holiday reading

To start with:  two books that I didn't take.

In the checklist of things I had to do before leaving, one of the only unticked entries is "Buy Flora of Western Australia". This was my facetious term for a beginner's guide that would help me identify a few of the plants I might see as we walked about in this distant continent. It was a good idea, but I never got any further with it, or I might be able to tell you the names of the plants in these photos.

The second book that I didn't take was John Wilkinson's  book of essays The Lyric Touch. (I bought it primarily to read the piece about Andrea Brady; the one about Prynne is downloadable in the preview that you can find on Salt's website.) It was delivered a few hours before we left, and after skim-reading a few pages of Wilkinson's profoundly-considered but disputable prose I felt tempted to bring it along with me (plus I remembered reading his Lake Shore Drive while in Spain about ten years ago).  But I also knew that Wilkinson's text would try to make my brain work in a different way from the way it works on holiday. I need an emptier head than that.

As always I packed at the last minute, and books just got flung in. Here's what I took with me.

Xenophon, The Persian Expedition (Penguin Classic, Rex Warner's 1950 translation of the Anabasis). I don't know why. It was one of the treasure trove of mainly classic Penguiins that I had persuaded my pal Richard to give to me last September (instead of to the charity shop). I just remember having the thought that this was the only way I'd ever get round to reading it. It worked, too. I finished it in the departure lounge at Perth International. More thoughts about it here.

Tim Winton, Dirt Music. Laura's Lonely Planet guide to Australia had helpfully listed some authors from Western Australia. Of these, Tim Winton was the only one that showed up in the Swindon branch of Waterstones. Dirt Music is evidently a widely-admired modern classic in WA itself (I also found it on the bookshelf of the place we stayed in Fremantle). I was half-way through it by the end of the holiday, and when I read the rest it prolonged the sense of being there. As I later found out, Winton himself lives in Fremantle. Dirt Music is an epic of WA in which the backgrounds are huge, the foregrounds minimal; it centres on two main characters who for most of the novel are apart. Yet the book also strikes us foreigners as principally about this land, this life, and this language.

Marco Polo Map of Australia. This was the other thing I bought in Waterstones. (I had a cursory search for the "Flora of Western Australia" but you'd be pushed to find that sort of thing - i.e. field guides relating to countries other than the UK - even in the Piccadilly branch of Waterstones, never mind Swindon.) The map was totally impractical since our own rovings around Greater Perth occupied only about a centimeter in the bottom left-hand corner.  But it was fun to marvel at. Inevitably, my eye kept coming back to those huge empty bits like the Great Sandy Desert and the Nullarbor Plain. A couple of times while in Perth we chatted with people who had visited Kalgoorlie (the gold-mining town 600km inland). I got the impression that once was enough. One day we were briefly on the Great Eastern Highway ourselves (before turning off to Kalamunda); I saw some of the trucks with gigantic plant that was bound for Kalgoorlie. I got a breath, but only a breath, of the inhuman scale of the hinterlands.

Teach Yourself: Read and Write Arabic Script (John Mace). I bought this in Dubai and I take it with me every time we go back there (we book-ended our Perth trip with two short stays in Dubai; Laura's daughter lives there).  This time I didn't look at it for long enough to recover all that I'd learnt on previous trips. I did learn that the hamsa is implicit in the alif madda.

Berlitz Arabic for Travellers. Interestingly outdated phrasebook that I picked up in a charity shop somewhere.

Katrina Mazetti, Grabben i graven bredvid plus Swedish dictionary. I was in the middle of reading this when we set off. I think I read one dozy page while we were on the flight from Gatwick. Then I discovered that you could watch Wallander (in Swedish) on the Emirates In-Flight Entertainment system, so I did that instead.

John Donne's Selected Poems. Grabbed it because it was compact. I had time to read The Sunne Rising and Elegy on His Mistres Going to Bed before I accidentally left it propping up a wobbly table in Salty's at Quinn's Rocks.

Monica Rinck - Barque pamphlet containing a few of her poems, with Alistair Noon's translations. Packed at the last minute in response to a sudden feeling of guilt about not having taken any modern poetry. Never a good motive. Fittingly, I never opened it.

And a mini-volume of Shakespeare: Two Gentlemen of Verona. Designed to be carried with me at all times and resorted to in the absence of other books. It only emerged once, when Laura and I played a game of trying to read the tiny print upside down.

Inevitably, I also bought some books while I was on my travels. They are my favourite kind of souvenir.

Bram Stoker, Dracula. Bought at Borders Express in Dubai Marina Mall, because it was cheap. There wasn't a huge choice of literary stuff. The bookshop is notably strong on self-improvement books and books about how to succeed in business. It also has a whole section devoted to Sheikh Mo's publications (His Highness Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum), such as Flashes of Thought (thoughts on leadership - we did read some of this) and Flashes of Verse (poems). I've had it in mind to read Dracula ever since I admired the first few pages while at a boot sale last spring. The admiration fluctuated as I read more of it.

At the same time, Laura bought The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari by Robin S. Sharma and she read it every night before dropping asleep. (We called it The Monk for short, a title which seemed to go better with Dracula.)

Rex Warner, The Greek Philosophers. When we got to Fremantle I had to go to the library to do some internet stuff, and here there was a book sale, just like you'd expect to find in the UK. All libraries are falling over themselves to offload the books that no-one borrows any more. I was determined to find something, and I chose this (obviously to go along with the Xenophon). Laura got Louise L. Hay's Meditations to Heal Your Life. We read a Meditation each evening, until Laura could improvise them on any topic.  As for The Greek Philosophers (commentary with selected texts), I eagerly read the Epicurus section but I found the rest a bit dull and I ended up donating it to the bookshelf at our AirBnB place in Fremantle. I once read a lot of Plato and Aristotle - and Anselm and Abelard and Aquinas. That was for my PhD. Now I begin to think that it isn't only "theory" that bores me. it's philosophy in general. Perhaps that's wrong and perhaps one day it'll change.

Henry Fielding, Jonathan Wild / A Voyage to Lisbon. This is a classic Everyman paperback that I've owned once before and have always meant to read, though I still haven't. (Desire re-ignited of course by a recent reading of Tom Jones.) Bought in Elizabeth's second-hand bookstore in Fremantle. Late-opening bookshops are a feature of Australian cafe strips that I admired very much.  

J.C. Ryle, Five English Reformers. Bought in a charity shop in Freo (they call them OpShops). Fiercely readable book with a mission of attacking the burgeoning Ritualist movement. This was the kind of controversy that C.S. Lewis tried to put behind him with his vision of "mere Christianity".

Dodie Smith, The Town in Bloom. A later novel (1965) by the author of 101 Dalmatians and I Capture The Castle. Bought from a newsagent in Mends Street, South Perth. Like the previous purchase, I bought it mainly because I was struck by ifinding it where I did, standing out from all the John Grisham and Stephenie Meyer. This was a reprint from 2012 by Constable & Robinson (Corsair). Who did they think would buy it? Smith's gentle London comedy is, however, very pleasing.

Robert Gray, Coast Road (selected poems). Almost at the end of my time in Oz, I returned to Crow Books in East Victoria Park (another late-opening bookstore) determined to buy some Australian poetry. The first time I'd gone in there, I'd goggled at, and felt dismayed by, the big books that I knew I ought to read if I had any pretensions at all to understanding modern poetry: Prynne's Collected (I didn't know then that it had a Fremantle connection) and Pierre Joris's Celan. Gray is by no means so essential, but he is an Australian poet and I liked reading his book very much, though of course it's distinctly mainstream and poetically conservative. There are always interesting reasons for taking any journey in poetry; poets are like other people, they are never normal.

At the last minute, while going to the departure gate to fly home from Dubai, I snatched up the free Dubai Pocket Guide published by the Department of Tourism and Commerce. This is actually pretty informative, for example about social etiquette and the region's flora and fauna.

There were some other things I read while I was away.

During our first stay in Dubai, Jazmin's boyfriend passed on to me a travel book called Hello Dubai by Joe Bennett. It was published in 2010 but is still a pretty good guide; the topic invites buffoonery but there's a lot of intelligence and information amid the comedy. Colin also wanted me to take away Ken Follett's World Without End (a massive medieval epic), and in a perfect world I'd have liked to, but I doubted I'd ever get round to reading it.

Bill Bryson, Down Under. This was on the Fremantle bookshelf and I read a couple of chapters while we were packing up to move on to our next AirBnB gaff. Clearly extremely readable and informative in the best Bryson manner.

The place we were going to was a beach-hut up at Quinn's Rocks, and there were some books on the shelves here too. I read as much as I could of Henning Mankell's The White Lioness, a Wallander novel; I had to leave it behind at the point where he was starting to fill in the South African background to the mystery.

[Well I know what those flowers are: Gazanias - maybe Gazania rigens. These are plants from southern Africa, naturalized here on coastal dunes, along with a low-growing Evening-Primrose (from America). There were actually a lot of other plants I recognized in the urban and coastal areas of Perth and Fremantle: pretty much the same sort of international collection that you'd also find in any Mediterranean resort - bougainvillea, oleander, palms, etc. However I did make some mistakes here. For instance elsewhere on the dunes I assumed I was seeing lots of another S. African plant, Hottentot Fig (Carpobrotus edulis); a plant you can also find in great quantity on Bexhill beach. Only when I got home did I realize that the plants I'd seen were Coastal Pigface (Carpobrotus virescens), which is endemic to Western Australia. And I hadn't even taken a photo!]

So as you can see, if you've been following closely, I only managed to finish three books in the four weeks I was on holiday (and two of those were on the flight home). Holiday reading is a scrappy experience, but that doesn't mean it isn't an intense one. With so many stimulated sensors, any few lines (even of the Dubai Pocket Guide) are enough to resonate hugely in these unfamiliar surroundings. There is a cross-current of thoughts from book to place. This can be pre-arranged (e.g. by choosing to read Tim Winton while in WA - his novel visits Perth several times)  but it's the unpredictable connections that are often most interesting. Mankell's South Africa matched the gazanias, obviously. I found the Persian Expedition of Xenophon seeming to pass ironic comment on my own oil-burning progress eastward. (The battle of Cunaxa took place somewhere near Baghdad International Airport.) As the Greek army threaded into Kurdestan, we chatted with a taxi-driver who was forced out of Iran by its theocracy. Count Dracula's ancestors fought the Turks while I ate Turkish food. J.C. Ryle's evangelicalism and combative martyrolatry provoked thoughts of present-day Salafism in Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Robert Gray's journalist's outlook asked probing questions about Dubai's free market. Reading Dodie Smith in South Perth inadvertently highlit all the ways in which Perth resembles a transformed London with a Thames swelling grandly like a black swan's plumage; full of pubs, colonial-terraced hotels, cricket and strong pots of English Breakfast Tea; all the ways,too, that London is insistently Australian.

Was this really thinking, or just a passive registering of flitting ironies and minor fortuities? Why does it look so much like columnism?

The books also chime off each other, as well as the world around us. For example:

The egret is shapely and tapering as an amulet
or a slim gourd
it's compact
as though smoothed between the hands
the neck
is kinked and finely drawn-out, which suggests a loose
length of vine
sharply trimmed-off, and it is seemingly ineffectual,
pensive.
One can imagine
as its claim that to pick the excess
from small life
is an honourable
scheme. It steps out of the stillness and stands
still again
and blue
like backyard smoke,
among the aimless insects of the sunlit rain.

(from Robert Gray, "The Creek").

We had seen white egrets around, but not blue ones. Gray's egret is, I suppose, the dark form of the Eastern Reef-egret (Egretta sacra). The gourd-shape is spot on, and the shaping between hands. "Amulet" is less obvious, as I'm not aware that amulets have any pre-defined shape - he might have had a specific one in mind.

Egretta sacra (dark form)

[Image source: http://ibc.lynxeds.com/photo/eastern-reef-egret-egretta-sacra/bird-sea]

But I also remembered that I'd just been reading this scene from Joe Bennett's Hello Dubai:

    Only a few yards from the ceaseless traffic a bird is bearing down on a flower bed, an egret. It is as white as a medieval virgin and shaped like a stretched Chianti bottle.
    The egret seems unfazed by the roaring vehicles, but when it spots me, the sole pedestrian in vehicle land, it stands still. I stand still. A few seconds and it resumes its progress, picking its deliberate way on huge splayed feet, reaches the edge of the bed and studies the ranks of plants, peering under leaves and flower heads and swaying its head like a charmed cobra. It freezes momentarily, then strikes. In its beak a lizard, gripped across the belly. From only a few yards away I can make out the tiny reptilian claws, grasping at the nothingness of air. The bird tosses the lizard twice to align it with its gullet, then points its beak at the sky and lets gravity do the rest. What started as just another day for the lizard has come to a drastic end. I can see the slight bulge in the bird's throat. The bird moves on and I cross the road. Perhaps five minutes later I've made it across all six lanes. I look back. The bird is hunting again.   

The Australian birds we saw were a joy. Australasian darters, giant moorhens, black swans, kookaburras, tiny doves, gulls with black beaks and birds like big terns with heavy heads. The crows (if that's what they were) were very tame. Their voices are not as harsh as British crows and the sound made us laugh because of the slow slide down in pitch at the end of a phrase.

The kind of openness to different kinds of book that I've tried to illustrate here can be put down to a healthy appetite for reading (though I don't myself think it's an adequate explanation).

Accordingly, you could argue that this consumption has nothing to say about the intrinsic quality of the books, nor about whether I myself really have any taste.

Kant said: "Hunger is the best sauce, and people with a healthy appetite relish everything, so long as it is something they can eat. Such delight, consequently, gives no indication of taste having anything to say to the choice. Only when men have got all they want can we tell who among the crowd has taste or not."

I'd rather trust my taste when I'm hungry, but there you go.

[I know this one, too. It's a Norfolk Island Pine (Araucaria heterophylla), a tree I'm familiar with from the Mediterranean (it's part of that international community I mentioned), but which is much more impressive here, rather closer to its small homeland (Norfolk Island lies between Oz and NZ). These mature trees are much less symmetrical than the younger ones I've seen in Spain. The growth of this one, above Fremantle South Beach, has clearly been influenced by the prevailing southerlies.

The northern-hemisphere eye may hesitate at that point. Is south on the right, then? Yes it is: down here the sun passes by to the north, and shadows fall to the south. I never stopped being childishly excited by this; nor by the moon changing phase from the "wrong" side;  nor by Orion being "upside-down". Late at night, under constantly clear skies, I marvelled at the three crosses in the southern sky.]

Epicurus (341-270 BCE)

Nothing to fear in God.
Nothing to feel in Death.
Good can be attained.
Evil can be endured.

(Philodemus, The Fourfold Remedy – a renowned summary of Epicurean teachings)

Of all the pre-Christian philosophers Epicurus was least likely to attract a Christian preserver. Nevertheless, an adequate quantity of Epicurean dicta remain, besides the miraculous preservation of Lucretius’ poem.

Even in his own time Epicurus was traduced as an atheist and a sensualist. The former charge was on the right lines, inasmuch as the gods are of no consequence in Epicurean thought – being perfectly self-sufficient, they do not interfere in the lives of men.

Epicurus took care to differentiate his conception of pleasure from sensual excess. “The pleasurable life is not continuous drinking, dancing and sex; nor the enjoyment of fish or other delicacies of an extravagant table” (Letter to Menoeceus). Nevertheless, his conception of the good is founded on the senses; fundamentally, it is plain fare enjoyed in security. Though he regards “prudence, honour and justice” as inseparable from the pleasant life, the ultimate function of these virtues is to secure pleasure. “The beginning and the root of all good is the pleasure of the stomach; even wisdom and culture must be referred to this.” More generally, “The stable condition of well-being in the body and the sure hope of its continuance holds the fullest and surest joy for those who can rightly calculate it”.

A somewhat complex theory of moderation controls the emphasis on pleasure. “Self-sufficiency” and “limits” are terms favoured by Epicurus. This is clear enough when he deprecates the pursuit of vain objects such as fame (“Nature’s wealth at once has its bounds and is easy to procure; but the wealth of vain fancies recedes to an infinite distance”). One can concede, too, the force of his conservatism in “Among the rest of his faults the fool hath also this: that he is always beginning to live.” However, the following saying appears to be wrong: “Nothing satisfies him for whom enough is too little” (alternatively, “Nothing is sufficient for him to whom what is sufficient seems little”). This dissatisfied person could after all be satisfied by some measure of things over and above what is strictly sufficient. Even Epicurus says elsewhere that frugality should not be absolute. In fact he is unable to make a precise definition of what consitutes sufficiency; his statements can only be taken as suggestive.

There are two additional elements in Epicurus’s conception of the pleasant life: philosophy and friendship. Philosophy is instrumental as a means of banishing the fear of gods, death and other transcendental anxieties; also, because it dissuades from pursuit of the unnecessary pleasures (with their inevitable insecurities).

“All friendship is desirable in itself, though it starts from the need of help”. This leaves room for some haziness. The origin in expediency is fully in accord with what Epicurus says elsewhere of natural law and other social advantages, but it gives him some trouble, since the warmth of his feelings outruns practicality. His most satisfactory resolution is: “It is not so much our friends’ help that helps us as the confidence of their help” – which ties up with security again. But there is still a sizeable leap to “Friendship goes dancing round the world proclaiming to us all to awake to the praises of a happy life”.

Behind all this lies the vision of a symposium, a friendly browsing and philosophising thoroughly in accord with Greek tradition. It is, perhaps, a slave-owning conception. Procurement should be modest, Epicurus advises; but he offers no theory of production.

This gentlemanly narrowness of focus needs to be remembered. “To live under constraint is an evil, but no one is constrained to live under constraint.” This can only refer to mental dissatisfaction (for “the greatest fruit of self-sufficiency is freedom”) – applied, e.g. to bondage, it would be nonsense. Similarly, the remark “it is vain to ask of the gods what a man is capable of supplying for himself” refers not to physical labour but to tranquillity.

Epicurus’s thought is clearly not heroic, since it lacks a sense of strenuous effort, of love and of tragic insufficiency (these are the features that make it most fundamentally un-Christian). He emphasizes that the procurement of pleasure is easy. The existence of mental suffering is ignored; physical pain is considered negligible and both death and long life irrelevant.

But Epicurus’ position is strong, because he declines to allow any meaning to “good” other than what every human being regards as good. I admire the clarity, for better or worse, of such statements as these:

“No one when he sees evil deliberately chooses it, but is enticed by it as being good in comparison with a greater evil and so pursues it.”

“We must not pretend to study philosophy, but study it in reality: for it is not the appearance of health that we need, but real health.”

“The laws exist for the sake of the wise, not that they may not do wrong, but that they may not suffer it.”

[Epicureanism is briefly the topic of discussion in Book III of Wordsworth’s The Excursion (1814). The “I” of the poem introduces it, zealously pouring scorn on the sub-human aims of this lowly creed. Rather unfairly, it may be thought, he cites Epicureanism as an argument against Philosophy herself:

                all too timid and reserved
For onset, for resistance too inert,
Too weak for suffering, and for hope too tame... (III, 343-45)

But the despondent Solitary has no sympathy with this zeal.

                                     Ah! gentle Sir,
Slight, if you will, the means; but spare to slight
The end of those, who did, by system, rank,
As the prime object of a wise man’s aim,
Security from shock of accident,
Release from fear; and cherished peaceful days
For their own sakes, as mortal life’s chief good,
And only reasonable felicity. (III, 359-66)

He proceeds to claim that the minor tranquillity aimed at by Epicurus was also an unconfessed motive of monasticism.

Putting these words into the mouth of the Solitary, a man who has lost his faith in Providence, implies a severe qualification of their tenor. At the same time the Solitary’s misfortunes give him a certain authority – for instance, when he reproves the glib courage with which, in his own zealous youth, he would have demanded

                                     from real life
The test of act and suffering, to provoke
Hostility – how dreadful when it comes,
Whether affliction be the foe, or guilt! (III, 417-20)

There’s little doubt in my mind that for Wordsworth Epicureanism represented far more of a “live issue” than anyone but an infidel could admit. I imagine he entertained it as a secondary philosophy, the way you might support a second football team (If I wasn’t a Christian / United fan...). I think many people do. There are some football teams that, the pundits say, “attract the neutral” – that are (with pardonable exaggeration) “everyone’s second team”. Epicureanism is “everyone’s second creed”, but perhaps only if you have a first one at all. I don't think Epicureanism can be a first creed, simply because it doesn't strike me as complete; the world is too full of mental chasms, too full of anguish, horror and insanity. Epicureanism slips away from those incomprehensible portals, cannot explain them, treats them as blots. But when a reasonable and pleasant space reappears, Epicureanism reappears to occupy it.

The bases of this discussion have shifted a long way since Wordsworth wrote, and few people today have ever heard the word “Providence”.]