What does the flight of an arrow describe for us today? In my last post, speaking of horses, I concluded that we were losing a certain collective mental shape, and I now find the same to be true of the flight of an arrow. I was a spectator at the Olympic women’s ... Read More...
The horse is a singularly beautiful animal. But will we always prize its artistic representation? I established my literary fame, aged 13, by writing an essay at school on the theme of a job I would not like to do. I chose jockey. I’m not sure, with 30 years’ experience, if ... Read More...
Remembering the dead is easy when they're part of the furniture... In the room of quattrocento sculpture in the Louvre, lined up with the portrait busts of Filippo Strozzi and Dietisalvi Neroni and the rest, there is an odd relic of Florentine interior design: a terracotta death mask of a woman ... Read More...
Music composed in the fifteenth century that will always be in tune with the cosmos... On March 25th 1436, Florence cathedral was consecrated by Pope Eugenius IV. In his two years in the city, the Pope had not, thus far, set foot outside the monastery of Santa Maria Novella where he ... Read More...
A break in Paris provides Toby Ferris an opportunity to consider how we overcome our everyday exhaustion. Last week I was in Paris, and successfully carried out a minor mission in the Louvre to locate the solitary Bruegel they have hanging there, known as the Mendicants or Beggars. It is a ... Read More...
Toby Ferris is away this week, but has provided us with an extract from the Anatomy of Norbiton, in which he speculates on the experience of Charles VIII in Naples, how he reached his Furthest South, and what he discovered there. In 1494 Charles VIII of France, pursuing some tenuous antique ... Read More...
Good cosmic gardening weather - where else but Norbiton? I have missed, once again, the Opening of the Garden of Cosmic Speculation. It is like missing a total eclipse (and so far I have missed all of those): it is a predictable, repeated, attainable happening, but somehow you never go, and ... Read More...
Norbiton may have found its perfect twin town - the city of Paterson, NJ. But how to describe it? I have been reading Paterson by William Carlos Williams, and in consequence stand accused in the assizes of my own head of writing only (in Ezra Pound’s phrase, referring to the sort ... Read More...
So how would Norbiton mark the passing of the Olympic flame? The Olympic flame is approaching, relayed from Cornwall like news of a shiny corporate rainbow armada; and the sight of it makes me impatient to reclaim the idea of procession for Norbiton. There are varieties of procession, of course – there ... Read More...
What a drunken satyr, a grotesquely inflated armadillo and a parachuting nonagenarian have to tell us about not just our death, but everyone's... Wisdom is proverbially reticent. The wise need to be eked from their crabby shells; we are, perhaps rightly, suspicious of philosophical or rhetorical fluency. In a story related in ... Read More...