Two kinds of ideas animate the world. One kind is private, hermetic, sovereign; I would go as far as to call it anaerobic, by analogy with the bacteria that perish when exposed to air and light. Fedor Tiutchev, Russia’s most original nineteenth-century poet, had this variety in mind when we wrote his “Silentium”: “Keep silent, secret, and obscured / Thy thoughts and dreams without end, / And let them rise like stars, inured / To darkness regnant in thine head.”
My paternal grandmother’s family was from Vitebsk, where it was well remembered that as a callow youth Marc Chagall made a living painting shop signs in that provincial town. It turns out, however, that the canvases Chagall produced in the years preceding his emigration to France are perhaps the only pictures of lasting value – of genius, a more impulsive chronicler would say – ever painted on the territory of the Russian, and then Soviet, empire.
Children are often asked by adults, especially by those who have made a stinking mess of their own lives, what they want to be when they grow up. Mercifully, before the child is able too speak for himself, there are parents on hand to answer the question. I always say I want Vasily to become a painter.
Of the many, possibly apocryphal, stories about Diogenes, I like the one where he came to visit Plato bearing a basket of figs, which everybody in Athens knew were the man’s favorite snack. Diogenes meant to treat him to a few figs in the basket, but instead Plato wolfed down the lot, leaving none for Diogenes and leading him to exclaim: “You just can’t control the animal in you! And you call yourself a philosopher?”
A venerable old derelict who washed parked cars up and down the little street where I first lived in London had been born in a house next door to Winston Churchill’s. His only character flaw was drinking sixteen pints of bitter every evening, and as I never owned a car he felt he could talk to me with a frankness that rose above mercantile niceties.
One aspect of the present invasion of Ukraine, and of the causes that precipitated it, has gone virtually unremarked. Yet recent revelations consequent to the ongoing mass arrests in the highest echelons of the Russian military – an echo of Stalin’s purge of the Red Army on the eve of World War II – are shedding light on a murky chapter in the annals of this century’s history.
Van Houten, the Dutch chocolatier founded some two hundred years ago, is still in business today selling its brand of cocoa, but few remember the public-relations ploy that made it famous. Mayakovsky, in a poem written in 1914, recalls a man condemned to death by hanging who had been paid by the company to shout “Drink Van Houten’s cocoa!” from the scaffold as the sentence was being carried out.
Before I say anything else about last week’s sojourn, I must mention the eatery where we dined on Wednesday. As it’s in Milan, not Palermo, where I keep such things under wraps, I make public its name and declare it one of the ten best in a lifetime of anxiously restrained gluttony.
Whoever did not fantasize about making Plato’s Symposium or Phaedrus into a feature film had probably had a deprived childhood. I certainly did, and one particular detail sticks in my mind, namely, that I gave the Russian actor playing Socrates a slight stutter.
Jean Baudrillard, who died some twenty years ago, was a French intellectual, and this, perhaps, is all the gentle reader wants to know. But in fact, the species Baudrillard represents is not indigenous to voluble France.
