Too busy to blog

Things have calmed down and I'm free to think again, outside the parameters of established tasks. I have watched the late November sun, the early December sun, rise late in the South Eastern sky and pass low over the length of the loch. People shudder at the supposed absence of daylight up here but there is mysterious light before sunrise and after sunset and in the twilight skies are big and dramatic, even when they are heavy with rain.

I was in Edinburgh recently, en route down to Bakewell, and found a fine, lively book on Goethe by John Armstrong. I remember reading Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers when I was still at school and being transported by the passionate nature mysticism, which I noticed then much more than the love life, noticed because it gave me a language for the experience of the gorge and the valley, the rushing stream, the rocks, the giant beeches, the wind. This was at the time when I was becoming aware of his lyrical poetry through hearing the Schubert settings. Many years later I was struck by the notion of Entsagung, renunciation, the moment one knows that one has to deny an impulse that before one felt was a proper means of self-expression, so that one grows, but not in the direction one anticipated, or according to any prior and favoured conception of growth.

Armstrong is good and eloquent on these things associated with Bildung, with growth towards maturity as a human being, and this all sits well with the recent turn towards philosophy as a way of life. It is particularly pertinent to my own thinking about the nuances of the term 'world'. Armstrong is surely right to credit Goethe with the question, how should we live in an imperfect world? as the correct development of the bare question, how should we live? And it is good to see him connect this with scepticism about the natural goodness one associates with Rousseau. So the real question should be, how should we live, given that we are flawed beings in a flawed world?

I must find my old copy of Goethe's Italian Journey. There's a wonderful sighting of the young Emma Hamilton dancing on a table in skimpy dress and tambourine in a Roman salon (or was it in Naples, there's a great painting of this in the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight, outside which gallery as a child I used to send out my green toy yacht into the boating lake as water cascaded from the mouth of some energetic Greek god. She was the mistress, wasn't she, and then the wife? of the elderly British Ambassador. Interesting to read Goethe's observations. Strange that we don't seem to have a reciprocal word for mistress, as in husband and wife: mistress and ...? what does this show us?

Rather drifting away ... The collection of eighteen essays is now with the publisher, probably to be called Philosophers and God: Religion, Life and Reason. Quite tough to write an introduction against the clock. I'm rather weary of all the God stuff, but have to write a paper for the RIP series in February, which I'm calling 'Spirituality for the godless'. I'm wary rather than weary of the term 'spirituality' but it's a good starting off point to take us into the subjectivity of the moral life, indeed into the questions implicit in the Goethe life.