MEDITATION 88

As I sit here by my candle musing before committing my thoughts to paper, flowers have come to my mind, bunches of freshly cut flowers.

Last week an item on the BBC News caught my attention. A young boy of junior school age from the North of England has been spending his weekly pocket money on bunches of flowers. He buys them and then offers them to strangers in the street. (I apologise that I do not have the exact details – I cannot find the item on the BBC News website.) He was filmed offering the flowers to passers by and their eyes lit up and smiles appeared on their faces as he said to them ‘Would you like some flowers for free?’ Not only was this an act of regular generosity on the boy’s part but also he was able to bring a little happiness into the lives of people he didn’t know. It was a cheering and uplifting item in the otherwise dreary news bulletin. A far cry from the arrest and arraigning of Donald Trump!

I have often found in my career as a teacher that young people can be very generous with their time, effort and money when collecting for good causes. There is a natural generosity of spirit and a raw compassion in young people in particular, something which we have always tried to encourage in my school. It is sad, perhaps, that as people grow older, the cares of life sometimes prevent them from maintaining that generosity of spirit. Also adults can sometimes grow more insular, cynical and selfish. And yet, when adults do become involved in charity work, especially when it is a community effort or a major appeal, they can of course be incredibly generous with their time, effort and money. And also with their own homes -as has been the case with those who have taken in Ukrainian and other refugees, (like my dear friends Alan and Helen in Yorkshire).

Perhaps that youthful generous spirit comes alive in us again when we get involved in some kind of work that is trying to help others. Perhaps this is because it involves working with people and helping people. Inevitably we come out of ourselves and take a wider view. There is a certain freedom about giving in this way. Donating to charity is important but being actively involved is more enervating.

The London Marathon takes place on April 23rd – Shakespeare’s birthday. The first one took place in 1981. Two years later, I went with some friends to watch the third marathon on the course at Blackheath as I lived nearby. I remember it was a rainy Sunday as we cheered the runners on. It wasn’t as colourful an event as it is now. There wasn’t so much of a carnival atmosphere then but nevertheless there was an encouraging crowd cheering on the participants. There was a warm communal spirit through the cold drizzle. In that year, 1983, 19,735 runners took part. In 2019 there were 56.398 participants. Through the London Marathon, millions have been raised for charities over the years.

It is wonderful that so many amateur runners (of varied ability, experience and ages) give 100% commitment to training for the marathon over many months not only for the sense of achievement in taking part and hopefully completing the course, but in aid of charities. My friend Henry, who posts these blogs for me is running for charity in the London Marathon next week. (Do support him -details are below – it still not too late to support him!). Another dear friend of mine, Steven, has run three London marathons for charity. He also volunteered at Crisis for Christmas one year.

My dear friend Marcus Aurelius at the start of his ‘Meditations’, which are the inspiration for my own, takes great pains to explain what he admires in his family members, tutors and friends (alive and deceased) : for example: ‘From Severus: love of family, love of truth, love of justice’. The subtext of these is perhaps a desire to emulate them. I greatly admire my friends for their commitment to charitable deeds (among other things). Perhaps I should follow Marcus and attempt to emulate them myself.

Perhaps I should follow in their footsteps – or rather tracks! I do not think I would be able to endure the training for the London Marathon. Besides I am unable to run on hard surfaces, as I have a frayed disc. When a physiotherapist informed me of this several years ago, while encouraging me to do exercise, I heaved a sigh of relief. Athletics have never been my forte somehow. I was always last in cross country races at school, not that it would matter as far as the London Marathon goes, as you can reach the finishing line at whatever time you are able.

However I am coming up to my 70th year so perhaps I ought to engage in some special event for charity: a sponsored reading of Shakespeare for example. Or a reading of the all seven volumes of Marcel Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time’ (though not in the original French as Marcel’s sentences can be tortuous enough in English!). No it would have to something outdoors. Skydiving! Yes that would be something!

In the lockdown, my friend Peter suggested that we should always smile at people who we encounter in the street (or on the bus or in shops for that matter) because we do not know what they might be going through in their lives. In those dark days (which seem historical now) people would smile at each other in the street or park. They would even say hello and make brief conversation sometimes. This practice appears to have declined, although I have noticed that people are more aware of each other on the street or in the bus and sometimes a little talkative. Maybe it’s because I am now a retired old buffer!

That is what charity boils down to: being aware of other people. Like the boy offering flowers to strangers.

Ave atque Vale – until the next blog.

If you would like to support Henry here is the link:

LINK: https://2023tcslondonmarathon.enthuse.com/pf/henry-riley

He is running running for Global’s Make Some Noise, which supports hundreds of small charities across the UK – everything from food banks, to mental health and domestic abuse helplines, to carer support, and much more.

If you are enjoying my blog, and have not already done so, please sign up below to receive notification of each new blog by e-mail. Just add your e mail to ‘Follow’ as it pops up.

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MEDITATION 78

When I began my last meditation, a lone Parisian violin was playing in my mind. It was a poignant memory, if you remember, of a recent visit to Paris. As I light the candle beside me and begin this new meditation, another musical instrument is playing an equally poignant melody in my consciousness. It is a solo piano and the music is a nocturne by Chopin. A nocturne is a short night piece and meditative, so highly conducive to writing this reflection. I have the complete Chopin Nocturnes in my cd collection but I am not playing them at this present moment. The nocturne in my head is another memory from my recent visit to Paris.

The gentle tune takes me back to a morning visit to the Pere Lachaise cemetery in the heart of the city. I was standing in front of Chopin’s grave. Though he was Polish, he died in Paris in 1849, at the young age of 39 of tuberculosis, which he had suffered from for most of his adult life. As well as being a composer, he was also a great performer on the piano and of the stature of a rock star across Europe in his time.

A monument stood above his grave: a seated lady with a broken lyre in her lap looking down in grief. I have just discovered that the figure is of Euterpe, the muse of music. Behind the monument was a wall of trees, vibrantly green in the morning sunshine.

A small group of visitors stood in front of the grave. Some took a brief look at the monument then moved on. Other like me stood for a while to pay their respects.

People had left tributes to Chopin at the bottom of the monument: small plants, little posies of flowers, single roses and a few small Polish flags. One tribute caught my eye. It was a sheet of music of one of his compositions, though I could not make out the title clearly. It looked a little rumpled laying on the stone step in front of the monument as there had been rain the day before. A single flower lay across it.

As I stepped back from the grave, a piano began to play behind me. It was one of the nocturnes: delicate and sad. I turned round. A man standing in the group was playing the nocturne on his phone. Instead of listening to it himself, he had turned on the speaker so that we could all hear it. It was his tribute. We all stood still, looking towards the grave, as the tender notes floated on the spring breeze.

I wanted to cry. I am half – Polish after all. If you can’t cry in a cemetery, where can you cry. Poor Frederic so far from his homeland, I thought. Although his heart is buried in a church in Warsaw, in Poland, where his heart always was. And he lives on of course in his music. The nocturne finished, I gave a nod of thanks to the man with the phone and walked on. Short as it was, it was the most moving concert I have ever attended.

I have never visited the cemetery before. It is like a small town itself within the city. There are long avenues of trees between the sections of graves. It made for a peaceful walk in the spring sunshine. Despite having a map, the graves were rather difficult to find, however, as the map only indicated the section they are situated in and the sections are quite large. Also the graves are not in chronological order so recent ones are often laying side by side with ones over a hundred years old or earlier, as the cemetery opened in 1804. Well chronology has no meaning anymore for the dead in eternity.

There are many other famous people buried there and one of my reasons for visiting was to find the grave of Marcel Proust (1871-1922) the novelist. It is the centenary of his death this year and I have been reading his great seven volume novel: ‘In Search of Lost Time’, which I have mentioned in these meditations before. He was a great music lover and adored Chopin’s music, which is mentioned in his novel. I have also been reading several books about Proust himself. One included a map of the places where Proust lived in Paris. He spent most of his life there. With my patient friend Phil, I sought out these places the day before, most of which are near the Madeleine church. So, it was important to discover his final resting place, which is a simple grave of black marble with no monument.

This simplicity was unlike Oscar Wilde’s tomb, which I also visited, He had a simple grave at first having died a pauper in 1900 and was then buried outside Paris in Bagneux. However, he was transferred to Pere Lachaise in 1909 and then a grandiose sphinx – like monument (sculpted in 1911 by Sir Jacob Epstein) was placed there.

So many artists, musicians and writers are buried in the shady avenues of Pere Lachaise. We found some of them including: the composers Rossini and Cherubini, the novelists Balzac and Colette, the singer Edith Piaf and rock musician Jim Morrison from Doors, the actor Yves Montand, the composer Michel Le Grand and George Melies, one of the pioneers of the cinema. I would like to go back to find some others and revisit Frederic, Marcel, and Oscar of course.

Once outside the cemetery we found a good bistro for lunch. Opposite us were the opulent offices of several grand funeral directors. No doubt they provide opulent funerals over the road in the cemetery at a grand price. I began to think that it would be good to be buried in Pere Lachaise, when my time comes, though I doubt that I could afford it. I had this thought not because I would be buried among the cultural elite of the last two hundred years, or because of all the grand monuments, but because of the peaceful avenues of trees. Well who would visit my grave in Paris anyway? Although it would be as good an excuse as any for a Eurostar jaunt for my friends. Perhaps if I was buried there, one of my ex students might leave a few pages of one of my scripts on top of my grave with a flower across it. Perhaps not only as a tribute but also as an apology for the lines they never learnt properly!

The visit to Pere Lachaise was important to me to pay homage, to say thank you to some of those who have enriched my life. It is why I visit Shakespeare’s grave every time I go to Stratford- Upon-Avon.

You may have deduced from my meditations, that I something of a cultural tourist. Does that term exist or have I invented it? Well I am. It is easy for me to be reminded of my cultural tourism as I only have to look around the rooms in my house. Not only are there photos on display from my holidays but also pictures (I have two Rembrandts and a Da Vinci – but only copies of course!); framed posters (two Broadway productions I saw in New York for example) and on the shelves books I bought abroad, and cd’s, souvenirs posing as artefacts and of course my large collection of fridge magnets on display in the kitchen. Not to mention the thousands of photos on my I phone and laptop from my travels!

A photo encapsulates a memory, more than that, it evokes a memory if we look at it for long enough. Sadly these days we tend to snap away on our phones too quickly and look at the photos too quickly too, especially when we are scrolling through them to see which ones we want to delete. But do we really look at the ones that are left after our digital cull?

Along with the cultural souvenirs I have just listed, the photos can also be a trigger to our memory, if we stop and reflect, if we take a moment to remember.

Marcel Proust’s great novel ‘In Search of Lost Time’ is about memory. No-one describes how memories fade in and out of our consciousness as well as he does. He believed that as well as wanting to remember a memory, by looking at a photo for example or by trying to remember one, there is involuntary memory. This is when a memory comes to us clearly and concretely, unaided and unasked for, as a surprise, almost a revelation.

Like my lone Parisian violin and my piano nocturne.

Ave atque Vale – until the next blog.

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Neilus Aurelius

MEDITATION 54

As I begin to write beside my customary candle, I am feeling cabined, cribbed and confined, as Macbeth would say. I have been asked to self-isolate according to the NHS Covid app on my phone. I have six out of seven days still to run as I received the message yesterday.

Of course I have decided to obey the instruction, annoying though it is. When I delved into my personal data on the app, I discovered that whoever I came into contact with had declared a positive test yesterday, so, it must be said, the app is very efficient. But it is also, to the best of my knowledge, wrong. I was supposedly in contact with this person on Saturday. However, I never left my house on Saturday, so it was impossible for me to be in contact with anyone, except myself and I certainly haven’t had a positive test.

My annoyance, of course, stems from an injustice, petty though that injustice is. I am reminded of my career as a teacher. Children and young adults have an acute sense of injustice and, in my experience, more than most other things, it arouses an acute anger in them. So too with adults. The sense of being accused of something we didn’t do digs deep. It did with me yesterday. I smarted at it. ‘My gorge rises at it’, as Shakespeare would say; well it did rise. It is like being in a lunchtime detention and angrily watching your schoolmates playing outside the classroom window.

The injustice is, as I have already mentioned, petty and slight. It is nothing compared with those who are imprisoned for something they haven’t done. Or those who are incarcerated by oppressive regimes because of their political views, ethnicity, sexuality or religious faith. Neither have I been asked to shield for many months as so many have, with little opportunity to see loved ones. As I write this paragraph, I ask myself why I am complaining at all through this blog.

As I think back to yesterday, it was the loss of personal freedom that annoyed me most. But then, it is only for a few days, I have a freezer that is replete with food and none of us are going far at the moment anyway. Marcus would tell me to persevere, to endure this present annoyance.

But I have been asking myself why was this sudden loss of freedom so irksome to me? I think there were echoes of those first weeks of lockdown almost a year ago: the sudden changes imposed externally by the government, the return of a twinge of fear.

None of us likes to forego our liberty, It is something we have all battled with over the last gruelling months and we have perhaps, over time, been reduced to a tired resignation about it. But our liberty has to be gently pushed to one side in the medical emergency we are still in for the good of others. Just as having the vaccine (which I had two weeks ago) is not just to protect ourselves but also to protect others. So I am asked to self-isolate, even if erroneously, for the good of others, just in case. In the same way, we wear masks and drown our hands in cleansing fluid, just in case and as much for the good of others as for ourselves.

I am reminded of one of those occasions when my aunt Barbara would show me some of her numerous volumes of photographs, while staying with her on holiday on Vancouver Island. She was showing me pictures of my childhood and there I was as a toddler in a walking harness with her young and glamorous self holding the reins behind me. ‘You were so cute’ she said to me, I remember. I must admit to a cringe of embarrassment. I did not like to be reminded I was a toddler once and barely out of babyhood. There I was with my fat little legs – they are more shapely now of course!

In the photograph I was squirming in those walking reins and itching to move off, to walk away, to be free. It is a natural impulse -to be free. But the reins were there to keep me from falling over, from harming myself. We, too, at this moment are itching to be free of the reins of lockdown, to move on. And perhaps, yesterday, I was squirming in those reins again, because I had suddenly been reminded of them.

The weather has not been too cold to sit in my garden. Sitting there, I read these words. ‘Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy.’ The words are not by Marcus Aurelius but Anne Frank, who was in hiding with her Jewish family behind a bookcase in concealed rooms above offices in Amsterdam from 1942-44 during the Nazi occupation. Self-isolation is nothing compared to what she endured with her family or afterwards, when she was discovered.

The great French novelist Marcel Proust (1877-1922) says ‘Turn your griefs, your suffering into ideas.’ A suitable creed for a writer, and so I have written this particular blog.

But I am not grieving or suffering. I am only annoyed. And, like all of us, I am weary with almost a year of various versions of lockdown. It is weariness, grumpiness, a fit of peak. My apologies. But if you read a blog, you must put up with the shifting emotions of the writer!

Perhaps Marcus can help us to endure what will hopefully be the last phase of lockdown, however long or short that phase may be: ‘When you arise in the morning,think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive and breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.’

Ave atque Vale – Hail and Farewell – until the next blog!

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Many thanks

Now I have returned from Budapest and I am writing this beside the steady flame of my customary candle. The Cafe Dumas on the Danube embankment, where I last wrote to you, dear reader, seems far, far away now. My travels are over for a while and I am ‘home for good and all’ as Fan, the boy Scrooge’s sister, says to him, when she comes to the boarding school to take him home for Christmas. But I should not be mentioning Christmas yet as we are only into September!

While I was away, I did not spend all my time in Budapest. I went with friends out of the city several times. One of the places I visited was Esztergom, in Upper Hungary, which, like Budapest, is on the river Danube. You can look down on Slovakia on the other side of the river from an elegant promenade. This is behind the imposing Basilica, the largest church in Hungary and one of the largest in Europe, and the remains of the Royal Palace. For Esztergom was where the Hungarian Kings first lived before the royal residence was moved to the Buda hills overlooking Pest. St Stephen, their first King was crowned there and baptised into the Christian Faith on Christmas Day 1000.

Centuries earlier, according to my guide book, it was also where Marcus Aurelius had an army encampment during the Romans’ reign over the territory. It was here, on the banks of the river Hron, which runs into the Danube, that Marcus wrote his Meditations. Sadly I did not have time to write one of my own there myself. I did discern a quietness and stillness about the castle area and the town, however, which was conducive to reflection.

It is that stillness and quietness of the towns we visited that impressed me most, aside from some beautiful buildings and piazzas large and small. As I sit here by my candle it is is the lamps that I remember: ornate and brilliant, beaming on stucco walls of yellow ochre, pink, grey, green and blue.

I was staying at my friend Adam’s apartment in the Taban district of Budapest at the back of the Royal Palace. Behind the block is a road where he parks his car with the Palace towering above it on the other side. There are similar lamps all along the road in the walls, elegant and warmly inviting, making me feel at home as I get out of the car. They remind me of the lamps in chapel quad at Pembroke, my Oxford college. I didn’t notice them much when I was an undergraduate there but I do now when I occasionally return.

Yes it was the lamps that I noticed as I sat one evening in the main square of Szekesfehervar, with my friends and a glass of wine. They slowly became brighter as the twilight faded into evening, their beams warming the yellow stucco walls until in the darkening sky, the square became blanketed in one incandescent comforting glow.

The great French novelist Marcel Proust commented in his masterpiece about memory ‘In Search of Lost Time’ that he would like life to be a series of happy afternoons. For myself, I would like life to be a series of mellow twilights. I image that Marcel was thinking of summer afternoons and I am certainly thinking of summer twilights, for it is only in summer that afternoons and twilights seem to stretch forever.

The square was quiet and quite still with a relaxed atmosphere. There was the low hum of conversation and music playing somewhere, perhaps in another street. The square was pedestrianised so children were running about, playing with their cycles and with water in a fountain.

People were quietly enjoying the evening and each other, sitting in the cafes and restaurants dotted about the square. There I was, in a town in Central Europe, enjoying the peace and quiet of a twilight evening. “Isn’t this what people really want?’ I reflected. To lead peaceful quiet lives enjoying being with their partners, their lovers, their friends,their children; enjoying being with each other? Life can be difficult enough after all. Is not this what the so called ‘European project’ is all about? It is not the ‘European project’ but the ‘European Peace.’ A peace we have shared somehow and not without problems. for seven decades and with which we have also embraced our ex-Soviet block neighbours. In abandoning the European project we should take care not to abandon the European peace.

‘The lamps are going out all over Europe’, said Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary at the start of the First World War. We must do our utmost to make sure they do not got out again.

If you are enjoying my blog, and have not already done so, please sign up below to receive notification of each new blog by e mail. Just add your e mail to ‘Follow’ as it pops up!

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Many thanks
Neilus Aurelius