Christ Stopped at Eboli

Are you one of those people who routinely puts a book in your bag before leaving home? Okay, so we are in the minority, a few more may leave one in the car, or pack one only when they know they will be away from home for more than a night or so. When I say book I recognise that today this may include electronic forms, but this post is about how a single book may become a companion and be read over and over again. And whilst I am not a religious person, and pass no judgement on other’s holy texts, the kinds of book I refer to here certainly do aid contemplation, offer much to meditate upon and are a source of wisdom and spiritual guidance.

‘.. ‘We’re not Christians,’ they say. ‘Christ stopped short of here, at Eboli.’ ‘Christian’, in their way of speaking, means ‘human being’…’ (Levi 1982:11)   

Those of us non-electronic readers, who are lucky enough to be able to scan our bookshelves in the last moments before leaving home and select what we will read today, face a bigger dilemma when we know we will be away for any length of time. You may feel you only have the space for one book, or are only prepared to tolerate the weight of one, but some of us go a stage further and ask; what one book will satisfy all our needs on this journey, or indeed any journey which may be of indeterminate length? Sometimes we end up giving the status of companion to a single volume for years at a time.

I first became aware of this as a child when I read John Buchan’s Richard Hannay spy stories, where one of the central characters uses John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress as a guide and companion. Only reading Buchan later in life did I realise how much Bunyan had influenced all his stories, leading later still to an appreciation of how Bunyan’s personal story had come to have such a powerful impact, over more than four centuries, on thousands of people pursuing less than conventional religious lives.

It was around the beginning of the 1980’s, when I was in my early twenties, that I found myself placing a copy of Kipling’s Kim in my rucksack whenever I went on a trip. I had begun to realise, as with Buchan, that what others had told you was childhood reading did in fact contained more, much more, if you were willing to learn a little about the historical context in which they had been written.

Kipling was only displaced when a university lecturer pressed his copy of Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli into my hands at the start of the Easter vacation in 1984. (I should say that even at that time he was the last remaining philosopher at the university!) What prompted him was one of those conversations that would gather you an audience in the area of the humanities building, between the office and the coffee machine, where undergraduates congregated between lectures. I’d been trying to explain that I was about to return to the community in south west France where I had spent four months or so the previous year. I have described elsewhere this small outpost of the counterculture of the early 1970’s, an organic farm and vineyard in the Bordeaux region. But it was my assertion that in many ways this modern community embodied virtuous aspects of traditional European peasant life that led to the lecturer offering me the book as a corrective influence on what he suspected was my over stated, if not romantic view. But of course what he could not have anticipated was that I would still be reading it thirty years later - for with my experience of WWOOFing, I never came to think of Christ Stopped at Eboli as a negative interpretation of the peasant experience at all!

‘Many years have gone by, years of war and of what men call History. Buffeted here and there at random I have not been able to return…’ (Levi 1982:11)

After giving back the loaned copy, I bought one of my own. But in time it fell apart, hence the photo above. One of those rare experiences where the cover illustration seems to match the images evoked when reading the text. Still today a copy goes in my rucksack when I’m out walking, or can be found in my satchel when I’m sitting in a café, as of now, trying to devise an ecotherapy that takes better account of the historical reality of agricultural labour and the limitations of our manmade landscape.

So what’s the book about? Carlo Levi was a young doctor and vocal left-wing opponent of Mussolini in Italy in the 1930’s, he was ‘banished’ for a year to one of the most remote and ‘backward’ parts of the country - a mountain village beyond Eboli.

Levi, C (1982) Christ Stopped at Eboli Penguin: London

Imitable Jeeves (updated 2020)

(What follows are a series of short parodies of P G Wodehouse’s Jeeves stories which I wrote as family emails some years ago. My father was of the generation which automatically read Wodehouse as ‘light reading’. I’m not aware that my sister or niece ever read him, but they did both enjoy the Clive Exton TV adaptations broadcast between 1990 and 1993 starring Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry. I’m the one who is the real addict. Hearing a BBC radio adaptation in the early 1970’s prompted me to roam the half a dozen or so Jeeves paperbacks on my father’s bookshelves. That particular Penguin edition had on the back cover a quote from Evelyn Waugh about how the stories released the reader from the real world into something much more idyllic, he also predicted that the effect would be even greater in the future as our world grew grimmer! My experience has been a little different, as I grow older I find myself interpreting the world more and more in Wodehousian terms; as I people-watch, an internal dialogue between Bertie and Jeeves often erupts, in which the absurdity of others behaviour must be made a source of amusement in order maintain one’s sanity. The first dialogue, from 21.11.09, looks forward to my sister returning from a work trip to Africa.)

(photo by Nick Hewling)

I say Jeeves when is my sister due back from her latest inspection of the Dark Continent?

I couldn't say sir.

Some of her photos make it look quite inviting. Perhaps I should undertake an expedition?

I couldn't advise it, for a gentleman of your description sir.

What do you mean you couldn't advise it!

It has well been said sir, that Africa is only for those with a commanding personality and considerable strength of character.

Precisely, condemned out your own mouth! I take it Cook's do a tour.

I fear it would take you away from England for many months.

Well, I'm sure my friends can manage without me for a while - get packing Jeeves.

Sir! It will require several weeks just to purchase the necessary tropical outfits and camping equipment.

Camping! No, no, no. We shall stay in the best hotels.

I'm afraid sir, they all have a tendency to be several thousand miles apart.

All right, all right. I give in. Bring out the Michael Palin DVDs and fetch me a whiskey and soda.

(This one, penned on the 2.12.09, looks forward to Christmas.)

Well Jeeves, the festive season is upon us.

Indeed, sir.

Therefore the burning question of the hour is; which one of this array of invitations above the hearth should we accept?

Sir! Forgive me for pointing it out, but this service flat has the latest central heating. There is no hearth.

Jeeves! I was speaking figuratively, as well you know.

I see, sir.

Don't you yearn for an open fire, for crumpets toasted over a yuletide log?

I hesitate to mention it sir, but if we are to descend on any one of the residences to which you have been invited there will be nothing but open fires in the middle of winter!

Quite.

Chilly sheets and ice on the insides of windows during the morning hours.

Sounds quite romantic.

Not a situation inclined to induce good feeling in the servant’s hall, sir. Parlour maids are generally required to rise an hour before other staff in winter in order to have fires lit in all bedrooms before 6,00am.

Ah, now! Was it not you who pointed out only the other day whilst running my bath, that the doorman Jarvis is required to descend five times a day to the basement in order to stoke the boiler so that we can enjoy this central heating! Umm, well?

Sir, I..

I say, you're not still mooning over that scheme of yours to winter in Provence are you?

Antibes has many attractions for a young man of your description sir, and if the timing is right, can be accessed in little over 24 hours with only two changes of train...

Enough, Jeeves! Never mind showing-off your knowledge of Bradshaw and foreign railway timetables, we shall be spending Christmas with the least objectionable of my relatives - it's just a question of working out which they are?

Very good, sir.

If we ignore them all, we'll get it in the neck from all of them. If we go to one, then at least we have a passable excuse for not going to the others. I shall set my mind to the problem.

At what time would you like to be awoken sir?

No, no, I shall be totally focused on the question in hand. Jeeves, who are the least objectionable of my relatives?

I really couldn't say sir. Perhaps you should attempt to ascertain which other guests are likely to be present before coming to a conclusion. Equally, consideration might be given to the quality of food and availability of alcoholic beverages, and whether, in the absence of the aforementioned, there are good local hostelries to repair to.

Jeeves your cynicism astounds me - aren't you at all moved by the thought of Christmas?

I try to resist succumbing to a sentimental urge, sir. One should always be mindful that it was the popular Victorian moralist Charles Dickens sentimental urge to improve the lot of the working classes which led him to pen the ghost story known as A Christmas Carol, and which subsequently led to many of the current absurdities of modern winter feasting.

Now, don't start getting pompous about The Carol, Jeeves! I've known it backwards since I was a child. I've half a mind to read it aloud to my young niece.

I couldn't advise it sir, the young lady is approaching seventeen and will almost certainly have a portable musical device secreted about her person for the express purpose of fading-out any intrusive adult.

Well then, I shall read it to my father!

He no doubt will use the opposite strategy to achieve precisely the same outcome, sir.

I don't follow Jeeves?

Hearing aids can be turned down as well as up, sir!

Well, what about my sister and her friends?

It has well been said that a public performer needs to know how to cope with hecklers...

Enough! The boat train Jeeves, Victoria isn't it, 5 minutes past midnight, platform 3?

Indeed, sir.

(..and on Christmas Day I sent the following.)

Good morning sir. Your breakfast tray!

What time is it Jeeves?

Ten past nine, sir.

Ten past nine! Is the building on fire?

No, sir. I thought you might care to take breakfast now - in light of events.

Events? The only event, if I remember rightly is that I left the casino at 2,00am. Now is no time for bringing in breakfast, especially on Christmas Day.

It was events at the casino to which I was referring sir. If I might venture the opinion, a hasty return to England might be advisable.

But Jeeves, I won! Handsomely as it happens. I'm on a winning streak.

Precisely, sir.

What's the matter, have you suddenly developed a moral objection to your employer having a gamble.

No, sir. It is just that a winning streak never lasts.

Ah, but I have my system Jeeves.

And so do the casinos, sir. They take great exception to losing large sums of money and will make strenuous efforts to take it back again - with interest.

What, you don't mean strong-arm tactics surely?

Not at all sir, they simply know that if they can keep you at the tables long enough, then their profits will be restored. They have already approached the manager of the hotel with a view to paying your bill and having you upgraded to a more superior suite.

I don't get it Jeeves, it will cost them a packet!

No sir, if they can keep you here for another week they will undoubtedly come out ahead.

Well, of all the bally nerve, spying on their customers - think my credit's not good enough do they?

On the contrary sir, the purpose of checking someone's credit is to ascertain which of their patrons can afford to lose the most, and then encourage them to do so.

And if I go on winning?

Then you will simply be barred, sir.

What!

It is always the successful who are banned from casinos, sir - never the losers.

Well what about your professional gambler then?

Professional gamblers are not particularly wealthy sir. They simply make a good living by travelling from one gambling resort to another, making modest gains at each casino and being careful not to draw attention to themselves.

Good lord, Jeeves! Do you know everything?

I really don't know.

I say, that chef has failed to do my boiled eggs, again! I can't be doing with scrambled.

We are in France sir. English habits are not always respected.

Indeed not, where is the best place to spend New Year?

I am told the Highlands of Scotland...

(It was too tempting not to continue – from 1.1.10.)

I blame you for this Jeeves!

Perhaps we are not keeping our eye on the ball with sufficient assiduity sir.

In case you hadn't noticed the Norwegian's are blowing a force 10 gale at us.

It was your expressed wish to visit the 'home of golf' sir.

Only after you put the idea of Hogmanay in my mind. As it is we only just got here in time!

We did make the journey from Provence to London in record time, sir.

Only to find the London and North Eastern on a go-slow for the entire festive season. And as for that last train, it was positively Victorian.

Indeed sir, the journey has changed little since the time of the late Queen, we can count our blessings we only had to travel the one stop from Leuchars to St. Andrews. The other passengers will have had to continue along the coast via Boarhills, Pitmilly West, Crail and Anstruther before re-joining the main line north of Kirkcaldy...

Enough Jeeves, you're putting me off my stroke.

I do apologise sir.

Damn! Did you see where that one went?

The mist does seem to be closing in. Perhaps one should heed the lesson of Robert Tyre Jones Jr, sir. When as a very young man he came to the Old Course for the first time he played badly, had a temper tantrum and left the championship after eleven holes of the third round, citing intense dislike of the course. Nonetheless he returned and won The Open in 1927 choosing to leave the cup here at the Royal and Ancient, and so won the hearts of the Scottish people.

So, you think I need to take lessons from Bobby Jones on how to be a gentleman, Jeeves?

Oh, no sir, I merely...

Don't think I haven't noticed the way you talk of a 'gentleman of my description', not just a 'gentlemen', always the qualifier huh?

Be in no doubt sir, there is no one else I'd rather be employed by - you offer a life of rare interest and variety. I cannot think of another gentleman who would provide such a challenge to my capabilities.

Very well Jeeves. But you do know that some people think you have me under your thumb.

Heaven forbid sir! May I suggest a five iron next - just to get us back onto the fairway?

(And finally on 20.9.10.)

Well Jeeves, what do you think? Romantic what! Dawn rising, or is it sunset, over the water hole?

Sir! May I enquire as to the purpose to which you intend putting such an illustration?

It's a birthday card for my sister - what with her being an old Africa hand.

You wish your sister to know you associate her with a herd of elephants?

Oh, not psychology again Jeeves.

Indeed sir, visual images are a lot more powerful than words.

Every picture tells a thousand stories and all that?

Something of the kind!

But just think of all the positive associations - they live a terribly long time, their skin is as tough as old boot straps, they can be aggressive when they need to be, pore torrents of foul water on the unsuspecting...

Precisely sir.

And they never forget, and always return... Jeeves I think I'm starting to hallucinate, that picture is transforming before my eyes into a regiment of Aunts - with Aunt Agatha at the head of them! Suddenly I feel the chill at sunset on the savannah.  

Shall I prepare our morning bath sir? It will have a soothing affect and whilst you wait may I recommend a whisky and soda - purely for medicinal purposes.

(In 2018 I found myself wondering if such a relationship as Jeeves and Bertie Wooster could exist in the 21st century? I concluded that it couldn't. So I came up with Sparkwell and I - tales of a personal therapist. See sidebar link.) 

My Artist Grandmother - or how family history becomes everyone's history

One day when my sister and I were really quite young and our maternal grandmother was on a visit she had us painting large flowers and leaves at the table in what our parents called the breakfast room. When they were dry we cut them out, and using a long horizontal pencil line as a guide, stuck them up close together along one of the walls. I don’t remember how high on the wall they were but to my child’s eye view it was as if I was laying in the long grass looking at daisies and other assorted wild things.

Later I came to realise that most of the paintings on the walls of my grandmother’s, my aunt’s and my childhood homes were her work. Later still I worked out that there was a store of other paintings the grown-ups thought didn’t merit a place on the wall. They knew her as an amateur painter and found her work decorative. To me there was a magic to be found in many of them, but it soon became obvious that what I saw was not what the others saw.

Slowly over the years I’ve inherited the paintings of hers that I value the most, with the exception of one which still hangs in my father’s house. Part of the value I ascribe to my grandmother’s work has its source in having witnessed at a young age the magic of her creating the illusion in the first place. But I was also around to see her stop painting in the last years of her life. She went, as so many did, from living independently, to being in a nursing home, to spending the final year of her life on a ward for the elderly mentally ill in one of the local psychiatric hospitals. I didn’t visit her after she left her last home, I was about fourteen at the time and my mother said I didn’t have to visit if I didn’t want to. I said I’d rather not and that was accepted by the family. But the truth is somewhat different. I didn’t visit anymore because my Grandmother had told me not to. It had been my habit to go to her flat once a week after school. I witnessed her mental decline, the increasing inability to take on new memories. She knew what was happening to her and she knew she appeared different to me. I won’t repeat the actual conversation, sufficient to say I interpreted her to mean; ‘I don’t want you to see me like this’. She, increasingly unable to make memories, wanted my memories of her to remain intact.

So in time my mother and my aunt became the custodians of one half of my family history. Along with my grandmother’s paintings came a mass of photographs and documents. Later my Great uncle died (brother of my Grandmother’s husband) and the rest of that side of the family’s history became available to view. In this computer age, which has given such an impetus to the idea of a family history, it slowly dawned on me that one of my ancestors above all had given this side of the family a history.

Hebert Crosoer (1859-1934), was a tailor from Ashford in Kent, his hobbies were photography and family history. He traced the family tree of our ancestors (Huguenots) back to the seventeenth century, almost to the point where they stepped of the boat from France. And he took pictures of the gravestones whenever he got the opportunity, lugging his heavy camera and tripod around the country. I once stumbled upon a reference to a particular location, but for me it was only a matter of minutes, courtesy of Google Earth, before I was looking into that churchyard. He left eighteen photo albums, the one of his honeymoon on the Isle of Wight was given to me by my mother many years ago. Just browsing the pictures and the short captions with the benefit of a little knowledge about early photography turned out to be a revelation and seemed to contradict a family myth.  

Herbert married Ellen Mary Giles (1866-1951), she was remembered by my mother and aunt as a strict Victorian grandmother with a moral code to match, who invaded their childhood home during her final years. She was also credited with dressing her younger son (my Great uncle) in female baby clothes (because she really wanted a girl), which was recalled as being in some way related to his lifelong speech impediment (a profound stutter). But the honeymoon album tantalisingly suggests a different character, at least in youth. Many of the photos are really self-portraits, though you wouldn’t know it without knowledge of photography in the 1880’s. They were not a wealthy couple, but the album they put together would have impressed everyone they showed it to. The pictures are of a couple, appropriately in love, relaxed and lounging amongst scenic locations from across the island. They were all made within a week of the marriage ceremony. Together they must have organised the pony and trap, the heavy tripod, the large camera, the box of ‘half plate’ glass negatives, found the locations and the weather, composed themselves in an intimate but respectable way, hidden the shutter release (held in Herbert’s right hand) and of course ‘held the pose’ for up to half a second in order to get the correct exposure. This couple acted as one, it couldn’t have been organised in the time available unless they had. Neither could have dictated to the other. This couple knew each other very well before they were married.

There are other pictures of their first home, of his chair and her chaise lounge. We have all inherited a cultural belief in a repressed Victorian sexuality, I wonder? In practical terms engagement meant being given public permission to be alone together. She, according to popular fiction, retires to the withdrawing room with the ‘vapours’, he goes down on one knee, half an hour later they emerge engaged to be married… Now, when just about any of us can call ourselves a historian, the problems of historiography multiply. Any follower of the television series Who Do You Think You Are will know that there always comes a point when the celebrity family historian starts to empathise with a particular ancestor and states how, not just genetically, but psychologically some part of that distant relative seems to live within them today. This is dangerous ground indeed. As for Herbert, I’ll leave further elaboration of that story until I’m in a position to show you the evidence.

Since the death of my mother and my aunt I’ve had access to more information about my artist Grandmother. One example is knowledge of the context in which the above picture was painted, it’s a favourite and has hung on my wall for more than twenty years. But part of the reason I was allowed to take possession of it the first place was that it wasn’t a particular favourite of any of the rest of the family. The composition is classic and simple, perhaps banal to the more sophisticated. But the location is real. It was painted on a trip to Switzerland which she undertook with her local art group in the early 1960’s. That much I always knew. But it wasn’t until I was sorting through my late aunt’s possessions that I found the following.

(The ‘process of mastication’ by the way refers to the fact that at the age of almost forty my aunt decided to have all her teeth removed in favour of dentures. It became a source of comment in the family because she wasn’t suffering from excessive tooth decay rather it was thought she was over occupied with her ‘crooked’ teeth.)

In the future we will know more of the past. This is true of both recent and more ancient times. One of the awareness’s of age is not just that ‘everything our parents/teachers/other authority figures taught us was wrong’, but that new technology makes available masses of additional evidence or data to argue over! Equally, it appears that for the foreseeable future computers will not have a problem with memory capacity, and so should we choose to, then what we post on the Web can not only be available to anyone, but for an indefinite period in the future. It is a slightly scary thought. I often pause to check in my own mind whether I'm really happy for anyone to know what I’d like to say. But one should also be aware that the same patterns of self-censorship are being applied by the viewer of Web content as they are in any other realm of life. So what is useful to share of a family history, perhaps those aspects which are not common to all families?

It is remarkable how much of the 20th century was recorded on film, and is rapidly becoming available in bite-sized chunks on YouTube and elsewhere. At some point one of our family will almost certainly place on the Web the forty minutes of black and white, nine and a half millimetre cine film, taken by my maternal Grandfather in the 1930’s and 40’s which features, albeit fleetingly, all the characters mentioned above. I’ve yet to find on the Web the aerial movie film shot by Claude Friese-Greene from a biplane in 1919 and restored by the British Film Institute, showing the down Cornish Riviera Express leaving Exeter, travelling down the Exe estuary, onto the sea wall and passed my window. Perhaps I should post it myself.

Written records, slowly becoming digitised and available in an easily searchable form, abound for the last few centuries. It is a highly skewed record of course, produced by and reflecting the concerns and priorities of mostly educated, relatively wealthy and powerful men. What is less well known is that museums, local records offices, government departments, the National Archive and numerous other organisations have massive warehoused collections of which they themselves are only vaguely aware of the contents. For many ancestor hunters however the story does appear to dry-up in the eighteenth or seventeenth centuries unless someone was particularly well connected. If your family were in any way connected to the English court, then you may find much to amuse in the Tudor period. It tends to be the most popular period in English history, not least amongst television producers. The reason for this is simple; it was the first time that detailed records of day to day activities were maintained. Modern-day bureaucracy was born at that time, and many a modern academic career has been built on  the back of long hours spent bent over Henry VIII’s laundry lists! Another possibility is that you have an ancestor who belonged to a minority religious group for whom membership of, and identity with, the group was their particularly priority in life. The story of the founding of a New England, and therefore an America, became the dominant narrative because the Puritans recorded everybody and everything which went aboard the Mayflower. Puritan identity was reinforced by their invention of additional Christian names like Verity, Prudence etc.

But it may be that in the future a personalised family history need not shade away to something remote in time and place, alluded to only in less accessible history books. We can increasingly access thousands of years of family history. Facebook is not just the biggest social media network of now, or for the future - it is also a resource for the past. Hewling and Crosoer are two of the less common surnames, search them on Facebook and you have an instant ‘data set’ of manageable size, just let your eyes scan the faces. We were vaguely aware that a Hewling had once migrated to the West Indies, there are plenty of black Americans with the name Hewling on Facebook. Genes get passed on complete or not at all, they are digital and don’t get mixed like items from a recipe which is then cooked. So there are distinct facial characteristics, you may have the nose of one grandparent, the forehead or chin of another.

DNA only tells you about the past, genetics is the study of the past. Anything else is about uncertainty - forecast, prediction, probability. DNA profiling will become commonplace and what is tells you about your ancestry can be accepted with much greater confidence than what it says about the probability of you suffering a fatal disease thirty years in the future! It is a relatively simple comparison with a data base of over two hundred thousand samples, gifted by people from every location on the planet, who have had close family living in the same place for at least three generations. For example, it can tell you how much of you is northern European, how much of you is from elsewhere; and that, combined with other data, can tell you how long your ancestors have been here and their migration route since all of us of non-African descent shared a common female ancestor who sailed out-of-Africa eighty thousand years ago. It may tell you that you carry the genes of humans other than homo sapiens.     

The story of genetics is the same story as the creation of different languages and the story of human migration. When I was a child I asked my mother if she was born in the Middle Ages, after-all she'd described herself as middle-aged! Now I can state with some confidence that we, with all the same physical and mental capacities and capabilities have been around for between one hundred and eighty and two hundred thousand years. We live in one world in so far as we are prepared to think in an evolutionary way. But I can also 'see' our ancestors; the view from my window as I write is of Lyme Bay (well Berry Head to Portland - on a good day!) Whilst their human remains lie in the sands below the English Channel, in my imagination I can visualise the lower sea levels of earlier times (at the last glacial maximum sea levels were one hundred and twenty metres lower than today), the channel as one vast river plain and estuary fed by the Rhine, the Thames and the Seine and at times easy enough to cross.

Books Do Furnish a Room

(First posted, 17.8.13)

About twenty years ago I made a decision not to buy anymore bookshelves. It occurred to me that if I was going to have enough time to read all the unread books and also re-read as often as I wished, then I’d already reached some kind of ‘tipping point’. I invented one rule for myself, if a new book was to be introduced then something inferior had to go. And I’ve stuck to it, though at times I’ve cheated like crazy!

It’s helped that I prefer paperbacks, that over time omnibus editions have appeared that take up less space than original volumes, that cassette tapes became CDs, that DVDs could replace videos – but when it came to judging worth, that was quite another matter.

Very occasionally one undergoes complete reversals of opinion, making it seem unacceptable to keep certain books. But such new space isn’t afforded when it comes to scholarly debate, where having certain authors to argue against is the only way to keep critical faculties awake. Another ‘problem’ is that the better your choice of book in the first instance, the less likely it is to date!

The Web has helped immeasurably, removing the need to keep many reference books although I haven’t acquired the habit of reading online for any length of time, or overcome the need to browse bookshops.

Emotion, sentiment and nostalgia play a large part in keeping certain books on the shelves, but even these would not remain unless I still believed there was something new to learn from them when read by the older me.

In the last year I’ve added just two books to the collection of about four hundred. I like to read several books in series, so many are half completed. My best guesstimate is, that about twenty per cent of the total are unread, whilst fifty per cent have been read twice or more.

But many might argue that by doing all of this I’ve constructed the very opposite of what a library should be – that an ever expanding collection, of even greater numbers of unread volumes, is some sort of guarantee against tunnel vision, some protection from ‘knowing more and more about less and less’ and the dangers of confirmation bias.

Well I like to think of myself as a practical man of limited resources, who knows his time is constrained and can focus on what’s important. I’m prepared to make judgements (the willingness to be wrong) at the same time as accepting that no author represents the last word on anything. To achieve clarity of thought requires selection and discrimination.

(I find I’ve written this using slightly ‘oldie worldie’ English as if I were writing from the library of an old country house, or the smoking room of a gentleman’s club – but then this room does have leather bound chairs and I do enjoy the occasional ‘gasper’!)

It may be a tougher path, but it leads straight to the hilltops

(Email 06.09.08, first posted on Facebook 15.10.11)

Kipling wrote ‘If’ in 1895 supposedly about someone else. But I can’t help thinking of how at the age of twenty-one in 1886, whilst writing for the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore, he was ostracised by the English community for putting himself alongside, and being the first to write sympathetically about, the ‘native’ people of the city!

If -

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

The Only Way Out (updated 2019)

(First posted on Facebook, 19.7.11)

If society (parents, siblings, peers, school, work, community...) is to blame for the way you turned out, and it almost certainly is, then the chances of it helping you out of the mess, is practically zero! You don't have the answers otherwise you wouldn't have got into such a mess. Neither do your friends or partners, it was their similarity to you which attracted you to them. That's why the only way out, is to find the few people who represent excellence (who have the life you want) and model them.

1/ Note for scholarly readers; in any medical or social scientific enquiry, the actions of the observer always affect the outcome, just like the actions of the participants; with any social species, agency never lies just with the an individual. Agency is always on a positive feedback loop within any human group, just as social structures are only ever temporary pockets of order. So, it’s just the same for the distinguished research professor, as it is for the guy on the street trapped by the habitual influence of significant others!

2/ In pursuit of the life you want; observation is all about recognizing patterns in the actions of others – habits, in everything! If a habit no longer delivers the reward it once did it is a bad habit, the only way to break a bad habit is to replace it with a better one that delivers the same reward.

3/ Pleasure (this feels good, I want some more); happiness (this feels good, I don’t need anymore.)

4/ Whatever it is you do, do it because it is a worthwhile and purposeful activity in and of itself, here and now.

5/ Money; is this expenditure essential, important, or just everything else?! Will it make you richer (an investment) or poorer (waste)?

6/ Diet: drink; alcohol (really bad), caffeine (not good), water (all you actually need). Food; refined sugars (worst), grains (human invention), dairy (mother's milk of another species), roots/tubers (good in an emergency, but costly to get at), fresh meat cooked fast (best), ripe red fruit and fresh green leaves (best).

Sherlock Holmes Syndrome

(first written 2008, first posted on Facebook 4.5.11, updated 2012, 2016)

You see the problem is there’s this strange phenomenon of people liking mysteries and not wanting them explained.

In the world of mental health it often appears that someone in distress, does not want, nor responds to, either explicit explanation of their difficulties, or to training in techniques to relieve them. It’s even got to the point in our individualistic society where many will argue that there are no universal ways of understanding or helping - apart from the mysterious ‘love conquers all’!

(photo by Nick Hewling)

And the more knowledgeable person certainly doesn’t want to end up suffering the emotional isolation of what I call Sherlock Holmes Syndrome - of going to the trouble to explain (about inductive and deductive reasoning, how he built-up his library, apprenticed himself to learn about such things as horses and dogs, the logic of railway operations and timetabling, etc, etc) only for Watson to call it all inborn ‘talent’ and ‘genius‘, the police to call it ‘luck’, and the public ‘…well when you put it like Mr Holmes, I can see it really is so simple anyone could…’ It was others who set him apart. People fear something is lost in explanation when in fact the reverse is true - it only adds to the wonder of the world.

The wilful ignorance of those who see in others an inborn talent often drives those with such supposed abilities to distraction. The spectator at a golf tournament who said to Arnold Palmer - after he’d made a great shot - how lucky he was to have such a talent, got the reply: ‘Yes, it’s crazy, the more I practice the luckier I get! In traditional craftsmanship, ten thousand hours is the ‘rule of thumb’ for mastering a complex skill set - the point at which practice, becomes ‘seamless’ and the outsider cannot see ‘how it’s done’.

In the context of mental health, explanation leading to instruction, demonstration and practice meets additional resistance because the very subject is the inadequacy of early emotional learning from parents, other adults, siblings and peers. A large part of emotional learning is of course all about sexual intimacy, and here the Holmes analogy is useful again.

Dr Watson a believer in the mystery of love, as much as non-explainable 'genius', offers us this in, A Scandal in Bohemia: 'It was not that he felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler. All emotions, and that one in particular, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but reasonable balanced mind, but as a lover he would have put himself in a false position. He never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer. They were admirable things for the observer - excellent for drawing a veil from men's motives and passions.'

Now we know that such a lack of emotion would have been impossible - modern opinion  divides two ways; either towards some effortful suppression or towards an autistic spectrum, even the sociopathic! It doesn't occur to Watson that Holmes might have applied the same methods to learning about sex and love as he did to everything else. If that were true, then his pursuit of excellence would have led to his rejection by almost all in Victorian society. (It is perhaps worth remembering that it is only points of similarity between people which attract.)

(All of the above refers to the character of Sherlock Holmes originally offered us by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.)

It is nice to see that some of the themes above have been highlighted by Elementary, the contemporary take on Holmes from CBS.

HOLMES:  It has its costs.
WATSON:  What does?
HOLMES:  Learning to see the puzzle in everything. They’re everywhere, once you start looking it’s impossible to stop. It just so happens that people and all the deceits and delusions which inform everything they do, tend to be the most fascinating puzzle of all. Of course they don’t always appreciate being seen as such.
WATSON:  Seems like a lonely way to live.
HOLMES:  As I said it has its costs.

(photo by Nick Hewling)

HOLMES:  ..the things that I do, the things that you care about, you think I do them because I’m a good person, I do them because it would hurt too much not to.
AGATHA:  Because you are a good person.
HOLMES:  No, it hurts Agatha. All of this, everything I see, everything I hear, touch and smell. The conclusions I’m able to draw, the things that are revealed to me, the ugliness. My work focuses me, it helps. You say I am using my gifts, I say I am just treating them…

(Elementary, created by Robert Doherty for CBS.)