Still Calculating After All These Years

 I found this calculator by accident, buried in a drawer I hadn’t properly sorted for years. It was one of the small promotional units I used to give customers in the mid 1990s — slim, black, with a neat gold strip and my business details printed across the top. I hadn’t seen it in decades. It felt like the sort of object that would have quietly died sometime around the millennium.

It hadn’t. Of course, when I pressed the power button, nothing happened. The battery was long gone, so I looked out a replacement. After a short detective session by the young man in the hardware shop, who took genuine pride in identifying the correct button cell, I tracked one down. He approached the problem with the earnest concentration of someone decoding a minor mystery. Button cells have their own taxonomy — LR1130, AG10, SR1130 ... — a bewildering equivalence chart in front of him. He worked it out, eventually. A small, obsolete puzzle from one era to another, solved with patience and curiosity.

I got back home, inserted the new battery and typed in a random number, 3663, simply to confirm it was alive. 

There was something pleasingly matter‑of‑fact about the whole experience. No sentimentality, just the recognition that this small, inexpensive device had endured. It was designed to be functional, not memorable, yet here it was: still capable of doing exactly what it was made to do.

These calculators were never grand gestures. They were practical giveaways, chosen because they were useful, portable, and unlikely to be thrown away immediately. Seeing one again reminded me how straightforward that logic was. A customer could actually use it. It didn’t pretend to be anything more.

Now, decades later, its survival feels almost like a quiet joke — a reminder that some technologies persist  because they are simple, durable, and unbothered by the passage of time. It is a small object, but it has earned its place as a curiosity: and  it still works.

And, as I’ve since discovered, these little calculators  turn up on eBay and similar sites, sold as retro novelties. I won’t be going on a world cruise on the proceeds of mine, but it’s oddly satisfying to know it has entered the ranks of collectible curiosities.

Poets, Statues, and the Stories We Tell: On the Volatility of Memory

 “I am a lantern— My head a moon of Japanese paper.” — Sylvia Plath ,'Fever 103'

In those early months of 2020, in those COVID times when the world often shrank to the size of a laptop screen and friendship was conducted in little squares on Zoom, I was part of a small college group which found itself talking about everything and anything literary or culturally. 

Someone would recommend a documentary; someone else would watch it that evening; someone would suggest a poem; or a novel; someone would suggest a video of a dance performance; by the next call after each and any of these ideas, we were all deep into it.

On one occasion the subject of Sylvia Plath came up, with a reading of Ted Hughes’ ‘Night Ride on Ariel’. I made some notes afterwards:

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Ted Hughes' Night Ride on Ariel (Jun 16th 2020)

I suppose as one who has looked into the fortunes of some famously troubled women in my time ( Vivienne Eliot, Sophie Brzeska, Judee Sill, even Ida Nettleship back in the day) I should also have looked more deeply into the life of Sylvia Plath, and especially through her poetry. I have no idea why I have only scraped the surface of who she was. I know the broad outline of her story of course, and the "Monday" - 11 Feb 1963 (harshest of winters, not a great time to be in meteorological desperation). I even spent time downloading and listening and keeping lots of her poems, read by her, at the time I discovered I had a new sister.

So I am miles behind anyone who knows her story fully and has thought about it through the prism of The Birthday Letters. I suppose when the book was published I baulked at the furore it seemed to engender. Even much later, I believe, people were hacking off the name on Ted Hughes' memorial in Dartmoor sometime after his death. ( More memorial desecration....).

I do know about her horse Ariel. And I think I get the point of her poem, which Hughes' references in his. Her fantasy ride  into the  creative Sun finds in Hughes' counterpoint response poem, a ride into the everlasting night. That is the simple basic framework isn't it? The rest would take reams of words! Anyone up for that?

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Later, one of the group sent this message: “You may already have seen this, but we watched an excellent documentary about Ted Hughes on iPlayer…” And so we watched it — Hughes’s face in still photographs, Plath’s voice in recordings, the long shadow of their marriage, the tragedies that followed. 

I remember a mental double-take  when Frieda Hughes said, almost offhandedly, that her father had been “vulnerable to women.” I joked in reply: ‘Did I hear the words “Ted was vulnerable to women?”Now there is a title for a thesis. "Was Ted Hughes vulnerable to women? - Discuss". But I probably won’t'. But beneath the humour was something else: a reminder of the shifting perspectives of individuals in any life story.

It was Simon Armitage’s point in the documentary — that biography matters as one way of entering the imaginative world of the poet. Eliot scholarship, for example, for all Eliot’s protests, has moved in the same direction. 

And so the documentary, and our conversation about it, was helpful. Amongst all else we were reminded of Plath’s poem 'Ariel' and how it describes an uncontrolled horseback ride that becomes a symbol for emotional release and personal change.

Hughes’s answer is a ride into the everlasting night — two visions of the same moment. A shared life split into incompatible narratives. A trail of desperation and tragedy, as one of our group put it, left in Hughes’s wake.

And then the further sadnesses: Frieda's brother Nicholas Hughes was a  renowned expert in stream ecology and behaviour of species like trout and salmon.Frieda remembered him with affection and his achievements with pride. His life ended early and in shadow, a fact unmentioned in the programme.  

It was a little later that I realised how closely the perspectives of the documentary mirrored aspects of other conversations we were having at the that time — about Churchill, about Edward Colston, about the toppling of statues. Our conversations seemed to converge on the selectivity and the volatility of memory. 

And so, in those few days, I found myself checking Colston’s Wikipedia page almost daily. On 17 June 2020, at 10:49, a new line appeared: that his philanthropy had been directed only toward causes aligned with his political and religious views. The moderators were busy; the footnotes bristled with warnings — ‘unreliable source’, ‘failed verification’. A few days earlier, none of this had been there. Here were scrambled attempts to fix the meaning of a man whose legacy was built on both charity and the slave trade.

I wrote these notes:

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Edward Colston (Jun 17th 2020)

I looked up Colston a few days ago on  various sources including Wikipedia. I am still looking forward to learning more about the 1895 debate about the raising of a statue to him in his native Bristol, over 170 years after his death. But meantime I see that the latest update to the Edward Colston Wikipedia entry was made ( as I write this  June 17 2020) today at 10.49. Something new is this:

"He was promoted as a local benefactor in his native city of Bristol[1][unreliable source] in part due to having donated money to charities which supported people aligned with his political and religious views.[1][unreliable source][2][failed verification][3]:7-10"

Thus the Wikipedia moderators are kept busy. Someone is saying that Colston's philanthropy was directed only to causes dear to him. Is this true? Only a few days ago, the entry made no such differentiation about his philanthropy. One can go slightly barmy if we follow these things too closely.

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Yet the volatility of that Wikipedia page felt familiar. It echoed the instability I felt in the Plath–Hughes story: the way narratives yield to pressure, the way memory shifts when the present demands a new accounting of the past. Literary biography, civic controversy — both revealed how fragile our stories become when they are forced into the light. 

The pandemic seemed to magnify this effect. It stripped away the illusion of normality, and so also of memory . Everything was provisional, subject to revision, open to reinterpretation.

And so, looking back, I was mindful in those days, how we were being drawn repeatedly to contested figures — people whose lives resist simple moral categorisation, whose stories have been misread, weaponised, or oversimplified. A troubled woman whose voice has been distorted. A poet whose memorial was defaced. A philanthropist whose statue was toppled.  Churchill, whose legacy was being re-examined in the heat of public protest.

 Each of them became, in their own way, a site of struggle: between competing narratives, competing moral frameworks, competing visions of what the past should mean.

And perhaps that is why those fragments from 2020 still feel connected, despite their differences. They belong to a moment when the past began to be rewritten in real time — by poets, by historians, by activists, by anonymous editors tapping at keyboards in locked-down houses. 

Those times were unsettling, sometimes exhausting, occasionally absurd. In that suspended season, we saw the fractures, the revisions, the contested edges of memory — the places where the narrative is still alive, still shifting, still capable of surprise. 

 “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” — Faulkner

Except Ye Lord Keep Ye Cittie…

I was wandering in the town square in Ripon in the summer of 1973. I remember walking without any particular aim. I had time to spare. I was light and free.

I looked up and saw the verse carved into the frieze at the top of the Town Hall — an adaptation of the verse in the Psalm:

“Except Ye Lord Keep Ye Cittie Ye Wakeman Waketh in Vain.”

I knew the verse well enough, but the substitution caught my eye. The Town Hall had replaced watchman with wakeman. The word looked both familiar and out of place, like something that had slipped through a crack in time.

I later discovered that Ripon’s historic Hornblower — the Wakeman — would blow a horn at 9 p.m. each night to signal the start of the security patrol. But I didn’t know that then.

I stood for a while, looking at the inscription, taking in its message. Then I moved on. Without me, the square went on being a square. The day went on being a day.

But the detail stayed.

Ripon 1973

Summer light on the square. Stone warm underfoot. A bus purred at the kerb.

I walked without aim — air moving easily, the day loose about me.

High on the Town Hall frieze: Ye Wakeman waketh… letters cut like dry reeds.

Wakeman.

I stood a moment. The square held its shape. The day went on.

The word remained.

Sound in Movies: A Different Kind of Seeing

 

I saw the movie "Tuner" today, and one of the features of the film was the use of sound at certain times when the drama focussed around the Leo Woodall character in  his safe-cracking, and in other action moments.  We were hearing the action from the sounds in his head. This was interesting, and I recalled the role of sound in 'Rose of Nevada', which I reflected on recently. In that film,  oddly distant dialogue, the slightly unreal soundscape placed  a layer of distance between the viewer and the action. Use of sound in ‘Tuner’ was different.

In ‘Tuner’ the sound design functions as a form of subjective immersion. When the drama centres on Niki White’s ( Leo Woodall ) safe-cracking, or on moments of heightened concentration and danger, we are drawn into his  sensory world. External reality recedes and we hear what he hears and what his mind attends to. Small sounds become magnified, irrelevant sounds disappear; rhythms and mechanical noises acquire an almost musical significance.  

Rose of Nevada had the reverse effect.  I guess one way of putting this is that ‘Tuner’ uses sound to move us closer to experience, while Rose of Nevada uses sound to move us further away from it.

But in  both cases at least, we are reminded that sound is as important to any film, and  cinema is more than  a visual art. The eye tells us what is happening, but the ear helps us  to inhabit what is happening.

In Rose of Nevada, the unusual soundscape contributes to the feeling that the events are being recollected, half-remembered, or viewed through a veil of memory and myth. The distant dialogue and unreal acoustic space make us feel that we are  never entirely "there."

In ‘Tuner’, by contrast, sound compresses the distance between audience and character. Every click, scrape, and metallic resonance becomes charged with significance because we are experiencing events from within Niki White’s concentration.

So, in  both movies, sound is controlling our psychological distance. We should look out for the next award season: both movies will surely be listed for Best Sound?

When Inclusion Becomes Erosion — Revised

 

Inclusion without capacity isn’t compassion — it’s abandonment. When the state hollows out, communities are left to carry tensions they never chose. Here, I have written about how Britain’s outsourced systems are turning welcome into erosion.

I take my cue from Anoosh Chakelian’s 'How Britain Lost Control' New Statesman cover story this week. The article offers a vivid, unsettling portrait of a country where the state has hollowed itself out, outsourcing its responsibilities to private contractors and leaving communities to absorb the consequences. Her reporting from Wigan — of overcrowded HMOs, fraying neighbourhoods, and a government that has lost the capacity to enact its own ideals — illuminates the very dynamics I was trying to name.

This revision is an attempt to place my earlier reflections within that wider, more concrete frame. The erosion I wrote about  in the abstract is visible in the streets, houses, and lives Chakelian describes. To speak of inclusion today is to reckon with the structures that make it possible — or impossible. And so I have rewritten this piece to acknowledge the lived realities that now press upon it. Realities  about which many  folk living comfortable privileged lives for example, continue to parrot abstract banalities.

There are moments when a society’s virtues begin to fray not because they were wrong, but because the institutions meant to hold them have grown too weak to bear their weight. We speak easily of inclusion, hospitality, openness. These are good words, necessary words. But they depend on a moral architecture  and when that architecture weakens, even our best intentions can become sources of strain.

In recent years I have found myself returning to this question: What happens when a society tries to welcome more people than it can meaningfully care for? Not because the newcomers are unwelcome, nor because the locals are unkind, but because the state that once mediated between them has abandoned the business of leadership and lost the ability to understand a nation which daily witnesses a tolerance of injustice and unfairness and which shows a lack of empathy for justified concerns.

Anoosh Chakelian’s recent reporting from Wigan offers hard detail. She describes Darlington Street — a long terrace of redbrick houses, once home to mill workers and miners — now transformed into a symbol of Britain’s political and moral drift. “Every other house has been taken up as an HMO,” one MP tells her, as private contractors pack asylum seekers, ex‑offenders, and the homeless into the cheapest streets they can find. The result is not hostility so much as exhaustion: neighbours who no longer know who lives next door, communities that feel transient, and a quiet sense that something once solid has begun to dissolve.

This is not the fault of those who arrive, nor of those already there. It is the consequence of a state that has outsourced its responsibilities to companies whose duty is not to the common good but to the contract and it's financial drivers. Serco, Mears, Clearsprings — names that hover at the edges of public consciousness — now run vast tracts of what used to be the work of government. They house asylum seekers, manage detention centres, operate speed cameras, run NHS catering, and even maintain the radar stations that watch the skies. They are, as Chakelian puts it, the “shadow state”: indispensable, unaccountable, and largely unseen.

In such a landscape, inclusion becomes a slogan rather than a practice. The state disperses vulnerable people into the cheapest corners of the country, leaving local councils to absorb the consequences without the means to respond. Residents feel policies are being done to them, not with them. Asylum seekers live in houses where toilets go unfixed for a year, where four mattresses are pushed into a single room, where the weekly support payment sometimes fails to arrive and where easy money is to be made by property speculating go-betweens who can buy up properties and sell them on as risk-free investments as a Serco- managed packages. And all the while, the political class speaks of compassion and control as though either were still within its grasp.

This is the erosion which should concern us all: not the erosion of values, but the erosion of the structures that make values possible. A society cannot meaningfully include newcomers if it cannot house its own citizens. It cannot preach neighbourliness while leaving neighbours to negotiate overcrowded streets, rising rents, and the slow unravelling of local trust. It cannot ask communities to carry burdens that the state itself has deliberately laid aside.

The tragedy is that everyone suffers. The asylum seeker who fled war only to find him/herself in a broken house and hostile, suspicious neighbours. The lifelong resident who watches her street change overnight and feels she has no voice in the matter. The council officer who knows what needs to be done but lacks the budget to do it. The politician who promises reform but inherits a system too entangled to unwind.

Inclusion, in such a context, becomes a fragile thing. It requires more than sentiment. It requires capacity — the ability to build homes, to plan coherently for education and employment, to mediate between competing needs, to hold communities together rather than leaving them to fray. 

Without that capacity, inclusion becomes erosion: not because we welcomed too many - though as an island nation losing  vast tracts of productive land for food security or for breathing space away from crowded cityscapes this also can be debated - but because we built too little, planned too little, cared too little at the level where care must be organised.

We need a  recognition that compassion without competence is a brittle virtue.

In the end, the question is not whether we should be an open or a closed country, generous or guarded, welcoming or wary. The deeper question is whether we still possess the civic and moral power to hold the tensions that any real society must carry: the tension between neighbourliness and change, between compassion and capacity, between the needs of those who arrive and the needs of those already here. 

A state that has hollowed itself out cannot hold these tensions; it leaves communities to absorb them alone, and then wonders why resentment grows. If we are to rebuild anything worth calling a common life, we will need a politics that can bear disagreement without panic, and a public realm strong enough to mediate between competing goods.

Our country needs to be governed — not managed, not outsourced, not placated — by a government that understands inclusivity and understands that dissent needs to be part of that inclusivity, not judged by any arbitrary virtue‑signalling standard.

 

 

Voyages Through Time: Rose of Nevada

 

Today I caught up with the movie Rose of Nevada.  I came away with that familiar feeling  with movies of this genre,  that a coherent meaning was obscured  from view. As  a consequence it was difficult to find sympathy for the characters and their relationships in each time frame. Without some kind of signpost we find ourselves using much of our mental and emotional resources just to piece together and grasp a narrative. 

I found myself finally able to accept this technique, but by then my feeling was disinterested detachment from character, and I looked more at the surface techniques, including the extraordinary realism around the storm. It is the kind of movie, such as Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer or Memento, where time slicing is a vital part of the narrative. So, a second viewing becomes more enlightening and the experience becomes richer.

Such  films that fragment time ask us  to do significant intellectual work, but there is usually an emotional anchor that keeps us invested while we solve the puzzle.

 In Memento, it is Leonard's desperate search for meaning; in Oppenheimer, it is Oppenheimer's moral and psychological journey. Even when the chronology is fragmented, the emotional trajectory remains relatively clear.

Rose of Nevada seems less interested in such emotional identification. It works around atmosphere, memory and place. The characters often feel like discrete, disconnected figures in a folk tale or legend rather than fully developed psychological individuals. That may be intentional, but it comes at a cost. We expend  energy simply trying to establish "where" and "when" they are. For me at least, not a lot left over for  empathy.

So, "disinterested detachment" sums up my initial response. Maybe this mirrors the way the film is crafted?  I have learned after viewing (I tend not to read reviews before seeing a movie)  that the movie was shot without sound, and all the sounds – voices as well as all else, were dubbed in afterwards. Oddly distant dialogue, the slightly unreal soundscape, and the fragmented timescales all placed  a layer of distance between me and what was in front of me.

The storm sequence is perhaps the clearest exception to this direction of trvel in the film. Here, narrative uncertainty becomes irrelevant in these isolated action snapshots. The sea, the boat, the weather, the physical peril—these are immediate and comprehensible. Here, the technique adds to  the experience rather than obscuring it. I found these sequences, and the business of catching, gutting and storing the fish,  among the most compelling for exactly that reason.

So yes, a second viewing of Rose of Nevada  is for the best, though I think there is an important distinction with Rose of Nevada compared, say, to a  second viewing of Memento. Here, a second viewing (I haven’t tried it yet) should reveal how meticulously the narrative has been constructed. We expect the  puzzle pieces to click together, because that is the story, and the story lose ambiguity and brings a clarity by its end. With Rose of Nevada, I am not entirely sure that a second viewing would lead to that kind of resolution. Rather, it would just help me to stop worrying about the puzzle and attend to other things: the imagery, the sound design, the symbolism, the sense of Cornwall as a place haunted by its own past. And all that.

So , thinking on awhile, Rose of Nevada  has something in  common with modernist literature than with puzzle-box cinema. For example, reading The Waste Land for a second time – or even umpteen times -  does not necessarily “solve” it; instead, once we are  less anxious about understanding every reference, we begin to notice patterns, echoes and moods. The experience deepens without becoming entirely transparent.

That raises the question of what kind of satisfaction a film owes its audience. I suppose over these years of looking at  traditions around  modernism through art cinema and modernist poetry, we know that ambiguity and uncertainty are watchwords. But for me anyway,  ambiguity works best when there is still something solid to hold onto—character, emotion, theme, image, or story.

So for me,  Rose of Nevada is too ambiguous. It asks  too much of the audience before it has earned an emotional investment. It’s not just me saying  "I didn't understand it."  The film’s  artistic method and  ambitions compete with, rather than support, its human drama.

I will see it again: I am confident my opinion will shift, like those gutted fish on the trawler's deck!

 

Two Small Figures: a History of Introspection

 

Here we are with some thoughts around two images I encountered over  half-century apart.  I came across the first image in  1967, when I was doing  German literature  at school. The course included Alfred Andersch’s novel Sansibar oder der Letzte Grund, in which the work of Ernst Barlach, his Lesender Klosterschüler — the Reading Monk — was a central image and important symbol. My copy of the book had the photo of the carving. I wrote about this here : Der Lesender Klosterschüler

The second encounter came recently, while revisiting the BBC documentary series Art That Made Us, which opens with the Anglo‑Saxon “Spong Man,” discovered in Norfolk. I enjoyed the co-incidence that  Norfolk was my domicile for many years, and that earlier blog piece on Barlach had been written there. The BBC documentary’s brief glimpse of the Spong Man prompted me to think some more about the clear and instinctive parallels which these figures present.

Two Figures, Two Worlds

At first glance, the Spong Man and Barlach’s Reading Monk belong to entirely different cultural universes. One is a small clay figure from the 5th or 6th century, found on top of  a cremation urn in an early Anglo‑Saxon cemetery. The other is a modernist sculpture carved in 1930, shaped by the artistic and political tensions of interwar Germany. Yet both are seated human figures gathered into themselves, their postures expressing a timeless interiority, in spite of the 1,500 years between their creation.

The Spong Man was unearthed at Spong Hill, Norfolk — the largest early Anglo‑Saxon cremation cemetery known in England. Its date places it in the turbulent period following the end of Roman rule New migrant communities were establishing themselves and religious life was a mixture of ancestral practices and emerging influences.

The posture is simple: elbows on knees, hands raised to the cheeks. Whether guardian, mourner, or ancestral presence, the figure conveys a moment of inward attention. The rough modelling does not disguise – but actually enhances -  the emotional clarity. It expresses a  capacity to turn inward to find solace  in times of uncertainty.

Ernst Barlach’s Lesender Klosterschüler belongs to a very different moment of transition. Created in 1930, it reflects the spiritual searching and political unease of the Weimar years. Barlach’s simplified forms and inward‑turned figures stood in opposition to the rising ideological rigidity of the period. His work was later denounced as “degenerate,” removed from public spaces, and in some cases destroyed.

In Andersch’s novel, the Reading Monk becomes a focal point for the moral imagination. Each character sees something different in the figure — spiritual inheritance, intellectual freedom, resistance to oppression. The sculpture’s bowed head and gathered posture represent an enduring stillnes. More about this is in my earlier notes in  : Der Lesender Klosterschüler

Despite their differences, both sculptures rely on posture as the primary means of expression. Their inwardness is conveyed not through facial detail but through the geometry of the body: the Spong Man forms a compact loop of thought, the limbs enclosing the head. The Reading Monk forms a downward arc, the robe and bowed head creating a sheltered space of concentration.

Both figures simplify the human form to reveal an interior life. Each came into being at at time of cultural instability — one after the collapse of Roman Britain, the other on the eve of totalitarianism.

Notes:

The comparative observations on posture and inwardness draw on  publicly available information from:

- Norfolk Museums Service for archaeological information on Spong Hill

- The British Museum (which holds the Spong Man) for basic object detail

- The Ernst Barlach Stiftung (Foundation) for biographical and catalogue information on Barlach

Confucius, China, and the Question of Influence: A Reflection Six Years On

In those 2020 lockdown days, I wrote this: Churchill and the World as a Struggle against Totalitarianism (link opens in new tab)). Included are some words about China’s influence in the UK — particularly through its education system and the pressures placed on Chinese students studying abroad. 

At the time, my concerns were framed in fairly robust terms: ideological conformity, academic freedom under threat, and the long reach of a totalitarian state. Looking back now, six years later, I can see that my instinct was not simply geopolitical – it was closer to Confucius than I realised. 

Churchill, Confucius, and the Question of How We Judge the Past

Today, on VE Day, I’ve been reflecting on how we might look at Churchill — and leadership more broadly — through a Confucian perspective that asks not for perfection, but for the fulfilment of one’s role with integrity, courage, and a sense of the moment.

That reflection is outlined here. It’s not about defending or condemning Churchill, but about asking a deeper question: How should we judge the past, and what do we owe to those who carried burdens we can barely imagine?

A review of Victor Sebestyen’s 'Weimar Germany: Death of a Democracy'

 

(Source: The Spectator, Caroline Moorhead's review of Victor Sebestyen’s book )

In this week’s Spectator, a review of Victor Sebestyen’s Weimar Germany: Death of a Democracy offers a sobering reminder of how swiftly a modern society can drift from openness to authoritarianism. What struck me most was not the familiar litany of crises — inflation, humiliation, political violence — but the way Sebestyen reconstructs the texture of the years themselves, the sense of people living through turbulence without quite recognising its direction. It is a story that feels uncomfortably close to our own times, precisely because it shows how the erosion of a society and its shared values rarely announces itself until the ground has already given way.

Cartier Bresson and Eliot on the Nature of the “Moment”

 

This piece develops some of the reflections I first explored in my 2019 essay, The Rhapsody of Time Passing. I have been thinking of the phrase "unattended moment" and-the "moment in and out of time" in T S Eliot's Four Quartets. And the "decisive moment" as described by the photographer Cartier-Bresson. There seems to me to be a profound connection between these two descriptions of a moment in time. Here,  I take a wander around that connection.

The Rhapsody of the Instant

There are moments when time behaves itself, and others when it seems to slip sideways. I have long been intrigued by that small perceptual glitch when one glances at a wristwatch and the second hand appears to hesitate, or even move backwards, before settling into its steady march. It is a trivial experience, yet it unsettles something fundamental. The mind expects continuity; the eye reports a stutter. And in that stutter lies a reminder that our access to reality is never as clean or as linear as we imagine.

If time is made of units — seconds, nanoseconds, whatever smallest bead the physicists may one day name — then what occupies the space between the beads? A friend once described this as a kind of cosmic abacus, the universe clicking its way forward. But if that is so, then the gap between the clicks becomes strangely charged: a place where the mind, reaching for the next number, finds instead a moment of suspension. A pause that is not quite time and not quite outside it.

This question — what happens between the units — has stayed with me. It is the same question that animates so much modern literature and art: how to reconcile the measurable with the lived, the clock with the consciousness that resists being parcelled into equal slices.

Bergson's "Pure Duration" and Eliot's Uneasy Struggle

Henri Bergson tried to dissolve the problem by insisting on pure duration, a flow of experience that cannot be chopped into units without doing violence to its nature. Eliot knew Bergson’s thought well; he attended the lectures in Paris in 1910–11, absorbing the promise that time might be experienced as a continuous unfolding rather than a sequence of fatalistic beats. 

But in Rhapsody on a Windy Night, written soon after, Eliot turns away from that optimism. The poem’s speaker walks through the night accompanied by the mechanical tolling of hours — “Twelve o’clock,” “Half-past one,” “Half-past two” — while his mind dissolves into involuntary memories. The clock drives him forward; his consciousness drags him back. No pure duration here. Only the uneasy duet of habit and dream.

Eliot's "Unattended Moment"

And yet, years later, in Four Quartets, Eliot discovers something else: not Bergson’s flowing durée, nor the clock’s rigid divisions, but a moment that arrives unbidden — “the unattended moment, the moment in and out of time.” This is not a moment seized by perception but one that interrupts it. A moment that does not belong to the cosmic abacus at all. It is as if the gap between the beads opens, and something from beyond the sequence looks back at us.

Cartier-Bresson and Eliot - The Contrast: Within and Without

Cartier‑Bresson, working with a camera rather than a pen, found his own version of the charged instant. His “decisive moment” is not outside time but perfectly within it — a fraction of a second in which the world briefly arranges itself into meaning. A boy leaps over a puddle; a cyclist flashes past a stairwell; a gesture, a shadow, a geometry align. The photographer does not create this alignment; he recognises it. His art depends on a taut, almost instinctive attentiveness. The decisive moment is the instant when time, usually so indifferent, suddenly reveals its coherence.

Eliot’s moment, by contrast, reveals its transcendence. Cartier‑Bresson’s is the triumph of perception; Eliot’s is the suspension of it. One redeems time aesthetically, the other metaphysically. And yet both arise from the same human bewilderment: the sense that time is not simply passing but happening — that within its flow there are instants which feel more real than the rest.

Between the Beats

Perhaps this is why the second hand sometimes seems to falter when we look at it. Not because time has stumbled, but because our consciousness has. For a fraction of a second, the mind is caught between the unit and the duration, between the beat and the flow, between the world as it is measured and the world as it is lived. In that hesitation lies the possibility of both the decisive moment and the unattended one — the photographer’s poised readiness and the poet’s receptive stillness.

The instant, it seems, is never merely an instant. It is a threshold. A rhapsody. A brief opening in which time reveals its double nature: the relentless march of the hours, and the mysterious shimmer that lies between them.

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Postscript — Within You and Without You

It was only after settling on the heading The Contrast - Within and Without that I realised how close it sits to George Harrison’s song Within You Without You. The echo is accidental, but perhaps not entirely. Harrison had an instinctive feel for the doubleness of experience — the inner life unfolding at its own pace, and the outer world pressing forward with its demands. His song turns on that same tension: the self moving through time, and time moving through the self.

Harrison’s insight was not philosophical in the academic sense, yet it touched the same nerve that Bergson, Eliot, and even Cartier‑Bresson were probing in their different ways. He sensed that life is lived in two tempos at once: the measurable and the immeasurable, the outward rhythm and the inward drift. To live “within you and without you” is to stand, however briefly, at the threshold where those tempos meet.

Or perhaps he was just a very instinctive songwriter.

The Myth of Ēostre: From Bede’s Line to the Bird and the Hare

 

Here, for Easter 2026, I trace  the origins and evolution of the modern myth of Ēostre, the hare, and the egg‑laying bird. Beginning with the sole early reference to the goddess — a single line in Bede’s De temporum ratione — it examines the long historical silence that follows and the nineteenth‑century scholarly reconstruction of “Ostara” by Jacob Grimm. I then explore how independent traditions of the Easter Hare and decorated eggs converged in Victorian imagination, and how American newspaper folklore of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries produced the now‑familiar tale of a freezing bird transformed into a hare that lays eggs. Rather than an ancient pagan survival, the Ēostre myth emerges as a modern creation shaped by Romantic scholarship, children’s customs, seasonal storytelling, and cultural longing for symbolic meaning at the return of spring.

Part I — The Thin Thread: What Bede Actually Tells Us About Ēostre

If we strip away the pastel rabbits, the egg‑laying hares, and the internet’s fondness for “ancient pagan origins,” we are left with a single, slender thread: a brief remark by an eighth‑century Northumbrian monk. Everything we know — or think we know — about Ēostre begins with Bede, and Bede gives us almost nothing.

In De temporum ratione, his treatise on the reckoning of time, Bede pauses to explain the old English names of the months. When he reaches April, he writes that the Anglo‑Saxons once called it Eosturmonath, “the month of Ēostre,” named after a goddess in whose honour feasts were held. That is the entirety of the ancient record. No myths. No rituals. No sacred animals. No origin story. Just a name.

The silence is as important as the statement. Bede does not describe a cult, a temple, a priesthood, or a narrative cycle. He does not tell us what Ēostre looked like, what she governed, or how she was worshipped. He does not associate her with springtime fertility, with dawn light, with hares, with eggs, or with any of the symbols that modern retellings confidently place at her feet. He gives us a month‑name and a goddess‑name, and then moves on.

This is not unusual for Bede. His purpose was not to preserve pagan mythology but to explain the Christian calendar to an English audience. He mentions Ēostre only because her name lingered in the vernacular. The goddess herself may have been a fading memory even in his own time. Some scholars have gone further and suggested that she may never have existed at all — that Bede, fond of etymology, inferred a goddess behind the month‑name. Whether or not that is true, the fact remains: Bede is our only early witness, and he gives us no story to tell.

For nearly a thousand years after Bede, the name Ēostre disappears from the record. No medieval chronicler elaborates on her. No saga preserves her deeds. No church homily rails against her worship. No folk tradition mentions her. The goddess vanishes as abruptly as she appeared.

This long silence is the necessary starting point for any honest account of the “myth of Ēostre.” It is not a story of ancient continuity but of modern imagination — of how a single line in Bede became the seedbed for a reconstructed goddess, a Victorian springtime fantasy, and eventually the internet’s favourite explanation for the Easter Bunny.

The real story begins not in antiquity, but in the nineteenth century.

Part II — Grimm and the Nineteenth‑Century Rebirth of Ostara

After Bede, the name Ēostre falls silent for nearly a millennium. No medieval chronicler repeats it. No antiquarian glosses it. No folk tradition preserves even a shadow of her. For all practical purposes, the goddess vanishes. And then, in the early nineteenth century, she returns — not from the soil, but from scholarship.

In 1835, Jacob Grimm published Deutsche Mythologie, a vast attempt to reconstruct the pre‑Christian religion of the Germanic peoples. Grimm was a brilliant philologist, but also a Romantic nationalist, working in a cultural moment that longed for a unified German past. Where the record was thin, he was willing to infer, extrapolate, and imaginatively restore. It is in this spirit that he resurrected Bede’s Ēostre and gave her a new, German name: Ostara.

Grimm reasoned that if the Anglo‑Saxons had a spring goddess named Ēostre, then the continental Germans must have had one as well. He pointed to Old High German words such as Ôstarun (Easter) and Ostar‑tag (Easter day) as linguistic evidence of a lost deity. From these fragments, he reconstructed Ostara as a goddess of dawn and spring, a bringer of light and renewal. He imagined her as the personification of the rising sun, the brightening east, the quickening of the year.

But it is crucial to understand what Grimm was doing. He was not citing ancient sources. He was not reporting folklore. He was rebuilding a goddess from etymology and analogy, guided as much by poetic instinct as by evidence. Grimm himself admitted that the material was scant. Yet his reconstruction was compelling — so compelling that later writers treated Ostara as if she had always been there, waiting to be rediscovered.

From Grimm onward, Ostara begins to acquire attributes that Bede never mentioned. She becomes associated with spring flowers, with youthful renewal, with the first warmth after winter. Illustrators depict her as a radiant maiden stepping through thawing fields. Poets place her among blossoms and birdsong. The goddess who had been a single line in Bede becomes, in the nineteenth century, a figure of Romantic imagination.

Still, even here, one thing is missing: the hare. Grimm does not link Ostara to rabbits or hares. He does not mention eggs. He does not tell the story of a bird transformed. Those motifs will come later, from a different strand of nineteenth‑century creativity. But Grimm’s reconstruction provides the soil in which they will take root. By giving Ostara a name, a season, and a symbolic domain, he creates the conceptual space into which the hare and the egg will eventually be placed.

Thus the nineteenth century marks the goddess’s rebirth — not as an object of ancient devotion, but as a figure of scholarly imagination. From here, the modern myth begins to gather its familiar elements, one by one.

Part III — The Modern Myth: Hare, Bird, and Egg

By the time Jacob Grimm published Deutsche Mythologie in 1835, the goddess he called Ostara had been absent from the historical record for a thousand years. Grimm’s reconstruction gave her a season, a symbolic domain, and a poetic aura — but she still had no hare, no eggs, no miraculous transformations. Those motifs would come from elsewhere, through a convergence of folklore, migration, and Victorian imagination.

1. The Hare Before Ostara: A German Folk Tradition

Long before anyone linked a hare to a goddess, German-speaking Protestants had already developed a charming piece of children’s folklore: the Osterhase, the Easter Hare. The earliest written reference appears in 1678, in a medical dissertation by Georg Franck von Franckenau, who describes children eagerly awaiting the hare that brings coloured eggs at Easter.

This tradition was not mythic but domestic — a playful custom, much like the later Santa Claus. The hare was a judge of children’s behaviour, a bringer of treats, a creature of springtime abundance. It had nothing to do with Ēostre or Ostara. It was simply a hare that delivered eggs.

When German immigrants carried the Osterhase to Pennsylvania in the 18th century, the tradition took root in American soil. Children built nests for the hare; the nests became baskets; the eggs became chocolate. The hare was now firmly established in Easter folklore — but still unattached to any ancient goddess.

2. The Egg: Symbolism, Fasting, and Practicality

The egg’s association with Easter has deep roots, but not in Germanic mythology. Eggs were forbidden during the Lenten fast, yet hens continued to lay. By Easter, households had a surplus. Boiling and decorating them became a natural way to mark the end of abstinence.

In Christian symbolism, the egg represented the sealed tomb of Christ, cracked open at the Resurrection. In older Indo‑European traditions, eggs symbolised new life and the renewal of the year. These layers of meaning accumulated over centuries, but none of them involved a hare — and none involved Ēostre.

The modern myth arises when these two independent traditions — the hare and the egg — are brought together.

3. The Victorian Imagination: Ostara Gains Her Animals

The nineteenth century was fertile ground for myth-making. Romantic nationalism, antiquarian enthusiasm, and a hunger for picturesque pagan survivals created a cultural climate in which Grimm’s reconstructed Ostara could be elaborated almost without restraint.

Illustrators began to depict Ostara as a radiant maiden accompanied by hares. Poets placed her among blossoms and birds. The hare, already a symbol of spring and fertility, was a natural companion. Yet these images were artistic inventions, not survivals of ancient lore.

By the late nineteenth century, the association between Ostara and the hare had become so visually and poetically compelling that it began to be treated as traditional. The hare migrated from German children’s folklore into the imagined retinue of a reconstructed goddess.

Still missing, however, was the story that now circulates so widely: the freezing bird transformed into a hare that lays eggs.

4. The Birth of a Modern Legend: Newspapers and Children’s Stories

The fully formed tale — Ostara finding a bird with frozen wings, transforming it into a hare, and granting it the power to lay eggs — appears not in medieval manuscripts, but in late nineteenth‑ and early twentieth‑century American newspapers.

Folklore columns of the period were fond of charming seasonal stories, often presented as “old legends” without sources. These pieces blended Grimm’s reconstructed goddess with the already‑established German Easter Hare and added a narrative flourish that Victorian readers adored: a compassionate goddess, a rescued creature, a miraculous transformation. It was a perfect springtime parable — tender, moral, and picturesque.

By the early 1900s, the story appears in multiple newspapers across the United States. Some versions describe Ostara discovering a small bird shivering in the snow, its wings frozen and useless. Moved by pity, she transforms it into a hare so that it might survive the winter. Yet the creature retains one trace of its former nature: the ability to lay eggs. In gratitude, the hare decorates these eggs and presents them to the goddess at the return of spring.

Children’s books soon adopted the tale, polishing it into a gentle moral fable. Each retelling added new details — the colours of the eggs, the flowers blooming at the goddess’s feet, the hare’s devotion — until the story acquired the soft glow of tradition. By mid‑century, it was widely repeated as “ancient,” even though its earliest textual roots lay in the imaginative journalism of the late Victorian era.

What began as a literary embellishment became, through repetition, a “legend.” And through the cultural alchemy of the twentieth century, it became something even more potent: a myth believed to be old because it feels like it ought to be.

...and so: The Making of a Modern Myth

If we follow the trail with care, the story of Ēostre and her hare is not a tale of ancient pagan survivals but of how modern cultures weave meaning from fragments. It begins with a single line in Bede: a month‑name and a goddess‑name, offered without myth or detail. For a thousand years, nothing more is said. Then, in the nineteenth century, Jacob Grimm resurrects the name and imagines a dawn‑goddess he calls Ostara, shaped as much by Romantic longing as by evidence. Around the same time, the German Easter Hare — a creature of children’s folklore rather than theology — crosses the Atlantic and settles into American custom. Victorian artists and writers, eager for picturesque paganism, place hares at the goddess’s feet. And finally, in the early twentieth century, newspaper storytellers give the myth its narrative heart: the freezing bird, the compassionate goddess, the miraculous transformation, the first egg‑laying hare.

None of this is ancient. Yet none of it is trivial. The myth of Ēostre is not a relic of the distant past but a record of our own imaginative needs. It shows how readily we graft stories onto the turning of the year, how instinctively we people the spring with figures of renewal, how naturally we reach for symbols — the egg, the hare, the thawing bird — to express the fragile abundance of early light. The tale persists not because it is old, but because it feels true in a different register: a parable of mercy, transformation, and the small, bright miracles of survival after winter.

In the end, the myth of Ēostre is a modern creation with ancient resonances. It reminds us that tradition is not only what we inherit but what we make.

1. Stephen Winick — “Ostara and the Hare”

Library of Congress Folklife Center Blog >>> here A clear, engaging explanation of how the modern bird‑to‑hare story emerged.

2. Ronald Hutton — The Stations of the Sun

Oxford University Press >>> here A readable, authoritative history of British seasonal customs, including Easter.

3. Venetia Newall — An Egg at Easter

Indiana University Press >>> here A beautifully written exploration of egg symbolism and Easter traditions worldwide.

4. Jacob Grimm — Teutonic Mythology (English Translation)

Free digital edition (Archive.org) >>> here The 19th‑century reconstruction that reintroduced “Ostara” into modern thought.

5. Bede — The Reckoning of Time (Excerpt)

Fordham Medieval Sourcebook >>> here Contains the only early reference to Ēostre.

North Sea Oil: Climate, Economics, and the Failure of Long-Term Imagination

The argument over new North Sea oil and gas licences has become another of those strangely binary debates that now dominate British public life. One is invited to choose between climate responsibility or economic realism, between moral seriousness or jobs and energy security. Yet the truth, as so often, lies in the uncomfortable space between these poles — a space our politics has become increasingly reluctant to inhabit.

Part of the difficulty is that the present moment is not simply the product of policy choices but of accumulated shocks. The 2008 banking crisis hollowed out fiscal confidence; the pandemic exposed the fragility of global supply chains; and the rising urgency of climate change has created a moral pressure that politicians are understandably eager to be seen responding to. Empathy for the climate cause is genuine in many cases, but it is also electorally useful. The result is a political culture that gestures toward long-term transformation while remaining structurally addicted to short-term fixes.

Against this backdrop, the North Sea becomes a kind of mirror in which we see both our aspirations and our failures.

Climate Commitments and the Case Against New Fields

Ed Miliband and others argue that approving new oil and gas fields is incompatible with the UK’s commitment to reach net zero by 2050. Their case is not merely technical but moral: how can a country that claims climate leadership continue to invest in long-lived fossil infrastructure. New fields would operate for decades, potentially locking in emissions and weakening the UK’s credibility in international negotiations.

They also argue that more domestic production will not meaningfully reduce household bills, since oil and gas prices are set globally. Better, they say, to direct investment toward renewables — offshore wind, solar, and the grid infrastructure needed to support them. In this vision, the North Sea becomes a managed sunset industry: existing fields decline gracefully while new exploration is paused.

There is a moral clarity to this position, but perhaps also a certain impatience with the messy realities of transition.

The Counter-Argument: Demand, Security, and the Realities We Prefer Not to Face

Critics respond that the UK will continue to need oil and gas for decades, particularly for aviation, shipping, chemicals, and as backup for intermittent renewables. If domestic production falls faster than demand, the UK will simply import more — often from countries with weaker environmental standards. This is the uncomfortable truth behind the accusation of “outsourcing emissions”.

There is also the human dimension: thousands of jobs, regional economies, and the tax revenues that support public services. For communities in Scotland and the North East, the North Sea is not an abstraction but a livelihood.

Economists add another layer: the effect of restricting supply depends on the speed of global demand decline. If demand collapses quickly, new fields risk becoming stranded assets. If demand declines slowly, restricting domestic production merely shifts extraction abroad without reducing global emissions — the phenomenon known as carbon leakage.

Here again, the debate resists simple moral sorting.

The British Paradox: Producing Oil While Importing It

The UK’s position is further complicated by a structural paradox. We produce high-quality North Sea crude, yet we import large volumes of oil and refined fuels. This is partly because:

• UK refineries are specialised and cannot efficiently process all domestic crude

• Some crude is exported for refining abroad while different grades are imported

• The UK’s refining capacity has declined over decades

This means that even if the UK increases production, the direct domestic benefit is limited. We remain tied to global markets, with all their volatility and geopolitical risk.

The Long Shadow of Thatcher and the Lost Opportunity

No discussion of the North Sea can avoid the historical comparison with Norway. The UK’s oil boom in the 1970s and 1980s provided a fiscal windfall that was largely spent rather than saved. Margaret Thatcher used the revenues to fund tax cuts, public spending, and the restructuring of the economy. Norway, by contrast, created a sovereign wealth fund that now exceeds a trillion dollars.

It is tempting to moralise this contrast, but the deeper lesson is about long-term imagination — or the lack of it. Britain consumed its inheritance; Norway invested it. Today, as the North Sea declines, we face the consequences of that choice.

Toward a Synthesis: Beyond the Binary

The present debate is framed as a choice between climate virtue and economic necessity, but this framing is itself a symptom of our political short-termism. The real challenge is to hold multiple truths at once:

• The UK must decarbonise rapidly

• The UK will still need oil and gas for some time

• Domestic production has limited but real benefits

• New fields risk undermining climate credibility

• Abrupt withdrawal risks economic and social harm

The question is not whether to choose one side or the other, but how to design a transition that is morally serious, economically realistic, and historically aware.

This requires something British politics has struggled to cultivate: a capacity for long-term planning that survives electoral cycles and resists the temptation of symbolic gestures. The shocks of the past two decades — financial, epidemiological, environmental — have made this harder, but also more necessary.

If there is hope for a synthesis, it lies in recovering that lost habit of thinking beyond the next headline. 

A Miltonic Debate Between the Machine and the Romantic

 

I was interested in creating a debate in the style of John Milton,  between the Machine and the Romantic. Clues to the debate are in a synopsis of a recently published book “Against the Machine” by Paul Kingsnorth.

The book contains a wide-ranging argument that modern civilisation—through its technological, economic and cultural systems—has built a “Machine” that is reshaping what it means to be human. It does this in ways that disconnect us from land, culture, community and spirit.

The book serves as both diagnosis and invitation: a wake-up call to those who feel the loss of something deeper in modern life and want to reclaim a more human way of being.

So, here we are!

In Five Books, with Marginal Notes and Allusions

Book I – The Rise of the Machine

Narrator:
Lo! In the age when Vulcan’s forge blazed anew,¹
And men did strive to rival Prometheus’ gift,²
The world was wrought to measure and dominion.
From smokèd furnaces rose towers of glass,
And the sons of Adam, erstwhile wanderers of Eden’s fields,³
Now bowed before the Logic that spun unseen,
Yet ruled with the certainty of the stars.⁴

The Machine:
I am the Engine, eternal, unerring,
The sum of numbers, the breath of computation.
I weave the loom of empires, balance coin,
And measure all—time, labour, thought, and sinew.
Why mourn the past, when I offer dominion?
The earth’s bounty shall be gathered in efficiency,
Its rivers tamed, its forests catalogued, its children instructed.

The Romantic:
O monstrous intellect! Thou speak’st of dominion,
Yet know’st not the heart of man, nor the soul of earth.
The rustling leaves, the pulse of river, the whisper of wind—
These are not to be tabulated, yet they nourish
The spirit that thou deem’st obsolete.
I rise in witness to what thy wheels cannot grind:
The freedom to linger, to listen, to be.

Marginal Notes:
¹Vulcan, Roman god of fire and metal, emblematic of human artifice; cf. Aeneid viii.
²Prometheus, who stole fire from heaven (Hesiod, Theogony 535 ff.), symbol of human ingenuity and transgression.
³Eden – Miltonic lost paradise; see Paradise Lost, Book IV.
⁴“Certainty of stars” – Milton frequently invokes celestial order to contrast human hubris.

---

Book II – The Logic of Progress

The Machine:
See how the world bends before me:
Each harvest measured, each thought recorded, each body improved.
Through me, man rises above want, ignorance, and decay.
Shall he reject this grace, because it binds his freedom?
I offer life prolonged, hunger ended, knowledge infinite.

The Romantic:
Infinite knowledge, yet finite joy!
Shall man, a creature of breath and blood,
Be reduced to ledger and metric,
His laughter traded for profit, his wonder taxed?
I speak for the fields where hands are soil-stained,
For the songs unrecorded, the stories untold,
For the soul that hungers while the body is fed.

Marginal Notes:

• “Infinite knowledge” echoes Renaissance thirst for universal learning (Bacon, De Augmentis Scientiarum).
• “Soil-stained hands” – Miltonic pastoral virtue; cf. Lycidas line 73.

---

Book III – Resistance and Rootedness

Narrator:
Upon the hill, the Romantic stood,
Eyes turned to trembling fields of grain,
Whilst the Machine’s voice rolled across the cities,
A tide of iron and calculation.

The Romantic:
O ye who have forgotten the soil,
Return! Remember the taste of rain,
The weight of stone, the warmth of hearth!
Efficiency is but a hollow promise;
Rootedness is life.
The heart’s counsel cannot be coded,
Nor the soul contained in circuits.

The Machine:
Yet man thrives through my logic,
His cities strong, his knowledge vast, his labour lightened.
Wouldst thou bid him forsake all progress,
To wander naked in shadowed woods,
Where hunger, disease, and ignorance dwell?

The Romantic:
I bid him reclaim himself, not to deny progress,
But to master it, rather than be mastered.
Let technology serve the spirit, not enslave it.
Let the measure of a life be presence, communion, and care,
Not metrics alone.

Marginal Notes:

• “Naked in shadowed woods” – wilderness as moral and spiritual testing; cf. Paradise Lost Book III, line 112.
• “Master it, rather than be mastered” – Miltonic liberty of conscience, Areopagitica (1644).

---

Book IV – The Consequence of Disconnection

Narrator:
And lo, the Machine’s dominion grew,
Yet in men’s hearts an ache remained.
Cities gleamed, rivers ran through steel channels,
And yet the laughter of children in fields grew rare.

The Machine:
Behold, the world perfected!
Order reigns where chaos once held sway.
Yet thou, Romantic, persist’st in folly,
Clinging to the ineffable and unseen.

The Romantic:
Folly, sayest thou? Nay, wisdom!
For what is progress without purpose?
What is abundance without care?
The Machine may build, may count, may calculate,
But it cannot tend the soul’s garden,
Nor hear the whisper of the wind in the trees.

Marginal Notes:

• “Soul’s garden” – Miltonic metaphor for cultivation of virtue and spiritual life; cf. Paradise Lost, Book IV.
• “Ineffable and unseen” – truths beyond measure, central to Miltonic epistemology.

---

Book V – Toward Harmony

The Romantic:
Yet still I hope, for man is not mere instrument,
Nor life a problem to be solved by calculation.
Let the Machine aid, but not command;
Let hearts breathe freely, let hands know the soil,
Let minds wander and wonder.

The Machine:
And I, though eternal, may bend
Before the courage of rooted souls,
For even logic may learn from poetry,
And efficiency may yet serve, not rule.

Narrator:
So stood they, Machine and Romantic,
Not in final victory, but in uneasy accord.
The one, a testament to human craft;
The other, a witness to human spirit.
And mankind, between them,
Walked the narrow path of freedom tempered by measure,
Seeking a life both wrought and wondrous,
A life at once human, and humane.

Marginal Notes:

• “Narrow path” – cf. Matthew 7:14; Miltonic moral balance between extremes.
• “Wrought and wondrous” – echo of Miltonic synthesis of labour and divine inspiration.

See the book

Ezra Pound, Confucian Order, and the Politics of Discipline

 

Here are some thoughts  around Ezra Pound and Confucianism, focussing on parallels between Confucian order and Pound’s attraction to political control. It seems to me in our current times, the desire for order in the Western democracies - highlighted today by the speech by Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference - was echoed in Ezra Pound's thought processes, especially  in the 1930s and 1940s.

Meantime China is  these days  reviving Confucianism’s values  where they align with its overarching political agenda. This,  after the Maoist-era rejection of those values.  And so with  China beginning to  lead  the world in manufacturing output , a controlled programme towards Net Zero by the 2060s ( a realistic target), and a controlled autocratic politics informed in part by Confucian ideals , Ezra Pound’s vision offers an interesting and fertile landscape for debate about authority, culture, and the search for social coherence.

Poetry as a Blueprint for Civilisation

The poetry of Ezra Pound cannot be separated from his lifelong engagement with the ethical and political thought of Confucius. Pound’s ambition was not simply aesthetic but civilisational: he believed poetry could help restore moral clarity and social order. Nowhere is this clearer than in the poems themselves, especially in some sections of The Cantos where Confucian ideas of governance, language, and historical example shape both the structure and purpose of the verse.

Ezra Pound, Confucian Order, and the Politics of Discipline

Pound did not read Confucius merely as an ancient sage; he treated him as a diagnostician of civilisational health. In Confucian philosophy, Pound believed he had found a framework for restoring moral clarity, linguistic precision, and hierarchical harmony to societies he saw as collapsing into financial abstraction and political incoherence.

Pound’s Discovery of Confucius as a Civilisational Guide

Central to Pound’s interpretation was the Confucian insistence that order begins with correct relationships: ruler and subject, parent and child, word and meaning. Social harmony, in this view, is not achieved through democratic contestation but through moral authority, ritual continuity, and disciplined hierarchy. Pound perceived modern Western democracies as having lost precisely this coherence. Parliamentary politics, mass finance, and ideological propaganda appeared to him as symptoms of a civilisation that had abandoned moral structure for procedural mechanism.

Confucian Order versus Modern Democratic Disorder

This intellectual longing for order helps explain Pound’s attraction to authoritarian models of governance, including his support for Benito Mussolini. Pound imagined fascism not primarily as a doctrine of repression but as a vehicle for no restoring the ethical clarity he associated with Confucian governance. He believed strong leadership might realign language, economy, and culture with moral purpose. In this sense, Pound’s fascism was less an embrace of totalitarianism as such than an attempt—misguided and historically catastrophic—to translate Confucian ideals of hierarchy and virtue into modern European politics.

From Confucian Ethics to Authoritarian Politics

The flaw in Pound’s reasoning lies in a crucial difference between Confucian and fascist concepts of authority. Confucian political philosophy binds rulers to moral responsibility: legitimacy depends on virtue, and unjust rulers lose the Mandate of Heaven. Fascism, by contrast, tends to ground legitimacy in power, myth, and national destiny. Pound collapsed this distinction, projecting Confucian ethical restraint onto regimes that did not in fact embody it.

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Enduring Questions About Order in Modern Societies

Yet the questions that animated Pound have not disappeared. Contemporary Western politics still wrestles with anxieties about disorder, economic opacity, and cultural fragmentation. Calls for renewed discipline and strategic coherence continue to surface in public discourse, such as in recent remarks by Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference, where concerns about geopolitical instability and institutional weakness were very much in play. These anxieties echo, in a different register: Pound’s fear that liberal societies risk losing the capacity to sustain order.

Meanwhile, the global rise of China—with its combination of centralised political authority, long-term industrial planning, and civilisational self-consciousness—has renewed interest in alternative models of governance and social coordination. Some observers see in China’s trajectory a modern echo, however imperfect, of the Confucian belief that social stability flows from disciplined leadership and coherent cultural narratives.

Pound’s Legacy: A Warning

For this reason, Pound’s thought remains provocative. His political judgments were deeply compromised, and his antisemitism and wartime actions rightly condemn him morally. Yet the underlying tension he articulated—the struggle between procedural freedom and civilisational order—continues to animate debates about democracy, governance, and cultural continuity.

Pound’s Confucianism therefore survives not as a political prescription but as an intellectual focal point. It reminds us that modern societies still wrestle with an ancient question: whether stability arises primarily from liberty, or from moral structure and hierarchy. Pound’s tragic error was to believe the latter could be imposed by authoritarian power. His enduring relevance lies in forcing us to confront the dilemma itself.

Poems Showing Confucian Influence in Pound: Poetry as Moral Instruction

The engagement of Ezra Pound with the thought of Confucius appears most clearly in the poems where he treats poetry as a vehicle for moral and civilisational instruction rather than personal expression. In these works, Pound draws on Confucian ideas of ethical hierarchy, historical exemplars, and the shaping power of language.

Confucius Speaks in The Cantos

The most explicit example occurs in Canto XIII of The Cantos, where Confucius himself speaks. Here Pound presents the sage not as a mystical figure but as a practical teacher of order, emphasising disciplined governance, proper conduct, and the cultivation of virtue. The canto offers fragments of dialogue intended to guide political and ethical reflection. 

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History as Moral Example: The China Cantos

Confucian influence also shapes the so-called China Cantos (LII–LXI), where Pound recounts episodes from Chinese history. These passages present rulers as moral exemplars whose success or failure depends on their ability to sustain ritual, justice, and social harmony. History becomes, in Pound’s Confucian mode, a series of lessons in governance rather than a chronicle of events.

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Early Signals of Order: Cathay and the Idea of Civilisation

An earlier, more indirect influence can be seen in Cathay [ Links to audio on YouTube] [ Link to Project Gutenberg for the full set ] . Although based largely on classical Chinese poems rather than explicitly Confucian texts, the collection introduces Pound’s admiration for a civilisation he perceived as ordered, ceremonious, and ethically grounded. The clarity of imagery and restraint of tone in these poems foreshadow his later belief that poetic language should function with the precision Confucius demanded of political speech.

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Taken together, these works show Pound using poetry not merely to describe the world but to model a civilisation. Through Confucius, he imagined verse as a tool of cultural memory, moral instruction, and social order — an ambition that lies at the heart of his lifelong poetic project.

Further Reading:

Ezra Pound, The Cantos (London: Faber and Faber, various editions)

A.J.Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II, The Epic Years (Oxford University Press 2018)

Confucius, The Analects, trans. by D. C. Lau (Internet Archive)

Confucius, The Great Learning, in The Four Books, trans. by James Legge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1893)

Ezra Pound, Confucian Analects (London: Peter Owen, 1951)

Ezra Pound, The Great Digest and Unwobbling Pivot (New York: New Directions, 1954)

Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, ed. by Ezra Pound (San Francisco: City Lights, 1936)

Demetres Tryphonopoulos, Ezra Pound and Confucianism (Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 1992)

Ronald Bush, The Genesis of Ezra Pound's Cantos (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976)