge of the Id], and his capacity to forgive [through his superego]. At the same moment the tablets of the Ten Commandments can be seen slipping out of his fingers. Michaleangelo has depicted simultaneously two monumental acts, smashing the tablets and destroying the idol in a fury. Yet about neither of which can we be sure the state of Moses’ true desire, or his intention, unconscious or conscious.

Fragment on Dreaming

As a child he had believed, facing them close as a breath, that cats could sleep so deeply and their dreams be so all-consuming and real (a truth which could readily be seen in their flickering eyes and twitching bodies and the misty undulations of their unconscious noises), that waking them from such a state would risk killing them. He would look at his sleeping cats when he was a little boy, marvelling at how vulnerable they became in their stupor, when to dream was perchance to die, and wonder how cats could ever grow up, so waspish was their nightly hazard between life and death. As an only child he had never slept in a room with siblings. He had never, growing up, lain awake next to another human, staring wide-sharp through the gloam at the flickering eyelids and twitching body, convulsing perhaps with the images of unknowable dreams projected somehow onto their retinas from behind. Had he seen such things he might have guessed the story of the cats to be nothing but a myth spread in the invented certainty of the playground. More likely though as a child he would have concluded that humans too, like cats, risk their lives each time they fall asleep, their souls drifting far away, far away from their day-side oculi, far away inside the vast basemented house of the mind. Could he, a little boy, in waking them, sever the filigree ropebridge over which they travel each night into that dark continent, leaving the sleeper stranded forever on the nocturnal side, under some grudging moon, reaching out in longing for the further bank? Each time he terrified tried, the cats would flinch and start nearly before he touched them, jerked awake by a jolt experienced solely somewhere in the tiny balancing reservoirs deep inside their eardrums.

Fragment on falling in love

Her eyes were dark, not black but brown, a high-pitched D minor, the colour of antique patina. They washed over the manifold of his experience as a truth dawns over an uncertain consciousness. He felt as if he was falling and simultaneously rising, the same momentary sense of disorientation a passenger feels when a railway station unhooks its tethers and pulls away from a stationary train.

The first time he was untethered by the concordance of her eyes it seemed there could be no possible alternative in any possible world. It was now an immutable Law of Nature, as unquestioning as the wind, that in the same room they would broaden and lift their eyes, touch fingertips, conduct invisible electricity to which other people mustn’t have access; electricity latent among all people, housed deep inside them, inaccessible to choice, coursing and twisting in endless random spasms, the will driving us all now forwards, now backwards. And like the wind the currents which drew them together were not capricious but purposeful, disposed of a certainty of movement, not blown here and there like leaves, but forever being sucked as is the air, sucked from a place of high pressure to a place of lower pressure, rushing across the globe unconcerned and without effort. No-one else could be like that, all those others whose lives bob up and down like corks adrift on a great invisible ocean of hidden desires. In amongst the spinning quantum particles whose tiny yet endless labyrinths we have no hope of navigating as they sublimate our unconscious desires or draw into consciousness the illusion of our choices, in amongst synapses clicking into being doubt and surprise and disgust and charade, a pair of eyes looked at him with the sound of bells, wide and deep, and undercut choice, undercut doubt, straightened into certainties everything that was hitherto pulsing and unpredictable.

It was at this time, sucked as air across atmospheres, in violent covenant with love, that he would suddenly become aware of the inside of his ribcage, as if his internal organs had dissolved and melted to the base of his abdomen leaving his heart in remainder, suspended and helpless. This, he told himself, is happiness. A new bright-lit objectivity. This must be how god himself might part the clouds with his wrinkled white fingers to look upon the tumult of his creation, himself safely suspended high in the firmament. Other times the dizzy gutted sensation made him feel sick: sick and weak. Then his chest wall was not dissolving himself into a unity, but had become insubstantially thin, nothing but a cowardly evaporating membrane between his heart and another synecdoche too tightknit to undo: these unyielding eyes, shining brown lights which did not invade his body piercingly, but through their benign overwhelming power caused his sternum to crumble, his viscera to atrophy and his gut to surrender to a force against which it had neither means nor desire to resist.

San Lorenzo, A Story

Long after we had lived in Rome together, my old friend and colleague F. told me once, so strangely and erratically did he withhold and divulge his innermost thoughts, that as he walked through the streets of San Lorenzo, a beatnik student enclave to the East of Termini station, an area charged with the naïve honesty of the authentic anarchic movement that still pervades so much of Southern Europe but which has long since petered out in Britain into a discrete nostalgia reserved for the bad-old-good-old-days, he found that these muralled walls and ever-trickling street-fountains, cars on bricks and graffitied shutters, so totally overpainted in Marxist slogans and clumsy satires, peopled with knot-tops and punks with mongrel dogs on string, created such a sense of quasi-reality that he felt himself to be walking not through a Roman street but through an actual cartoon, as if pulled out of physical contact with his surroundings and dropped into the foreground of a hand-drawn comic strip. Even his gait would become an idiom of animated movement: jerky and lop-sided, his right arm pushing upwards unevenly and repetitively with each step, as if walking on the spot while a raggedly illustrated streetscene is reeled behind. This hyper-coloured reality was to him a stronger, more convincing one than what we take for the actual. As he stalked these sulphur-lit night streets he felt as if the world had been safely wrapped up, as if this life was just a youthful idealistic runthrough in which nothing could be broken forever and the stains and smudges of foolishness or fate could be erased and redrawn. Even motion itself was imbued with an inbuilt narrative direction: travelling horizontally, reassuringly from left to right, from beginning to end, granting him a security of meaning and purpose that real life withholds. He felt that the distance created by the depth of field between the protagonist and the background in the cartoons of his childhood, and now in the super-imposition of himself into this living comic, defines more clearly the remoteness between the experience of self and the experience of other than anything in what he was decreasingly inclined to refer to as mundane reality ever could. So safe he felt, he told me, walking through this animated life, in which he drew and redrew himself, that mundanity, if he allowed it to fog over again what he described as the clarity of the unreal, seemed to reveal our humdrum lives to be made up of little more than such acts as the endless folding and unfolding of tea-towels.

Corpus Domini, A Story

At the time that I took a spring in Italy, I was trying to escape a terrible time in my life. Whilst giving myself this sojourn in which to be alone, with total freedom and independence, I was simultaneously engaged by email in a crushing breakup, the causes of which had occurred so far in the past that the events themselves had lost their original meanings, revealing in retrospect not just that the protagonists had ceased to communicate or understand each other, but perhaps also the utterly solipsistic nature of all arguments, as if it is only through a long process of losing touch with objectivity that we can finally arrive at a truth that all reality is subjective and that the external world is nothing but a cloudy, indistinct projection of ourselves. And here in Italy in springtime, bodily facing outwards and with a self-experience of moving forward in time, I was engaged chasing arguments backwards, deeper and deeper, piercing not into the truth but only into my own heart, as if possessed by a determination to accumulate more and more suffering, an expression of human greed in its most self-destructive form. I felt stretched by two wild beasts lashed together, fixed so taut that I might eventually perish like an old rubber band.

With this unvoiced feeling lurking within me, in small Tuscan and Perugian towns not in the hills but on the fertile plains, towns suffused with knowing workadayness, I would await the change of trains by going in search of an internet café in order to do nothing but sit for a moment to check my inbox, as an injured man might pummel his own wounds as if he were convinced his body had a limited supply of pain which could be exhausted through a dedicated course of self-infliction, or as an addict might attempt to cure himself through blindly consuming his vice into oblivion.

In one such town, in a state of headiness from the dusty alien light and in a state of ritualised anxiety, I left the station and walked across the municipal square, towards the centre, following the age of the architecture backwards into the past. I came after a little while to the main church, out of which a procession was flowing like a human mudslide. This, I discovered, was the Sunday after Corpus Domini, and the devout came out of the cool darkness of the church brightly-coloured and unhesitatingly, reminding me unavoidably of colourful handkerchiefs pulled endlessly from a magician’s nose. Since the majority of the town’s adults seemed to be emerging from the church, the thin layer of onlookers must have been none but the wives and children of the participants. I watched in the shade of a triumphal pillar. After a while I found myself pulled in the wake of the marchers by their collective momentum. I was inclined to move with a marching band that emerged out of the church portal into the afternoon light, wishing, as I had once played in one, to examine the subtle differences which demarcate shared pursuits: the cadence of their footfall, the tightness of their turning steps, the presence or absence of little music stands welded onto their instruments, the colours of their straps, socks and gloves, the age and carriage of the players: their commitment or disinterest. So dragging my luggage behind me, an encumbered procession of one, I continued awkwardly alongside, tripping up and down the high pavement edges, with my wheeled bag clipping ungracefully lampposts and ungraciously the heels of onlookers, quite out of time to the music, the bombastic Fascist brass writing that seemed oddly not to have been wiped out in Italy as it had been in Germany since the war. Seeing a few blocks down that the marchers were looping around the town, and becoming fed up with the cumbersome bag I was dragging through the narrow crowd, I decided to cut down a sidestreet and rejoin the processioners nearer the station square. Seeing on this deserted road an internet sign, I ducked in, sensing the certainty of another crushing rebuff rising up in my gut.

The white-tiled floor was filthy, unforgiving strip lighting bathed a scatter of plastic garden chairs in a fuzzy institutional light, the chairs clustered into clumps rather than aligned with terminals, as if placed in order to be obstacles to a convenient entry or a hasty escape. The sound of the plastic legs being pushed around was heavy with moisture, perspiration seeping off the two-dozen or so Chinese teenagers, off their foreheads or through patches of their unbranded cotton tshirts, grey-lit by screens, standing around, or seated or betting at some game of cards, arguing. As I walked in those not involved in the card game looked up with contempt, those at their computer games remained in utter stillness, all controlling a figure, their lifesake, who runs endlessly on the spot as his landscape moves under him, a planet rolling round and round and from side to side, forever curving away beneath, the exact inverse of a mouse in a treadmill. The sweat-bright yet somehow poorly lit room, tiles grimy, accumulations of foot-swept dust and hair at each desk and in each corner, felt like some weirdly upgraded voluntary workhouse, and brought a sense that someone had flicked some switch in reality, as if the train that carries us on through life had been suddenly diverted to the wrong track by a group of delinquent teenagers throwing down the point. I sat at a screen. Everything was in Chinese. I could recognise all the symbols but I was unable to make anything work, as if the computer itself was some parochial bureaucrat pretending to speak only Chinese, innocently and stubbornly refusing to comply with my requests. I got up flustered and overheating, and left quickly without paying, knocking aside and dragging my bag waist-deep in the plastic garden chairs, giving a undefined gesture to the staring adolescents, signifying nothing but confusion and the acknowledgement that I had wandered into a place I didn’t belong.

Outside the pale orange dusty light of Tuscany hovered just above the stench of incense and the stench of patriotic music which housed the otherness of Catholicism, as the parade marched perpendicular across the end of the road. As I stepped from out of the room and in to the street, the contrast of these two evident realities was so great that I seemed to have made some deeper transition, as if stepping out of the inside of one person’s imagination into the imagination of another, as if these two tableaux were nothing but furnished rooms in the memories of people whose lives I would never hope to know or understand. I stood feeling a little high, a little dissolved, in this desert watching the shifting dune of the devout blowing down the street as if carried on by the winds of the certainty of salvation. It seemed to me on the other hand that the notion of certainty itself was an act of faith, and that I might dissolve into the fissure between the two opposing realties either side of me, realities of such incongruence as to defy the very possibility of a single self that could encounter both. Seeking to escape back into my own reality I headed directly to the train station to await my connection to Rome.

At the metaphysical Event Horizon

A review of Pure Reason (for David),
in
Pure Reason, Poems by Nikos Stangos

As a manifestation of both reason and passion, humanity blinds philosophers: it is the sun in to which we seem unable not to stare. Analysis is blunted by our contradictory compass: the self-evident truth that we are both proud, thinking, striving and yet wretched, fearing, loving things. Nikos’s poetry exists in that philosophic interjacency, humorous and connected, a membrane under which to dovetail the bifurcated strands of earnest Kantian dialectic with honesty, love and obsession. In Pure Reason (for David), Nikos, like many essentially unbelieving students of philosophy, will not expunge reality from the metaphysical mission. He must reconcile “year after year” the “whole culture of human reason”, with the erotic, cloudy humanity from which all our experiences, moreover all our lives, must be drawn.
The conflict is beautifully and dramatically portrayed by the twin “you”s to whom the poem is addressed: by turns our transcendent or our human foils. Kant is our metaphysical guide, scolding Nikos for “my impatience, my laziness, my lack of perseverance”, and being ribbed in return:

“‘Necessary’
you are. ‘Strictly universal’?”

The other “you”, love, life, returning inevitably, seeps sensually and luminously through the fabric of the text:

“The walls define your size, the pools of
light explain your colours, the rooms are tuned to your voice, our bed
admits to your weight.”

The dramatic and philosophical centrepiece of the work is the denouement and collapse of the metaphysical project. As “obscurities strain to become clarity” (a quotation from Falsetto by Eugenio Montale), like “the inaudible sounds [of] cats’ dreams”, we approach the limit of experience, the boundary between what is empirical and what exists beyond the reach of empiricism: pure a priori knowledge. Here my sensation is of being drawn into an experiential black hole. Physicists describe the brink of a black hole as an ‘event horizon’, where not only light and matter but their conceptual counterparts, speed and weight, are described, in an evocative piece of scientific baptism, as ‘smearing’ together.
At the event horizon of this Kantian black hole knowledge and experience are severed, reality and ideality are smeared together, “anarchic”, “turbid”,

“opposites, the antinomies, lose their prescribed
definition,… …sound has become silence,
silence sound, movement is now stasis, stasis movement, your
appearance is always certain when you are absent, the previously
invisible concepts are now most concretely visible”.

Kant could not have imagined his preciously constructed analogies of experience: permanence, co-existence and succession, the building blocks of what can be known to us, greased into one another, his architectonic dissolving helplessly into that which it was designed to prove.

To search for the harmless-sounding “knowledge a priori” conceals the mystery, the fear and emptiness of the unknown that might exist beyond the limits of our possible experience. What “general truths” could we find “independent of our experience”, and how could they be “clear and certain by themselves”, if to find them is to journey to the limit of reality and have our perceptions smeared along the metaphysical event horizon? Kant was flying into the sun, forcing the impossible to become necessary. If we come to the brink of this abyss, what could we see?

Recoiling, we fall back to Earth (“The seasons have lost their clarity.”), burnt out, dejected, surrounded by merely our own discrete purities: “We have failed. Each of us keeps to himself.” But a paradigm shift has taken place, a Copernican revolution: no longer analysis, but “you provide the focus.” We are in Nikos’s home, feeling and touching, meeting his cats and their naïve philosophical convictions; but also experiencing absences, the truly and only human uncertainties of safety and calm, of reciprocal need, of loss and isolation. It is these experiences which are prior. This colour, this life fills the gap, or replaces the fear, of the metaphysical black hole.

And closer, smaller, more simple and pure, is “you”: “you precede experience”. The humane “you”, left on earth, waiting, being, “the analogies of experience” as intended: a becoming moment by moment; a permanence even in absence; the inevitable immediacy of touch and taste—unspoiled, indissoluble, a wholeness available only to those, to us, who experience.
Purity is not to be gained from a rationalizing simplification, “a dangerous, a suspect / obsessive drive to ‘reduce’ things”, but from an

“inward necessity, simple and certain in itself:
to make this our categorical imperative.”

This revelation, “your pulse, the thumping heartbeat as I hold you closely”, is to be the fixed centre on which “we can build our solid edifice”. And this experience of love, of other, of life can spin the particle antinomies “resolving themselves as if by magic, and fabulous marriages will take place among them.”

Not the inaccessible high windows of a truth beyond experience, but “’a fluidity of colours, these in music’” are “this ultimate knowledge”: the only “pure reason” which we can both aspire to know and are granted to achieve.

January 19th, 2008