From Tristes Tropiques

“Man is not alone in the universe, any more than the individual is alone in the group, or any one society among other societies. Even if the rainbow of human cultures should go down for ever into the abyss which we are so insanely creating, there will still remain open to us — provided we are alive and the world is in existence — a precarious arch that points toward the inaccessible. The road which it indicates to us is the one that leads directly away from our present serfdom: and even if we cannot set off along it, merely to contemplate it will procure us the only grace that we know how to deserve. The grace to call a halt, that is to say: to check the impulse which prompts Man always to block up, one after another, such fissures as may open up in the blank wall of necessity and to round off his achievement by slamming shut the doors of his own prison. This is the grace for which every society longs, irrespective of its beliefs, its political regime, its level of civilization. It stands, in every case, for leisure, and recreation, and freedom, and peace of body and mind. On this opportunity, the chance of for once detaching oneself from the implacable process, life itself depends.

Farewell to savages, then, farewell to journeying! And instead, during the brief intervals in which humanity can bear to interrupt its hive-like labours, let us grasp the essence of what our species has been and still is, beyond thought and beneath society: an essence that may be vouchsafed to us in a mineral more beautiful than any work of Man: in the scent, more subtly evolved than our books, that lingers in the heart of a lily; or in the wink of an eye, heavy with patience, serenity, and mutual forgiveness, that sometimes, through an involuntary understanding, one can exchange with a cat.”

This quote is very beautiful, and brings to mind two thoughts: 1) That we really might have graduated to a paradigm in which philosophy provides the most accurate reflection of the human condition (following the equivalent dominance of epic poetry - analogous with martial society - and novel writing, which was analogous with bourgeois society; and 2) that this sort of philosophy really does have a kind of formal, aesthetic value which constitutes part of the text's meaning.

Please note: this is the author with a monkey. I could not find a picture of him with a cat. Although, to be honest, I didn't try very hard. 

Impossible Brasil.

It’s a bit of a cliché to say that America and Brazil have a lot in common: they both gained independence and attempted, with varying degrees of success, to embrace constitutional democracy; they both had a westward race for land and resources; they both have an uncomfortable relationship with slavery and their indigenous population; and they're both bloody huge. But Brazil doesn’t feel like the US. In the States, you somehow get the feeling that the immigrants have occupied the land so completely that they’ve effaced all but a few government-sponsored scraps of its pre-history; in my Hollywood-shaped imagination, every square inch of the U.S. is occupied by vast wheat fields, homely New England woods, Thoreau-style national parks, suburban enclaves like the ones in E.T. and the counterweight urban sprawls of the east and west coasts.

Brazil doesn’t feel quite so domesticated, so orderly and tame. In Brazil, it feels like the cities are a crust floating on top of impossible depths. Perhaps it’s the jungle which does that. A quick search reveals that Brazil is the fifth most populous country in the world, yet the population of Brazil is massively urbanised, with 78% living in the cities, and most of the big cities clingingfor safety to the Atlantic coastal region. Behind them waits the endless jungle, Heart of Darkness-style, and the equally endless plantations of corn, soy, tobacco and coffee which help power the Brazilian economy.

That sense of strangeness, of a wildness only partially contained, hits you in different ways. Sometimes it’s seeing a beautiful Indian place name on the highway, like Pindamonhangaba, Taubaté or Itaquaqucetuba. Sometimes it’s hearing a song you love in the morning sun of a strange café and having that sudden vertiginous glimpse of how far the inchoate strands of music and ideas can travel, across the jungle and the mountains and the sea. Sometimes it’s walking into a graveyard and finding a dead black hen with a cigar in its mouth, sacrificed as part of a macumba ritual, that strange, catch-all term for the syncretism of Catholicism, Candomblé and other imported and indigenous religions. Sometimes it’s the way you simply can’t tell where a Brazilian originally came from, whether Europe, Asia, Africa, or Brazil, combined with the fact that most Brazilians refuse to cling to and define themselves by their immigrant past like so many of their north American cousins.

Another way to try and convey the sheer enormity and sense of dislocation which Brazil induces in a foreigner is to consider how many languages contiguously evolved in Europe, and how many distinct cultural traditions these languages represent; all those revolutions and rivalries, those horrors and wonders; Norse gods, King Arthur, Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Leonardo, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Jim Davidson, all crammed into a tiny, seething patchwork of warring principalities and fiefdoms and republics and picturesque scenes. Then you have to juxtapose that image with the fact that the whole of Europe fits inside Brazil, and yet Brazil has only one language and one overarching culture within which are swirled all the races, cultures, religions and music of all the millions of people who immigrated here and those who lived here for however many thousands of years (well, about eight thousand year) before the Europeans came.

It is this which makes Brazil so mind-boggling: the fact that it has so much richness and strangeness, but can never hope to reconcile all the various narratives. That’s not a bad thing. But it is, I don’t know, confusing; there’s always so much to take in, there are so many contradictions, so many examples of terrible inequality alongside wonderful, disarming instances of kindness, so many maddening incomprehensible accretions of old Brazil left behind by the glacial shift of history for you to trip over as you walk through modern streets. Perhaps that is both the tragedy and salvation of Brazil: it is too big to know itself, but it's big enough and strange enough to absorb the contradiction. 

B.O.U.R.G.E.O.I.S

I have decided that I love the middle classes. After years being ashamed of my bourgeois status because of the many abject twats I knew who were middle class and all the possibly fake working class people who inverse-sneered at my accent, my bag of toffees and my taste for scrumping, I can confirm that I have embraced with open arms my non-humble, non-privileged background. It’s not just me, either. I’m a zealous convert: I think everyone should be middle class.

Now hold on. Before you hate me, allow me to explain. I don’t mean that we should all be coveting semi-detached houses in Chiswick. I mean that we should all be aspiring to the middle ground. See, when you’re a kid, you feel ashamed of being stuck in the middle; you envy the working classes their inviolable cause and you envy the rich their inviolable entitlement. But the bourgeoisie are great precisely because they occupy the middle.

It’s no coincidence that Buddhism, a religion based on maximizing happiness, is known sometimes as the middle path. That’s where everyone should be, you see, sharing the middle ground. That’s where I imagine we'd all be happiest, with the same amount of education, the same buying power, the same access to nice things, the same opportunity to determine our futures, the same heightened awareness and, hopefully, the same sense of conscience.

The problem with Brazil, if I may venture to say so, is that there isn’t enough of a middle class. As I have said elsewhere, society here is polarised between the very poor and the very rich, with a huge gulf in between. Into this gap, this non-existent middle-ground, fall the few professionals who think more progressively, but they seem to be actively squeezed out or antagonised by the inability of the economy in its present state to accommodate their needs.

Things are changing, however; the working classes are getting more and more strident in their demands for proper jobs, rights and education. They are improving themselves. In short, they want to be middle class in the purely abstract sense of wanting to have enough equality to determine their own futures (which, ironically, is something the middle classes of the first world may be losing, but that’s another story). The rich of Brazil, however, seem to be seeking to prevent this transition, because the elevation of some people makes others want it for themselves, and suddenly all the serving classes, all their babas and drivers and maids, don’t want to be babas and drivers and maids anymore; they want to go to college and become librarians, beauticians and teachers. In that order. And then where would the rich Brasileiros be? Using eHow to learn to boil an egg.

What's the use of literature?

Priyamvada Gopal, Dean of Churchill College, Cambridge, and Senior Lecturer to the English faculty, appeared on yesterday's Start The Week to publicise her appearance on an RSL lecture entitled 'What's the Use of Literature?' and explain why she believes the Coalition's education cuts will impoverish the humanities. Regrettably, her argument seemed to revolve in ever-decreasing circles of solipsism around the idea that reading English is useful because close reading, comparing texts and appreciating the nuances of interpretation is useful. She didn't at any point tell us what these skills are good for, and it wasn't hard to imagine the collective sigh of 'so what?' going up around the country. The whole thing felt like a missed opportunity to draw attention to something both important and, to my mind, relatively obvious. What she should have said is that the abilities the humanities foster - independent thought, rational analysis, synthesis of information, considered judgement and eloquent argument - are vital components of a civilised society. Indeed, I think the humanities are the only manmade construct which holds equal sway alongside our inherent capacity for love in the difficult and strange process of civilising ourselves. Without the humanities you wouldn't have democratic government, civil rights, free speech, religion and the freedom to reject it, the welfare state, the civil rights movement, Radio 4 or The Beatles. As for the person who sneers and says, 'yeah, but so what?' - well, the plain fact is that he wouldn't be able to say that if it weren't for the humanities, because dialectic (the resolution of disagreement through dialogue) wouldn't exist without Socrates. So science cannot flourish without the humanities, and vice versa. For example, a scientist working on stem cell research is doing important but controversial work. Now, he doesn't need an English graduate to sit there and tell him whether what he's doing is right or wrong, but his thinking on ethics is nonetheless informed by every book he's ever read and every teacher he's ever had. And the degree of ethical consideration invested in our actions is the barometer of how humane, equal and emancipated a person, nation or species is. Furthermore the skills which humanities teach are a useful commodity in their own right. Without them we wouldn't have the tertiary economy which is vital to a nation like Britain with its dwindling agriculture and industry. Finally, a novel or a poem is the vessel which conveys our essential humanity: these are the artefacts which teach us to empathise with others, to remember and to dream. Of course, a dream doesn't have any inherent value. But that's the point of dreams: they're free, and, being free, priceless.

Micro-Theory 2: Tesco Spires

You’re driving along a busy dual carriageway. All you can see to either side are dusty trees and high palisades of fencing. Then, just for a moment, you see the shape of a church spire appear and disappear between the trees. And somehow you’re reassured by that – even though you’ll never know the name of the church or go inside it. You’re reassured, perhaps, by the thought that there’s still a rural England out there, a land of quiet spinneys and village greens, the town hall and the war memorial, Easter Egg hunts and home-made jams – and so forth. The only problem is that what you saw wasn’t a church: it was a Tesco Superstore, an out-of-town retail outlet with the same vast acreage and strip-lit aisles as Asda or Sainsbury’s. The difference with Tesco is that they plonk a super-structure on top of their store which is a sort of bastard amalgamation of clock tower, church spire and oast house, complete with picturesque weather-vane. Tesco is, I believe, the only supermarket which seeks to appropriate the traditional iconography of the village green in this way. And while Tesco is certainly not the only greedy supermarket out there, it is, as far as I know, the only supermarket which seeks to disguise the familiar process of draining money away from the town centre by subliminally evoking our collective memory of the same world which they’re helping to destroy, and supplanting themselves there as an empty, trashy surrogate.