WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:03.000 [MUSIC PLAYING] 00:00:03.000 --> 00:00:07.000 [MUSIC PLAYING] 00:00:07.000 --> 00:00:11.000 [MUSIC PLAYING] 00:00:11.000 --> 00:00:13.000 [MUSIC PLAYING] 00:00:13.000 --> 00:00:15.000 [MUSIC PLAYING] 00:00:15.000 --> 00:00:17.000 [MUSIC PLAYING] 00:00:17.000 --> 00:00:19.000 [MUSIC PLAYING] 00:00:19.000 --> 00:00:21.000 [MUSIC PLAYING] 00:00:21.000 --> 00:00:23.000 [MUSIC PLAYING] 00:00:23.000 --> 00:00:25.000 [MUSIC PLAYING] 00:00:25.000 --> 00:00:27.000 [MUSIC PLAYING] 00:00:27.000 --> 00:00:29.000 [MUSIC PLAYING] 00:00:29.000 --> 00:00:31.000 [MUSIC PLAYING] 00:00:31.000 --> 00:00:33.000 [MUSIC PLAYING] 00:00:33.000 --> 00:00:35.000 [MUSIC PLAYING] 00:00:35.000 --> 00:00:37.000 [MUSIC PLAYING] 00:00:37.000 --> 00:00:39.000 [MUSIC PLAYING] 00:00:39.000 --> 00:00:41.000 [MUSIC PLAYING] 00:00:41.000 --> 00:00:43.000 [MUSIC PLAYING] 00:00:43.000 --> 00:00:45.000 [MUSIC PLAYING] 00:00:45.000 --> 00:00:47.000 [MUSIC PLAYING] 00:00:47.000 --> 00:00:49.000 [MUSIC PLAYING] 00:00:49.000 --> 00:00:51.000 [MUSIC PLAYING] 00:00:51.000 --> 00:00:53.000 [MUSIC PLAYING] 00:00:53.000 --> 00:00:55.000 [MUSIC PLAYING] 00:00:55.000 --> 00:00:57.000 [MUSIC PLAYING] 00:00:57.000 --> 00:00:59.000 [MUSIC PLAYING] 00:00:59.000 --> 00:01:01.000 [MUSIC PLAYING] 00:01:01.000 --> 00:01:03.000 [MUSIC PLAYING] 00:01:03.000 --> 00:01:31.000 [Music] 00:01:31.000 --> 00:01:35.000 Greetings and salutations to all you friends of entitled opinions, 00:01:35.000 --> 00:01:39.960 Vittori Amollo and I are in the studio of KZSU for the last time this season, 00:01:39.960 --> 00:01:43.880 before our program goes on hiatus for a few months. 00:01:43.880 --> 00:01:49.320 As many of you know, summer marks the beginning of our hibernation period, 00:01:49.320 --> 00:01:56.120 but before we go down under, I thought I would honor a request from our very good friend, Andrea 00:01:56.120 --> 00:02:01.480 Nightingale, who besieged me to end this season with some thoughts of my own, 00:02:01.480 --> 00:02:05.800 since she felt that I have been holding back on them somewhat this season. 00:02:05.800 --> 00:02:13.240 And you know me, I was educated at the school of the Dolce Chistilinova, a coterie of poets who 00:02:13.240 --> 00:02:22.200 called themselves the Cavallieri Damore, or Knights of Love, to whom our comrade Dante belonged, 00:02:23.080 --> 00:02:31.480 and among these Vittori, when a lady asks the Knight of Blajas, "Don nami Praga, a lady requests of me, 00:02:31.480 --> 00:02:35.320 is the title of Guido Cavacantes most famous poem." 00:02:35.320 --> 00:02:42.360 And since Andrea gave me permission to speak about anything I want, I thought I would take the 00:02:42.360 --> 00:02:48.280 occasion to say something about the summer season, that's upon us. We're recording the show 00:02:48.280 --> 00:02:54.840 on or around the summer solstice, and I want to think a little bit aloud with you about what is 00:02:54.840 --> 00:03:02.360 a summer solstice and draw some of the cosmic consequences of what we take for granted on a daily basis. 00:03:02.360 --> 00:03:09.160 Now, I don't need to tell you that the summer solstice is when the northern hemisphere 00:03:09.160 --> 00:03:13.880 is in the direct sunlight for longer than any other day of the year. 00:03:15.720 --> 00:03:23.640 It's the time when the sun rises the earliest and is the highest in the sky, and it's also the longest 00:03:23.640 --> 00:03:32.280 day of the annual year. And the reason we have a summer solstice, as well as a winter solstice, 00:03:32.280 --> 00:03:43.080 is because the earth does not spin upright. It actually leans 23.3 degrees or 23.5 degrees 00:03:43.800 --> 00:03:55.560 on its tilted axis, and that obliquity, believe it or not, is probably responsible for the fact that 00:03:55.560 --> 00:04:05.880 there is life on this planet. Holy contingent and accidental for sure. So let's think about this for a 00:04:05.880 --> 00:04:17.960 minute. A planetary body can have any amount of tilt. There are some, I think, Mars, for example. 00:04:17.960 --> 00:04:26.840 It's at Mars or no, it's Mercury. The planet Mercury has a tilt of 0.03 degrees, so it hardly 00:04:26.840 --> 00:04:39.960 tilts at all, while Uranus leads, you know, slouches at about 82.23 degrees. And it seems that these two 00:04:39.960 --> 00:04:45.080 extremes make life quite uninhabitable on either of those planets. 00:04:48.360 --> 00:05:01.480 Certainly when a planet that had no tilts like Mercury wouldn't have seasons, but not only that, 00:05:01.480 --> 00:05:09.320 it would be so cold at the poles of the planet that carbon dioxide would be pulled from the 00:05:09.320 --> 00:05:16.200 atmosphere or the sky, and this would cause the planet to lose its precious greenhouse gas so 00:05:16.200 --> 00:05:21.640 that liquid water could never form. And if liquid water could never form, it's highly unlikely that life 00:05:21.640 --> 00:05:29.800 would ever arise. If you take the other example of a planet that spins on its side, it's not impossible 00:05:29.800 --> 00:05:36.280 that life could arise, but certainly you would have a bizarre situation where for six months out of 00:05:36.280 --> 00:05:45.640 the year, if it's rotating at our rate, it would be blazing hot, and the other six months would be 00:05:45.640 --> 00:05:55.320 placed, you know, frigidly cold. So astronomers tell us that the optimal tilt runs from about 10 to 35 00:05:55.320 --> 00:06:04.120 degrees, and our Earth is kind of like in the middle of that sweet spot, and it enables not only 00:06:04.120 --> 00:06:17.400 the seasons to rotate as we're used to, but it also allows for life to arise in a way that might not 00:06:17.400 --> 00:06:29.080 be possible under other conditions. We know that the tilt of the Earth is an accidental contingent 00:06:29.080 --> 00:06:41.320 phenomenon. When Dante, our friend Dante, whom I mentioned already, has a canto in his padadizo, 00:06:41.320 --> 00:06:49.160 canto 10 of the padadizo, where he asks his reader to raise his and her eyes up to that point in 00:06:49.160 --> 00:06:58.520 the sky where the celestial equator intersects with the ecliptic, and there that point which he 00:06:58.920 --> 00:07:05.960 took to be this moment of the the not the summer solstice, but rather the spring equinox and the 00:07:05.960 --> 00:07:13.240 autumn equinox, there are two points in the year when the intersection occurs. For him, 00:07:13.240 --> 00:07:22.520 there was a way in which that evidenced the grand design of God who had created things in such a way 00:07:22.520 --> 00:07:30.200 that the Earth would have just the right tilt so that we could have a spring summer winter and autumn, 00:07:30.200 --> 00:07:37.880 and that had he not designed that universe in such a way than life on Earth as we know it would not 00:07:37.880 --> 00:07:45.480 occur. I'm going to read you canto 10 just so you can hear the man himself in his own original 00:07:46.600 --> 00:07:52.840 Italian guardando no no suafilio con la moric el uno el a lao trater en al maine des pira 00:07:52.840 --> 00:07:59.160 la primo de en fábile valor de quanto per meno e per loco cajera 00:07:59.160 --> 00:08:06.120 contanto organ a fé que ser non pót des sancagustar del lúi qui chó remira. 00:08:06.120 --> 00:08:12.440 So lift your eyes reader with me to those high wheels, gazed directly at that part where the one 00:08:12.440 --> 00:08:17.800 motion strikes against the other and there begin to look with longing at the master's art, 00:08:17.800 --> 00:08:22.840 which in himself he loved so much that his eye never parts from it. 00:08:22.840 --> 00:08:30.440 He's essentially addressing the same phenomenon that we've been talking about in terms of the 00:08:30.440 --> 00:08:38.920 tilt of the Earth. And when I say there's scientifically shown to be utterly accidental and not part 00:08:38.920 --> 00:08:46.840 of a grand design, we have to bring in another phenomenon into this. And that is our beloved sister 00:08:46.840 --> 00:08:51.960 moon. It seems that billions a few billion years ago, 00:08:51.960 --> 00:09:03.960 a heavenly body, the size of Mars crashed into the Earth and broke away a piece of the Earth that 00:09:03.960 --> 00:09:10.440 then subsequently became the moon. The moon is about a quarter of the size of the Earth. 00:09:10.440 --> 00:09:18.360 And that moon is what is responsible for the tilt or a bliquity of the Earth. 00:09:18.360 --> 00:09:27.720 And it's the gravitational forces between the Earth, the moon and the sun. But especially the moon 00:09:28.360 --> 00:09:35.080 is the gravitational force of the moon that really keeps the Earth's a bliquity at a kind of 00:09:35.080 --> 00:09:42.120 constant degree. And that constancy is what we take for the laws of nature and the unfolding of the 00:09:42.120 --> 00:09:49.720 seasons. Life on Earth owes more to the moon than you might suspect because we're at not 00:09:49.720 --> 00:09:57.560 obviously for those gravitational forces, it wouldn't favor the emergence of life. 00:09:57.720 --> 00:10:07.320 At the same time, we know that it's the tidal phenomenon of the ocean tides that are also caught up 00:10:07.320 --> 00:10:19.320 in the gravitational forces between Earth, moon and sun. And without the tides to create these pools 00:10:19.320 --> 00:10:26.680 in which life first originated according to our best guess, again, we have to thank the moon 00:10:26.680 --> 00:10:35.640 for the fact that it created certain conditions that enabled us to be where we are now here on Earth, 00:10:35.640 --> 00:10:46.520 on a planet that is totally and absolutely alive. So speaking of life and all that it owes both 00:10:46.520 --> 00:10:54.680 to the moon and to the tilt of the Earth and given that the fact that we are coming to you on 00:10:55.640 --> 00:11:03.800 on or around the solstice, let me say a word about life. Actually, a graduate student here at Stanford 00:11:03.800 --> 00:11:09.880 in our department of the DLCL, the Division of Literature, Language and Cultures, 00:11:09.880 --> 00:11:20.440 Pow Guinar, he went around asking a few faculty members from the DLCL to go on video and answer 00:11:21.480 --> 00:11:27.240 one simple question in about five minutes. The question is, what do I think about life? 00:11:27.240 --> 00:11:38.840 What do I think about life? So I sat in and allowed myself to be videotaped for that, but 00:11:38.840 --> 00:11:43.000 let me return to that question because the first thing I think about when I hear that question is, 00:11:43.000 --> 00:11:47.720 does thinking have something to do with life? And I raise this question here on this program because 00:11:47.720 --> 00:11:55.640 you know how committed I am to preserving the space of thought in our own lived worlds. 00:11:55.640 --> 00:12:00.600 So does thinking have something to do with life? Or what form of life 00:12:00.600 --> 00:12:09.640 thinks or better yet? What kind of life form can think about a question like what do I think about 00:12:09.640 --> 00:12:17.080 life? And the mystery here is that life happened once and once only in the whole history of the 00:12:17.080 --> 00:12:27.320 earth. And the initial spark of Genesis was never repeated. And this, despite the fact that the 00:12:27.320 --> 00:12:34.360 tilt of the earth has remained constant for a few billion years and we've had a moon and we've had 00:12:34.360 --> 00:12:41.560 tides and so forth, the actual spark of Genesis happened once and once only. And why is that? 00:12:42.840 --> 00:12:48.920 We live on a planet that is chock full of life for what Stephen J. Gould called a full house, 00:12:48.920 --> 00:12:56.600 a full house of endless organisms and different life forms that have populated the seas, the air, 00:12:56.600 --> 00:13:05.240 the earth, and it all has one common origin. And again, it only happened once. No one has ever been 00:13:05.240 --> 00:13:15.000 able to reproduce that moment of Genesis and no one has any truly definitive or perhaps even probable 00:13:15.000 --> 00:13:21.720 theory of how it all began. What we do know is that the planet was not hospitable to life 00:13:21.720 --> 00:13:29.480 in its early history far, far from it. We also know that the first sparks of life, 00:13:29.480 --> 00:13:37.800 the first primitive cells with membranes containing RNA occurred within common clay minerals, 00:13:37.800 --> 00:13:46.200 which provided the basic platforms for the formation, growth, and division of some of the earliest 00:13:46.200 --> 00:13:54.280 living cells on earth. In the beginning, there was clay. In the beginning, there was clay. 00:13:55.880 --> 00:14:04.680 You find that in Genesis, where the first human was made out of this clay, you find it in the 00:14:04.680 --> 00:14:13.960 Epic of Gilgamesh, you find it in all sorts of world myths. But it is actually scientifically 00:14:13.960 --> 00:14:22.200 true that in the beginning, there was clay and that it was the labor of living organisms fighting 00:14:22.200 --> 00:14:31.240 every inch of the way that turned that clay into humus, into the animate soil that sustains so much 00:14:31.240 --> 00:14:37.560 of the life on this planet. And with your permission, let me quote one of the writers and human beings 00:14:37.560 --> 00:14:44.520 who I most esteem among the moderns. I have in mind the 20th century Czech author, Karl 00:14:44.520 --> 00:14:49.080 Chapek. I don't know if I've ever mentioned him over the last 12 years of this show, but 00:14:50.040 --> 00:14:59.640 Karl Chapek, this Czech author, political activist, and profound Democrat Republican. 00:14:59.640 --> 00:15:06.520 He was in many respects the founder of Modern Czech Literature, which is an incredibly rich tradition 00:15:06.520 --> 00:15:14.040 that has not received anywhere near its proper due. And that's because the Czech Republican 00:15:14.680 --> 00:15:21.160 interwar period when he was writing. And subsequently was never a big powerful populist nation. 00:15:21.160 --> 00:15:28.760 But it's literary tradition in the 20th century is really quite almost incomparable, I would say. 00:15:28.760 --> 00:15:34.840 In any case, Chapek invented or refined a wide variety of genres. He wrote plays, novels, 00:15:34.840 --> 00:15:44.040 short stories, pamphlets, political discuisions, newspaper columns, and some other unclassifiable 00:15:45.000 --> 00:15:50.760 testimonies such as his little book called The Gardeners Year. And it's a passage from that book 00:15:50.760 --> 00:15:58.040 that is about gardening and about the meaning and philosophy of gardening that I'd like to quote 00:15:58.040 --> 00:16:04.280 from, because they're in a discussion about the humus or the soil in which gardeners immerse 00:16:04.280 --> 00:16:12.040 themselves as they go about their business of nurturing plant life. Chapek writes that soil 00:16:13.080 --> 00:16:19.480 is a battleground where the forces of life confront the merciless resistance of the lifeless and 00:16:19.480 --> 00:16:27.400 inanimate. I tell you, he writes, "To tame a couple of rods of soil is a great victory." 00:16:27.400 --> 00:16:34.200 And he goes on to declare the following, "If you have no appreciation for this strange beauty, 00:16:34.920 --> 00:16:40.440 let fate be stole upon you a couple of rods of clay, clay like lead, 00:16:40.440 --> 00:16:49.560 squelching, and primeval clay out of which coldness oozes, which yields under the spade like 00:16:49.560 --> 00:16:57.080 chewing gum, which bakes in the sun and gets sour in the shade, ill-tempered, un-maliable greasy and 00:16:57.080 --> 00:17:04.360 sticky like plasters of Paris, slippery like a snake and dry as a brick impermeable like tin 00:17:04.360 --> 00:17:11.160 and heavy like lead, and now smash it with a pick axe, cut it with a spade, break it with a hammer, 00:17:11.160 --> 00:17:19.080 turn it over and labor, cursing aloud and lamenting. Then you will understand the animosity and 00:17:19.080 --> 00:17:26.440 callousness of dead and sterile matter, which ever did defend itself and still does, 00:17:26.440 --> 00:17:33.720 against becoming a soil of life. And you will realize what a terrible fight life must have 00:17:33.720 --> 00:17:41.080 undergone, inch by inch to take root in the soil of the earth, whether that life be called 00:17:41.080 --> 00:17:50.840 vegetation or man." So cultivating his garden plot somewhere in a corner of the city of Prague, 00:17:50.840 --> 00:17:56.840 Tropic came to understand intuitively what science now knows with theoretical certainly. 00:17:58.120 --> 00:18:04.600 Namely that in the beginning was an earth that aggressively resisted life's colonizing 00:18:04.600 --> 00:18:12.120 adventures, and it took the tremendous self-affirming struggles of life itself to transform the earth, 00:18:12.120 --> 00:18:19.320 see and air into elements hospitable to life. Life itself first brought about the conditions 00:18:19.320 --> 00:18:25.400 that favor life on the planet today. This is the great paradox, and this is the great miracle, 00:18:25.400 --> 00:18:33.080 like I said, it's life itself that actually transformed the earth into a planet favorable for life. 00:18:33.080 --> 00:18:40.840 Because it was thanks to the discrete and relentless metabolism, a primitive bacteria, 00:18:40.840 --> 00:18:48.040 over untold millions of years that allowed an atmosphere rich with oxygen and carbon dioxide 00:18:48.040 --> 00:18:55.160 to slowly form around the earth. That atmosphere in turn made possible the process of photosynthesis, 00:18:56.120 --> 00:19:02.680 which in turn transformed the planet as a whole into a living organism. So if over time 00:19:02.680 --> 00:19:09.720 earth became a thriving garden of sorts, primitive life was the original gardener who worked its 00:19:09.720 --> 00:19:16.440 soil and made it fit for growth. The human gardeners are late-coming participants in, 00:19:16.440 --> 00:19:22.440 as well as the beneficiaries of this primordial chemistry of vitalization. 00:19:24.520 --> 00:19:29.080 Now I don't want to ascribe care in the human sense to primitive organisms, 00:19:29.080 --> 00:19:37.320 I would rather say that care are human care that makes it matter that we are on the earth. 00:19:37.320 --> 00:19:44.920 That makes us gardeners or farmers or educators or cultivators of virtue and so forth. 00:19:44.920 --> 00:19:52.920 That human care in its self-transending character is an expansive projection of the intrinsic 00:19:52.920 --> 00:20:00.440 ecstasy of life. Why do I call it the ecstasy of life? Because what distinguishes life from the 00:20:00.440 --> 00:20:07.240 inanimate matter in which it has its origins is the continuous self-exceeding by which it bursts 00:20:07.240 --> 00:20:15.400 forth from the lifeless and extatically maintains itself in being through expenditures that increase 00:20:15.400 --> 00:20:23.720 rather than deplete the reserves of vitality. Life is an excess, call it, the self-exstacy of matter. 00:20:23.720 --> 00:20:31.320 And in that respect I'm convinced that our thinking minds participate in this excessive surplus 00:20:31.320 --> 00:20:37.640 that allows life to always precariously situate itself just beyond the condition of inanimate matter. 00:20:37.640 --> 00:20:44.360 It is this constant struggle that keeps us and everything else that is alive in a perpetual 00:20:44.360 --> 00:20:52.520 state of anxiety and even terror. That in itself is a thought-provoking matter and who knows maybe it's life 00:20:52.520 --> 00:21:00.280 itself that thinks through us when we think about a question like what do I think about life? 00:21:00.280 --> 00:21:25.100 [Music] 00:21:25.100 --> 00:21:29.100 [Music] 00:21:29.100 --> 00:21:35.100 [Music] 00:21:35.100 --> 00:21:45.100 [Music] 00:21:45.100 --> 00:21:55.100 [Music] 00:21:55.100 --> 00:22:05.100 [Music] 00:22:05.100 --> 00:22:15.100 [Music] 00:22:15.100 --> 00:22:19.100 [Music] 00:22:19.100 --> 00:22:23.100 [Music] 00:22:23.100 --> 00:22:29.900 I've talked a lot about thinking in this regard but let me also say a word about sentiment and seasonality 00:22:29.900 --> 00:22:34.700 because I we're talking here about the summer and the spirit of the summer and there's 00:22:34.700 --> 00:22:40.780 a certain kind of music to each of the seasons and perhaps even our music owes something to the 00:22:40.780 --> 00:22:46.700 obliquity of the earth's axis and to all these forces that I was speaking about earlier. 00:22:46.700 --> 00:22:54.380 And I don't know why Virginia Woolf comes to mind in this regard. I think it's because 00:22:56.380 --> 00:23:05.820 I'm really very impressed by her book of room of one's own and something in that in the earlier 00:23:05.820 --> 00:23:12.220 pages that book has been kind of coming to my into my ear and it's really a passage in that book 00:23:12.220 --> 00:23:19.100 which is about things coming into the inner ear so that are somehow dependent on or correlated with 00:23:19.100 --> 00:23:24.460 the seasons and not only the seasons and the literal sense but also the seasons of history 00:23:25.180 --> 00:23:33.020 because history too it goes through its springs and summers and falls and so forth. And towards the end of this 00:23:33.020 --> 00:23:40.540 strange book a room of one's own which is about which is this kind of half fictional book about 00:23:40.540 --> 00:23:48.220 giving a lecture at a university called Oxbridge about women in fiction. Virginia Woolf is 00:23:50.060 --> 00:23:58.140 describing a luncheon that she was at with a lot of good food and it's a late October so we're talking 00:23:58.140 --> 00:24:06.940 about a fall season here. And she says if by good luck there had been an ashtray handy in the 00:24:06.940 --> 00:24:15.580 luncheon hall where she was dining with a number of other scholars and hosts and so forth. 00:24:15.580 --> 00:24:21.820 If by good luck there had been an ashtray handy if one had not knocked the ash out of the window 00:24:21.820 --> 00:24:28.460 in default so obviously she was putting her cigarette out the window to knock the ashes. If things 00:24:28.460 --> 00:24:34.700 had been a little different from what they were one would not have seen presumably a cat without a 00:24:34.700 --> 00:24:44.460 tail. The sight of that abrupt and truncated animal paddling softly across the quadrangle 00:24:45.420 --> 00:24:52.140 changed by some fluke of the subconscious intelligence the emotional light for me. 00:24:52.140 --> 00:25:00.860 It was as if someone had let fall a shade perhaps the excellent hawk was relinquishing its hold 00:25:00.860 --> 00:25:07.660 certainly as I watched the manks cat paws in the middle of the lawn as it too questioned the 00:25:07.660 --> 00:25:17.980 universe. Something seemed lacking something seemed different but what was lacking what was 00:25:17.980 --> 00:25:25.740 different I asked myself listening to the talk around me and to that question I had to think myself 00:25:25.740 --> 00:25:34.460 out of the room back into the past before the war indeed and to set my said before my eyes the model 00:25:34.460 --> 00:25:41.020 of another luncheon party held in rooms not very far distant from these but different. 00:25:41.020 --> 00:25:49.980 So let's pause there a moment. She's thinking about another time back in the past before the first 00:25:49.980 --> 00:26:00.860 war war had begun. She's writing this I think in the 1925 so we're talking about seven years after 00:26:00.860 --> 00:26:07.260 the war and that first war war of course had changed the entire mood it had changed the season of 00:26:07.260 --> 00:26:16.620 western history at that moment and she's evoking another luncheon party that would be more like a 00:26:16.620 --> 00:26:24.780 summer luncheon party and those of you who have read to the lighthouse know that that extraordinary 00:26:24.780 --> 00:26:34.140 novel is a summer story about lunchons and dinner parties and this kind of strange summer 00:26:34.140 --> 00:26:41.100 enchantment that takes place in part one of the book before the disasters of the first war war 00:26:41.100 --> 00:26:49.980 that are in the aftermath of that in the second part of the book so there's a number of 00:26:49.980 --> 00:26:57.340 indications that she's going back to a kind of summer season of the spirit so let me continue 00:26:57.340 --> 00:27:04.460 everything was different she says meanwhile the talk went on among the guests who were many and 00:27:04.460 --> 00:27:11.660 young some of this sex some of that it went on swimmingly it went on agreeably freely amusingly 00:27:11.660 --> 00:27:17.980 and as it went on I said it against the background of that other talk and I matched the two together 00:27:19.260 --> 00:27:26.300 and I had no doubt that one was the descendant the legitimate air of the other nothing was changed nothing 00:27:26.300 --> 00:27:34.780 was different save only here I listened with all my ears not entirely to what was being said 00:27:34.780 --> 00:27:42.780 but to the murmur or current behind it yes that was it the change was there 00:27:45.020 --> 00:27:50.380 before the war at a luncheon party like this people would have said precisely the same things 00:27:50.380 --> 00:27:56.300 but they would have sounded different because in those days they were accompanied by a sort of 00:27:56.300 --> 00:28:04.860 humming noise not articulate but musical exciting which changed the value of the words themselves 00:28:04.860 --> 00:28:09.100 could one set that humming noise to words 00:28:10.540 --> 00:28:18.220 perhaps with the help of the poets one could a book lay beside me and opening it I turned casually 00:28:18.220 --> 00:28:26.700 enough to Tennyson and here I found Tennyson that's Lord Alfred Tennyson was singing 00:28:26.700 --> 00:28:35.340 there has fallen a splendid tear from the passion flower at the gate she is coming my dove my 00:28:35.340 --> 00:28:45.020 dear she is coming my life my fate the red rose cries she is near she is near and the white rose 00:28:45.020 --> 00:28:53.100 weeps she is late the larkspur listens I hear I hear and the lily whispers I wait 00:28:53.100 --> 00:29:01.100 was that what men hummed at luncheon parties before the war and the women 00:29:02.780 --> 00:29:09.420 my heart is like a singing bird whose nest is in a water chute my heart is like an apple tree 00:29:09.420 --> 00:29:17.180 whose bows are bent with thick set fruit my heart is like a rainbow shell that paddles on a halkyon sea 00:29:17.180 --> 00:29:22.780 my heart is clatter than all these because my love is come to me 00:29:22.780 --> 00:29:29.260 was that what women hummed at luncheon parties before the war 00:29:31.740 --> 00:29:37.980 I'm going to continue there was something so ludicrous in thinking of people humming such things 00:29:37.980 --> 00:29:42.700 even under their breath at luncheon parties before the war that I burst out laughing and had to 00:29:42.700 --> 00:29:49.740 explain my laughter by pointing at the manks cat who did look a little absurd poor beast without a 00:29:49.740 --> 00:29:57.180 tail in the middle of the lawn pause and parentheses that cat without a tail seems highly symbolic 00:29:57.180 --> 00:30:03.340 of something that has been lost between one season and another I would say no was he really 00:30:03.340 --> 00:30:11.740 born so or had he lost his tail in an accident the tailless cat though some are said to exist 00:30:11.740 --> 00:30:17.580 in the Isle of Man is rarer than one thinks it is a queer animal quaint rather than beautiful 00:30:17.580 --> 00:30:24.380 it is strange what a difference a tail makes you know the sort of things one says at a lunch party 00:30:24.380 --> 00:30:32.860 breaks up and people are finding their coats and hats it is strange she goes on how a scrap of 00:30:32.860 --> 00:30:40.460 poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road those words 00:30:40.460 --> 00:30:46.140 there has fallen a splendid tear from the passion flower at the gate she is coming my dove my 00:30:46.140 --> 00:30:53.180 dear sang in my blood as I stepped quickly along towards headingly and then switching off into 00:30:53.180 --> 00:31:00.220 the other measure I sang where the waters are turned up by the rear my heart is like a singing bird 00:31:00.220 --> 00:31:08.620 whose nest is in a water chute my heart is like an apple tree what poets I cried aloud as 00:31:08.620 --> 00:31:16.860 one does in the dusk what poets they were in a sort of jealousy I suppose for our own age 00:31:16.860 --> 00:31:21.900 silly and absurd though these comparisons are I went on to wonder if honestly one could name two 00:31:21.900 --> 00:31:29.900 living poets now as great as Tennyson and Christina Rosetti were then but why I continued moving on 00:31:29.900 --> 00:31:36.620 towards headingly have we stopped humming under our breath at luncheon parties why has Alfred 00:31:36.620 --> 00:31:44.780 ceased to sing she is coming my dove my dear why has Christina ceased to respond my heart is 00:31:44.780 --> 00:31:52.220 glatter than all these because my love has come to me then she goes on to ask shall we lay the 00:31:52.220 --> 00:32:00.620 blame on the war and the guns of 1914 and it goes on from there into a meandering kind of stream of 00:32:00.620 --> 00:32:08.700 consciousness narrative that I could spend the next two and a half hours reading aloud to you 00:32:09.340 --> 00:32:17.660 and that would probably be a welcome sort of strange episode of entitled opinions but I'd like to 00:32:17.660 --> 00:32:27.420 just kind of wrap up some thoughts here about the humming inarticulate music that one can hear 00:32:27.420 --> 00:32:34.380 in one's head that corresponds or resonates with or that is in some kind of sintany 00:32:35.420 --> 00:32:47.580 with a season and how the poems that she chose to invoke in this part of her narrative were 00:32:47.580 --> 00:32:57.820 clearly summer poems recalling some of the summer scenes of to the lighthouse and let me just 00:32:57.820 --> 00:33:05.180 since I'm into reading from chapick and virginia wolf I'm just going to read you the whole section 00:33:05.180 --> 00:33:14.060 of that poem from Alfred Lord Tennyson it's a long poem mod and this is part one and he calls it 00:33:14.060 --> 00:33:25.740 a monodrama and it's a poem that is profoundly summarized like a sense of summer of the season 00:33:27.180 --> 00:33:36.380 and it's there to remind us that were it not you know for the tilt in the earth's axis were it not for 00:33:36.380 --> 00:33:45.980 the fact that the moon keeps the slouch of the earth constant through the millennia and the 00:33:45.980 --> 00:33:52.780 millions of years if we were not for the fact that life had originated thanks to all these precarious 00:33:53.500 --> 00:34:01.820 circumstances and accidents that happened once and once only on the planet then we might 00:34:01.820 --> 00:34:14.460 never know what this kind of cosmic music that resounds in our minds if not our thinking 00:34:14.460 --> 00:34:21.900 minds and our feeling minds and that has its most immediate sort of manifestation in this kind of 00:34:21.900 --> 00:34:30.780 poetry summer poetry in this case come into the garden mod for the black bat night has flown come into 00:34:30.780 --> 00:34:38.220 the garden mod I am here at the gate alone and the wood bind spices are wafted abroad and the 00:34:38.220 --> 00:34:46.140 musk of the rose is blown for a breeze of morning moves and the planet of love is on high beginning 00:34:46.140 --> 00:34:53.740 to faint in the light that she loves in a bed of daffodil sky to faint in the night of the sun 00:34:53.740 --> 00:35:01.100 she loves to faint in his light and to die all night have the roses heard the flute 00:35:01.100 --> 00:35:08.860 violin bassoon all night has the casement jessamine stirred to the dancers dancing in tune 00:35:09.980 --> 00:35:17.500 till the silence fell with a waking bird and a hush with the setting moon I said to the lily 00:35:17.500 --> 00:35:25.340 there is but one with whom she has heart to be gay when will the dancers leave her alone 00:35:25.340 --> 00:35:32.620 she is weary of dance and play now half to the setting moon are gone and half to the rising day 00:35:34.140 --> 00:35:43.500 low on the sand and loud on the stone the last wheels echo away I said to the rose the brief night 00:35:43.500 --> 00:35:52.300 goes in babble and revel and wine oh young lord lover what societies are these for those that 00:35:52.300 --> 00:36:03.980 will never be thine but mine but mine so I swear to the rose forever and ever mine and the 00:36:03.980 --> 00:36:11.820 soul of the rose went into my blood as the music clashed in the hall and long by the garden lake I 00:36:11.820 --> 00:36:19.980 stood for I heard your rivulet fall from the lake to the meadow and on to the wood our wood 00:36:19.980 --> 00:36:27.980 that is dear than all from the meadow your walks have left so sweet that whenever a march wind 00:36:27.980 --> 00:36:35.340 size he sets the jewel print of your feet in violets blue as your eyes to the woody hollows in which 00:36:35.340 --> 00:36:43.660 we meet and the valleys of paradise the slender acacia would not shake one long milk bloom on the tree 00:36:43.660 --> 00:36:53.740 the white lake blossom fell into the lake as the pimpurnal dewused into the lee but the rose was 00:36:53.740 --> 00:37:01.260 awake all night for your sake knowing your promise to me the lilies and the roses were all awake 00:37:01.260 --> 00:37:09.340 they sighed for the dawn and the queen rose of the rosewood garden of girls come hither the 00:37:09.340 --> 00:37:15.500 dances are done in gloss of satin and glimmer of pearls queen lily and rose in one 00:37:15.500 --> 00:37:21.900 shine out little head sunning over with curls to the flowers and be their son 00:37:22.860 --> 00:37:30.940 from the passion flower at the gate she is coming my dove my dear she is coming my life my fate 00:37:30.940 --> 00:37:39.420 the red rose cries she is near she is near and the white rose weeks she is late the larkspur 00:37:39.420 --> 00:37:50.540 listens I hear I hear and the lily whispers I wait she is coming my own my sweet word ever so 00:37:50.540 --> 00:37:59.900 area tread my heart would hear her and beat were at earth in an earthly bed my dust would hear her 00:37:59.900 --> 00:38:09.180 and beat had I lain for a century dead would start and tremble under her feet and blossom in purple 00:38:09.180 --> 00:38:17.420 and red as far as I'm concerned if all the wild accidents that gave us a moon and an earth that 00:38:17.420 --> 00:38:23.900 tilts at twenty three point five degrees and the rise and fall of the sea levels caused by the 00:38:23.900 --> 00:38:29.900 combined effects of the gravitational forces exerted by the moon and the sun and the rotation of the 00:38:29.900 --> 00:38:38.060 earth if all these can create the conditions for the musical hum that tennis and poem transcribes 00:38:38.060 --> 00:38:46.700 into words it will all have been worthwhile toward the end of his life Samuel Beckett was asked 00:38:46.700 --> 00:38:57.180 whether any of it was worthwhile his answer precious little of those two words I would ask all of 00:38:57.180 --> 00:39:04.380 you friends of entitled opinions to think about the word precious even a cat without a tail 00:39:04.380 --> 00:39:19.660 is precious enough 00:39:19.660 --> 00:39:46.600 I love you, the best, bettles at all, the rest. 00:39:46.600 --> 00:40:08.540 I love you, the best, bettles at all, the rest. 00:40:08.540 --> 00:40:28.540 But I'm mean, in the song, in the end, in the end song. 00:40:28.540 --> 00:40:56.540 I'm mean, in the song, in the end. 00:40:56.540 --> 00:41:06.540 In the end, in the end, in the end, in the end. 00:41:06.540 --> 00:41:22.540 I love you, the best, bettles at all. 00:41:22.540 --> 00:41:37.540 The rest. 00:41:37.540 --> 00:41:47.540 [BLANK_AUDIO]