Areopagus Volume XXV

Welcome one and all to the twenty fifth volume of the Areopagus. I could hardly have guessed when I wrote the first Areopagus for about thirty readers that, five months later, there'd be nearly sixty thousand. It's a joy and a privilege to write for you all.

And I'd like to mention once again that none of this would have been possible without David Perell and Write of Passage, who support my work without asking for anything in return. They simply want to help those who, like myself, are writing online. In a world that can seem so transactional it's remarkable to come across such deeply principled people.

Now, on with the show...

I - Classical Music

Toccata and Fugue in D Minor

Johann Sebastian Bach (c.1740)

Why this piece?

It is dramatic, rapturous, ornate, and majestic; and it gets better every time you listen. I don't think it's too unreasonable to say that this is surely one of the greatest pieces of music ever written. And when performed on an organ, when thundering down the nave and echoing over the vaults, the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor will lift you off your feet. From that famous opening - like a bolt of dark lightning- you know you're in for something special. And then it begins... a kaleidoscope of musical magic which leaves the listener breathless, uplifted, and transported.

There has been some debate about whether the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor is "representational" or "absolute" music. The former refers to a composition which seeks to evoke some extra-musical theme, such as a story or mood or place, and the latter to any work which simply stands on its own merits. An interesting discussion, certainly, but not one that matters too much. For there's something submlime here, and abstract or not, it seems to trascend whatever Bach might have once intended.

This music is also perfectly in tune with the architecture of the day; Bach's almost overwhelming Toccata and Fugue in D Minor feels like a musical interpretation of the overwhelmingly ornate and extravagantly decorated Baroque churches of the 18th century. Hence why I combined it with a picture of the Basilica of the Holy Helpers, constructed in the 1740s in Bavaria, Germany, and a supreme work of Baroque architecture. Its form is no less fluid, its minute detailing no less complex, its overall impression no less astounding than Bach's music.

What style is it?

As the title indicates, it begins with a toccata and moves into a fugue. The toccata is a piece of music for keyboard (including piano, harpsichord, or organ) whose purpose is to display the talent of the performer, typically featuring rapid movements and fast-paced, elaborate passages.

The fugue is essentially an exercise in counterpoint - the way melodically independent musical lines relate to one another and are harmonically interdependent. A basic theme is introduced at the beginning, thus to be imitated and developed throughout the fugue, resulting in a complex, interlocking composition that seems to unfold from within itself.

Both were popular forms in the Baroque Era (1600-1750), when the musical ideas that had been developed during the Renaissance (1400-1600) were taken to their conclusion. Not only did music become more expressive and dramatic, but composers like Bach brought a sort of mathematical precision to it. Using the internal logic of counterpoint they developed something like an objective musical language in which any given tune could be played in a hundred different but related ways. Few pieces better capture this compositional spirit than the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, which with its repeated imitations and unifying conclusion gives the delightful impression of a natural, internally-coherent musical journey.

Who was J.S. Bach?

The importance of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) to the world of music is hard to overstate. He was a once-in-a-generation talent whose prolific body of work is a monument of musical mastery. For many he is the greatest composer who ever lived, a genius who essentially created Western Music as we understand it today. So much for Bach's glowing modern reputation.

But what's more interesting than his current status is the long sleep that Bach once endured. Though we might be tempted to imagine classical music as a linear path of progress in which the masters of old collectively formed part of an ever-growing repertoire passed on from one generation to the next, the truth is rather different.

Bach, like so many great composers in the past, faded from the limelight after his death. Such was the norm for most of musical history. It was only during the so-called "Bach Revival" in the 1830s, largely led by the German composer Felix Mendelssohn, that Bach's name came to be so highly revered and his works so profoundly influential and popular. Even during his lifetime Bach was regarded as an old-fashioned composer, and it was more for his virtuoso skills than his compositions that Bach initially became famous. Indeed, when Mendelssohn conducted a performance of the St Matthew Passion in 1829 it had been a century since that piece's most recent performance.

This has all changed, of course, and Bach's name is written in the stars - literally. When the Voyager probe was sent into space in 1977 NASA compiled a "Golden Record" to accompany it; something like a short guide to human civilisation intended for extraterrestial life. The Golden Record also included a selection of music from around the globe, with three pieces by Bach - more than any other composer.

II - Historical Figure

Lord Byron

Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know

Who was he?

George Gordon Byron (1788-1824) became Lord Byron when his great-uncle died in 1798. The ten year old thus became a peer in the House of Lords and inherited a crumbling ancestral manor in Scotland. His life was a tumultuous one. One story goes - perhaps apocryphal - that Lord Byron kept a bear in his room while a student at Cambridge. What's clear is that he was a prodigously talented poet and a colourful character. By 1812 he had been given his famous descriptor - mad, bad, and dangerous to know - by Lady Caroline Lamb, one of numerous women with whom Lord Byron shared scandalous and well-publicised affairs.

It was in the same year, with the publication of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, that Lord Byron became both a literary and popular celebrity. He was a star of Regency Era London, the talk of the town for his wild lifestyle, popular poetry, and frequent battles with the "establishment" writers of the day, like the Poet Laureate Bob Southey.

No artist or individual so well captures the spirit of the Romantic Era like Lord Byron. The ideals of the Enlightenment - of pure rationality, say - had been victorious. But a generation of young artists were deeply dissatisfied with it; they felt that the beauty of the natural world had been demystified by scientific progress, that mankind's spirit had been dulled by too much rationalisation. And so it was Lord Byron, along with his poet friends John Keats and Percy Shelley, who championed the Romantic response to the Enlightenment in England. Whether Keats' portrayal of nature's unknowable beauty or Shelley's visions of social decay, these young artists sought to re-establish the sublimity of the natural world and of humankind.

But it's no coincidence that it was Byron who gave us an eponym - Byronic - to describe the ideas they embodied. For though his poetry is less technically superb than that of his contemporaries, Byron wrote with an astonishing energy and emotional power that seems to convey Romanticism better than anybody else. Don Juan, a lengthy poem unfinished at the time of his death, ranges from shocking to moving to hilarious. As somebody who's rather fond of burning the midnight oil myself, I rather like this stanza:

Though the line which best summarises Byron is this, from Childe Harold's Pilgrimage:

It was such world-weariness, such implacable melancholy, that has given the word Byronic its brooding overtones. Byron was unhappy with the world as he found it, forever searching - both in literature and in his life - for a sense of purpose and peace. Emotion was Byron's poetic currency; a forthright challenge to the Age of Reason. For something a little shorter than Don Juan or Childe Harolde's Pilgrimage you should try out The Corsair; it has all the classic characteristics of a Romantic poem, with wild adventure, great romance, and a heavy dose of melancholic fatalism.

Soon enough he became involved in the push for Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire in the 1820s; perhaps, after his years of chaotic celebrity and unfulfilling wanderings, Byron had found something truly meaningful. He used his fame to raise funds for the Greek revolutionaries and even went out there to join the fight. I should also add that when Lord Elgin returned to England with a selection of marble friezes hacked off Athens' Parthenon, Byron was among his most vocal critics. Alas, he caught a fever during the Siege of Missolonghi and died in 1824, succumbing like his friends Keats and Shelley to an early death.

We cannot say whether Byron would have been happy with such a fate, but suffice to say that it seems only fitting for a man whose every word and action was dedicated to the Romantic ideal that he should have perished in this way.

III - Painting

Cracked Ice

Maruyama Ōkyo (1780s)

Why this painting?

How remarkable that a few scattered lines can conjure up the image of a frozen lake, and even colourless can draw us to picture the heavy frosts of deepest winter. The human imagination is terrifyingly powerful; Cracked Ice is evidence of that. For despite its simplicity I find this painting utterly engrossing. Ōkyo's reduction of a natural scene to its most basic elements, to its fundamental essence, is typical of Chinese and Japanese landscape art. In this way it's more like poetry than art, more like a harmonic meditation than a representation of reality.

I also like Cracked Ice because it shows how supposedly modern trends are often far older than we think. Abstract art may seem like a recent invention, but the quasi-abstract work of Ōkyo and many other painters of his era and region - who used a few simple brush-strokes to evoke the natural world - would suggest otherwise.

Who was Maruyama Ōkyo and what style is Cracked Ice?

Maruyama Ōkyo (1733-1795) was both an influential and a controversial artist. He spent the bulk of his life in Kyoto, and there became involved in the creation of new Japanese school of art. See, Chinese-influenced Japanese art had long operated on different lines to Western painting. Since the Renaissance European painters had made the conquest of reality their goal: the representation of the world as it really looked, with three-dimensional perspective and realism, even idealised, its main features. In Eastern Asia, however, artists were less interested in representing reality as it looked and more in what it meant.

But contact with European nations had brought representational art to the attention of Japanese painters. Whereas some dismissed its realism as undignified, Ōkyo saw the potential for a new style. From him came the Maruyama–Shijō School, a style which blended European realism with traditional Japanese essentialism. The results, as in Cracked Ice and its vanishing-point perspective, are rather splendid. Many of Ōkyo's other paintings are less abstract, leaning more towards the European than the Japanese. I thoroughly recommend exploring them.

What was it for?

As I've written before, galleries (or disembodied pictures online) can make us forget that art almost always has a specific context and purpose. Cracked Ice is actually a decorative folding screen, or byōbu, used in Japanese households to separate interiors. These decorated screens became an art form all of their own; it gave people a chance to surround themselves with the evocation of a different place - a forest, a mountain landscape, or a frozen lake. Specifically, Cracked Ice was a furosaki byōbu, to be placed in front of the fire during tea ceremonies. It is quite beautiful on its own, but surely even more beautiful when lit from behind by a fire, as an atmospheric backdrop to the tea ceremony.

IV - Architectural Masterpiece

Roman Walls of Lugo

Living Ruins

Fact-File

Lugo is a small city in Galicia, a region on the Atlantic coast in northwestern Spain. It was conquered in 13 BC and renamed Lucus Augusti by Paullus Fabius Maximus. Iberia had taken a long time to conquer, and so Lucus Augusti became a vital outpost for the Roman Empire; in the 2nd century AD a monumental circuit of walls was build around the town. They were over two kilometres in length, up to seventeen metres high in places, and featured over eighty towers. What's remarkable is that, nearly two thousand years later, these ancient walls are still standing. In fact, Lugo is the only city in the world to have a fully intact set of Roman walls.

Why is it a masterpiece?

As you may have guessed, the truth is that Lugo's Roman walls have not survived by accident, nor in their original state. Over the centuries they have been repaired, tampered with, and restored several times. In the 19th century, as the city grew, five larger gates were added to the existing Roman ones to aid traffic and pedestrian circulation. Since then they have undergone everything from simple preservation work (such as the removal of invasive weeds) to more thorough rebuilding.

Now, the restoration of ancient ruins can seem unthinkable; it's impossible to imagine returning something like the Parthenon in Athens to its original state, for example. Back in the 19th century, a time when Victorian restorers were radically altering Medieval churches, the English artist and scholar John Ruskin wrote this:

But the thing about ruins, even while we can look at them and learn from them, is that they can't be used. Sometimes, then, perhaps it isn't such a bad idea to rebuild them as they once were, or even to meddle with them a little. After all, the most striking feature of Lugo's walls - that broad pathway which runs along their entire length and allows you to walk around the entire old town - isn't an original Roman feature. Is that inauthentic? Maybe.

But the result is an object of great pride for the citizens of Lugo. And, more importantly, these walls are now a central part of the life of the city. From a purely economic perspective they draw in tourists - no bad thing. More meaningfully, they are a place where Lucences go walking, whether with their dogs, on their lunch-breaks, or in romantic pairs, where they go for runs in the morning and where they simply hang out. What might have been a disconnected string of rubble is instead a living, breathing part of Lugo; it is both a part of the city's ancient history and its modern life.

Now, there's nothing unusual about a European town with walls; almost every city once had fortifications, whether Roman or Medieval. What's incredible is that Lugo's survived. During the 19th century, as industrialisation swept the continent, it became the norm for a city to demolish its walls. After all, with their defensive purpose no longer relevant, they were simply a barrier to urban development. London, for example, once had a circuit of walls. They were Roman in origin and had been further expanded during the Middle Ages. But in the 19th century they were almost completely demolished to make way for new roads and urban expansion projects, with only a few fragments now scattered around the city.

And so the Roman walls of Lugo are testament to the possibilities of restoration (as opposed to mere preservation) and the way that ruins can actually become a part of modern life. Rather than existing as a static reminder of the past, that past can merge into the present and the future; like culture itself, architecture needn't be frozen in time. They are also evidence of the value of simple preservation itself; had those walls been demolished, like so many others around Europe, Lugo would have been denied a unique cultural quirk. There are surely many other ruins with such potential.

V - Rhetoric

Greguería

An aphorism is a short, memorable statement which contains a nugget of truth or a useful principle. And the greguería is a type of aphorism specific to Spain and Latin America. The idea is to express a thought - whether philosophical or mundane - in a witty and original way, usually by inverting expectations and making use of surprising images. So think of it like a humorous aphorism with a poetic, oftentimes surreal twist. For example:

The greguería first appeared in the early 20th century, pioneered by Ramón Gómez de la Serna, and has since worked its way into culture more widely. While they are funny in a paradoxical, surrealist sort of way, I think there's more to the greguería than mere wit. They're a wonderful way to connect ideas that otherwise would never be put together.

"Idea generation", as it is sometimes rather clinically termed, is a challenge for any writer. If you struggle with it then why not read a few greguerías - or even try writing some! - and see what strange things you can throw together.

VI - Writing

Clarity & Brevity

Complex ideas require more than a handful of words to really explore, but it's hard not to feel pressured by the Internet Age - where attention is the most valuable commodity - and its preference for numerical brevity. Use as many words as you need. Just make sure you couldn’t have used any less. I embolden that statement because it would be a terrible mistake to believe that, simply by writing more, you will by proxy arrive at greater depth. Many a short work has done far more than a thousand words than others have with ten times as many.

Indeed, the words clarity and brevity are often thrown around in the world of writing advice. But what are they? Neither clarity nor brevity are necessarily about short sentences, simple words, and a modest length of text. They can be, and often are, but don’t need to be.

First: what is clarity? A clearly written work is one in which the reader knows, at all times, what the writer is writing about. The corollary of such clarity is that the writer’s ideas, arguments, images, emotions, and thoughts will be readily understandable by the reader.

Second: what is brevity? Brevity does not refer to the same things as clarity – short sentences and simple words. Polybius prized brevity, but his Histories were formed of over forty separate books and perhaps four hundred thousand words. Brevity is the elimination of extraneous detail. In other words, brevity is saying only what is important.

Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables is over one thousand pages and five hundred and forty thousand words long. And yet his novel is an ideal of clarity and brevity, despite its length, because Hugo communicates clearly at all times and only ever writes things worth writing. The power of such brevity and clarity is that every word and sentence of his work - however many there are - becomes pregnant with meaning.

Remember: a book is only as long as the sentence you’re reading. All you can do is make that one sentence meaningful.

So, to write clearly and briefly is to say only what is important and in a way that the reader can readily understand, regardless of the length of text. Horace wrote in his tenth Satire that ‘one needs to be succinct, so that the thought may run on and not become entangled in wordiness that weighs upon weary ears.’ That is the price we pay for falling short of brevity and clarity. Our meaning becomes entangled in wordiness and the reader is forced to expend mental energy separating the wheat of what is worthwhile from the chaff of needless words. This danger threatens ten words no less than ten thousand. But a hundred thousand well-written words, no less than ten, can be a burning bullet fired from the rifle of meaning.

VII - The Seventh Plinth

Laconic Wit

Each week, in response to the critical thinking question, one or more of you usually responds with a laconic answer - one which is terse and pithy.

Laconic is a great word. But where does it come from? You may be surprised to hear that laconic as an adjective actually refers to a region and the characteristics of the people who inhabit it rather than abstractly describing a quality. Specifically, it refers to the ancient citizens of a region in Greece called Laconia, whose capital was Sparta. Now, the Spartans are famous for their warrior-culture and status as the ultimate fighters of the ancient world - so much was also true in 400 B.C.

And a key part of this martial lifestyle was the preference for action over words. They made a point of avoiding needless talking, showy rhetoric, and frivolous dialogues. Spartans were expected to be brief, clear, and to the point. The result was a uniquely blunt sense of humour, called "Laconic" by the Athenians. Here are some examples of Spartan humour that have come down to us in the history books, many of which also convey that distinctive Spartan pride:

And here, the best of all, from Plutarch:

All of this was in contrast to Attic wit - the humour of Athens, Sparta's great rival - which was generally much more elaborate and refined. In any case, that's the etymology of laconic, a great word with surprising origins.

Question of the Week

Last week's question to test your critical thinking was:

What makes a joke funny?

Julio N's answer seems to capture what most of you thought:

While Guillermo G argued that delivery is actually more important than content:

Neil W suggested three factors for the success of a joke:

And here was Laura W's answer, one that Lycurgus himself would have been proud of:

And for this week's question, inspired by Lugo's walls:

Should we restore ruins or preserve them as they are?

And that's all

So the twenty fifth volume of Areopagus comes to an end; I hope you found it useful, interesting, and beautiful. To be quite honest I think I'm going to listen to Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor again.

You'll be hearing from me on the 1st December. Until then - good night, and thanks awfully.

Yours,