Thought for the future

When one comes to think of it one cannot help feeling that nearly half the misery of the world would disappear if we fretting mortals knew the value of silence. Before modern civilisation came upon us at least six to eight hours of silence out of twenty four were vouchsafed to us. Modern civilisation has taught us to convert night into day and golden silence into brazen din and noise. What a great thing it would be if we in our busy lives could restore into ourselves each day for at least a couple of hours and prepare our minds to listen to the Voice of the Great Silence. The Divine Radio is always singing if we could only make ourselves ready to listen to it, but it is impossible to listen without silence… ~ Mahatma Gandhi
Photo was taken by me in Ladakh on the Bailey bridge crossing the Indus river approaching the Tibetan Buddhist monastery of Stakna which can be seen on the hill ahead. The bridge is so narrow that cars have to fold in their mirrors to cross it! Any copyrighted material is included as "fair use" for critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Also on Facebook and Twitter.

Comments

billoo said…
lovely thought, pli. Thanks for sharing it (reminded me of Illich's 'silence is a commons')

Can't resist, though, mentioning Churchill's comment on learning Gandhi was back in town (London)..."oh no, not that bloody fakir again!"

:-))

Salams,

b.
11:44 am
Pliable said…
Churchill also referred to Ghandi as "a half-naked fakir". That disparaging reference is quoted in Sudheendra Kulkarni's admirable The Music of the Spinning Wheel.

http://www.overgrownpath.com/2014/09/this-digital-fixation-is-damaging-live.html
8:16 pm
billoo said…
Gotta admit that's quite funny, pli. (don't know why the word fakir reminds me of Spike). Which is not to take away anything from Gandhi's greatness, of course.
4:36 am
Philip Amos said…
If I have made any friends via my occasional comments on this most admirable of blogs, I'm probably about to lose the lot, but I'm an historian, albeit retired, and I do so like accuracy in quotations.

I must say that the words attributed to Churchill by billoo sound a lot more characteristic of Eric Idle. But that apart, the words of WSC that gave rise to the "half-naked fakir" image, surely one of the best-known of the plethora of things Churchill never said, were:

"...a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well-known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the viceregal palace..."
12:26 am
billoo said…
You're probably right, Philip! I can't even remember where I read it. But it does 'sound' true and isn't that part of the historian's job as well, to find the balance between scholarship and imagination (Peter Brown)?
5:21 am
Philip Amos said…
Ah, but, billoo, it doesn't sound true. WSC did not phrase like that. Also, a shelf of my library contains works by or on him, and I don't think he ever used the word 'bloody', though he may have. And he never referred to Gandhi as a 'fakir' in that way. The mere use of the word is not enough.

When historians of my age and (even older) Peter Brown's speak of the 'historical imagination', we don't mean just making stuff up. (See Collingwood, Oakeshott, Barfield, White, et al.) That we really do leave to Monty Python, Hollywood filmmakers, and the historical novelists averse from research. Oh, and also to the younger generations of historians who adhere to post-modernist thought, giving primacy to subjective opinion and bringing the historical discipline to an undignified end.
10:16 am
billoo said…
No, Philip, quite agree with you, I don't think the imagination is the same thing as subjective opinion and there are obviously dangers of 'fancy'-to take up Peter Brown again-developing without discipline, effort and the constraints of reality (or social institutions).

So, yes, your point is well taken...it was a flippant comment and I can see how it must be quite infuriating as a scholar to read that. I would be interested to know in what sense Churchill used the word 'fakir' but am extremely weary of using Pli's space here for this digression)

Perhaps we can at least agree that it was quite funny?
4:48 am
Philip Amos said…
Heavens, yes, billoo, and it was funny. On the other hand, I wasn't in the least infuriated. I meant my first comment to come across in a vein much lighter of heart than it did. I suspect I was very tired when I wrote both comments -- my insomnia of world-class severity catching up with me. I've enjoyed our chat very much. Thank you!
3:35 pm
Post a Comment

Recent popular posts

David Munrow - more than early music

Image
'David Munrow and the Early Music Consort of London transformed our view of medieval music. The impact of their performances far surparssed any that had gone before: by demonstrating how medieval music could sound normal, they created a niche for it in the concert hall and on record that it has never lost' ~ From Daniel Leech-Wilkinson's notes for Music of the Gothic era May 15 2007 is the thirty-first anniversary of the death of David Munrow. His contribution to the acceptance, understanding and performance of early music almost defies summary. He was born in 1942, and learnt the bassoon and recorder as a child. Between school and university he travelled and taught in South America , and started the collection of ethnic instruments that were to give him, and the world, a new perspective on early music making. He read English at Pembroke College , Cambridge, and was encouraged by Thurston Dart to take an active role in the music-making of that most musical of cities. ...
Read more

Classical music must be doing something wrong

Image
Classical music's website of choice Slipped Disc  today runs a story on the latest RAJAR UK radio listening figures . This story states that a "...record number of individual hours was spent listening to [BBC Radio 3]. They must be doing something right". Which is good news; but only for those who believe that facts should never stand in the way of a good story. Because simple arithmetic shows that BBC Radio 3 is not doing very much right, while UK classical radio in its entirety is doing something wrong.   In the quarter ended September 2024, BBC Radio 3 and Classic FM audiences were 2.039m and 4.416m respectively. Which gives a total audience for the two classical stations of 6.455m. For the same quarter in September 2023 the audiences were 2.002m and 4.467m, giving a total classical radio audience 12 months previously of 6.469m.  So BBC Radio 3's "something right" turns out to be a fractional increase in its audience year on year, and a contribution ...
Read more

The Accidental Pilgrim

Image
There are an awful lot of books around about the journey to Santiago de Compostela in particular, and pilgrimages in general; and let’s be quite truthful a lot of them are rather average. But one that stood out from the crowd for me was David Moore’s The Accidental Pilgrim which was published in 2004 as a paperback by Hodder Headline Ireland, and is available in both the UK and US. The serendipitous path that links these posts meant that I bought this book in the departures lounge at Stansted Airport en route to the Danish Thread Subtitled 'Travels with a Celtic Saint', The Accidental Pilgrim is the story of a 1500 mile bike ride by the author from Bangor in Northern Ireland to Bobbio in northern Italy via France and Switzerland. The journey follows in the footsteps of the Irish missionary Saint Columbanus who made the journey in the 6th Century. (Which coincidentally, and linked to other threads , was around the time that Gregorian Chant was emerging as the official musi...
Read more

Soundtrack for a porn movie

Image
"No, you have not landed on Slipped Disc by mistake. Respected electronic music pioneer Klaus Schulze tells the story himself.  The origins of " Body Love " are quite funny. I received a call from a movie producer named Manfred Menz and I wound up becoming his principal composer for a period of time. Amongst others, I composed the "Barracuda" soundtrack for him [1978, previously unreleased on album]. This led to a friendship which lasts till today. Menz now lives in Malibu, California where I visited him a couple of years ago. Anyway, this guy calls me and asks if I would compose the score to a porn movie. I said: "Porn? Nah, I don't do that kind of thing".  As it turned out, the director of the movie, Lasse Braun, had already shot it and had used my albums " Timewind " [1975] and " Moondawn " [1976] as a kind of "working soundtrack". This was obvious because the couples in the film were moving in time to my gro...
Read more

The Berlin Philharmonic's darkest hour

Image
Wilhelm Furtwängler was born on 25th January 1886. He was Music Director of the Berlin Philharmonic from 1923 to his death in 1954, and held this position for the twelve years that Hitler was in power. In January 1945 he was conducting in Vienna, and fled from there to Switzerland where he remained until the Battle of Berlin ended in the defeat of the Nazis. The musicians of his orchestra remained in Berlin during its darkest hour. Here is their story: On 28th March 1945 the Russian forces commanded by Marshal Georgy Zhukov were just twenty miles to the east of Berlin. A month previously Albert Speer had been replaced as Nazi armaments minister after trying to persuade Hitler that defeat was inevitable. Speer now turned his energies to preventing the musicians of his adored Berlin Philharmonic from perishing in the inevitable final battle. Reich Commisioner Dr Joseph Goebells, who was in charge of the defence of Berlin, had ordered the entire orchestra to be drafted into the Vol...
Read more

To listen to classical music you need a good pair of eyes

Image
The periodical Nature reports on research by a social psychologist which shows that judgements about the quality of a musical performance are influenced more by what is see than by what is heard. The remit of the somewhat superficial research was the impact of body language, which means it did not consider a little-known but far more important link between the eyes and sound. It has long been a puzzle as to why high-order harmonics extending beyond the upper limit of human hearing produced by fine instruments such as Stradivarius violins make the music sound better. Similarly there has been no explanation as to why extending the frequency response of an audio system beyond the upper limit of human hearing improves the sound quality. But recent medical research has shown that our eyes are sound as well as vision transducers, and that the eyes play an important role in passing ultrasound to the brain. While the upper limit of human hearing ranges from 15 to 18 khz depending on age, ...
Read more

The act of killing from 20,000 feet

Image
Today's Guardian reports the attempted suicide bombings at UK airports under the headline ' A plot to commit murder on an unimaginable scale' . Any attempt to take human life is abhorrent, and thank heavens the alleged plot was foiled. But let us not forget that killing on an unimaginable scale by aircraft is not the monopoly of any one ideoology. ' As German fuel supplies dwindled in the autumn of 1944 and into the final months of the war, aircraft were grounded, tanks halted, training for replacement pilots could not be maintained, and most of the new and highly effective Messerschmitt 262 jet-fighter aircraft (photo above), of which over 1,200 had been produced by the end of 1944 and which might have considerably prolonged the war, had neither fuel to fly nor trained pilots to fly them. The ME 262s were anyway extremely fuel-hungry aircraft, and those that went into action had to be towed to their end of their runways to conserve fuel, cows were used to do the towin...
Read more

Eric Whitacre outsells Mozart

Image
How to reach new audiences is a continuing preoccupation of the 'serious music' community. Yet just this week a surprise classical best-seller has shown how to do it. You don't need dumbing-down , the latest avant-garde tricks , classical music night-clubs or free Beethoven MP3s. What you need is great contemporary music which is innovative, honest and accessible. It needs to be recorded by an enterprising label, with top-class performers and engineering. It also needs to feature a marketable personality and be supported by the media. Cloudburst , a CD of Eric Whitacre's choral works sung by Polyphony, is currently the surprise UK classical best seller. It hit all the hot buttons, and proves that a full price CD of music written in the last fifteen years can outsell the TV promoted greatest hits of a dead guy from Salzburg. Andrew Cane of leading UK independent classical store Prelude Records explained to An Overgrown Path yesterday: " Cloudburst had been ou...
Read more

Nothing but malice, unchecked egoism, rawness...

Image
German violinist Christian Tetzlaff has explained his decision to cancel his American concerts saying "I feel utter anger. I cannot go on with this feeling inside. I cannot just go and play a tour of beautiful concerts". Tezlaff then goes on to express a sentiment that many of us share: "There seems to be a quietness or denial about what’s going on". This prompted a post by the ever-wise Alex Ross headlined The Spirit of Casals . Which in turn prompted me to reread articles I wrote many years ago after visiting Casals' beloved Catalonia . These reminded me that Casals' wisdom is still as painfully relevant today as it was when he was railing against Franco's authoritarian regime. Here is one example  of that wisdom: Music must serve a purpose; it must be a part of something larger than itself, a part of humanity; and that, indeed, is at the core of my argument with music today - its lack of humanity. A musician is also a man, and more important than his...
Read more

What I envied him was his courage

Image
Brother Paul saw me off, repeating his assurance that it had been an honour. On the road in the bright sunshine, I found myself envying him. But precisely what was it that I was envying? The warmth of the cocoon that surrounded him? His certainty? The joy that peeped out again as we shook hands? His faith itself? To some extent, of course, all of these, but there was something else: his courage. The truth is that I am unable to believe that when Christ said: 'My Kingdom is not of this world' he meant that it was. Among the fifty monks of Notre Dame d'Aiguebelle, it was possible to see, misty but unmistakeable, the point. The enclosing shell of the monastery becomes a symbol of what must be the ultimate truth not only of Christianity but of all religions: the Kingdom of Heaven is within. For the monks within the walls, for the rest of us, within the human heart, which has room enough for all the walls there are. We all carry within our hearts a Notre Dame d'Aiguebelle, ...
Read more