Category: History

The Warburg Institute under threat

I read that London University is trying to charge the Warburg an impossible rent for its property in Woburn Square.  And the university back in June launched a legal action to challenge a  deed of trust signed back in 1944 when it undertook to ‘maintain the Library [the Institute’s library] in perpetuity.’

As the THES put it, ‘The future of a “unique and extraordinary” library saved from Nazi Germany lies in the balance …’

How this will be resolved we will know this autumn.

I studied at the Warburg under Ernst Gombrich over forty years ago. And I notice Yale are re-publishing Gombrich’s ‘Shadows: The Depiction of Shadows in Western Art’ this autumn.  It is a most wonderful title, and idea. What can we learn from shadows in art, how do shadows in art and in life change the way we experience things…

But there is of course an irony here.

Should the Warburg be forced to close or relocate to some cheap and gloomy cellar, or be broken up, that would cast the longest shadow of all. It just needs one collector wiser than his peers to put his money into an endowment, and the Warburg, ‘dedicated to the intellectual and artistic legacies of Greece and Rome’ on which our civilsation rests, would be saved.

And if such a wise person is not to be found? If the university has its way?

[Ref: Martin Kemp’s article in the RA Magazine.]

The dry bones of a thousand empires

Also from the Mark Twain quote:

(Damascus) has looked upon the dry bones of a thousand empires, and will see the tombs of a thousand more before she dies.

When we talk of being part of a Christian tradition, we do need to widen that to encompass Judaic, Greek, Roman, Arab. Talk of a thousand empires may be a little exaggerated … but our spiritual and cultural traditions have been nurtured and fashioned over many millennia, and they’ve come down to us interpreted and recreated through (for the UK) a fifteen-hundred-year Christian history. When we try and conjure value systems without that spiritual content we are doing simply that – conjuring. Belief is one thing, faith is another, they can be disavowed, but to disavow our Christian tradition, to imagine that our values have simply an evolutionary explanation, is to deny history. I italicise simply. Scientific and cultural evolution work together. The former doesn’t have the conceptual framework remotely to encompass the latter, any more than the latter can explain the former (not that anti-evolution and intelligent design protagonists haven’t tried).

To get back to Damascus – ‘will see the tombs of a thousand more before she dies’. Thing long, think in terms of centuries, even millennia. Every generation thinks it has solutions, and every generation comes up short. Put the rights of man and democracy in that context: if there is a promised land it will not come out a eureka democratic moment, it will evolve over historic time.

For Syria, as for all of us.

 

Damascus

Syria’s turmoil continues, with the numbers of refugees and violence and destruction at levels which would have seemed inconceivable three years ago. It is a reminder that the inconceivable can happen. Syria is such an extraordinary country, a crossroad and an intermingling of cultures, now as three thousand years ago. Diana Darke in her insider’s view of Syria and Damascus in particular (My House in Damascus) quotes Mark Twain (An Innocent Abroad):

She measures time not by days and months and years, but by the empires she has seen rise and crumble to ruin. She is a type of immortality… Damascus has seen all that ever occurred on earth and still she lives.

She is being challenged now as never before, such is the ability of modern armament to flatten the old with same equanimity as it flattens the new. It will take an extraordinary mix of tolerance and goodwill to restore old harmonies and the old fabric. We may glibly think that democracy, western-style, is the answer. But leadership and vision must come first.

Democracy as in Algeria and Egypt and Libya can tear a country apart.

Wildwood

In a previous blog I mentioned Roger Deakin’s Wildwood…

He makes habitable the Tudor farmhouse he buys by keeping out the wind and rain but still allowing at least partial free passage for the animal and insect life who had been its previous owners. He sleeps in a caravan to listen to the rooks, he’s part of the moth-makers circle as they cluster round the bright lights that draw the moths in, he recounts the stories of willow-men and the basket-and bat-makers who work the willow.

His is a wonderful but all too little known counter-balance to all the damage we do to our world, to our climate, to our landscape. I wonder at times whether we could impose a back-to-nature requirement on all road-builders, all architects and town-planners, anyone who would spread bricks and especially concrete over the landscape without a thought for future generations who will be left with it when lifestyles and domiciles and transport have moved on. Where once we felled trees in Britain at least we now have open pasture and hedges and copses which hide and nurture their own wildlife. Where we put down concrete nothing can grow, save after decades in the slow-wearing interstices where weeds find a scraggy home.

It would be good to have a long-term damage assessment built into every new project, with a minimum threshold in terms of decay or decomposition, to remind ourselves of the duty we owe not just our children, but to many generations hence.

It seems that the Environment Agency haven’t a clue when it comes to considerations of this kind. Deakin quotes their indifference to the withy (willow) growing tradition in the Somerset Levels. Floods brought poisoned water which ruined the crop one year, and no-one from the agency visited, and now it seems they have plans to flood the withy beds permanently. When I’ve heard stories about the agency in other flood situations I’ve always put it down to shortages of staff, or local misunderstandings, but it seems that it goes deeper, to an institutional level.

On a lighter note, Deakin notes that cricket bat willow only grows really well in England, to the frustration of Australians who must import English willow wherewith to thrash, they hope, the Poms.  Louis MacNeice writes of the drunkenness of things being various. Here we have the singular, the co-incidence of place and time to play which led to a game where the spring of willow and the resilience of cork and leather make for a game perfectly matched to human strength and capabilities. A more stolid bat would propel the ball much less far, and vibrate the hand, a softer bat and the ball would die before it left the square. Without willow where would we be, without the game that’s an antidote to all the frenetic activity which characterises most popular sports. With maybe the exception of snooker, but that’s about paralysis rather than relaxation of mind. But I digress.

20:20 cricket is another game altogether, although it still requires the magic of the willow wand, which however brandished remains something it seems modern materials can’t replicate. Long may it remain so.