The story of the “Florentine Codex,” one of the few documents saving a remembrance of pre-Columbian Aztec life; it was written in the midst of plague in Mexico City in the late 16th century. An inspiration for people today, writing Coronavirus diaries, or Coronavirus chronicles.
Peter Serkin, who died this week, and his life-long fascination with CPE Bach, culminating in a recording project accomplished just before his death.
A new History of Solitude, and this interesting factoid:
“In the 19th century, only 1% of the British population lived on their own; in 2011 it was 31%, or some 8 million people.…as urbanisation and large families pitched people together, the anonymous world of industrial capitalism also split them apart.”
Freud himself understood that he was not really a scientist, and that “social philosophy and cultural critique” were always the focal points of his deepest interests. What Freud was really after was a fresh “interpretation of culture,” one that would then lend itself to the transformation of culture. Science was valued not for its capacity to ascertain unassailable truth but for its power as a critical weapon, a cultural solvent capable of dissolving the illusory hold of such oppressive forces as religion, social hierarchy, and bourgeois morality.
Also, his last paragraph’s point about the book’s author’s rejection of any language of naturalism as teleological, seems spot-on: Jonathan Lear’s Love and its Place in Nature may be something of an ally here.
Auden once almost wrote a book about JRR Tolkien! But Tolkein was so put off by comments Auden had made about him—that, for instance he lived in a “hideous house” with “hideous pictures on the walls”—that he put the kibosh on the whole thing. A pity.