glass buildings shining with lights

I remember I was on the floor hugging her legs, kissing her knees. And I was begging, "Now, right now, this minute . . ."

The sharp teeth, the sharp mocking triangle of her brows. She leaned over and undid my badge, not saying a word.

"Yes! Yes, darling . . . darling." I started throwing my yuny off. But she, still without saying a word, brought the watch in my badge right up to my eyes. In five minutes it would be 22:30.

That put a chill on me. I knew what it meant to show yourself on the street after 22:30. All my madness seemed to be blown away from me all of a sudden. I was me again. One thing was clear: I hated her, I hated her, I hated her!

Without saying good-bye or looking back, I rushed out the room. Pinning my badge back on as I ran down the steps (taking the emergency stairs for fear of running into somebody in the elevator), I ran out onto the empty avenue.

Nothing was out of place -- the usual simple, customary, normal scene: glass buildings shining with lights, pale glass sky, the greenish quiet night. But underneath this quiet cool glass something wild, crimson, and hairy was silently rushing along. And I was racing along, fighting for breath, trying not to be late.

Suddenly I felt that the badge I'd stuck back on so hastily was coming off -- it came off, and clattered as it hit the glass sidewalk. I bent over to retrieve it, and in the momentary silence I heard someone's footsteps behind me. I turned. 

Something small and bent was rounding the corner, or at least that's how it seemed to me at the time.

I took off as fast as I could and heard nothing but the wind rushing past my ears. At the entrance I stopped: The clock showed one minute remaining before 22:30. I listened hard -- no-one back there. Stupid . . . I'd imagined the whole thing. Effect of the poison.

That night was torture. The bed under me rose and fell and rose again -- sailing along a sinusoid. I kept repeating to myself: "At night the Number's duty is to sleep. This is just as much an obligation as work during the day. It is required so that one can work during the day. Not to sleep at night is unlawful." And still I could not, I just could not.

I'm done for. I'm in no condition to fulfill my obligations to OneState. I . . .

(Yevgeny Zamyatin's We (written 1920), end of Record 10. Translation by Clarence Brown, 1993.)

*

And the energy for all those lights? Well, it comes from the Accumulator Tower, an enormously high tower. An accumulator is an energy storage device. Maybe Zamyatin got his idea, visually speaking, from the very tall hydraulic accumulators that were built in the mid-19th century, e.g. Grimsby Dock Tower. But his Accumulator Tower works by "sucking electricity" from the clouds (defusing electrical storms), and presumably storing it to power the city. When Zamyatin was writing We, electric lights in buildings were still a relative novelty. (To give one example, in 1919 only 6% of UK homes were connected to an electricity source.)

The Accumulator Tower has a secondary function, too. At the top it has a bell which strikes the hours of the day (Record 2). As demonstrated in this extract, the hours determine all the activity of OneState's inhabitants. 

The Accumulator Tower is visually prominent and is also prominent in the novel, in poetic cityscapes and in views from the air. (I'm seeing it like the Burj Khalifa over downtown Dubai.)

Symbolically you could say that it represents OneState's single Benefactor and also the unity of "We", the people who are numbers. 

But in its singleness it also seems strangely vulnerable. It is the obvious target of a revolution. Topple the Accumulator Tower, and OneState would instantly cease to function. 

It never happens in We. But the implication is clear: states, even OneState, are mortal, and they can be toppled. 

*

D-503 is, almost throughout the book, a true believer in OneState. His obsession with I-330 makes him do crazy things that contradict his beliefs, but have his beliefs actually changed? Yes, but the signs are subtle. D-503 himself doesn't consciously articulate the changes, he continues to think spasmodically in the received forms that have become automatic to him, and he cannot frame arguments against his former beliefs (e.g. when challenged by the Benefactor -- quoted below).

*

A few months ago I found a copy of Yevgeny Zamyatin's We in a local book-swap and I seized on it. It was the Clarence Brown translation of 1993, based on the Russian edition of 1988. [Alas, my copy doesn't include Brown's Introduction, but I found about half of it here by doing a Look Inside.]

Because, yes, We had finally been published in Russian in Russia, half a century after its author's death. You can only read snippets of Brown's translation online, but you can read the whole of We in the form that the world first saw it: Gregory Zilboorg's translation, published in New York in 1924. It isn't as lively or accurate as Clarence Brown's, but it's a decent translation, as well as a piece of history in its own right. It isn't the book George Orwell read, though: he wasn't able to track down a copy, so he read the French translation instead. In his 1946 review, he surmised that Aldous Huxley must have read We before embarking on Brave New World (1932). Huxley's novel is set in the World State, Zamyatin's in "the United State" (as Zilboorg calls it; Brown calls it "OneState"; Mirra Ginsburg and Natasha Randall "the One State"). Anyway Huxley said he hadn't read We, and I believe him. But both he and Zamyatin were kicking back at H.G. Wells' A Modern Utopia (1905) -- as was E.M. Forster in his astonishing story "The Machine Stops" (1909). Perhaps just as significant, Huxley was reacting against Henry Ford's production line and Zamyatin against Frederick Winslow Taylor's ideas of "scientific management" (time and motion, etc. Taylorism was very popular in Lenin's circle).

[You can also read Mirra Ginsburg's fine 1972 translation, here: https://libcom.org/article/we-yevgeny-zamyatin , along with its very useful Introduction (placed at the end)]

*

One thing I don't understand, though. This passage in Record 32:

(Zilboorg's translation:)

“Well, then. How much fuel for the motors shall we load on? If we count on three, or say three and a half hours.⁠ ⁠…”
I see before me, over a draught, my hand with the counter and the logarithmic dial at the figure 15.
“Fifteen tons. But you’d better take⁠ ⁠… yes, better take a thousand.”
I said that because I know that tomorrow.⁠ ⁠… I noticed that my hands and the dial began to tremble.
“A thousand! What do you need such a lot for? That would last a week! No, more than a week!”
“Well, nobody knows.⁠ ⁠…”

I do know....

(Brown's translation:)

"So what do you say? How much fuel shall we take on for the engines? If you count three, or say, three and a half hours . . ."

Before me, in three-dimensional projection on the diagram, I see my hand, which is holding a calculator, the logarithmic dial of which points to the number 15.

"Fifteen tons. No, better make that . . . Yes, make it 100 . . ."

This is because I do after all know that tomorrow . . .

And out of the corner of my eye I see my hand, the one holding the dial, begin almost imperceptibly to tremble. 

"A hundred? But why such a lot? That's enough for a week. What am I saying? For much longer than a week!"

"There's no telling . . . who knows?" I know. 

So Brown's translation, like the other modern ones, has D-503 asking for a hundred tons. But surely it's Zilboorg's translation that has the numbers right. If 15 tons is about right for 3.5 hours, then the Second Builder's comment about lasting more than a week must refer to a thousand tons (which would last about ten days), not a hundred (about 24 hours). 

*

Actually, there's plenty more I don't understand. Both Zilboorg and Brown talk of irrational numbers (Record 8), evidently meaning imaginary numbers; not the square root of 2, but the square root of -1. That must represent Zamyatin's own usage, I suppose.  

It was true that D-503's horror at imaginary numbers is reminiscent of how the Pythagoreans are said to have reacted to the discovery of irrational numbers. This is traditionally attributed to Hippasus of Metapontum. The proof attributed to him is elegant and can be understood even by a non-mathematician like me; it's in Wikipedia's entry on "Irrational Number". 

I'm calling the square root of -1 an imaginary number because that's what Descartes called it. I suppose you'd have to be a historian of mathematics, specifically Russian mathematics, to know what terms Zamyatin would have used. Could the name of his revolutionary heroine, I-330 (I for short), allude to i (the imaginary unit, i.e. the square root of -1)? Did he know Descartes' term "imaginary" and thus linked the square root of -1 with the human imagination, the thing that OneState realizes it must excise? (While on this subject, Zilboorg translates the latter as "fancy", not one of his best decisions). 

[When I was at school c. 1970, we called it j. I gather this is an acceptable alternative, but normally it's used only in contexts where i already has a different meaning, e.g. current in electrical engineering.]

*

I did some online tutoring this past summer; the book I taught was Lois Lowry's The Giver, a justly celebrated YA novel in which twelve-year-old Jonas gradually realizes that the utopian community he has grown up in is a dystopia in which the price of a safe, predictable existence is eugenics and the absence of meaningful choice or deep emotion.

[Jonas] smiled as he watched the newchild plant one small foot carefully before the other, grinning with glee at his own steps as he tried them out.

"I want to get to sleep early tonight," Father said. "Tomorrow's a busy day for me. The twins are being born to- morrow, and the test results show that they're identical."

"One for here, one for Elsewhere," Lily chanted. "One for here, one for Else — "

"Do you actually take it Elsewhere, Father?" Jonas asked.

"No, I just have to make the selection. I weigh them, hand the larger over to a Nurturer who's standing by, waiting, and then I get the smaller one all cleaned up and comfy. Then I perform a small Ceremony of Release and — " He glanced down, grinning at Gabriel. "Then I wave bye- bye," he said, in the special sweet voice he used when he spoke to the newchild. He waved his hand in the familiar gesture.

Gabriel giggled and waved bye-bye back to him. "And somebody else comes to get him? Somebody from Elsewhere?"

"That's right, Jonas-bonus."

Jonas rolled his eyes in embarrassment that his father had used the silly pet name.

(from Lois Lowry, The Giver (1993), Chapter 17.)

It's interesting to see The Giver and We adopting similar solutions to similar technical issues. Jonas grows up in "the community", a Stepford Wives sort of place surrounded by empty and wild nature. We are told that there are other communities, but the novel leaves them shadowy: we don't clearly grasp how much they interact with each other, what transport links exist, or what layer of government presides over them all. To all intents and purposes, the "community" that we see is the dystopia. Likewise in We, though there are very fleeting hints that other cities and other accumulator towers exist*, D-503 takes no interest in them. OneState as we come to know it is a single city state, population 10 million, surrounded by wild and trackless nature, its monolithic Benefactor presiding over everything. Both novels in fact adopt the point of view of a single protagonist in a single place; the superficial benefits and the underlying horrors are local. Yet both novels want to imply that the dystopia in question is universal, hence the vague hints of other communities, other cities...

(It's powerful and affecting, but it's very different from a colonial or post-colonial world in which some places enjoy most of the benefits while other places cope with most of the horrors.)

*

[* E.g. "living in cities that were cut off from one another by all the tangled green stuff" (Record 3), "our Accumulator Towers" (Record 25). In Record 5, D-503 tells us that after the 200-Years War, only 0.2 of the world's population survived, and he repeats this figure later in the same paragraph as "two tenths" (Ginsburg). Brown's translation says "zero point two tenths", which contradicts his earlier "0.2". That's one reason I don't feel quite confident of what Zamyatin intended here. The other is that the overall tone of the paragraph, e.g. its histrionic claim of the earth being cleansed of a thousand years of filth, seems to suggest that only a comparatively tiny fraction of the human population survived (0.2 per cent, perhaps). But if we accept 0.2 at face value, i.e. as a fifth... well the world population in 1920 was about 1800 million, so its reduction to a fifth would still leave a world population of 360 million. But the population of D-503's city is only ten million. So this passage, too, seems to imply the existence of other cities.] 

*

It all began, I suppose, with Plato's Republic. Just put the philosophers in charge (i.e. what we would call scientists), and they can design a better society. Even this early, the blatant authoritarianism and indifference to personal freedoms is a disquieting factor, but after all, this was only in a hypothetical world, where the philosopher's temptation to over-control could be safely indulged because no-one was actually oppressed by it. Sir Thomas More imagined a fictional Utopia, but already his lively curiosity suggested that such a society might not ever exist and might not be altogether utopian if it did. Johnson in Rasselas considered the pursuit of utopias entirely vain. But then -- with the industrial revolution, for instance -- utopias started to leave the study and emerge in the real world. They were admired, of course, but they were monstrous too.

Dystopian literature can be interpreted in a soft way; here is how bad things might get if technology is in the wrong hands, or is used to further a coercive agenda. 

Or it can be interpreted in a hard way: technology itself is the issue; it invariably has a cost, is intrinsically controlling and always generates dystopias; dystopian literature is thus a way of talking about the conditions we already live under. 

*

For science, both in its experimental and its applied form, likes a clean slate. It wants to control the conditions, and free will is like a dirty stain in the test tube that will ruin everything. So Plato and Wells, for example, were perfectly fine about placing rather severe limits on freedom in their utopias.

"... A true algebraic love of mankind will inevitably be inhuman, and the inevitable sign of the truth is its cruelty. Just as the inevitable sign of of fire is that it burns. Can you show me a fire that does not burn? Well? Prove it! Put up an argument!" 

How could I argue? How could I dispute what were (formerly) my own thoughts? 

(from Record 36, in which D-503 converses with the Benefactor.)

*

OneState is a dystopia, but Zamyatin himself was a utopian. Probably Zamyatin, a former naval engineer in love with mathematics, wasn't at all opposed to technology in itself. He was perhaps anticipating a post-modern view of science as revolutionary. The error of OneState is to see science as completed, and thus as justifying a system of totalitarian social control to match its fixed beliefs. 

Well, no, I need to rephrase that. OneState, and D-503, do admittedly see science as continuing to progress. In their first conversation he says rather sharply to I-330: "Science is going forward, and it's clear that, maybe not right away, but in fifty or a hundred years . . ." (Record 2) After all, D-503 is himself the builder of the INTEGRAL, now readying its first flight (Record 1). And what about that remarkable recent invention, the musicometer (Record 4)? And, in the course of the novel, the great medical advance: how to remove the imagination (Records 15, 26, 31)? 

But what we're seeing here is choreographed science, a science that proceeds dutifully along paths that have already been laid out; for instance, to make noses more alike. These new advances will not contradict existing science; to D-503 it's axiomatic that "OneState Science cannot make a mistake" (Record 3). The INTEGRAL program will head off into space not to learn anything new but to spread its own gospel and to subjugate the inhabitants of other worlds. The musicometer is remarkable only for its banality. And the great medical advance, if universally imposed, would eliminate the source of all further speculation. (But in fact this would condemn OneState itself to slow extinction; its scientific paradigm would be secure from internal questioning, but not to incursion from beyond its borders.)

[On Zamyatin's anticipation of postmodernist ideas of science, see Tony Burns, "Zamyatin's We and Postmodernism", Utopian Studies Vol. 11, No. 1 (2000), pp. 66-90. 

https://www.jstor.org/stable/25702458 ]

[On why Zamyatin should not be seen as rejecting utopianism per se, see Phillip E. Wegner, "On Zamyatin's We: A Critical Map of Utopia's 'Possible Worlds'", Utopian Studies Vol. 4, No. 2 (1993), pp. 94-116.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/20719963 ]

[On the mathematics of OneState and its enemies, see Brett Cooke's fascinating and wide-ranging "Ancient and Modern Mathematics in Zamyatin's We":

https://www.academia.edu/843898/Ancient_and_Modern_Mathematics_in_Zamyatins_We 

(Apparently this is a chapter in a larger book, but I can't find any more details). ]

 

cluttered desk literary ephemera

[UNFINISHED DRAFT]

To be honest, I don't often do a huge amount of reading at my Desk.

My favourite places for reading, in no particular order, are beds, toilets, bus-stops, trains, cafes, floor-cushions, dining-tables, park benches and beaches. Though I  stop short of Wordsworth's famous marmalade-smeared knife (which he used for cutting the pages of Burke's Works) , my reading-matter of the moment does to tend to become dog-eared and defaced.

I have a desk at home, certainly, but it's used for Facebook, email, on-line banking, Spider Solitaire and that kind of thing. (Sometimes for writing.) I also have a desk at work but this is for being an IT engineer.

Of course, I DO read things at my desks, such as other people's blogs and things that I turn up on Google, and poetry that I find on-line. It can be intense for a page or two, but it's not deep-water reading. For example, I've still got a bookmarked link from last year to Aphra Behn's The Rover Part II. This is a play that, as it happens, I am highly motivated to read. If I'd had it in printed form I'd have read it ages ago. But since all I've got is the on-line text, I've read the opening scenes a couple of times, scanned and rescanned a few other passages, and my impression of the play is all fragmentary and broken. If this is true of a play (plays, after all, only take a couple of hours to read), it applies even more strongly to something like a novel.

If I added up all the literature that I've read on-line, it wouldn't amount to much more than a paltry, haphazard collection of momentarily diverting titbits. Literature minced into blog-posts, as it were.

*

Elliott Carter died a couple of days ago, aged 103. I found this out by catching "Wind Rose" on Radio 3. There's an amazing amount of great Carter music, it's a world. Good excuse for a link, anyway.

Matribute (2007); I'm not sure who the performer is, maybe it's James Levine himself (for whom the piece was written).




*

[Here formerly appeared a review of Paul Brown's, A Cabin In the Mountains (Reality Street, 2012), now complete and moved to Intercapillary Space...]

http://www.intercapillaryspace.org/2012/12/paul-brown-cabin-in-mountains.html


*

E. M. Forster, Howard's End, via Librivox and Elizabeth Klett, who lets us into the novel as through a doorway. After I had heard it and enjoyed it, I went off browsing the internet for commentary, and the commentary closed the door on me again.

I  have side-stepped Forster for more than thirty years, since "doing" A Passage To India at university. I was apt to go off books that I did at university. Perhaps I also took exception to something - a lack of appreciation for Scott, was it? - in his Aspects of the Novel. Well, I consider it's high time to get over that.

The trouble with commentary on novels, especially novels, is that it tends to be commentary on the book remembered after reading, not commentary on the book as you experience it while you're reading it. Often it is not even that; it becomes commentary on the topics that are in effect pre-selected by previous commentary. Soon we are dealing with wearily familiar tropes: Forster's ideas of cross-cultural connection, or of connection across class barriers; their strengths and weaknesses. I know these discussions air important issues. Forster seems to have been especially prone to attract this kind of commentary because he devotes so much of his book to ideas, to a sort of philosophizing. And he was a humane and liberal man. Forster seems to be easily recognized as well-meaning, yet easily vulnerable to attack for having failed to go far enough; to be praised for having shone a light in darkness, and damned for his light's faintness. See how tempting it is? Now I too have slipped away from Howard's End to "the debate around Howard's End", I too am taking part in this abstracted Forster-conversation.

One has, often, to get through this thicket to arrive at the coal-face. I'm determined to say something about Howard's End, though, so how about this? As everyone knows, one of its more unexpectedly prominent themes is moving house. And I just want to point out that Howard's End was published in 1910 and, the year before, Jerome K. Jerome's They and I dealt with the same theme. (In both books, men talk of building a kitchen, or knocking the hall into the parlour, as if they were doing it themselves; when they really mean, paying someone else to do it.) And this theme also plays a part in Galsworthy's The Man of Property (1906).

[I suppose I should add something more about They and I, not a book (I'd imagine) that finds its way to many modern readers; though, of course, it is on Gutenberg (text) and indeed Librivox (audio) - I urge you to take a listen to the first chapter. It follows the pattern of more celebrated Jerome books in presenting most of the author's best comic routines early on; the later part of the book tending more towards wistful philosophizing (distant comparison with Forster is in that respect, too). They and I ( like Three men in a Boat) is a fiction that looks autobiographical, partly because there is no attempt to develop a story beyond the incidents of a week or two - during which a father and his three children rent a country cottage, while superintending the aforementioned house-building - and partly because the narrator is a literary man just like Jerome or J. Nevertheless, They and I is not autobiographical, this family is invented.]

Second listen (Spoilers imminent...):

A book like Howard's End is pretty well always worth reading (or listening to) twice, because our experience is so different the second time around.

For example: Aunt Julie's lift in the car with the Wilcox who she supposes is Paul, but is Charles. The first time through, we share her error, for at least a few miles. Even before we discover this error (since we already know of Helen's telegram) the sense of approaching ruin is dominant; the damage that Julie is unintentionally doing to people whom we already sympathise with, even though we haven't met them. And the fact, when it emerges, of her speaking to the wrong Wilcox just sets the seal on it. The scene is too absorbingly upsetting for us to quite appreciate the comedy.

The second time around, this is all different. Now we enjoy it as a comic prelude, because nothing of consequence followed. But other things come into view; we know now how Julie dies (or almost does), we know now that Charles will go to prison; we experience a new curiosity about them, a deeper curiosity than when they were more or less blank canvasses.

The loss of anxiety about "what's going to happen" has other surprising effects. In the first scene with Leonard Bast, the one where he has to come and collect his umbrella, I now have less fellow-feeling with him, I am no longer anxious on his behalf, my attitude is colder. A little of that surplus sympathy is now put to new use, it attends to Helen and Margaret.

Howard's End is an incredibly highly wrought novel, one of those books that expects the reader to hold in her mind everything that has been said in it. The goblins of the Beethoven concert are still in Leonard Bast's last rail journey. The discreet anti-naturalistic veins of symbolism: Evie's wedding is on Bast's birthday, or his premonitory fear of swords.  These ornamentations tend to cluster around Bast, perhaps to compensate for Forster's failure to completely realise him as a character. Anyhow, the second listening allows these details to emerge a little further into consciousness.

*

A line from Federico García Lorca´s "El Rey de Harlem":

bajo las pinzas y las retamas de la celeste luna de Cáncer.

Greg Simon and Steven F. White translate:

under the pincers and Scotch broom of Cancer's heavenly moon.

This was puzzling to me, because I didn't know that "Scotch broom" is what Americans call the plant that we call broom, i.e. Cytisus scoparius. In fact "retama" refers to a similar Mediterranean plant, perhaps Retama de Olor (Spartium junceum). Since Lorca uses it in the plural, I think he means sprigs of that plant, which could distantly resemble the moon in being curvy and yellow with flowers. However, Lorca's metaphors are often not about close physical resemblance.

*

(Image from Gillmark Gallery, Hertford)

I am also reading 2 Henry IV, very slowly. This falls into the "toilet category". It's a tiny book, 2 inches by 1.5,  that can be carried in a back pocket or the palm of my hand, thus avoiding the workplace embarrassment of being seen carrying a book down the corridor. These mini-Shakespeares were published by Allied Newspapers Ltd, apparently in 1932. When I was a child I inherited  - I'm not quite sure who from - a miniature oak desk containing about half of them (the full set is shown above). I guess it was one of a pair.  I've since lost a few volumes and ruined some others - this one hasn't benefitted from getting  too close to an uncapped tube of Rescue Cream. Anyhow. Of greater interest to bibliophiles, this edition manages to omit the climactic "I know thee not, old man" by accidentally printing a page from 2 Henry VI instead.)

2 Henry IV  is one of those rather rare works that is unashamedly a sequel and proceeds to discover peculiar kinds of excellence that only a sequel can have - like The Godfather Part II. These works are absolutely not freestanding, each is totally dependent on its predecessor.And in each there's a sense of fragmentation, glorious but diminishing returns, nostalgia for the first part, of a structure miraculously holding together as it becomes increasingly atomized.

An essay I found useful for the play, interesting for its own sake, and attractive to read (what more can you ask?) is Paul A. Jorgensen's 'The "Dastardly Treachery" Of Prince John Of Lancaster', PMLA 76 No 5 (1961).   [What?? I'm giving you a link to JSTOR?? Yes, I sure am. Because (if you don't know), there is now a Beta program called MyJStor and anyone can register, which  I strongly urge you to do. It gives you free access across all JStor's resources, the only restriction is that it's throttled down to three articles per fortnight. A big step in the right direction!].  The gist of Jorgensen's essay is that he identifies a new trend in the 1590s towards accepting the practice of dealing treacherously with the enemy, and he connects this new attitude with Elizabeth's miserable Irish wars. Jorgensen also emphasizes that the distasteful scene in which Prince John captures the rebel leaders by breaking a truce (IV.2)  is incurred deliberately by Shakespeare - he found its germ in the histories, but he transferred the agency from a general to a prince; and the historic event wasn't even decisive, so it could easily have been missed out. Clearly it was Shakespeare's intention to raise the treachery issue starkly (though drawing back from making Hal the agent) - to let it sit alongside the cold rejection of Falstaff.

This is another work about which it's difficult to say anything new, its character and tone have been so persuasively delineated by others. I just want to emphasize - nothing excitingly new about this -  the prominence of a "nothing actually happens" motif in the play. Examples:

Northumberland plans to revolt. He changes his mind. 
Mistress Quickly tries to get Falstaff to pay up. He isn't made to.
Prince Hal plans a big night out with Falstaff. Business calls them away after a few minutes.
The rebels and the royal forces expect to fight each other. They aren't required to.
Henry IV is dead. No, he isn't.
Falstaff plans to take advantage of Shallow and Silence. Business calls him away before he gets started.

Well, and so on. Drama in its primary key portrays action, but 2 Henry IV interests itself in what happens while waiting for actions that don't materialize.

Remember Henry IV, waiting for sleep?

Shakespeare always keeps the king's personality a little in shadow and there are possibilities that arise from this. Because Henry is neither a notably bad nor notably good king, because he is a bit troubled,, a bit guilty about vaguely sharp behaviour that is not really spelled out, but still a father, still kind of a businessman, he can articulate things about kingship.

This soliloquy is a difficult challenge for an actor. The speech is driven by personal troubles, but Henry does not tell us anything about them. I am sure the impression made on us needs to be a sympathetic one, yet it does not sit particularly well with kingship (especially a kingship that was eagerly seized on) to be moaning "it's so unfair". The speech must convey, simultaneously, contradictory emotions: a sensitive pity for the sufferings of the labouring poor and envy for their snoring oblivion.

It so happens that we have just left a sluttish inn as it begins to settle down for the night. II.4 is a disappointing scene (to us Falstaff and Hal) in that it is meant to climax in another magical celebration of the pair's unlikely driendship, but it doesn't work out, both have to leave suddenly. Perhaps it wasn't working out quite perfectly anyway. But if at the heart of the scene is an intentional sense of loss, the outworks are wonderful: Mrs Quickly and Doll Tearsheet, who start and end the scene, and the troublesome incursion of Ancient Pistol. 



*

Scott, The Antiquary, Guy Mannering.
Galdos, Fortunata and Jacinta
Richard Makin, Dwelling
Ammianus Marcellinus
The Roman Wall
Bodil Malmsten
Selma Lagerlof (finishing up the Further Adventures of Nils)
Lorca, Poeta en Nueva York
Freud, Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis
Lisa Robertson, The Weather
Hans Christian Andersen
Kalevala
VLAK3
Bold/Braithwaite/Morgan
Forster Passage to India, Hoaward's End
Adrian Clarke, Eurochants
Chris Goode, History of Airports
George Sand, Indiana
Aesop
Le Festin D'Esope (Charles-Valentin Alkan, Op 39, 12) "Attempting this variation (XX) with improper technique is likely to cause injury to the wrist". Another pal of George Sand, by the way.