Creative Non-fiction Archives - Page 2 of 4

The Salon

I have always been jealous of the poets and writers of yore. The name on a book tends to be singular, but the reality was that almost every great name lived at one time or other as part of a circle, whose every member buoyed each other up, so that the work that came out the other end always bore the marks of collaboration. I think of Goethe’s friends at Jena and Weimar in particular, or the various literary-revolutionary circles in Russia. The best things anyone has ever achieved have always been the work of groups, and literature is no exception. The salons, the visiting evenings of the nineteenth century’s aristocracy always left me feeling more than a little jealous, for our world has changed, and such things are little possible today. But not, it must be said, impossible altogether.

In my case, I was inspired by a friend of mine. One year, he invited me and several other friends round to his house in Jurmala, on the Baltic coast, to meet his girlfriend. I had met her before, but not his friends. One was a refugee from Russia, a revolutionary featured in the papers who was now living in the US, another was a Czech interested in China and AI while still able to speak Latin, and the third was a genius in the truest and most chaotic sense of the word. Every day it was politics, history, art, and conversation heaped upon conversation. Good food, walks around Riga and along the Baltic coast – nothing could top the impression it left upon me. The girl herself spent the time hiding upstairs. In all honesty, I cannot blame her. I remember walking out of my room one midmorning to hear some of the guys downstairs talking about British fascism in a way that wasn’t quite condemnatory enough for my tastes, then wheeling around and going back to bed.

But the time I had there left a strong impression on me, and eventually, I decided to organise something similar with my own friends. We are extremely lucky to have a Swiss chalet in our family’s possession, and I took the approach that not sharing it with others would be a terrible waste. Switzerland, that legendary neutral country, is also at the centre of Europe and easily accessible from any of its corners – or indeed, from further afield. It was a logical choice for a friend group that has since university been scattered like marbles from an upturned bag.

As I get older, I have come to certain realisations that may seem quite ridiculous to those who have already reached them, but which would seem equally ridiculous to those who have yet to have made them their own. The good life, at least the kind of good life that I am after, is so simple that I sometimes feel I must have missed something. Good food, fresh air and nature, meaningful and impactful work, the company of people I love, the self-realisation that comes through creative endeavour, the expansion of the soul that comes through learning and sharing one’s thoughts with others – these are simple things. Yet to notice them and then to live according to them, to make them real and present – that’s the task of our entire lives.

The inaugural salon had as its goal the bringing together of a number of my friends in an environment that would allow people to rest, to think and to walk, with as little stress and as much freedom as possible. I imagined everyone lounging on sofas discussing Kant or some other interesting topic, perhaps with a glass of wine dangling precipitously over the carpet, exhausted physically after a day spent hiking in the mountains.

I miscalculated. I miscalculated both in ways that were positive and in ways that were negative. My first mistake was a certain overconfidence. You would have thought that an invitation to spend up to a week staying in a Swiss chalet for free with no obligations other than occasionally croaking something interesting for the host’s entertainment would be extremely popular. It was not so. There were many mumbled apologies and sorry-I’m-busys, which in the latter case at least was almost certainly partly my fault for being a little disorganised about sending invites. In the end, instead of two weeks and eight to twelve guests, the salon was only one week and only four guests, plus myself and my girlfriend. For a trial run, which this was, I think it was for the best.

First, those positives. I found myself enjoying things that I wouldn’t have expected. Being a host was actually a lot of fun – setting the table, cooking meals, doing the washing up, and maintaining a certain amount of order and cleanliness. It wasn’t just my desire to control things that made me have fun; it was also a certain amount of pride in offering a service to others and trying to make it the best I could. Whether it was getting up early to make the house nice or standing by the sink half-hearing conversations after dinner, there was real romance in what I was doing that I had hardly expected.

I also discovered that my ideal of people just lounging about philosophising isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I ended up with four people in all – and to simplify in a way that is a little uncharitable to the people themselves who are far more complicated than this makes it sound, there were two people who were quiet and philosophical, and two who were much louder and “normal”. I discovered that the person with whom I probably had the best chats, the one most obviously deep down a certain spectrum I myself belong on, was also the one who was outright unable to help with the cooking or cleaning, and whose behaviour was generally fairly odd. (There is a restaurant I will be embarrassed to return to on his account). But on the bright side, one evening while the others danced drunkenly inside, I stood with him on the balcony discussing Aquinas and the challenges of interpreting early Biblical texts that remain even when one knows the original languages, for he is studying Ancient Hebrew in Israel.

Those loud people, who did not necessarily always want to discuss the loftiest topics – though, of course, we managed that perfectly well as well – turned out to provide things I hadn’t counted on needing when I started planning. They were great around the house, cooking, cleaning, and making such a hubbub that everything was bathed in a warm orange glow. What I had forgotten was that intellectual conversations without much life surrounding them, no matter the passion behind them, feel somewhat sad and empty after a while. In short, I realised that I should put far more weight behind factors that I had not previously considered important.

Things I had not counted on were mostly related to the actual running of things. There was a certain amount of stress concerning money and making sure nobody spilled anything on the carpet. More difficult, however, was the tiredness that sunk its teeth ever deeper into me as the week-or-so went on. Now, true to the salon’s aims, I could just disappear upstairs for a nap – the guests, left to themselves, were happy to go for walks or read Jane Austen or do whatever work they had – but even so, I found myself getting grumpier and ever more tired as the time went on, which obviously turned me from that prim and proper host I had been at the beginning into a terrible creature much befitting the mountains around us and their mood of Romantic desolation. I am extremely grateful to my girlfriend for not only taking on the lion’s share of the housekeeping, but also doing it fantastically. Without her I think we might have starved conversationally and definitely would have starved culinarily.

Now that everyone has gone, I am able to reflect. Already the tiredness is dripping away, and what remains are the good things – the photos, the memories, the numbness in my legs from all those walks, and last but not least my newly-acquired knowledge of the early Church Fathers. The fundamental idea behind the salon, of bringing my friends together, worked like a charm. There were good conversations, both with and without me. People who knew each other, got to know each other better, and those who did not know each other, managed to make at least a new acquaintance, and possibly in a case or two, a new friend.

What we are doing in this life, I still don’t know. We make decisions whose consequences we cannot apprehend, and even those decisions are made with the desperation of someone being carried down a hurtling river, reaching for something to hold on to. But I can say that, except for my wallet, which is not that important anyway, the salon achieved what I wanted it to do. It made a break in the torrent, a space for rest and for caring about people rather than one’s goals and ambitions, and for that I am grateful. I hope that next year we may manage two weeks instead of just the one and get new people to experience the wonder of the Swiss Alps and the peace of the mountain peaks.

Two Days in Trieste

Of course, I wanted to stop at Trieste, not Venice, on the way to visit my brother in Slovenia. Venice, even discounting my having been there once before, is the more familiar city, even if you haven’t yet visited. It is the habitual inspirer. I, who have barely any interest in travel literature, know of at least three serious writers who were besotted with the place. Venice is the home of schemes, daggers in the dark, and romance of a certain sort. But it is also a place that you can picture, that you know already, and so you know that even if you do go there you probably won’t be able to see it through the fog left by so many images, so many cliches, all those things that clog the brain.

I wanted to see Trieste instead. This was Joyce’s home, his place of exile – he wrote Portrait and most of Dubliners and much of Ulysses here. But more than Joyce, I wanted to see the ghosts of Austria-Hungry. More so even than Vienna, I thought that Trieste, the port city purpose-built by the Austrians to cater to their imperial and maritime ambitions and filled with Austrians, Jews, and Italians, surrounded by villages speaking mostly Slovenian, would be the place where the traces of that multi-ethnic medley would be most visible. Traces, memories carved into brickwork perhaps, but nothing more – I knew I could only ask so much.

Leaving the city after the first night, on a bus to Ljubljana, you rise up onto the karst – the hard rocks that mountainously surround the city and are covered with a dense thickness of green pines. From up there the view back down to the city, provided the twists and turns of the road have spared you seasicknesss and allow you to look back the way you came, in my mind is more than anything else reminiscent of the south of Crimea, which I visited two years ago. There too a mountainous forested landscape, rising above a civilized beach community with pretentions to Europeanness, with its promenades and serious stony buildings. Nowadays few foreigners visit Yalta or Alupka, and those that did would find a past as badly distorted as the dreadful statue inspired by Chekhov’s “Lady and the Little Dog” which blights the boardwalk.

Trieste was the Austrians’ port, its window to the East just as Saint Petersburg was Russia’s window to the West. The Baron Revoltella, whose museum-house is the main touristic attraction within Trieste’s city limits, was the largest private shareholder of the Suez Canal, and a noted Egyptophile. The first ship to pass through the Canal, before even its official opening, flew the flag of Trieste. Venice was wrest from the Austrians in the course of the Risorgimento, but Trieste miraculously survived until the empire itself collapsed at the end of the First World War. Returned to Italy, it no longer had any purpose and began a long decline that I suppose continues to this day.

There were only two trains in the train station the morning I left Trieste for second time, on the way back. It was as if the station itself were trying to tell me that this place is a dead end. Once trains ran to Vienna, via Ljubljana (then Laibach) and Graz; to Salzburg and Munich via Undine; to Prague via Gorizia; and southward to Pola, today’s Pula, at the bottom of the Istrian peninsula. Now the southern station is closed, half the northern one is bricked up, and only the tracks along the waterfront remind us that once this place was really alive, pulsing with imperial energy, and the hustle and bustle of world trade.

What remains? A beautiful square, some equally beautiful buildings, a pier. And the atmosphere, of course. Jan Morris, in her Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, which I picked up in a local bookshop, calls it “a city made for exiles.” And there is something in that. Trieste was built for a world that no longer exists, for a country that no longer exists. No matter how much tourism and research, the city’s main contributions these days, may attempt to rejuvenate it, or its authority over the autonomous region of Friuli Venezia Giulia, this city still seems to sit waiting for the return of the country that gave it purpose. It seems to be waiting to go home. Any exile finding herself in Trieste would know the feeling well.

The view towards the sea from the Piazza Unita d’Italia, once Piazza Grande

Besides Joyce, we might know his local friend Italo Svevo, author of the novel Zeno’s Conscience, about a man attempting to quit smoking. As a neurotic novel from the early 1900s, it fits rather comfortably into the other literature that the dying Viennese empire was producing at the time – all depressed people, dispossessed people, and people dislocated from reality. A wander round the art gallery that occupies the same building as the Revoltella Museum reveals that literature was not the only area in which Trieste seemed to live under the influence of Vienna. Cartoons, illustrations and paintings, all seem to be by someone – Egon Schiele or Klimt or any other more famous Austrian – anyone, in short, other than who they actually are by: native Triestinos who had studied in the same places, whether Munich or Vienna, at around the same time. This is rather startling, yet another push towards disorientation. We can no longer trust ourselves.

Trieste is not a big city. Like Vienna, the collapse of the Empire left it in a death spiral that it took time to recover from. It is a planned city, so walking around it is not difficult. There is only a single canal, the Canal Grande, and as it is covered with bridges and surrounded by cafes, it is unlikely to impress. But more than I remember Venice doing, Trieste has inspired me. There is something disconcerting by all these buildings, whose original purpose has been lost, standing so confidently around as if someone forgot to tell them their party is over. Everything seems alright, but clearly is not. I do not mean that the city is in decline, because those days have passed – now Trieste is quietly successful and a lovely place to visit. I mean that the city seems to tell two contradictory stories, making it every bit as schizophrenic as the modernisms that once argued amongst themselves at its literary cafes.

Saint Petersburg is also a great city that has lost its way. Wonderful, awe-inspiring, magnificent, today it is also dilapidated, poorly kept, and falling apart. In its visible decay it mimics its sad decline from Imperial capital into the place where Muscovite businessmen keep their mistresses. But this makes Petersburg, and its story, rather simple. Trieste is not like this. It is a fantastical city, like Gogol’s Petersburg, because it seems incapable of speaking straight to us. Even its truths it speaks with a wry smile. And so out of its paltry collection of old buildings and oversized squares it goads us into imagining something more. That’s what makes it exhilarating.

The Revoltella Museum is the best thing in the city, although I might be saying that because it’s pretty much the only museum in the city. Baron Revoltella was born in Venice, but spent most of his life in Trieste, building a business empire on the mainstays of 19^th century capitalism – speculating in grain and other goods. His house is closer to a palace, with a sublime trickling fountain at the foot of the winding stair up to his receiving rooms and his private quarters, the latter of which is unsubtly filled with paintings of coquettish women, sleeping girls, and all sorts of other paintings which would only be vaguely excusable in the home of a committed bachelor.

With Revoltella’s success, and the Slovene inscriptions we might catch site of on the walls of the odd building, and the docks and their ghostly bustle, we might allow ourselves the comfort of imagining that Trieste was a successful Mitteleuropan melting pot – the primary delusion of those of us who suffer nostalgia for the Austrian Empire. Morris’s book is interesting because it complicates that picture without destroying it entirely. Trieste’s growth came off the various privileges that were granted it by the Habsburgs, including relative religious freedom for the Jewish merchants who went there. There is a Serbian and a Greek Orthodox Church, a synagogue of course, and plenty of other places of worship. At one point or other, an awful lot of different people must have been comfortable here.

But then the nationalisms came, and things were ruined. The Italian irredentists wanted Trieste, and disaffected youths started throwing bombs about. In miniature, Trieste reflected the fate of the 19^th century nation, with its collapse into ethnic disharmony. The 20^th century only made things worse, as the Italians were finally granted the city in the Treaty of Rapallo in 1919. Mussolini began a process of Italianization, with predictable results for the non-Italians who had thought of the city as their home. Then the Nazis came, and Trieste became the only extermination camp on Italian soil. And with that, another people, another part of Trieste’s colour and vibrancy, was annihilated. Nowadays the Slovenes are allowed their schools and their language, but after the Second World War ended Trieste was briefly a free zone, contested by the Yugoslavs and the Allies, filled with spies and excitement, before being returned to Italy to bubble away, working out what to do with itself.

Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere is filled with this melancholy note – its subject matter, naturally, is contagious. It was nationalism that broke Trieste, as it broke Odessa and indeed Crimea’s southern shore (Stalin also played his part in the case of the latter), and Morris does not conceal her hatred of it. There was a time when Trieste was every bit as comfortably multicultural as Vienna was – it had been under Habsburg rule since 1382, after all. And were it not for that poisonous idea, no doubt it would have been under some kind of Habsburg rule for many years longer than reality allowed. Joyce left Trieste after it went over to Italy – something had departed the city, some kind of magic – and went back to Switzerland, that most unnationalistic of places.

In Trieste now we have only these ideas and these memories. We can have our gelatos and our pasta dishes – I had some octopus on mine and was not sick afterwards, which with seafood I always count as a success – and we can sit in the sun, watching the waveless Adriatic at the end of the Piazza Unita d’Italia, once Piazza Grande. We are exiles from that past Trieste and what it meant. We have come too late. It comes in our heads to represent a world and time that seems, at least sometimes, preferable to our own. But it is a world that is inaccessible. All we can do is learn about it, live and walk its streets, and with a bit of luck we will draw closer to the ghost of what once was here. We cannot cross over, but we can reach the border, we can see its forms through the haze beyond the barbed wire fence, and for an exile even that is an immense comfort.

Trieste is special not because it has a history – for any number of Italian cities reek of the stuff. It is special because it has an idea, a fantastical past image of itself that seems close enough to still have practical value. Rome of course bespeaks another Rome, but what in that world of gladiators and slaves can seem to offer us a home? Cosmopolitan Trieste, with its transients and its exiles, its artists and its capitalists, seems to say that everyone is welcome, would be welcome, if only it still lived. And so we sit imagining, inspired by what remains. And that is the true magic of the city – its hidden world, its hope.

The Death of the Black Hen

It was lucky I was at my desk or else I wouldn’t have seen them. Two foxes, big ones, and ahead of them flapping, hurtling, racing, mad as a damaged missile – the white hen. By the time I had unbolted the front door, they had had several seconds to continue their attack unimpeded. I was roaring monstrously, but far too slow to deal any damage – the foxes fled before I lay my hands on them. I chased them as far as the tall grass, but then I had to turn back.

The white hen was in the boiler room, buried in a corner with her back to the door. Perhaps she didn’t want to see her end if it was coming. Or perhaps she retained that childish notion that what she could not see, could not see her either. I picked her up and took her to the hen house, locking her in the enclosure. She was hurt, but less badly than I had thought. Her feathers littered the drive, but her attackers had not drawn blood.

I went to find the black hen.

I went through the garden, up and down the drive, and across the front lawn. I found feathers, a lot of them, on the path by the firepit. I found also the little hollow the foxes had made under the wire fence going into the undergrowth. I followed it, and as I advanced something moved ahead of me, retreated still further into the deep green darkness. But I came across a clearing covered in black feathers and I understood that I had come far too late.

Many of the pessimists whom I wrote about last week asked whether life was a good or a bad thing, all considered. One thought experiment they conducted was to ask who would be willing to live their life through again. The answer, they concluded sadly, was few of us. We may have plenty of pleasures and happiness in our time upon the earth, but when we consider the pains – grief, sorrow, illness – we find that they far outweigh the former in intensity, even if in quantity they may be evenly matched.

Our hens lived good lives. They had a huge area to roam, customers who did not insist on eggs – for neither myself nor my brother actually like them all that much – and food and water and love and warmth. Last year the smaller of the two black hens died of an illness, leaving us with just the big black one and the white one. And now the white one is all alone.

It’s funny the things that a death like this makes you think of. It’s funny really, that it can get to you at all. But I felt guilt, a lot of it, and still do in my way. Earlier that morning I had heard the hens, and I had thought then that it was simply the triumphant clucking of a successful egg-laying operation. But perhaps that had been a cry for help that I had missed.

When a friend visited, he told how all of his hens let him take them in his arms. Ours were much less affectionate. But still, you knew that they loved us. The white hen always let you stroke her if you insisted. And after the small black hen died the big black hen finally let us stroke her too.

More so than a pet, even, you feel a lot of responsibility for something like a hen. A cat or a dog has no real natural predators, at least in restive rural England. We cannot be at fault if an accident occurs because we have done our best. But with hens, it is a different matter. We could never have let them out, to begin with, we could have guarded them more carefully, and so on. Here, responsibility feels more firmly placed upon our shoulders.

Hens have personalities, you come to realise. Secretly, we’re glad that the white one survived because she is bossy boots and a real character. She is always bothering us. She comes and pecks my shins if her food is even a minute late in coming. She is always the most deranged, the wildest, and for all that the most human of the birds we had.

She survived a fox attack earlier in the year too. That was while I was away in Russia. She spent a week living in a little box on the side in the kitchen, and then went back to her business as normal. I am home alone, and boxes in the kitchen are beyond me, but I have brought her food and water, had various discussions and heart-to-hearts with her, and cleaned out her house. I even made her rice, which I was told is a particular delicacy among hens – and she ate the whole pan’s worth.

She limps now, but after a day spent hiding in the hen house, she now comes out into the larger hen run again and hobbles about. She is laying again and already talks. After the attack I was struck by how quiet she was – the only noise she made was terrible, heavy breathing. Understandable, given the circumstances, but so strange to hear coming from her when she is normally so chatty.

All this is to say that I was struck by how human she was. This is an obvious point, but still worth stating. In the relationship you have with these animals in your care they perhaps remain as animals – loved, but not quite fully human. And here the little hen was like a little child.

But the foxes were human too. This was the thing that shook me: the look in their eyes. There was something human about it, but not in any positive sense. We may, from Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr Fox or else cute pictures on the internet, assume that all foxes are rascals with hearts of gold. Like wolves, we may secretly admire them. But these two foxes had a look of hatred, human hatred, in their eyes, mixed with what can only be described as bloodlust. They hated me because I had arrived and driven them off and in doing so had deprived them of their kill. And although I am often annoying, never have I seen that look directed at me. Never have I felt the full force of another’s desire to see hurt come to me, never until then. It is not a feeling I’d like to feel again.

The white hen will recover. She is a fighter, after all. When I was talking about the attack with our gardener, she told me a story about another house she had worked on which also had hens and also was the site of a tragedy. In this place, the hens, about twenty of them, roamed on a field with a pond in the middle. They were rescue hens, taken from battery farms – jittery, nervous, and undersized creatures who have experienced more than their fair share of suffering. But one day two foxes got into their field too, and it was a massacre. Every single hen was slaughtered, all but one. As the others were being ripped and torn apart, she had gone to the pond and flown in. She had gone against her nature out of an instinct for survival that even the battery farms had not extinguished. In a way, it’s inspiring.

Looking particularly like a white onion in this one.

Schopenhauer has a famous example to illustrate the truth of his pessimism. He notes that “one simple test of the claim that the pleasure in the world outweighs the pain… is to compare the feelings of an animal that is devouring another with those of the animal being devoured.” This is something we instinctively agree with (though as proof of pessimism it probably does not convince us), but I really felt its truth after saving the white hen. The fear, the terror of her eyes – and she had survived. How much more would the black hen have suffered, I can only guess. And all that for a tasty meal that would be forgotten soon enough. A soul extinguished for a full belly. The scales are not in balance, that’s for sure. But then again, neither the eater not the eaten is given much to philosophising. This is just nature at work.

The thought experiment, would you be willing to live your life again, is an old one. Nietzsche turned it around into a positive guide with his da capo (“let’s do it all again”) attitude, saying that the potential for eternally repeating your life should be the guide for how you live it. In the case of pessimists, they answered that we would not wish to live our lives again, and our certainty in this would only grow as we got older. Illness and grief are things the experience of which is simply too great, they argue, to let us want to see the other things. Mara Van der Lugt in her book, however, notes that the experiment uses a kind of sleight-of-hand. If asked whether we wanted to play our lives through exactly as they were, perhaps we would say no. But if we were asked whether we wanted simply to live again, then many more of us would say yes. No matter how well lived, our lives will always lack novelty to one who has already lived them. But a new life, with new pain and new joy, probably tips the scales towards life being something worth experiencing.

But still, would the hens choose to live again? Two or three years of roaming the garden, the drive, the fields, pecking at me and the ground, pestering the gardener and my mother, but ending up being literally ripped limb from limb. Would they choose that?

Our lives are unlikely to end in us being ripped limb from limb. But one thing that has stuck with me after the attack was how unnecessary violence is for us as human beings. We do not need to rely on the suffering of humans and other animals to get our food, our water, our clothing, and our shelter. That we do is simply a reflection of our generally inadequate attempts to build a better world. But still, it must be possible. Whereas for these wild foxes, at least for the moment, a reason not to eat our hens is not going to be forthcoming. All our feathered friends and we, their carers, can do is be extra vigilant.

When I went to see the white hen this most recent time, she was already racing to the door out from her hen run into the world, even with her limp. I have decided that she is no longer a symbol of a willingness to fight to live against the odds. Instead, dear readers, she is simply as thick as beans.