by Jan Morris
Anyway, I sat in my car until the last chords of the concerto, and only then took the milk in.
DAY 58
______________________________________
I don’t how things are where you are, but here in north Wales, in a corner of Britain, on the edge of Europe, in the middle of what we used to call the Western world, if one is to go by the daily news, everything almost everywhere is in a state of muddled mayhem. Whom are we to believe, what do we aim for, why, or why not? It seems to me that the only people who know for certain what they want of the world are those with a dogma, and all too often, by the nature of things, they are dogmatic.
Too often the world’s ancient religions offer us no alternative. You believe in your particular divinity, or you don’t, and as a result millions of people everywhere have lost their inherited guides to conviction and behaviour, and millions more of us are searching for some new route to enlightenment.
Eastern mystics, although they so often mention a Way, are vague about a Destination, and Western theologians are more reticent than they used to be about the existence of an afterlife. Of course, they often remonstrate that when they talk of an afterlife, they mean something intangible, something merely ethereal, and anyway, I suspect few Western Christians, when they do something good, are consciously storing up credit for an entry pass to Heaven.
So? So I suspect – and hope! – that millions of us everywhere are reaching the conclusion that only one simple but tremendous conviction – Way and Destination all in one, as it were, with or without beliefs or disbeliefs – can offer us guidance through the endless tangle of the world’s affairs. Tolstoy called it simply Goodness, and the intangible movement I myself have founded in its honour requires no membership, still less subscription, but only the intention of decency.
There! You thought I was going to say Kindness, but now and then I go in for Elegant Variation.
DAY 59
______________________________________
And speaking of variety, as I was in yesterday’s entry, I note that it was the 250th day of this so-called diary, in its two volumes, and I am getting rather tired of me.
I dare say you are too, but then you can switch me off with the proverbial muttered curse and move on to pastures new. I am stuck with my tone of voice, the timbre and rhythm of it, the self-satisfaction and the sometimes tiresome humour.
More seriously, I am stuck with Me. For, of course, it is a carefully honed persona that I have been presenting to you these last 250 days. What a nice sort of person, I have evidently intended you to think, in the last years of a life so full of variety and surprise – sexually complex, sustained by a lifelong love of a partner, as of children and animals and home! But how often, if the truth be told, the whimsy masks bitter inadequacies, and how easily my vaunted devotion to the ideal of kindness fails me when it is truly challenged! I am not always as good to Elizabeth, in the growing confusions of her dementia, as I should be, or as generous to my children, or as responsive to old friends, or patient with fools, or, in short, anything like as agreeable as I have been implying for the past 250 days. And worst of all, perhaps, as I dare say you agree by now, the big doses of myself I have had to endure can be an awful bore …
But then again, come on, be fair, consider me now! How freely and frankly I am confessing my faults! I admit the worst in me. I apologize. Ah well, you may perhaps be thinking at this moment that on the whole this seems to be a fairly decent person after all; and may God forgive me, to tell you the truth that’s just what I’m thinking too …
PS It isn’t the 250th day of the diary – it’s only the 246th! Watch this space …
DAY 60
______________________________________
This year the peripatetic Welsh National Eisteddfod, commonly touted as Europe’s greatest arts festival, is being held in Cardiff, the national capital of our bilingual society. Very proper, you may think. Cardiff is the one great city of the little nation, big, rich, cosmopolitan, multiracial, historically significant and artistically progressive. Unfortunately, though, it is by no means representative of what one might call the mainland of the eisteddfod.
For one thing, it is geographically unrepresentative. Some 150 miles separate Cardiff, on the southern coast of Wales, from the tip of Anglesey in the north, and most of the country in between is profoundly rural or wild. Also, it is essentially a city of the world, an industrial, worldly seaport, experienced and outgoing, whereas the very nature of Wales as a whole is introspective, traditional, nostalgic and imaginative. Cardiff mostly speaks English, rather than Welsh: the Eisteddfod Genedlaethol Cymru is a festival devoted to the minority language of Cymraeg, and is famously rich in arcane ritual and tradition. Pitching its tents amidst the twenty-first-century urbanities of Caerdydd seemed to some of us anomalous and unpromising.
We were wrong. I did not myself travel the 118 miles from our home in Llanystumdwy to the festival site, but I watched it assiduously on television, and day by day it grew upon me that every now and then a National Eisteddfod in Cardiff might be a shot in the arm to the old country. It was sad in a way to watch those peculiar rituals being performed within buildings, rather than in tents or the open air, but it was fine to see unprecedented crowds attending them – 60,000 people and more – and perhaps experiencing for the first time something of the larger Welsh meaning. The language differences did not seem a hindrance – translations were always available – and, above all, the atmosphere seemed to be enthusiastic – not just the enthusiasm of mature traditionalists, but of an audience of all ages enjoying themselves.
For most of them, I suppose, it was an experience that was truly part of their own heritage, whether they spoke Welsh or not and had perhaps never set foot in the north of their country. Most of them, I do not doubt, were proud of their Welshness anyway, and pleased that this ancient demonstration of themselves, so to speak, had come to their own capital at last. I was pleased, too, as a patriot with a decidedly imperfect command of my own language but as an ardent believer in its prosperity.
Does a nation and its traditions necessarily depend upon a language? The National Eisteddfod is, of course, entirely devoted to Cymraeg and, above all, to its poetry; but there are many proud Welsh people who are devoted to the language but sometimes prefer, for one reason or another, to express themselves in English – many poets, for instance, from George Herbert and Henry Vaughan down to R. S. Thomas and that archetypical modern Welshman, Dylan Thomas.
Anyway, at Cardiff (Caerdydd) the other day I’m sure everyone sang with equal enthusiasm the first line of the national anthem, ‘Mae hen wlad fy nhadau yn annwyl i mi’ (‘The old land of my fathers is dear to me’), and its codicil, ‘O bydded i’r heniaith barhau’ (‘Long live the old language!’)
And so say all of us, but to stress rather than weaken the point, there are people who are devoted less to the lovely language of Wales than to the still lovelier numen of the place, in whatever language it expresses itself – or even more persuasively, perhaps, in no language at all.
DAY 61
______________________________________
Doesn’t regret nag at one? I was awake half the night regretting something I wrote in the previous batch of these diaries, which comes out very soon in book form, and of which an advance copy has just reached me.
In it I have mentioned my eldest son Mark, who has lived in Canada for many years, is a distinguished musicologist and has written, among much else, a wonderfully learned and much-admired book about twentieth-century composers. Well, in a diary entry about something else I referred to him, and when I re-read the entry yesterday, it seemed to me that I had expressed myself very badly in it, unintentionally seeming to slight his work and failing to articulate my lifelong admiration for him.
Of course, I did not mean it at all, but if that book is reaching him this morning too, forgive me my ham-handedness, dear Mark, accept my regret and let me sleep tonight. Thank you!
DAY 62
<
br /> ______________________________________
Every morning, just to make sure my e-mails are working, I send myself a mystic message on the Web, and today the message was this:
muddle-morning.
Cryptic, but true. Among the myriad symptoms of my old age, two are now particularly intrusive: physically, lack of balance; mentally, muddle.
What an admirable word it is, by the way, wonderfully expressive of my condition. What day is today anyway? Who’s coming this morning, if anybody? Isn’t it somebody’s birthday? Have I got to be somewhere, and if so, where?
Muddle-morning indeed! (And look back at my Day 59 for confirmation!)
DAY 63
______________________________________
It was my Elizabeth’s birthday yesterday, and I was the skeleton at the feast.
It really was an excellent feast, too, with a highly cosmopolitan menu and a merry complement of celebrants, young and old. It all went with a swing, so why did I sit there apparently morose? I loved everyone there, but I am just no good at such festivities, and simply cannot bring myself to contribute publicly to the goings-on. In particular – I cannot deny it – I loathe the jingle ‘Happy Birthday to You’, with its attendant chorus.
I think I heard it for the first time when I sailed as a lecturer on a cruise ship long years ago. At dinnertime during that otherwise agreeable voyage, first one table of passengers, then another, often a third, broke into that wretched hymn to celebrate a birthday among them, until its cadences were stamped once and for all upon my psyche.
Where they linger to this day, and emerged at Elizabeth’s birthday celebration, when somebody or other chose to resurrect them, and left me sitting there in morose and resentful silence. I need hardly tell you, I hope, that Elizabeth did not complain – after the best part of a century she knows my sentiments well enough, and does not invariably know what is going on anyway, so in fact I think it is perfectly possible that she actually joined in the dread chorus herself …
Well, why not, dear old friend? I sing it too, in my heart!
DAY 64
______________________________________
Aha! Just for once, an entirely happy story in the day’s news. It concerns the astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who as a postgraduate student scientist at Cambridge in 1967 discovered the existence of pulsars. Her supervisor at the Cavendish Laboratory corroborated the work, and he alone it was who was awarded the Nobel Prize for the epochal achievement.
Eminent scientists, I gather, protested at the unfairness of this, but young Ms Burnell, then in her thirties, accepted the situation without complaint, and just went on with her work.
Which led her, this week, to America, and the award of something called the Special Breakthrough Prize, which is awarded for exceptional scientific achievement anywhere in the world and is worth – wait for it! – £2.3 million.
And how did Burnell, now in her seventies and a tremendously eminent Dame of the British Empire, respond this time? Why, by gracefully refusing that fortune for herself, and passing the whole lot to a scientific charity.
Bravo! Congratulations from a total scientific ignoramus, Dame Jocelyn, and thanks a lot for the example to us all.
DAY 65
______________________________________
I’m big on goats, who will one day, I suspect, inherit the earth from us, and when I found in a tourist brochure yesterday that a sort of entertainment ranch near us went in for pygmy goats, my heart leapt. Pygmy goats! I had never heard of such creatures, and could hardly imagine anything more desirable. A cuddly, sweet version of horny old Capricorn, ready to snuggle up with me at bedtime in lieu of my dear friend, the late Norwegian cat Ibsen!
But ‘Huh!’ in my mind I heard old Ibsen snarl. ‘And just when did I ever snuggle up with you? Dear God, snuggling is hardly my style, and I think you’ll find that Capricorn feels likewise.’
This morning I drove over to that farm anyway. There were baby rabbits to be handled there, and lambs, and baby guinea pigs, nice little ponies and adorable kittens somewhere, I don’t doubt. But the pygmy goats seemed to me not sweetly pygmean at all. Tough, determined animals they turned out to be as they jostled around the bag of victuals I had brought for them, handsomely horned and bearded and full of grasping, greedy vigour.
‘What did I tell you?’ Ibsen murmured in my mind’s ear. ‘Try cuddling one of those little bruisers.’ I threw the rest of the victuals over the fence for them to fight over, and went home with my old respect for Capricorn confirmed.
So the cat was right.
DAY 66
______________________________________
Among the delights of living in Welsh Wales, in one of those parts of the little country that has not been deracinated by tourism and second homes, is the sense of an age-old Instinct, working away beneath the surface of things, according to its own values, with its own meanings.
My poet son Twm inhabits that other Instinct. He lives and writes anyway in the Welsh language, but I often feel that his love for Wales, which of course I share, shimmers more subtly somehow, on another wavelength from mine. Of course, it is partly because his command of the language is infinitely more absolute than mine, but it is chiefly because he is a member of the Instinct.
Every now and then he is asked, by a neighbour, a friend, an acquaintance or even a total stranger, to write a poem in perfect literary Welsh to be read at somebody’s funeral (or wedding, or birthday, or celebration of retirement). So natural is that sense of innate comradeship that on the one side the bereaved or celebrant simply asks, on the other the poet sings.
The tourists flock to the beach, the retirees watch their televisions, and they will seldom know of that lovely Instinct all around …
DAY 67
______________________________________
Once again, and surely for the last time, as I approach my ninety-second birthday I am thrust, almost detonated into a relative limelight. This is because the previous volume of these modest meditations has just been published, and to a degree unexampled in my own career, has been publicized! Times have changed in the literary industry, and while the most I used to get when a new book came out was a modest launch party, perhaps, and possibly an ad in one of the literary magazines, this time, my goodness, it feels positively explosive!
Somebody got the book on the radio, for a start, so that for a whole week extracts were broadcast. Then there was a small spate of interviews, when kindly, inquisitive journalists came to inspect the Morris ménage and incidentally mentioned the book. And the volume’s own publishers, Faber & Faber, my benefactors for half a century, broke with old styles by distributing an extraordinary sort of publicity portfolio, including tea cloths with quotes from the book on them and a clothes line to dry them from, with pegs.
And it worked, my goodness it worked! I don’t know if it sold many books, but to judge from my letters, e-mails and phone calls it made me famous for a whole week, largely, I suspect, among people who did not realize I was still alive.
Well, I was, and still am. Who d’you suppose is writing this, and why?
DAY 68
______________________________________
My heart leapt this morning when I read about the prime minister of New Zealand taking her baby with her to a session of the United Nations General Assembly. In my ignorance I had never heard of the lady before, but I liked the sound of her at once. Her name, I discovered as I read on, is Jacinda Ardern, and her policies in general seem liberal and generous, inasmuch as my ten minutes’ reading persuades me. But it was not the baby bit, nor yet the ideology that excited me just now. It was this: that for the very, very first time in my life I read of a politician employing as a plank in their policies the conception of Kindness.
Well, have you ever heard a politician even use the word? Yet Kindness is, to my mind, as loyalties of all sorts lose their magnetism, the one abstract conception that might persuade us all of our fundamental human uni
ty. I am not in the least ashamed of plugging it as a substitute for political systems, and indeed when years ago I half seriously proposed to found the Party of Kindness, many of my readers wanted to join it.
But no. Only Prime Minister Ardern, so far as I know, has shown any sign of thinking of Kindness as a political factor. I may have misunderstood her too, but anyway, the baby’s welcome to the General Assembly seemed a start.
DAY 69
______________________________________
Like most of us, I fear, I have sort of given up on Brexit. ‘For Heaven’s sake,’ I hear the poor old nation murmuring with me to its wretched politicians, ‘get on with it, stop squabbling, reach some damned conclusion or other – by now we don’t much care what conclusion it is anyway.’
But if it’s a political quagmire over here, in the autumn of 2018, my mind boggles at the news that daily emanates from Washington DC. I read about it dutifully time and again, but still cannot distinguish a Blasey Ford from a Chuck Schumer or, for that matter, from a Chuck Grassley, identify Deborah Ramirez as against Susan Collins, or even remember for sure who is a Democrat and who a Republican. I read yesterday that Mitch McConnell (Democrat? Republican? Search me) proposed a closure vote to end the debate on Kavanaugh’s nomination today, but shame on me, I have quite forgotten who Kavanaugh is, what he is being nominated for or what a closure vote is when it’s at home (if you will pardon the vernacular).
It is almost a relief to turn to the news about President Trump, whose appeal to old-fashioned patriotism may be deceptive but is at least comprehensible … And anyway, by the time you read this, history itself will have moved on, rather out of breath, I would imagine.