Nietzsche

Tuesday

Patrick West

Finland’s sad secret to happiness

In recent years it’s become a hackneyed truism that Nordic nations have found the key to happiness. The Danes, who often take first place in global rankings for mental wellbeing, pride themselves on hygge, that feeling of cosiness evoked by wrapping oneself in blankets and being surrounded by candles. The Swedes promote lagom, the concept of the optimal medium. And while the Finns also appear to be satisfied with their lot – Finland came first in this year’s World Happiness Report for the ninth time in a row – they have no well-known term that encapsulates their attitude to life. In the spirit of Nordic oneupmanship, however, that could be about to change.

Tuesday

Charlotte Stroud

Even as literate adults, we need to learn how to read

From our UK edition

Few readers can claim to be what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called ‘Mogul diamonds’ – those who not only ‘profit by what they read’, but ‘enable others to profit by it also’. If such people were rare in Coleridge’s time, then today, when reading is in dramatic decline, they are scarce enough that even the white rhino might feel a little smug. Anyone seeking a glimpse of this endangered reader could be forgiven for thinking that a university English department was its most likely habitat, but they would be wrong. Behind the brown office doors where academics labour, one is more likely to find the common squirrel, hoarding information and burying it under dense soil.

Thursday

M.G. Scott

What does it feel like to perform the same show 355 times in one year? 

From our UK edition

I have my routine down to a science. At 6.59, I’m sitting in the stairwell, typing on my laptop or scribbling in a book. At 7.01, I’m speeding down the hall to Dressing Room 18, where the rest of the girls are semi-apparelled, laughing, blasting out Tyla; or some days, silent, headphones in, munching pre-show snacks and staring blankly into space. From 7.01 to 7.05, I’m putting on my costume as the ambient noise of my cast mates getting dismantled by the demogorgon plays over the intercom. At 7.07, I’m sprinting down the dozens of stairs between Dressing Room 18 and the ground floor. And at 7.09, I’m stepping out on stage, wearing an orange tartan two-piece set and a pair of horn-rim glasses, where 2,024 eyes are watching me.

Thursday

Richard Bratby

A revelation: Delius’s Mass of Life at the Proms reviewed

From our UK edition

Regarding Frederick Delius, how do we stand? In the 1930s, Sir Henry Wood believed that Proms audiences much preferred Delius to Holst, and most critics back then would have described him as a major British composer. Times change: if you took your music GCSE in the late 1980s, you’ll have sensed that the Bradford lad was no longer quite up there. But you might well have been taught by people who still remembered him as a giant, and there was also the legacy of that greatest of composer biopics, Ken Russell’s Song of Summer, in which Delius’s music explodes in sunbursts of passion and colour against Russell’s austere black and white cinematography.

Monday

A.N. Wilson

Why Goethe matters

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe bears one of the most famous names in world literature, though he is largely unread by English-speakers. He is most closely associated with the novel and dramatic form, so many would be surprised to know that he primarily spoke of himself, for much of a long life that spanned from 1749 to 1832, as a scientist. He was a pioneering exponent of the science of evolution, and in two wonderful poems, The Metamorphosis of Plants and The Metamorphosis of Animals, he explored his belief that nature evolves from simpler, earlier life forms. This, rather incredibly, was seventy or eighty years before Charles Darwin began to write.

Goethe
argument
Micah Mattix

Picking a fight

Lee Siegel’s defense of argument in the latest volume of Yale’s “Why X Matters” series is original, provocative and frustrating, which isn’t bad for a book on argument. Siegel is less interested in what argument does than in what it is. An “expression of a universal longing for a better life” is how he puts it initially. It is also a justification for “ways of living,” something that“ flows from our intuitive certainty that our right to exist is the most fundamental truth,” and an expression of our “unique, particular existence.” Albert Camus stated in The Myth of Sisyphus that the only serious philosophical question is suicide, “whether life is or is not worth living.” Siegel therefore writes “To exist is to argue your existence.” You get the idea.

Thursday

Rupert Christiansen

Why I fell out of love with Wagner

From our UK edition

It’s four years since I gave up opera criticism. The pandemic had struck, I had hit a significant birthday, and notched up three decades at the coal face – a quarter of a century at the Telegraph, and an earlier stint at this address. There were other things I wanted to do and after reviewing something like 2,500 performances, I had said everything I wanted to say, several times over, and knew that it was time for other voices to be heard. Truth be told, I was becoming a little jaded. My blind spots – opera seria, the final eight mediocrities of Richard Strauss, Rossini’s irritating comedies – were turning cancerous, and I was even tiring of masterpieces like Tosca and Die Zauberflöte: no reflection on them, simply the effect of over-familiarity. ‘Don’t you miss it?

Friday

Dominic Green

The monsters we become

Nietzsche would have been great at Twitter. He excelled at epigrams, which are to philosophy as the fortune-cookie motto is to Chinese takeout, and he loved to hate. Scholars divide as to whether his epigrammatic excellence came from using a typewriter — he was the earliest philosophical adopter of this technology — or because he was no good at joined-up thinking but very good at vituperating about the news. It was Nietzsche who spotted that the emerging theme of democratic society was not the reign of reason and universal brotherhood, but the ‘stupidification of the world’ and resentment. He called it ressentiment. Philosophy goes better in French, and Nietzsche had lately turned against Wagner, anti-Semitism and German nationalism.

Nietzsche

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

My thrilling rendezvous with the sausage lady

From our UK edition

One day last week we did a wine run up to Manosque in the foothills of the Alps, leaving early in the morning. Catriona drove, big Vernon squeezed into the back seat and made a nest for himself among a fortnight’s recycling rubbish. Along the road up to Manosque the almond trees were in blossom, and in the gardens yellow forsythia and mimosa. But last year’s dead leaves still clung about the naked branches of the forest. Manosque it was because we’re massive fans of a local red called La Blaque. But on the way we passed a Louis Latour wine outlet. Catriona likes their Viré-Clessé white so we stopped for a tasting.

Sunday

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

The wonder of Wagner

Laramie, Wyoming Nearly all the famous artistic controversies in the aesthetic history of the western world — the Battle of the Ancients and the Moderns in France and the contest between the rococo and neoclassical schools across Europe in the middle of the 18th century; the subsequent rivalry between the Classicists and the Romantics and the contretemps in the late-19th century between the Realists and the Impressionists — are as dead, irrelevant and forgotten today as the wars between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines.

wagner

Sunday

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

Novel inspirations: H.L. Mencken, the bad boy of Baltimore

This article is in The Spectator’s January 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. In this age of dim digitized media in which E.J. Dionne and David Brooks are honored as distinguished columnists, the byline Henry Louis Mencken is virtually forgotten. Mencken, who died in his sleep 64 years ago this week after listening to Die Meistersinger on the Saturday afternoon broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera, is unlikely to be remembered by the mediacrats who abhor everything the man stood for. Yet Mencken in the 1920s was one of the most celebrated figures in America, and even the western world.

mencken

Monday

Dominic Green

Tulsi Gabbard: a Gandhi in Lycra

Andrew Yang claimed to be surprised that the media dubbed Tulsi Gabbard the first Asian American to run for the Democratic nomination. Of course Gabbard snagged this prize of the higher tokenism, first claimed by Patsy Mink in 1972. Yang may be doing better in the single-figure freakshow of the nomination race, but Gabbard looks better when encasing her policies in a tight wetsuit or engaging in Lycra-clad iron-pumping. https://twitter.com/tulsigabbard/status/1173605168841203712?lang=en This is not all the Gabbard candidacy has set a-pumping. No Democrat so quickens the blood of the red-meat, male-voice choir of Buchananites and Bannonites.

tulsi gabbard