1905, 1941
1905
The following essay (at this stage I am simply drafting its outlines, but the goal, eventually, is to turn it from a blog-page into a book) requires a date, and truthfully there isn't one, not a day, not a week, not a month, not even a year, and to some degree not even a century, because what I want to write about is something that takes many years to happen.
And for a title: "How waves on the ocean rise and rise, until they reach their absolute peak, and then, having nothing else to do, nowhere else to go, they crash".
Far too long-winded, I know. Then how
about "The Culmination of European Civilisation"? But isn't the
culmination of one epoch also the incipit of a new one?
Yes,
the start of a new epoch is what I said, and meant; but self-evidently I also
need to explain it. 1905 was the year in which European civilisation reached
its culmination – not its end, because there are no ends to human civilisation,
but the culmination of a specific phase of growth: the height of the wave. That
phase started, let us say, in 1492 – there may be a more precise date, allowing
for the Italian Renaissance in particular, but 1492 is the date I am choosing,
because this was the year in which the most important ship of all European time
was sailed into the Atlantic of the human intellect, and discovered the New
World – the completion of Copernicus’ “De Rerum orbium celestis”. At that
moment the power of the Catholic church began to wane, and especially its
ability to force the human intellect to remain closed, to sustain an era of
intellectual darkness that enabled it to operate its ideology of social control
across most of the planet, and to reap the rewards of earthly wealth and power in
the process.
Between 1492 and 1905, as we shall see, the
human intellect (in Europe and to some degree its colonies, which was most of
the rest of the planet) opened like a morning flower, petal by slow petal,
until it reached its full bloom; and then, as every fully bloomed flower must,
it wilted, and died, ready to be replaced by a new flower, blooming in its
passing; and one which, like itself, must already have begun to bud in order to
have been able to supplant its predecessor. The new bud is the ongoing proletarian
revolution, whose first manifestation was in Russia, in 1905 – though it failed,
as Copernicus did initially, to make the transformation, because
transformations take time too, several hundred years indeed.
So we have a year, but we also need a precise date on which to place this essay in the blog, and for that it has to be an event that at once describes the achieving of the peak, but also defines
what and how the new epoch would become, beyond the politics and economics of
the proletarian revolution, through the most significant change that revolution
would bring, the access for all people to genuine education, and thereby a
release from vassaldom and state or church control. So something that was neither
mythological nor metaphysical, but exclusively phenomenological,
epistemological - and other than Einstein’s
four seminal papers, all published that year, few events seemed to me more
symbolically precise.
So I looked up March 28 in the history almanacs, to see if I could justify
my choice, so to speak, of day M rather than week E or month C (they all proved
equal, once squared), and lo and behold "March 28 1905: Albert Einstein submitted a paper to the
journal 'Annalen der Physik' that explained the photoelectric effect by
proposing that light could behave as a particle (a 'quantum' of energy), a
concept that became a cornerstone of quantum theory." The fourth paper,
the culmination of his life's work, the final vincdication of Copernicus, the start of modern science. Perfection!
Now all I have to do is write the essay!
1941
The rose garden at Sissinghurst, now a National Trust property, formerly the home, the horticultural achievement, of Victoria Mary (Vita) Sackville-West, born
March 9 1892; died June 2 1962.
Victoria Mary, Lady Nicolson CH (that's
"Companion of Honour") is how she probably ought to be known, but common-or-garden Vita Sackville-West was her preference: English
novelist, poet, housescape designer, journalist, letter writer and diarist, though
not necessarily in that order every day.
Hubby was the politician Harold Nicholson
(whose diaries can be found here);
their son was Benedict, usually shortened to Ben
Nicholson (bio here)
though it also needs pointing out that this was Benedict, editor of "The
Burlington" magazine and art historian, not Benedict, husband of Barbara
Hepworth and modernist painter, who was not, as far as I am
aware, a relation.
A dozen novels (click here for the biblio), a dozen collections
of poetry, plus journalism, letters by the hundred, diaries - but what brings
me to her, and her to this page, is not simply the glory of her back garden; several
actually (click here), because she made a new one every time she moved - and if gardening were counted among the great art-forms as it should be, she would be regarded as the Turner of her day - though
Sissinghurst (here)
and Knole (here) are the two that matter.
Now I am a life-long admirer of Adeline Virginia Stephen (Virginia Woolf by her married
name), having read
"Orlando" as a teenager and been so completely mesmerised by it that I
devoured "Mrs Dalloway" and Jacob's Room" with equal passion straight away, then
"To The Lighthouse" and "The Waves" with even more, but slower, over several years, because they are much more richly complex, and returned to her again and again down the years, "A Room Of One's Own"
massively influential as a starting-point for what has now become
"Woman-Blindness", and her comments about Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "Aurora Leigh" one of the key incipits for my "Book of Joan"... but it was only when I went digging into the
equally but differently extraordinary VSW (I wonder if that similarity of
initials was one of their initial attractions) that I learned that... but let
me tell the whole tale.
They met at someone's dinner party in 1922, and became
intellectual friends at once. Somewhere around 1925 they moved from the library
to the bedroom, and when they were apart went back to their separate libraries
to write their extensive correspondence and, in Woolf 's case, extensive diary as well. But the
real love-letter was "Orlando", and the original manuscript, viewable
if you visit Knole (click here),
is inscribed "Vita from Virginia". They finally left the bedroom in
1935, confining their friendship to the library, occasionally the garden, until
Ginia's death, today in 1941.
