Most of human life is filled with insoluble mystery. Consider, for example, the discoid eczema that Dalrymple has been experiencing on his right foot. No one can really identify the ultimate cause of it.

[These] mysteries could only be solved within a very short period of time, within what is known in managerialese as a window of opportunity. Once I am dead, for example, they will be no longer be soluble even in theory. Which means that there is an infinity of things about the past that, even in principle, can never be known. True enough, no one will ever want to solve all these little mysteries. But the point is that they couldn’t do so even if they wanted to.

A hearty Happy New Year to you all. May your 2017 be filled with joy.

In honoring Bob Dylan with the Nobel Prize for Literature, a member of the committee, Horace Engdahl, said that Dylan “gave back to poetry its elevated style, lost since the romantics.” Dalrymple finds that a little hard to believe:

So here is the recent history of “the elevated style” in English poetry according to the Swedish Academy: Wordsworth and Coleridge, and then a fallow period of nearly a century and a half until Dylan arrived, like a Daniel come to judgment. No Tennyson, no Longfellow, no Browning (husband or wife), no Matthew Arnold, no Swinburne, no Gerard Manley Hopkins, to name but a small handful. Comment is redundant.

Read the piece here

At an airport, Dalrymple notices tobacco being sold only in a “hidden passageway”:

Is it not curious that the purchase and consumption of tobacco should be pushed into semi-clandestinity at the very time when pressure is mounting to make cannabis as freely available as (say) coffee? A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, no doubt, but it is odd that we accept new and blatant inconsistencies without noticing, let alone protesting them.

Dalrymple at Salisbury Review

On the essays of Abraham Cowley (1617-1667):

The theme of his essays—on solitude, on obscurity (lack of fame), on avarice, on the dangers confronting an honest man, on the shortness of life and uncertainty of riches—is that happiness resides in the control of one’s desires, a middling state being preferable to one of poverty or extreme wealth.

As Dalrymple notes, Cowley’s message is not a new one — which perhaps implies that it has always been, and will continue to be, ignored.

Read the piece here

A British Muslim man named Michael Coe was recently arrested and tried for attacking a young Muslim couple because they were hugging each other while being unmarried. He absurdly claimed self-defense but changed his tack after being convicted:

…Coe’s counsel entered a plea in mitigation before sentence. He said, among other things, that “Coe has now accepted he had a ‘limited’ knowledge of Islam, and has now resolved to seek a broader understanding of the religion.” When, one might ask, did Coe come to this realization? After claiming that the assault was justified, and the jury began deliberating?

Don’t worry about Mr. Coe, though. He was given a very light sentence, of course.

The politicians of Europe are working to save the EU in the aftermath of the Brexit vote and rising nationalist sentiment. Step one: punish Britain.

…say Britain were able to effect the departure from the European Union that the majority of its citizens want. In that case, the EU’s hopes for survival would rest squarely on economic catastrophe for Britain. For if it were able to prosper outside the Union, or even merely to maintain its current economic level, the value of the Union itself would be called into question by the peoples of Europe even more than is true today.

Read it here

Dalrymple on his writing efforts, including battling the MS Word spell- and grammar-checker:

Sometimes I try to write paragraphs more or less in order to have as much blue underlining in it as I possibly can, in as much as it is an amusing game to play. For ever is a useful standby in this game. Be that as it may (another standby) I have not yet managed an entire paragraph with blue underlining. Just as real meaning sometimes creeps inadvertently into politicians’ speeches, so some words escape the blue pencil even in the best of my efforts.

What was behind the love, on the part of Western intellectuals, for the dictator Fidel Castro? Dalrymple says it was partly envy of his power.

Just as everyone has his favorite crime, so everyone has his favorite dictator. For much of the 20th century, Fidel Castro was the darling of the intellectuals: partly because, like them, he was so slovenly in appearance, and partly because he represented so completely their wish fulfillment (inside every rebel there’s a dictator trying to get out). To rant for hours in front of a captive audience unable to answer or object: What greater bliss could an intellectual dream of?!

Latin America has a long history of dictatorship, as the reign of Dr. José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia in Paraguay shows. But Dalrymple notes one difference between Francia and Castro: Francia didn’t pretend to be democratic.

Read the rest here

Contemplating Velásquez’s portrait of El bufón don Sebastián de Morra at the Prado in Madrid, Dalrymple’s favorite art museum:

Velásquez’s great painting invites us (at the very least) to see what might not have been obvious in his own, very hard and cruel times, namely that dwarves are not to be dismissed or treated as intrinsically inferior or objects of amusement merely because of the stature and bodily peculiarities. But are we right to read into it don Sebastián’s humiliation? Might he not, if we had been able to ask him, have replied ‘It is all very well for you to sympathise with my plight and thus feel virtuous yourselves, but being a jester at the court of one of the mightiest monarchs in the world gives me at least an honourable and comfortable place in the world, at least compared to any possible alternative.’ And if we were to reply to this, ‘It is the world, then, that needs changing, it need to become stature-blind as it is supposed to be colour-blind,’ he might reply ‘That is all very well, but I cannot wait and have my living to earn, besides which who are you to tell me whether I am or ought to be humiliated?’

Read the whole piece here