Status Updates From The Last Supper

It strikes me that the glory of art is the glory of survival, for survival is an inhuman property. It is an attribute of mountains and objects, of the worthless toys in the children's bedroom at home that will outlive us all. That which is human decays and disappears: only in art does the quality of humanity favour survival. Only in art is a record kept of an instant, that the next instant doesn't erase.

I am thinking about the future, though these thoughts are wordless and indistinct.. They are like running water, they pour towards an edge, a precipice,and tumble over the side. I don't want to go home Life could become flat again. It is desire that is big and grand and treacherous; desire, not life.

We turn to art to dignify our eexperience of the world;to find a reply to the question of consciousness.But I, too, have a qualm about the Fra Angelicos, the Peruginos.It is that they belong to the past.Their reality is so remote from our own:I fear to look at them is a form of nostalgia.I fear the feeling of sadness they cause me, sadness that our own world is not more beautiful.
(paradoxical thought, if you ask me)

In England,I became increasingly sure that to possess sth was to arrest knowledge of it, because the thing itself is no longer free. For me the pain of knowledge is a tonic, an antidote to the pall of possession.But there is an element of death in knowledge.Knowledge is what remains to the human mind once the possession has been lost.Its presence is painful,because it signifies that what was known is no longer there.

The spaghetti alle vongole is so delicious that it has a kind of holiness about it. Trained as we now are on sheep's milk cheese and white Italian flour, purged of our promiscuous tastes, we are capable of understanding it. It is our prize, our reward, this understanding. A pile of empty clam-shells remains on my plate like the integuments of a poem whose meaning I have finally teased out.

We eat sheep's milk cheese and tomatoes. We eat the rough white bread. It is strange to eat the same things over and over again.It is not that we dislike this new, narrow range of satisfactions: on the contrary, the idea of eating at a wider scope begins to seem more and more grotesque. It is important to be satisfied by what is known to you. Is that not a basic truth, biblical like the olive tree?

In the old town an atmosphere of unusual refinement prevails. Every infelicitous speck of modernity has been sieved out. Of course, the beautiful islands of the past in their turbid oceans of modernity are to be found all over Europe, in England too. At the heart of every hideous human settlement we find an image of our predeceased ancestor, aestheticism. It is our lot to defend that image, lifeless as it might seem.

After the exhilaration of escape, we find that we are all still here, unaltered. But we did not come here to find ourselves: we came for something we are able to identify only by its absence.

We have closed the door on England as one would close the door on a dark and cluttered house and walk out into the sun. It is this release, from the feeling of interiority, that I relish the most. Yet I love its darkness and clutter, its shady labyrinths of memory and emotion. They give rise to feelings of outward misshapenness, but they have their own value, the heavy metal coins of Englishness.

At home I often felt that our life lacked beauty:I looked for it in music,in poetry and painting,in the world itself,when a particular evening sky or fall of light,a glimpse of city trees in leaf,seemed to become more than itself. I would put peonies in a vase,tidy up,but I never found much art in daily things.There was always too much reality churning just ahead,mixing everything together into a grey agitated mass.

Always the effort of resistance, of counter-motion, of breaking off into what is untried and unknown: yet the unknown seems in its distance and blank mystery to contain for me a form of hope, a strange force that is pure possibility.

it is hard to have faith in life when you have seen its credibility strained too often.