From a small corner of Cambridge, 10

We are better placed than very many; but even so — five months in from the initial “lockdown”, and with so much still not returned to the old normal — it is sometimes difficult to maintain good spirits.

Travel has to be virtual. There’s another possible world, not that remote from this one, where we would have been spending quite a bit of our time living close to Siena. So, encouraged by the reviews, I was looking forward to Hisham Matar’s short book A Month in Siena. But I have to report that it is a grave disappointment. The book has its moments, but Matar’s descriptions of the city are uninspired, and his reactions to some Sienese paintings seem quite overblown and self-indulgent. A pity.

I was sorry to hear of the death a few days ago of Elliott Mendelson. I suppose I owe him my whole career. For his classic Introduction to Mathematical Logic was published just before I took Part II of the Philosophy Tripos (d0 the math!). Some questions in Tripos that year could be aced if you’d got your head round that then-new book. In particular, I recall a question on a possible misunderstanding of Gödel’s Theorem (yes, that!) which I could answer elegantly by just giving part of Mendelson’s proof which showed exactly where the misunderstanding would lie. So by that sort of happy chance, I did much better in tripos than I really deserved (for my knowledge after just a year of philosophy was so fragmentary), which meant I carried on with philosophy rather than going back to applied maths. And here we are …

Things falling out one way with respect to living near Siena; the serendipty of things falling out another way with respect to becoming a philosopher of sorts. Thoughts about such chancy events encouraged, too, by re-reading Kate Atkinson’s terrific Life after Life, where the narrative starts and restarts, again and again, small chance changes making for such different outcomes. Still her best book, I think.

Pointless to wonder just who is to blame for the depressing fiasco over the English A-level results. But it brings home, again, just what a rotten time this must be for students — those about to start (or indeed, wondering whether to start) at university, those mid-course, and indeed those just-finished and facing such diminished prospects. Grim.

I’ve been struck by some of Vassily Kandinsky’s paintings for a long time. But I knew really embarrassingly little about his background, life and thought when I chose his Blue Painting for the cover of IFL2. So I’ve been reading the book of essays edited by Helmut Friedel and Annegret Hoberg. Which perhaps tells me just a bit more than I needed to know.

But, with some judicious skimming, the essays are indeed fascinating for someone as ignorant as I am about the birth of modernism and its roots. And the book’s many illustrations are terrific. Art books these days can be produced to a wonderful standard — cheaply too, at least for someone used to academic book prices, even for student texts. (Speaking of which, see the upcoming next post …)

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