Saturday, April 7, 2012

Just a lot of things to do

I'm listening to Leonard Cohen's new album Old Ideas. An early stanza from the song 'The Darkness' stands out with its plain-speaking directness & economy, and marvellously effective internal rhymes in lines 3 & 5. There is a Buddhist stripping away in this stanza & the song, and it reminds me of something Cohen said in an interview in 2005 about his time in a monastery ... "there you get so tired that you can’t pretend, and that’s all that a monastery is. They make you so tired that you give up pretending."

I got no future
I know my days are few
The present's not that pleasant
Just a lot of things to do
I thought the past would last me
But the darkness got that too.

Thursday, April 5, 2012

How easily the habits of luxury take root

When did the long trajectory to consumerism start? The burgeoning wealth of 17th-century Amsterdam in its mercantile heyday gave rise to a genre of domestic portraiture where families were depicted with their prized stuff. It's not a big step from bourgeois figures showing off & memorialising their purchases, to our advertising-bombarded world where the good life is a photogenic one.

And we have always known that it is essentially a one-way road, and the mechanism by which we easily morph our natures into dependence on comfort, and the innate programming of ambition for worldly success (which pays off in reproductive success) is today exploited by manufacturers and lending institutions to entrap us into slavery. Dostoevsky captures the essence of the demon: "В эти пять лет ее петербургской жизни было одно время, в начале, когда Афанасий Иванович особенно не жалел для нее денег; он еще рассчитывал тогда на ее любовь и думал соблазнить ее, главное, комфортом и роскошью, зная, как легко прививаются привычки роскоши и как трудно потом отставать от них, когда роскошь мало-помалу обращается в необходимость." ... "There had been a time, at the beginning of those five years of her Petersburg life, when Afansy Ivanovich had been particularly unstinting of money for her; he was then still counting on her love and thought he could seduce her mainly by comfort and luxury, knowing how easily the habits of luxury take root and how hard it is to give them up later, when luxury has gradually turned into necessity." (Pevear & Volokhonsky).