In My Mind's Eye Read online

  Fortunately, too, it is one of the few spiritual abstractions that is its own immediate reward. Being kind is not only, one might say, a stepping stone towards eternal recompense. It is itself an instant pleasure! It is fun! The kinder you are, the happier. Kindness is the very antithesis of those religious devices that, down the centuries, have required cruel sacrifices to achieve spiritual ends, like self-flagellations or fastings.

  On the contrary, the more extravagant your kindnesses, the more joyous will be your welcome in heaven – and, oh dear, I rather fear the more swollen may be your own self-satisfaction! But never mind, your God’s mercy is not strained. He will surely forgive a bit of swank in a just cause. So go on, be proud, be happy, be merciful, be grateful, be generous, be KIND.

  I went to bed happy that night, bless their Calvinist hearts. Who knows? They may well be right.

  DAY 107

  When a reader writes to me about some writing of mine, I habitually answer the letter and slip it inside the volume concerned as a kind of memento (though too candid friends suggest I preserve only the flattering ones). Last week, I came across one which had been written some years before, and it greatly touched me in retrospect. I thought it would be nice to get in touch with its unsuspecting author, to thank him again for the letter and tell him that all these years later his response to my work was still giving me pleasure.

  His telephone number was there at the top of his letter, and I rang it. There was no reply, but it was evidently still active, so instead I left a recorded message, thanking him for his kindness long before, wishing him well and hoping he was still enjoying the reading of books – perhaps even, I winsomely added, another one or two of mine … I gave him my telephone number too, in case he was amused enough to call me back.

  He evidently wasn’t – he never rang. However, now that I reread his original letter I see the reason why. ‘I am long retired,’ he had written at the bottom of the page, ‘and now well into my nineties …’

  Ah, what a sadness is there! My message had winged its way only to an emptiness. But I hope that perhaps, too late for this world, he may be listening to it in another, with a spectral chuckle.

  DAY 108

  Our half of the known world – the democratic part, that is, what we used to call the Free World – has been in a kind of maelstrom. From the Black Sea to the Baltic, it seems to have been enveloped in one vast and furious election. Polls have set upon us, generically as it were. The papers have been hijacked. TV illustrates nothing else. Every conversation is about one election or another, and a thousand politicians nag us to fulfil the duty of all conscientious citizens – to get out there and vote.

  Before long, this immense drama will reach a climax in a British general election which will, as I understand it, permanently shift the so-called United Kingdom’s status among the nations.

  In the meantime, my allotted part has been to express an opinion in the election for membership of the district council of Dwyfor, within the county of Gwynedd, in Wales, and the Welshest corner of our country. I take fate seriously, and aware of my solemn responsibility at this evidently seminal moment in history, yesterday I drove down to the village hall to cast my vote. I felt that out of the immense cloud of suggestion that darkened the sky that evening, just for that exact moment history was summoning me. The Digit of Destiny was touching my very self – the Finger of Fate – as in top gear I arrived to play my allotted role in the great performance.

  The village hall was closed. There was not an electoral placard in sight. Not a loudspeaker blared, nobody wore a rosette. When I asked why, they told me that since nobody wanted to oppose the candidate standing for Plaid Cymru, the Party of Wales, they did not see any point in having an election at all. The pub was open, though.

  DAY 109

  I don’t know about you, but I like to have music in my car while I drive, and in our part of the world there are only two radio stations that fulfil my musical requirements. I don’t want slush and I don’t want rock or rap and I don’t want anything tiresomely hackneyed or too experimental. I prefer something wonderful and slightly familar. Know what I mean? So I have become adept at switching between Classic FM and BBC Radio 3, and as I drive play the two of them contrapuntally. Here on 3, for instance, as my overture there is something rather lovely by a Lithuanian composer who’s new to me, haunting, semi-Slavic stuff which takes me thoughtfully up Radio 3 to the end of the lane. Dear God, though, the next item on the programme is going to be a selection of medieval madrigals, the sort of music that has made my heart sink ever since I was weaned on Palestrina in my childhood. Quick – quick – over to Classic FM!

  There they are playing something just a bit too hackneyed even for me – Rachmaninov or Mendelssohn, I would guess … But never fear, give it a moment and I’ll bet you it will turn into something more freshly familiar. Wait! – there, you see? Hardly a minute’s stop at the traffic lights and I am singing along with the radio a merry old Mozart melody …

  Had enough? Want something definitive, so to speak, as we approach Tesco’s and fumble for the debit card? Well, there’s always the news on Radio 4.

  DAY 110

  The motions of transport concern me today, together with its aesthetic. Motion in itself is rather lovely – don’t you think? – and most animals undertake it beautifully (not all – think of the crab or the poor pig). We human beings probably moved gracefully when we emerged from the Garden of Eden, and we still can, of course, when we try, but it is artificial modes of transport that concern me now. Humans riding horses often looked splendid, and navigating sailing ships was fine, but for my tastes the arrival of the machine muddied the immemorial beauties of human travel.

  Steam did it first. I have never been an admirer of the steam age, which seems to me in retrospect a messy amalgam of soot, rust, smoke, iron, noise and clutter, however heroic the locomotives still seem to their devoted buffs.

  But then came the airship and the aeroplane, and I have no grumble about them. Whether it has been by Concorde, Dreamliner or doomed Zeppelin, except for the clattering helicopter mankind’s modern passage through the skies has been conducted with an elegance worthy of the ages.

  And the automobile? Ah well, the car began in comical aesthetic ineptitude – did it not? – a clumsy stage coach without a horse, but today’s cars seem to me, on the whole, remarkably graceful, if rather too noisy and, if there is such a word, emissive. Some of the greater machines of transport – the buses and the terrific showy trucks – seem as exciting to me as any old Flying Scotsman.

  But wait, anyway! Do you hear that soft faint hum, gentle as the rub of silk on velvet, true as the whisper of heaven itself? That’s the sound of transport’s future, when – very soon, too! – the electric car takes over, making all else seem crude, selfish and coarse, and returning the practice of terrestrial travel to the serenity of the gods.

  *

  PS And if you believe all that, you’ll believe anything.

  DAY 111

  For seventy-odd years I have lived, in love and in life, with my beloved friend Elizabeth, and only now is that subtle demon of our time, Dementia, coming between us.

  She does not read these thoughts of mine, does not now read much really except catalogues and gardening magazines, and the scope of our conversation becomes narrower month by month. She forgets a lot, and crossly denies that she has forgotten it. She can still summon her old charm for outsiders, but saves her irritations for me.

  And here’s the subtlety of that damned demon. I know very well that her forgetfulness, her irritation, her narrowing interests are in no way her fault. I know it perfectly well, and I understand, but Dementia brings out the worst in me too. It is a two-way evil, and it incites me to harshness and impatience, and to say unpleasant things I really do not mean.

  But here’s a saving grace: I do not mean those calumnies, and Elizabeth knows it. Kindness reconciles us still, even when she is at her most irritating and I am at my nastiest, and
in all our long years together, in life as in love, we have not once said goodnight without the sweet kiss of reconciliation.

  Back to hell with you, Dementia!

  DAY 112

  Something tremendously awful happened to the world the other day. I cannot pretend to understand it, but it seemed that some extortionist malpractitioners, somewhere in the globe, by arcane cyber-techniques of ransom interfered directly with the private and public affairs of people and institutions in 150 countries.

  All at once! In one day! One hundred and fifty countries! Millions of people speaking countless languages in every continent! Across all ideologies! Embracing all religions! Surely this is one of the seminal events of history? It evidently even caught up with me, when my debit card mysteriously declined to pay my bill at the Plough in Llanystumdwy last night. What is the world coming to?

  Nobody seems to worry much around here. The chief complaint in the newspapers seems to be about the effect of this cataclysmic crime on the English National Health Service, never mind the effects on thousands of hospitals in China, Russia and, for all I know, inner Kazakhstan. There is much more in the news about football, local politics and President Trump.

  Perhaps by the time you read this it will all be old news, more or less forgotten, but it lurks in my mind as a dreadful portent. If a handful of criminals can interfere with the peaceable lives and economies of 150 nations, think of the havoc still more wicked cyber-villains could wreak upon everyone’s defences. Even their health. Even their moralities.

  It doesn’t bear thinking about.

  DAY 113

  Today, more about irony, that old preoccupation of mine.

  I have always admired Winston Churchill’s description of the British Grand Fleet sailing north to Scapa Flow at the start of the First World War. He said they were like ‘giants bowed in anxious thought’, and the phrase came pungently into my mind as I walked home up our lane yesterday. It was a classic Welsh evening of early summer: massed greens and speckled yellows, the lane dusty, the trees buoyant, the mountains dark blue and, yes, battleship grey on our horizon.

  I am no giant, but I felt myself at one with those warships, for I was distinctly bowed in anxious thought. It happens, doesn’t it? Quite suddenly, like an ultimatum, you find yourself clouded all around by worries, sadnesses and regrets.

  In my case, on my evening walk, on the way home, my old friend irony stepped in. For how could it be, I thought, that into the idyll Nature had arranged for me, my little evening paradise, should intrude all those spectres of unhappiness? For those great old warships there was no irony. They were on their way to war, and some of them were presently to be sunk at Jutland. For me, well, ‘Pull yourself together, Jan,’ I said to myself, ‘it’s not the end of the world (I hope not anyway), you’re not on your way to war (at ninety? Come on!), and by the nature of things irony is full of contradiction.’

  When I got home I sought out a poem I vaguely remembered by Thomas Hardy. It begins very gloomily, concerning the poet’s lugubrious thoughts about the miserable state of everything, but towards the end of the piece he is cheered up by the ecstatic sunset song of an ‘aged thrush, frail, gaunt and small’.

  It was just one word in the poem that I sought out this evening. Hardy tells us that the poor old bird, so gaunt and frail, ‘flung’ his soul against the prevailing gloom.

  That’s my thrush! There’s another aspect of irony – its magical instructions! ‘Stop moping about, Jan,’ said I, as I put the book back, ‘and get flinging!’

  DAY 114

  Today, 11 June 2017, I have to admit that, of all the days I have commemorated in this indolent sort of record, today the world around me seems to have reached some ultimate nadir. Wherever I look, east or west, up or down, inwards or outwards, searching the consolations of religion or the stimulants of art, in America as in Europe, in the war zones of Araby or the miserable refugee camps of Eritrea, everywhere I discern nothing but Chaos, with a capital ‘C’. I cannot think it is the Ultimate Biblical Chaos – this is only my 114th thought, after all – and as a matter of fact, just at this moment, as I meditate over my cornflakes, there comes into my mind once more, as a kind of wry consolation, that old acronym of my wartime youth, long, long, long ago:

  SNAFU.

  Which meant Situation Normal: All Fucked Up.

  Even then.

  DAY 115

  I am proud to be an honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, which gives me carte blanche, I tell myself, to sneer publicly at architects.

  Not that I have often done it. Only once, in fact, when I turned up my nose at Richard Rogers’s universally admired National Assembly building in Cardiff, on the grounds that it was insufficiently Welsh. But now I have come to feel that around the world too many architects no longer consider the city, surely their ultimate professional concern, to be itself a work of art, an emblem and declaration.

  Earth had nothing to show more fair, thought Wordsworth, contemplating London from Westminster Bridge in 1802, but what would he think today, surveying the vulgar hodge-podge that would now meet his eye – the Shard and the Gherkin, the Heron Tower and the Cheesegrater and the Walkie-Talkie and a host of showily anomalous residential tower blocks, built with no apparent reference to one another, still less to the civic whole?

  I suppose the first archetypically modernist conurbation was Manhattan, as it burgeoned with the advent of the skyscraper. Sensible planning restrictions governed its development, visionary architects contributed to its styles, and by the 1940s it truly was a thing of beauty, in distant silhouette as in street scene. It remains so today, no longer supreme in size or reputation, battered about a bit by history, but still a noble expression of human creativity.

  Alas, it is no longer a universal criterion. Look at the new cities that have sprung up in our time. Take Doha, for example, one of the richest cities on earth, which I remember myself as an insignificant Arabian fishing village, and which is now, thanks to the profits of oil, a visual epitome of capitalist opportunism. It is a sea city, but seen from the sea it offers us no proud exemplar of mankind’s noble enterprise, not even a monument to oil and its power, but just a preposterous parade of assorted shapes and substances, not unlike a child’s tin of biscuits. The emergence of Doha as a city not just of wealth, but of countless cultural initiatives has found no architectural expression, no inspiring skyline, no noble Islamic allegory, no view from Westminster Bridge.

  I know, I know, money is to blame, but money itself can have its dignity. Years ago I sailed into London on a ship from New York, and as we passed under Tower Bridge we saw the then modest but rather gloomily impressive buildings of the City, in those days still the financial capital of the world. ‘That’s the City of London?’ expostulated an American woman standing by me at the rail. ‘My God, I expected more than that!’ But to my mind architecture need not be pleasing to express its meaning – those buildings were grey and loveless, but so was the City of London, and the one expressed the other, as art and symbolism can.

  Anyway, that’s what I think. I think too many architects are concerned above all with profit and celebrity, rather than with art, or beauty, or aspiration, or philosophy, the human heart or the view from the bridge.

  (Lord Rogers, by the way, gently wrote to remind me that his great-grandfather had been responsible for many of the best nineteenth-century constructions of Trieste, in particular the funicular railway to Opicina, which I am particularly fond of. Ever since his letter I have assiduously championed that Cardiff building of his, a fine, fine conception.)

  DAY 116

  I have been ill, hospitalized, bed-bound at home, enduring the queer delusions that can accompany kidney failures and feeling thoroughly sorry for myself. The kindest administrations of family, neighbours and friends have carried me through, and today, at last, praise God, I am going to drive my car again!

  How faithfully it has been standing out there in the yard waiting for the summons,
my dear old Honda Civic Type R, 2006 vintage and still the elderly boy racer’s dream, with the leaves of autumn on its bonnet and the summer sunshine crinkling them – an old friend only waiting for a turn of the ignition key at last …

  O dear, what if …? But no, the battery’s fine, the handbrake’s off, the six gears eagerly await my orders. I fasten my belt, squirm in my seat a little, and with the appropriate snarl we are off, skidding out of the yard, through the rickety gates, through the farmyard, up the bumpy drive, and like Mr Toad before me I am away. Away! Out on the highway with the whole wide world before me!

  As it nears the end of its career, to be replaced by cleaner, more environmentalist successors, I would like, here and now, with a poisonous black burst from my exhaust and a vulgar toot upon my horn, to express my gratitude to the internal combustion engine, which did some dreadful things in its time, and is leaving some dire legacies behind, but which has given me and countless million others, Toads and all, the freedom of the open road.

  DAY 117

  O, I can imagine still the efforts of Great-Aunt Agatha, bedridden in her extreme old age, to find among her possessions a suitable birthday present for me, aged eight or so. I hardly knew her, and remember her not at all, but all my life I have felt the poignancy of unwrapping her little birthday parcel, to find within it a penknife so rusted with age that I was never able to open it.