'The True Apostles of Beauty in Our Time'

Let’s get the utilitarian Christmas gifts out of the way: shirts, socks, underwear. Next, the utilitarian-but-always-welcome gifts: hot sauce, wasabi peas, horseradish. Now for the important stuff: 

My daughter-in-law, who just returned from a week in Paris, visited the Comme un Roman bookstore in the 3rd arrondissement and picked up an elegant little edition of Balzac’s Traité de la vie élégante. I hadn’t heard of it before. I remember V.S. Naipaul saying that reading Balzac for him was like eating candy. Once he started he couldn’t stop.

 

Another attractive book, a pleasure to hold: Confessions of a Heretic (2021) by the late Sir Roger Scruton. I’ve read several volumes published by Notting Hill Editions of London, but never owned one.

 

Here’s a ringer from my middle son, now in his fourth year at the U.S. Naval Academy and soon to be commissioned a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps: The Weirdest People in the World (2020) by Joseph Henrich. Michael read it and thought I would like it. We’ll see.

 

Uwe Johnson (1934-1984) was the German author of the novel translated into English as Anniversaries: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl (trans. Damion Searls). New York Review Books published it in two hefty volumes in 2018 and I read it the following year. I don’t say this often of any book because it sounds like marketing copy, but Anniversaries is unlike any other book I ever read. Anyway, another Christmas gift was The Sea View Has Me Again: Uwe Johnson in Sheerness by Patrick Wright. Sheerness is a town on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent, where Johnson moved in 1974 and worked to finish Anniversaries. This book looks very odd and very interesting.

 

My oldest son, bless ’im, gave me a year’s subscription to the Criterion Channel. Hello, Andrzej Wajda.

Here is a passage from "Faking It," the first essay in the Scruton collection: "If we look at the true apostles of beauty in our time -- I think of composers like Henri Dutilleux and James MacMillan, of painters like David Inshaw and John Wonnacott, of poets like Ruth Padel and Charles Tomlinson, of prose writers like Italo Calvino and Georges Perec -- we are immediately struck by the immense hard work, the studious isolation, and the attention to detail which has characterized their craft."