Today marks 30 years since Tom Stoppard's dazzling play Arcadia opened at the
National Theatre. Praise and analysis of the work's sparkling wit and wisdom is probably well past saturation, but there's never a wrong time for appreciation of my favourite protagonist, the sarcastic (but who isn't, in this play?) Septimus Hodge. The young tutor's evident struggles to tame both his private life (the resultant comedy of errors in the first scene is priceless) and his precocious pupil, Thomasina, can distract from the fact that he is in fact a wise teacher. Partly wilfully, and partly through ignorance, he gives little outward hint of awe at Thomasina's intellect until the very end, spurring her on rather than allowing her to bask. He also gives the most stirring speech of the play, summarising its key themes, when she laments the losses to classical literature from the destruction of the Library of Alexandria. We cope, he points out:
'By counting our stock. Seven plays from Aeschylus, seven from Sopocles, nineteen from Euripides, my lady! You should no more grieve for the rest than for a buckle lost from your first shoe, or for your lesson book which will be lost when you are old. We shed as we pick up, Like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew? I have no doubt that the improved steam-driven heat-engine which puts Mr Noakes into an ecstasy that he and it and the modern age should all coincide was described on papyrus. Steam and brass were not invented in Glasgow.'
This briskly pragmatic speech remains one of the most moving in dramatic history-at once a consolation for what is lost, a humbling reminder of our interdependence, a celebration of our collective creative genius, and an observation of the cyclical nature of creation. I've often come back to this when reflecting sadly on the early deaths of Schubert, Chopin and Boulanger. Time is irreversible, as Septimus reminds Thomasina earlier in the play, comparing it to the jam which she cannot un-mix from her rice pudding- the past is lost to us forever. But this irreversibility sits nicely along a complementary cyclicality, and the human capacity to work from what we have- 'we must stir our way onward mixing as we go.... This is known as free will or self-determination.'
Septimus's advice, of course, is made all the more touching as himself is forced to "stir his way onwards" after the death of Thomasina at just seventeen (just as they had started to fall in love), devoting the rest of his days to continuing her groundbreaking work on entropy.
Normally, when listening to Bach's Contrapunctus 14, I prefer recordings which break off where Bach stopped writing- heartbreakingly mid-phrase. But a couple of years ago, for the first time, I listened to one of the versions "completed" by a modern pianist. It was Trifonov's now-legendary Deutsche Grammophone performance.
I don't think I could ever have anticipated, or will ever forget, how I felt when Trifonov picked up what I had long accepted as just a shard of a phrase, and kept right on going. It was an electrifying joint of history, an 'I got you' moment reaching back through time and space. I shed very nerdy tears.
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