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The Exquisite Adonis Blue

The Adonis Blue, loveliest of all the blue butterflies and rivalled only, perhaps, by the White Admiral as a thing of delicate wonder in flight, lending its  grace to the beauty of the chalk uplands of southern England. This is the butterfly of our joyous childhood excursions to Hod Hill, where, I hope, it will continue to flourish long after the footprints of rapacious men fade from view. LJ 

 

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A provisional top ten of films

Quite frivolously, I’ve been reflecting on films that I associate with joy. This is a provisional, personal top ten, which is unlikely to be understood.

The Quiet Man

Det sjunde inseglet

Lawrence of Arabia

Les ripoux

How Green Was My Valley

Amarcord

Jacques Brel is alive and well and living in Paris

The Castle

American Hot Wax

Nuovo Cinema Paradiso

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George Steiner, at once provocative and truthful

The number of human beings who, at any given moment and in any defined society, care deeply about literature, music and the arts, for whom such caring comports a truly personal investment and opening of being, is small. Or to put it more accurately, where accuracy is of the essence: the ordinary museum visitor, the fitful reader of poetry, of exigent prose, the audience for classical and modernist music as these are performed, broadcast or recorded, participates in a rite of encounter and response which, after the period of secondary and, possibly, of tertiary education in which such encounter may have been assigned its cultural and social functions, belongs less to the sphere of commitment than it does to that of decorum. In numerous societies, moreover, even this participation enlists only the privileged. Given a free vote, the bulk of humankind will choose football, the soap opera or bingo over Aeschylus. To pretend otherwise, to edify programmes of high humane civilization as arising from improvements in mass education – such didactic projections are active in Jeffersonian or Arnoldian liberalism no less than in Marxism–Leninism – is cant. Those who, in actual fact, generate the syllabus, who recognize, elucidate and transmit the legacy of literacy in regard to textual, artistic and musical creation, have always been, are a handful.

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From George Steiner’s “Real Presences”

A fascinating insight:

“Two principal impulses energize the American spirit: immanence and egalitarianism. The crux of American time is now. The past matters in direct reference to its usability in and by the present. American sensibility tends to invest remembrance not in historicity but in Utopia. Transcendence itself is made pragmatic; the definition of tomorrow is that of the empirical realization of substantive dreams. No other culture has so dignified the immanent. Concomitantly, the egalitarian ideal seeks to domesticate excellence. The European canon orders vertically, gives differing ranks to the products of intellect and of feeling. Its strategies are those of exclusion. The Parnassus, the Pantheon of official glory, integral to European humanities, are suspect to American sentiment. The American genius would democratize eternity. “

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