Friends

Staying at Combe Florey, Jack and I went one afternoon for a walk and Jack, wanting a stick, rather stupidly chose a light cane. This he broke, and on our return went shame-facedly to Evelyn to apologise. Evelyn was really upset and angry - he loved this small, rather dashing cane - and Jack felt an ass. When we got home he wrote to Evelyn asking him to send it to Briggs to be mended but Evelyn replied 'Tonkin has been spliced locally', and Jack forgot the incident.

Some weeks later I said to him, not thinking much about it:

'Annie has a letter from Evelyn in which he said: "The Donaldsons came to stay. He broke my cane.".'

'Oh no,' Jack cried. 'How beastly of him.'

Evelyn Waugh: Portrait of a Country Neighbour, Frances Donaldson (1967)

Their first halting-place was Yenidje, and Lear, armed as usual with letters of introduction, was staying with the postmaster. As they were drinking coffee in the evening an incident occurred which, though unfortunate in itself, provided an example of Oriental good manners which filled him with delight. In his awkward, shortsighted way (in a room where there was neither table nor chair) he stepped heavily on his host's handsome pipe-bowl. He apologised profusely through his interpreter, to which the postmaster, bowing as he sat cross-legged on the floor, replied: 'The breaking such a pipe-bowl would indeed, under ordinary circumstances, be disagreeable; but in a friend every action has its charms....'

Edward Lear: Landscape Painter and Nonsense Poet 1812-1888, Angus Davidson (1938)

Both Waugh and Lear travelled, sometimes alone (though I think Lear was the more intrepid) in remote parts of Europe and adjoining continents. Both were men for whom humour (of utterly different kinds) was essential in their relationship to the world.

This is the bicentenary of Edward Lear's birth - see A Blog of Bosh

Unicredit - and others

Shares in Unicredit - the largest Italian bank by assets - were suspended forty-five minutes after trading began at 8am this morning, during which time they fell by ten per cent.The trigger was the news this morning that Unicredit's emergency €7.5bn cash call was going to be priced at an even deeper discount than feared. The bank, which needs the funds (second only in quantity to those required by Santander) to shore up its capital reserves, is selling shares at a 43% discount to their market value, which had already fallen by fifty per cent over the past year.

Yet, least we should be feeling too comfortable here in the UK, look at this table courtesy of Morgan Stanley:

It seems we'd all be doing quite well by international comparisons if it weren't for the green column, courtesy of our much vaunted and nation-saving financial sector. For fuller and more balanced commentary refer to the article in Business Insider.

And consider also:

Bank share prices show a clear pattern of two waves of ‘collapse’ among large retail, or retail/investment, banks.

The 1st wave saw falls of 90% plus in the shares of banks such as Citigroup, Lloyd’s and RBS. No significant recovery in their share prices has taken place since – which is why they may, in terms of share prices, be characterised as ‘collapsed’ banks.

A number of other large banks – of which Barclays, Bank of America and Société Générale may be taken as examples – initially suffered very severe share price falls during the international financial crisis but then saw a significant recovery. Their share prices are, however, now again falling towards the level of the 1st group of banks. It, of course, remains to be seen whether this trend will continue, but a current tendency of a 2nd wave of banks being drawn into crises which essentially destroys share prices is clear.

Democracy in action

Mitt Romney has won the Iowa Republican caucus ahead of Rick Santorum by the narrowest of margins - eight votes.

Romney polled 30,015 votes. Total votes cast were 122,255. The total population of the State of Iowa was estimated by the US Census Bureau in July 2011 as 3,062,309. If one asumes that roughly half the population is entitled to vote in the presidential election, approximately 2 per cent of the electorate have just given their backing to Mitt Romney.

Republicans, we are told, seem set to save Obama's bacon by choosing from a pool of candidates that neither they in general, nor the country as a whole finds very attractive. Yet much may change in the outside world between now and the election.

A shiny, capacious new identity card?





World enough

And you should if you please refuse
Till the Conversion of the Jews

To early Christians belief was not of overwhelming importance, if one is to judge by the incidence of forced and mass conversions and conversion by conquest. Perhaps that was the cynicism of the powerful; perhaps a reflection of the hard realities of temporal allegiance; perhaps an acceptance that the rites of conversion established a reality of themselves.

To most modern Christians belief is essential to conversion, but for some denominations conversion takes place through selection by god, and is therefore irresistable.

My impression is, that in the modern polemic against religion, it is belief that is excoriated; faith escapes with its skin intact. By faith here I mean, not the sense of the corpus of belief, as in the Christian, Jewish or Muslim faith, but the word used in the sense of a personal experience. In religious discussion the it is, unhelpfully, often used simply to mean a religious belief, but there is a real distinction between belief and faith. Faith has necessarily elements of trust and adherence; there is something more reciprocal about it than with belief, which is rather more a subscription to an externality. Perhaps that is why belief draws the polemical atheist's fire, intent as he often strangely is on establishing the non-existence of any god. Notions of keeping faith, of good and bad faith, have a currency in modern non-religious thought with which it may be more enlightening to tangle.

The Mower against Gardens

Luxurious man, to bring his vice in use,
Did after him the world seduce,
And from the fields the flowers and plants allure,
Where nature was most plain and pure.
He first enclosed within the gardens square
A dead and standing pool of air,
And a more luscious earth for them did knead,
Which stupified them while it fed.
The pink grew then as double as his mind;
The nutriment did change the kind.
With strange perfumes he did the roses taint,
And flowers themselves were taught to paint.
The tulip, white, did for complexion seek,
And learned to interline its cheek:
Its onion root they then so high did hold,
That one was for a meadow sold.
Another world was searched, through oceans new,
To find the Marvel of Peru.
And yet these rarities might be allowed
To man, that sovereign thing and proud,
Had he not dealt between the bark and tree,
Forbidden mixtures there to see.
No plant now knew the stock from which it came;
He grafts upon the wild the tame:
That th’ uncertain and adulterate fruit
Might put the palate in dispute.
His green seraglio has its eunuchs too,
Lest any tyrant him outdo.
And in the cherry he does nature vex,
To procreate without a sex.
’Tis all enforced, the fountain and the grot,
While the sweet fields do lie forgot:
Where willing nature does to all dispense
A wild and fragrant innocence:
And fauns and fairies do the meadows till,
More by their presence than their skill.
Their statues, polished by some ancient hand,
May to adorn the gardens stand:
But howsoe’er the figures do excel,
The gods themselves with us do dwell.

Andrew Marvell
Latin Secretary for the Council of State of the Protectorate
Member of Parliament for Kingston upon Hull

See also Cannons: a tale of wealth, property, art and patronage

Infidels

A new year, if not a new age, dawns.

In modern polemical debate, 'belief' is spoken of as referring almost exclusively to religion. Those arguing that the persistence of real or token religious observance in present-day western society is illogical and pernicious can refer to 'believers' confident, in a mirror image of the use of 'infidels' by some modern Muslims, that their readers will be thinking of a duality between Christians, mostly, and atheists.

It is almost as though a deity were the only significant object of belief, and if religious observance were to disappear, as many hope for and consider inevitable, so too would the phenomenon of belief, as a perversion of knowledge and experience uniquely, and deplorably, manifested in religion. Yet belief, like love, fear, hope, hate, trust, delight, is just one in the range of modes of human experience, although those are intellectual abstractions of states that seldom, if ever, exist in individual isolation. We all believe in many things, from the mundane to the profound, and religious belief occurs in many forms, colours and admixtures.

It will probably be objected that this is defensive sophistry: there remains a hard distinction between those who do and those who do not believe in a god. Yet what that constitutes, what, exactly, a god is understood to be, has varied greatly through history and societies. Even now it is a question of legal debate as to what can claim the state's indulgence as a 'religion'. Current argument tends to focus on the idea of god as a 'supreme being', a term not wholly unambiguous but certainly inconsistent with many past and present forms of religious belief. The concept of course was the distinctive development of Judaism that has been passed on to Christianity (sometimes a little insecurely) and Islam, and it is both something of a religious peculiarity and a notion sympathetic in overall form to modern scientific understanding of the world. As such, it is perhaps seen as distastefully competitive.

The strangely active atheistic argument in our society directs little of its fire against the non-Judaic religions: Hinduism, despite the violence sometimes conducted in its name, appears to get off relatively lightly, and Buddhism, as the 'religion without a god' gains a little of the dispensation allowed to an emasculated appreciation of the B Minor Mass or the Sistine Chapel ceiling, although its priest-ridden structure and deference to a supreme earthly authority makes it vulnerable to disapproval.

Religion is chiefly scorned for its irrationality, but the charge sheet seems to be headed with utilitarian objections. One wonders what the modern disputants would think of the gentlemen in Addison and Steele's coffee house, with their over-riding concern that religion should be free of 'unseasonable passions' and that gentlemen (and ladies - though it would be impolite to doubt their destination or manner of arrival) should 'go to heaven with a very good mien' - or of Edward Gibbon's lament at the destruction of civilisation wrought by 'barbarism and religion'.