Areopagus Volume LXXXVIII

Welcome one and all to the eighty eighth volume of the Areopagus. First: more and thrilling (a little bit of hendiadys for you) news from my patrons at Write of Passage — enrolment for their next cohort opens tomorrow! A cohort for what?! For learning how to write. It's a course that places you in the heart of a writing community and teaches, specifically, the art of writing online. This is the Internet Age, after all, and Write of Passage have placed themselves at the forefront of this new frontier.

If you'd like to hear more about Write of Passage and their upcoming course, click here.​

Now, by way of prelude this week, I offer you but four lines of verse. They were written by the great Elizabeth Barrett Browning in the 42nd of her so-called Sonnets from the Portuguese:

To add more words, or even commentary, would be folly. So, the tone thus being set, and not wishing to "exceed the measure of a Preface", as those forty seven translators of the King James Bible said... onward!

I - Classical Music

Hamburger Ebb und Fluth I: Overture

Georg-Philipp Telemann (1723)

Performed by the Bremer Barockorchester
​Fireworks in Hamburg by Christian Fritzsch (1745)

This is an almost indisputably lovely piece; like so much Baroque music it has an air of pomp and occasion, an atmosphere of celebration and delight. Georg-Philipp Telemann wrote it, specifically, for his native city of Hamburg. Its name means "Hamburg Ebb and Flow", although it is usually known simply as Wassermusik, or Water Music, like the piece of the same name by George-Frederick Handel.

Telemann's Water Music is a ten movement orchestral suite, with each of the movements named after and inspired by a figure from Classical mythology somehow related to water — for Hamburg was, and remains, a booming port town. This sort of classicising mindset was also typical of the 18th century, and one cannot but read a poem or polemic from that era without finding it infested by references to or peculiar transmutations of Classical mythology. Who was Telemann? One of the leading composers of 18th century Europe and a friend of both Bach and Handel. He was supposed to be a lawyer — at least, that is what his parents wanted — but he became a musician and the world was much the better for his boldness.

This music is, as said, lovely in and of itself, but I think it is also useful to hear something adjacent to those other two great and perhaps more popular composers. Because no artist, however great, ever stands alone. Handel's Water Music, Zadok the Priest and Music for the Royal Fireworks feel like the definitive works of a certain sort of celebratory Baroque music. No doubt they are, but Telemann was equally gifted at crafting such music, and by listening to Telemann's Hamburger Ebb und Fluth alongside that of Handel it enriches our sense of their relative musical personalities, of their interdependence as composers of the same age, and of our broader feeling for the Baroque.

II - Historical Figure

Nabonidus

Last King of Babylon

Mesopotamia, in modern-day Iraq, was the original cradle of human civilisation. Cities and writing — and so much else — were invented there first, between the banks of the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. There was no precise moment when this civilisation emerged, but safe to say that by the end of the 4th millennium BC Mesopotamian society was flourishing. First were the Sumerians, after whom rose the Akkadians, and in their place the Babylonians.

This long and essentially uninterrupted line of Mesopotamian kingdoms finally came to an end in 539 BC. What happened? A man called Cyrus, from Persis in modern Iran, had arisen from obscurity and, after establishing an empire that stretched from India to the Aegean, conquered Mesopotamia. Thus the last of the native Mesopotamian kings, Nabonidus, takes his place alongside the likes of Romulus Augustulus, Constantine XIV, and Mehmed VI as the final ruler of a centuries-old and storied dynasty.

But Nabonidus is not only interesting because he was the last king of humanity's oldest civilisation; he was, in himself, a fascinating figure. See, Nabonidus has sometimes been called history's first archaeologist. A bold claim, but justifiable on the whole. For example, Nabonidus revived a number of ancient religious and political roles during his reign, alongside excavating, studying, and restoring old statues. Such statues, alongside inscriptions and tablets, he used to try and date the various reigns of his predecessors and key events in Mesopotamian history, especially those relating to Sargon of Akkad, who ruled in about 2,300 BC. As a later chronicle records:

He also ordered the restoration of several ruined temples, but rather than going at it willy-nilly he had them excavated and analysed so they could be rebuilt as they had originally looked. The best example is the Great Ziggurat of Ur. This was a large temple in the city of Ur in the south of modern-day Iraq (and the purported home of Abraham!) dedicated to the Sumerian moon god Nanna, or Sin to the Babylonians. It had been built in about 2100 BC but thereafter fell into decline. Under Nabonidus it was studied and restored on a grand scale, and it is largely the work carried out under his rule that was rediscovered by Sir Leonard Woolley in the 1920s. This was itself partly restored in the 1980s.

Otherwise he seems to have been something of a religious reformer, and his persistent attempts to promote Sin as the major Babylonian god — instead of the traditional primary god, Marduk — saw his priests rebel and make his son Belshazzar co-ruler. But no amount of reform could save the Neo-Babylonian Kingdom from the rising tide of Cyrus, who was beyond doubt one of history's greatest and most important leaders. His Achaemenid (or Persian) Empire was history's first true empire, and when he set his sights on Babylon its fall was only a matter of time. This phase of history also overlaps significantly with the Bible; it was Cyrus who ended the captivity of the Judeans and it was Belshazzar who featured in the eponymous story from the Book of Daniel.

After Cyrus' conquest there was also an account written of Nabonidus' rule. And, as ever, this particular history was very much written by the victors. Thus Nabonidus was portrayed as an evil king:

And then we are told how Cyrus was the liberator of Babylon:

Perhaps all of this is true, but we shall never know for certain. Still, and either way, the end of Nabonidus' reign at the hands of Cyrus marks one of those striking and strange historical fulcrums — a genuine turning point in the narrative of humankind. Here it was that the oldest civilisation in our history (notwithstanding a handful of later rebellions and without forgetting their immense cultural legacy) was finally and formally extinguished.

III - Painting

The Many Faces of Rembrandt van Rijn

You may have heard of Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, almost always known by the mononym Rembrandt. He is regarded as one of the greatest artists who ever lived and remains, as he was during his lifetime, fabulously popular. But why? What made Rembrandt so great, if at all he was? A question that might be answered in one of several ways, of course, all of them reasonable — but there is one above all that fascinates me. See, I think it is correct to say that we know the face of no pre-modern historical figure, from anywhere in the world and at any point in time, better than that of Rembrandt. Why? Because he painted, drew, and etched his own face almost one hundred times:

It wasn't that Rembrandt "invented" the self-portrait as a genre, and there was already a fashion in the 17th century Netherlands for purchasing the self-portraits of famous artists. But he was the first — perhaps with the exception of self-portraits in earlier Chinese and Japanese art — to paint self-portraits as we think of them today: intimate, expressive works of art in their own right, as genuine visual autobiographies.

We have neither time nor space to investigate all of Rembrandt's portraits, but even a small selection reveals much. Looking through them you can see the changing expressions of a precocious youth who became a world-weary, though still witty, old man, right up to the year of his death in 1669. His early self-portraits, like this one from 1630 (at the age of twenty four) are bursting with creative ecstasy:

Then, at the outset of his career and once his star had already risen, we find self-portraits full of confidence and swagger, with self-fascination that would verge on hubris if it weren't for a certain sense of detached, critical curiosity:

Throughout we see a steady maturing, both of the man himself and the artist. In this self-portrait from 1640 you can see that the youthful excess has started to melt away, replaced by something like a calm, self-conscious melancholy — although, as ever, the confidence is there.

Rembrandt's life became increasingly difficult in the 1650s; recession hit Amsterdam and after selling all his paintings for a fraction of their real value he was bankrupted. This, along with earlier personal tragedy — including the death of his wife Saskia — and a gentle fading of his local popularity, took its toll. Here, in 1665, we can surely see all that in his eyes.

His self-portrait drawings and etchings, meanwhile, are particularly expressive — some of them funny and some remarkably modern:

It seems that Rembrandt looked at himself with a rare composure, and in an age now when we look at our own faces more than ever, what with smart phones and selfies, there is much we could learn from how he did so. Rembrandt was eternally and shamelessly inquisitive about himself, introspective in what we might call a Shakespearean way, akin that old adage written upon the Temple of Apollo at Delphi: KNOW THYSELF.

It is incredibly moving to place two of Rembrandt's self-portraits, separated by about forty years, alongside one another. And it is those words of Matthew Arnold, from his poem Dover Beach, that come to mind upon doing so:

Few artists are comparable in this way — the likes of Vincent van Gogh, Zinaida Serebriakova, and Frida Kahlo come to mind as painters who have crafted the total vision of a human being across their life. There is more to Rembrandt than his self-portraits, and more that makes him worthy of the praise with which he has always been apprehended, but it is this striking, confident, contemplative, unusual personality — as revealed in those self-portraits — that defines all the rest of his work. Where to start with Rembrandt? With the man himself.

IV - Architecture

"From off the battlements of yonder tower..."

The rest of this Areopagus has become a somewhat wordish affair, and so the Architecture section I shall keep brief. Rather than telling you about a single building, or about a specific architectural element or general movement, I am willing to go out on a limb and offer (should I be so bold; should you be so gracious to think it worthy!) some advice: LOOK UP.

This could mean many things, but in this instance I am referring to roofs. Every building must have one, but rarely are two roofs alike, especially when you have buildings of different eras and different purposes clustered together. I had considered hunting for the most interesting rooftops I could find, but far better I thought to simply photograph a somewhat typical London street and show you what I mean. So here we have four consecutive rooftops, each of different heights and of totally different forms, together looking rather like the wildflowers and grasses of a meadow:

First: it is simply interesting to spend a few minutes picking out the various features of such a roofline — the various ornamentation, the inventiveness of the architects in fitting such fabulous shapes into such narrow spaces, the contrast between the plain white cornice of a Georgian roof with the flowing parapet of something rather more Victorian, the different materials, and so on.

And, second, it is a rewarding endeavour to try and understand exactly why and how a building's roof has been designed in its way. Take the roofline of this next building, which has a most unusual arrangement. We find a row of windows on the penultimate storey, separated by arches — quite ordinary so far. Now, one would expect these arches to open onto a balcony or terrace, but here they open directly onto the slates of the roof pitch itself! I can't say this is particularly effective or pretty, for in truth it looks quite strange, but it is certainly interesting and one wonders how this happened.

And all of this can come before we even know anything about roofs, about the East Asian hip-and-gable, the mansard, the Rhenish helm, onion domes, tented roofs, gambrels, open gables, closed gables, Dutch gables, crow-stepped gables... it is a long list, and one of infinite variation within each model, not to forget their infinite varieties of cross-pollination. Yes, roofs are a world of delight — and that is without addressing their related features like chimneys, windows, balustrades, parapets, cornices, corbels, towers, and suchlike. Knowing the terminology and workings of architecture is important, useful, and enriching, but knowing them is useless without the necessary first step of looking. The easiest thing in the world — and yet a thing we do so rarely. Look up! It is, I have found, almost always more fun than looking at one's phone.

V - Rhetoric

An Untameable Fire

You may remember, from previous instalments of the Areopagus, that whether or not rhetoric is an intrinsically moral thing has been debated for thousands of years. Plato said it wasn't, and alleged that Socrates agreed with him. For them rhetoric was simply the art of persuasion, a thing that could be used for good or bad. For Quintilian, meanwhile, rhetoric was fundamentally a moral force. Only a good person could be a good speaker, so he reasoned. This old argument was on my mind when I stumbled across this passage from the Epistle of James:

Strong words, but not without justification — and there are comparable passages in wisdom literature from all around the world, whether the Norse Hávamál or the Hindu Upanishads. How much trouble in the world, whether in daily life or geopolitics, has been caused by a needlessly loose tongue? How much trouble could have been avoided by bridling that tongue? Yes, with the art of speaking comes a duty to not say certain things, for the good of ourselves as much as the good of others. And I think this is the right way — or, at least, the Quintilianesque way — to think of rhetoric. Not as a neutral skill, but as one that demands of us a standard of behaviour. By recognising that the tongue is indeed an untameable fire (a fact always worth remembering) we prepare ourselves for the necessary job of watching what we say and working hard to say it prudently.

VI - Writing

Fiat Lux!

How to write? A question that has many answers, and one best answered with another question: in what sense? So-called "style" — word choice, grammar, syntax — is only one element of writing, and I daresay overrated. Just as important, if not more so, is what we choose to write about. After all, if Hemingway was nothing more than clipped prose then everybody would be just as good as him. William Shakespeare is another example. He did not "create" the stories he told in his plays; he took them from others. Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, Henry IV, Coriolanus — all these he loaned from the likes of Raphael Holinshed and Plutarch (via Thomas North). Does this make Shakespeare any less great? Not so. The very skill, the ultimate skill, lies in deciding what to write about rather than how to write about it. Thomas Carlyle, a 19th century historian, wrote about this with typical vigour:

This passage struck me, in part, because I have had similar thoughts. I had known that Shakespeare drew on Plutarch for his plays, but when I read Plutarch I realised that arranging his original narratives into such compelling dramas was a miracle. Not that Plutarch wasn't a good storyteller — in truth, he is one of the greatest biographers who ever lived! Rather, Shakespeare had the job of turning his biographies into stage plays. Insodoing he was able to look into the narrative and perceive what was of most import, what needed to be left behind, in what order things ought to be arranged, the exact balance of the characters and the precise moments or actions that reveal them best.

But this does not only apply to drama; it is true of all forms of writing. Because you can write about anything, but not everything — and therein we find the strange and eternal tension of all writing and speaking. Even on a narrow subject we must choose precisely what to mention and what not to mention. Even the question, "how was your day?" could be answered in an essentially infinite multitude of ways. This being the case, there is one line of Carlyle's passage I would have us remember, above all:

That is the ultimate test for any writer — what must be mentioned, what must be set aside, and in what order must you say these things? Can you take chaos and out of it make a world?

VII - The Seventh Plinth

Dogs Then & Now

The modern world is, I think it fair to say, pet crazy. Never before have household animals been so popular or revered, and with the rise of the internet — of cute animal videos and suchlike — this trend is only rising. Perhaps for this reason we have a tendency to imagine that people in the past were less affectionate toward animals. Well, not so many days ago I was wandering around the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and in its courtyard I came across this curious duet of plaques, hidden away in a corner to which nobody was paying attention:

It made me smile — how it could not?! — and also reminded me of that fabulous painting by Sir Edwin Landseer, of whom I have written recently, called A Distinguished Member of the Humane Society.

It was painted in 1831 and it depicts a dog called Bob who was washed ashore after a shipwreck and then, while living on the riverbanks of London, saved upwards of twenty people from drowning. For this noble service he was awarded membership of Royal Humane Society (normally reserved for humans, I should add), given a medal for it, and granted a lifetime's worth of food. The crowning achievement of Bob's canine career was a portrait by Landseer. This is simultaneously moving and funny, and reveals an historical conception of animals that might surprise us.

In any case, the story does not end there. The dog mentioned on the right-hand plaque, called Jim, belonged to Sir Henry Cole. Cole was an interesting man who, among other things, helped set up the Victoria & Albert Museum. In his diary for the year 1879 he recorded this entry:

Touching. And here is the illustration in Punch he was referring to:

Cole even made some sketches of little Jim:

A charming story — and one that inclines us to believe that, had animal videos been around in Victorian Britain, they would have been no less popular than now!

Question of the Week

A fortnight ago I said this:

Tell me about an underappreciated writer — from any era or place, living or dead.

And here were your responses...

Rachel F

Sean G

Tina C

VR

Jay F

Diogo U

Alberto C

Garth H

Harriet W

Cindy A

And for this week's question... I set you another challenge, inspired by the Architecture section:

Find an interesting roof and send in a photo — feel free to add your own commentary.

Email me your responses and I'll share them in next week's newsletter.

And that's all

Sir Philip Sidney, that 16th century prince of poets, has been on my mind lately. His Astrophel and Stella was a sequence of 108 sonnets on the theme of love, woven together by an overarching but elusive narrative, much of it tangential and philosophising, all of it delicate and exquisitely poised. The 39th of these begins thusly:

Has sleep ever been so serenely, purely described? To sleep I now go — I bid thee good night, Gentle Reader, and until the Areopagus next!

Yours,

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