The spirit of truth can dwell in science on condition that the motive prompting the [scientist] is the love of the object which forms the stuff of his investigations. That object is the universe in which we live. What can we find to love about it if it isn’t its beauty? The true definition of science is this: the study of the beauty of the world.
In the essay On the Greatness of Richard Wagner, [Thomas] Mann explains that Wagner was incapable of working without “palpable expressions of an extravagance of taste” which included, “wadded silk dressing-gowns” and “lace-trimmed satin bed-covers embroidered with garlands of roses.” Buttressed by these things, Mann writes, Wagner “sits down mornings to the grueling job, by dint of them he achieves the ‘atmosphere of luxury and art’ necessary to the creation of primitive Nordic heroes and exalted natural symbolism.” Is this a tacit admission on Mann’s part that the artist cannot create until first he is properly dressed?Mann described the clothing of his fictional characters so impeccably not out of empty volupté, but because he knew the world he described was going extinct. His craftsmanship is an homage to another kind of craftsmanship. The disappearance of handmade clothes and furniture as a result of mass manufacture, and the erosion of the material culture of old Europe had in William Morris its utopian denialist, in Thomas Carlyle its Jeremiah, and in Mann its quiet, bourgeois eulogist.
Mann was willing to fight for discernment in clothing, food, manners, and furniture, all of which he grouped together in the phrase bourgeois competence in a June 1926 speech given on the occasion of the 700 year anniversary of his home city, Lübeck. “Bourgeois competence” as Mann deploys it signals a sort of spacious capacity for the leisurely, deliberate prosecution of one’s affairs in a world where appreciation for the arts is central…. It is presented as a positive spiritual value (the speech itself is entitled “Lübeck as a spiritual way of life.”)
[gallery] The Quantified Self, sixteenth century edition: from The Clock and the Mirror: Girolamo Cardano and Renaissance Medicine, by Nancy G. Siraisi
Further irrelevancies
I made a radio documentary for the BBC about the influence in the 1930s of a cult book, An Experiment with Time, that seemed to rationalise spirituality and to promise a very peculiar form of fatalistic consolation, just right for an age of dread. Contains early aircraft design, a chocolate box of achingly British voices, and umpteen different versions of ‘As Time Goes By…’
How is it that for a person who cares about the way things look and feel more than anyone else in the world that iTunes looks like a spreadsheet?
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Z neznámých přičinPublished in Prague by Vytiskla “Legiografie” in 1933.
An unconventional publication from Prague in the early 1930s, presenting a wide array of contributions by noted cultural figures in the Czech avant-garde, including poetry, prose, music, drawings, color lithographs, and photography.
Geeks claim to know what it’s like to love art that’s been neglected or reviled by their culture. Well, this is the status of fans of traditional high culture now; those who like opera, jazz, experimental fiction, theater, and other types of traditional high culture are generally ignored in our mass media. When they are thought of at all, it is as snobby and irrelevant. Geeks now need to recognize their great fortune, enjoy it and extend a little sympathy in the direction of us sad few who prefer other things.Yet I wonder if any such recognition is even possible at this point. My fear is not merely that the geeks will never come to acknowledge their triumph, as comfortable as they are in their self-professed victimhood. I fear too that we have come to so thoroughly associate fandom with grievance that the two are now inextricable. That, I suspect, is the long-term consequence of the rise of the geeks: that we no longer know how to enjoy art without enjoying it against others. That’s a bitter, juvenile way to approach art, and if it’s the real legacy of the rise of the geeks, it’s an ugly legacy indeed.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hm_1cA2OcAs?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=250&h=187]
And while on the subject of Southern eccentrics on late-night talk shows, here’s the late and much-lamented Vic Chesnutt.