Music: Sibelius 7. Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic.
'And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it.”
This is the best-known extract from Roald Dahl's The Minpins, near-unique among Dahl's children's books in not being illustrated by Quentin Blake. I've always had a soft corner for this book- not because of the short and straightforward plot, but because of a particularly magical page, illustrated with reverent solemnity by Patrick Benson- a young boy riding a swan high above the clouds. The majestic, soaring quality always reminds me of that beautiful climax around five minutes into Sibelius 7 (play the video).
Here is Dahl, describing the scene: I think it's important to remember that Dahl's works, so often wacky and gruesome, could soar to such sublime heights. The great common denominator of Dahl's work, really, is not the tone but the absolute freedom of a child's imagination. Just reading this is liberating:
'Oh, it was a wondrous secret life that Little Billy lived up there in the sky at night on Swan's back! They flew in a magical world of silence, swooping and gliding over the dark world below where all the earthly people were fast asleep in their beds.
Once, Swan flew higher than ever before and they came to an enormous billowing cloud that was shining in a pale golden light, and in the folds of this cloud Little Billy could make out creatures of some sort moving around.'
Billy, who does not speak the swan's language, cannot ask who they are.
(This scene is rather reminiscent of that in James and the Giant Peach, when the peach soars past the Cloud-Men, only here Dahl leaves us, mysteriously, with no explanation).
On another voyage, they see a 'gigantic opening in the earth's surface,' a gaping abyss; they plunge to the bottom, where they find a great lake, 'gloriously blue,' filled with swans- 'thousands of swans swimming slowly about,' Billy marvels, but again, cannot ask, and never understands. 'But sometimes mysteries are more intriguing than explanations.'
Earlier today, I discovered Igor Levit's recording of Busoni's Fantasia after JS Bach- a criminally underrated piece, hauntingly beautiful. The brooding broken chords of the opening moved me so greatly, so unexpectedly, when I first heard them, that I rewound to try and figure out why. It was no use. As Oscar Wilde says somewhere, it is futile and plain wrong to attempt to recreate feelings, especially responses to art.
I'm very fond of reading people's descriptions of discovering art- almost as much as I like discovering art itself. Take Yeats's loving preface for Tagore's Gitanjali:
'I have carried the manuscript of these translations about with me for days, reading it in railway trains, or on the top of omnibuses and in restaurants, and I have often had to close it lest some stranger would see how much it moved me. These lyrics— which are in the original, my Indians tell me, full of subtlety of rhythm, of untranslatable delicacies of colour, of metrical invention—display in their thought a world I have dreamed of all my life long. The work of a supreme culture, they yet appear as much the growth of the common soil as the grass and the rushes.'
Tolkien's marvelling reflections upon discovering the Old English poem Earandel (as discussed by the medievalist Eleanor Parker in her fine blog)- are quieter, less fervent, but no less relatable:
'I felt a curious thrill, as if something had stirred in me, half wakened by sleep. There was something very remote and strange and beautiful behind those words, if I could grasp it, far beyond ancient English.'
These words have a universal ring, I think, for anyone who has discovered some fresh gift from the past.
As mathematics, too, is an art, I'm including a video of the mathematician Andrew Wiles, who laboured for years to find a proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, a seemingly simple theorem unproven for hundreds of years. In this clip, Wiles describes the moment he realised that two separate approaches he'd been trying to attack the theorem with, could be beautifully combined.
This video, especially the part beginning at 1:58, is one of the finest treasures of YouTube. I highly recommend watching the original BBC documentary from which the two or three separate clips in this video are taken, or reading the related book).
On a less philosophical note, and more in a boisterous New Year's spirit, here's the immortal Heifetz playing the Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso. It's just one of those recordings- I've heard more polished and finely shaded interpretations (like Bomsori Kim's beautiful take), but Heifetz's very twentieth-century combination of majestic aristocracy and don't-care badassery is uniquely endearing.
Update: I got recommended Francescatti's version of the same piece, which is amazing in a different way; sweet, lyrical, friendly rather than imperious. Also worth a listen.
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