The best reading experience involves an element of time travel. Issue 21 of The Reader offers you another world to discover, both ancient and new and full of surprises. The editors think ‘Ancient Worlds’ is our best issue yet. We hope you think so too. Some of the highlights include:
Alan Davis, ‘Ruskin’s Organic Vision’.
In this illustrated essay, Alan Davis lets the roughness of Ruskin collide directly and openly with the page. He describes Ruskin’s drawing Tree Study:
Its pencilled lines are strangely wild; the grey washes are brushed in expressively but roughly, with no attempt at neatness. The whole picture looks unfinished and imperfect, and the mysteries of its shadows are unsettling. There are loose ends everywhere. It looks as if the lid has come off something beautiful but dangerous. Many years later, Ruskin chose a special word to describe this quality – so evidently present in the Tree Study, and so absent in Watendlath Tarn. He called it ‘savageness’.
That is a fantastic meeting place between ‘special word’ and ‘savageness’ and Davis shows repeatedly that art galleries are not polite or refined. His essay is an exercise in carrying forth a dangerous substance without the writer much caring to be safe. This is because it is itself written according to Ruskinian principles, with ‘loose ends everywhere’ and a deep sense of the energy stored up in the painted lines or words that have power to move. It is a hugely encouraging piece and a great introduction to Ruskin. Ruskinian savageness is alive and well.
Philip Davis, ‘Isaiah and Ezekiel – But What About Charley?’
In this important and potentially life-changing essay, Philip Davis examines the state of mind of one ‘wanting to believe’. It’s an essay that puts the reader on the spot, with all our modern freedom suddenly an encumbrance. Choice is a weight we cannot put down. Here first of all is a quotation from George Eliot’s translation of Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity:
He who has an aim has a law over him; he does not merely guide himself; he is guided. He who has no aim, has no home, no sanctuary; aimlessness is the greatest unhappiness. An aim sets limits; but limits are the mentors of virtue. He who has an aim has a religion.
Davis writes:
This is of course a broad and liberal version of what is a religion, of what is a God. Here with Feuerbach anything, potentially, can be the object of belief – not just religion, but politics, money, love, private life. It seems as though you could choose your ground. But even so the pressure on Charley is still severe. If you do not believe in anything, you are not a real person, your life hasn’t a purpose, and you must be fundamentally unhappy. So, Charley, what do you believe in and what is your ultimate aim? No wonder our Charley believes in the importance of belief. Under such social and historical pressure, what is remarkable is not so much that Charley does not know if he has anything matching up to that belief, but that he dare admit that he may have none. What is more these Charleys are intelligent people, not least because their intelligence is relatively free of any allegiance. What they see is that what unreligious people know they have made up inside their heads, religious people unconsciously place outside themselves, as though to make those meanings somehow more real. We do not want to guide ourselves; we want to feel guided.
It is as though Charley feels himself orphaned, or abandoned, while at the same time he is testing his strength and independence against the parent, and recognising that he does not really have what it takes to stand alone. Yet the consciously weak position – that human place – is finally where we must stand and trust, Davis argues, that there is something in the desire alone to ‘feel guided’ that will help. This is how the essay concludes, with the exhortation not to think ahead, or to try to save ourselves by thought but rather to ‘follow it all through’.
David Constantine ‘Phantom Pain’
And then there is this story, suffering and watchful, and deeply personal, in which a son visits his mother in hospital. She is suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease. There is constantly a sense of seeing more than one would be allowed to see if this were an ordinary conversation with two sides to it, with two people in it, as if the narrator came through into the ward and into life to bear the weight of his mother’s character.
Again I vowed there would be no more interrogatives in my speaking with my mother, no more asking her could she remember it. From now on only the steady assertion: it happened, you were there. Fact upon fact, such a multitude I could tip out for you and fill your lap to overflowing, all our doings together on this earth, a multitude of stories and every one of them is true.
The woman in the next bed is full of talking and she tells about the death of her daughter and her son, family loss that changed everything in her life. ‘I used to wonder how a thing that wasn’t there could hurt so much.’ That’s one kind of phantom pain; the pain that cannot hurt any more is its partner in this story.
editorial
Guest Editor Frances Macmillan - Freedom of the Universe
new poetry
Carol Rumens
Richard Meier
Gary Allen
Pamela Coren
Sam Trainor
Bill Milner
Stanley Middleton
fiction
David Constantine - Phantom Pain
Jonathan Meades - Personal Eucharisting
essays
Alan Davis - Ruskin’s Organic Vision
Philip Davis - Isaiah and Ezekiel: But What About Charley?
Stephen Pollington - A Leaf from the Exeter Book
learning curve
Adam Piette’s Practice of Poetry - Syntax and Old Style in Basil Bunting’s Seventh Ode
Ask the Reader
Words We Had to Look Up
reading lives
Mary Weston Something Great
reviews
Peter J. Conradi - E.M. Forster, Alexandria: A History and a Guide and Pharos and Pharillon
Brian Nellist Edward Lear, Over the Land and Over the Sea
Aggie Shepherd John Kinsella, The New Arcadia
Simon Starkey Richard Dawkins, A Devil’s Chaplain
recommendations
Jane Shilling - On Reading Montaigne
Jonathan Meades - Michael Tournier, The Erl King
Ann Stapleton - Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove
Christopher Routledge - on The Orkneyinga Saga
Dana Cairns Watson - Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons
David Attwooll - Don DeLillo, Underworld
Sue Lloyd - Christopher Fry, One Thing More
Good Books - Brief recommendations by Erica Bridges and Catherine Sheldon
the back end
Stephen Newman - Newman’s Notes
Enid Stubin - Our Spy in NY
Jen Hadfield - Sleeping Beauty
Bel Mooney - Problems in Life and Letters
Letters
Cassandra Crossword
Buck’s Quiz
Contributors
Quiz and Puzzle Answers