Category Archives: Politics

The Unbearable Lightness of Brexit

19 Monday Aug 2019

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I have been struck recently – somewhat belatedly, I admit – by a curious aspect of the campaign to leave the European Union: a refusal to take seriously things that are demonstrably serious, creating an air of almost hysterical frivolity in the tradition of ‘Up Yours Delors’, ‘Allo ‘Allo and the Carry On films. A consistent theme in the rhetoric of Leave campaigners, for example, has been to compare the European Union to a totalitarian state or occupying power. For Jeremy Hunt, it was the USSR; For others, it was the Third Reich; and most recently, they have invoked the Chinese crackdown on the democracy protests in Hong Kong. The political and moral irresponsibility of such comparisons is only matched by the disrespect for those who have lived, or are still living, under real political oppression. But of course, it’s a figure of speech, an exaggeration, a joke. Where’s your sense of humour?

‘Who Do You Think You’re Kidding, Mr Juncker?’

Another comparison trundled out ad nauseam is the Second World War, the Blitz, Dunkirk… We heard it from Theresa May in her negotiations with the EU last April, prompting the Danish PM to whistle ‘We’ll Meet Again’. Back in 2017, Michael Howard even suggested that Britain would be prepared to go to war with Spain over Gibraltar. Those who wish to remain in the EU have been branded traitors, and just last week, Boris Johnson accused MPs seeking to avoid a no-deal Brexit of ‘collaboration’ with the EU. Collaboration? We are not – yet – at war with our European neighbours, as far as I know.

Here again, the lack of proportion and self-awareness would be astounding had we not been drip-fed this nonsense for decades. Few people who actually experienced the horrors of the Second World War wanted to relive them; even half a century later, many could not bring themselves to talk about it.

The sabre-rattling reached a new decibel level in an article by Rod Liddle in The Times  last week, arguing that ‘a peaceful, easy life hasn’t made us happy,’ and that war ‘increases social cohesion and integration’. Liddle is of course a professional wind-up merchant, and it wouldn’t do to take him too seriously, but he shrewdly tapped into a strain in the Leaver mentality, which might best be summed up by Samuel Johnson’s observation that ‘Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier.’ Not all the Doctor’s contemporaries would have agreed; John Scott of Amwell certainly didn’t.

Oh! What a Lovely War

But perhaps we have grown bored with 75 years of peace and prosperity, and forgotten how lucky we are. It has happened before. Until now, the longest interval of peace in Europe was from 1871 to 1914, when the imperial rivalries of Britain and France, Russia and Germany were fought out in far-off places at the expense of far-off people. It seems inconceivable now, in the knowledge of the catastrophe that followed, but towards the end of that period, people started to tire of peace and yearn for war. Politicians, the press and artists such as the Italian Futurist Filippo Marinetti began to argue that society had grown decadent, and that war would be cleansing, heroic and regenerative. As the title of a pamphlet published by Marinetti in 1909 put it, war is ‘the world’s only hygiene’.

Melodramatic stuff, but there is a strong element of narcissism, self-regard and self-pity to the current national psychodrama. ‘There seems to be an ingrown psychological thing about it,’ the writer Lawrence Durrell noted in an interview with the Paris Review  as long ago as 1959. ‘You can see it reflected even in quite primitive ways like this market business now – the European Common Market. It’s purely psychological, the feeling that we are too damned superior to join this bunch of continentals in anything they do.’

We don’t seem to have advanced much since then. The idea that we could be an ordinary, decent, middle-ranking country on amicable terms with our neighbours, sitting on boring committees painstakingly working out the humdrum details of food standards, workers’ rights, fishing quotas, Regional Development Grants and the Common Agricultural Policy – let alone the huge challenge of climate change – is just not grand, glamorous or exciting enough for the Leaver ego.

Carry On England

Instead, ever since the referendum campaign, Leavers have called for a return to Britain’s ‘buccaneering spirit’. Let us think for a moment what this actually means. The Collins English Dictionary defines a buccaneer as ‘a pirate, esp. one who preyed on the Spanish colonies and shipping in America and the Caribbean in the 17th and 18th centuries’. Buccaneering, then, is simply a romantic word for demanding money with menaces. Is this how a supposedly civilised country ought to conduct itself in the modern world? Even taken metaphorically, it glorifies a predatory mode of doing business that would not meet any current standards of ethics and corporate governance.

But then it’s not meant to be serious. Just like the Irish border isn’t serious, the shortage of medicines isn’t serious, the haemhorrage of capital and skilled workers isn’t serious, the spike in hate crimes isn’t serious. British pluck will see us though. Chin up, what ho!

Of course, some of the actors in this farce are serious – deadly serious. For Vladimir Putin, Steve Bannon, Arron Banks and the financial speculators who have already made fortunes short-selling the falling pound and the shares of struggling British businesses, this is a cold, calculated exercise in self-interest. But what characterises their cheerleaders and puppets, the little men like Nigel Farage, Mark Francois and yes, Boris ‘Bananas’ Johnson, is the fundamental lack of seriousness of their Carry-On vision of history. But they will not be the ones to suffer the consequences of their jolly japes.

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Carless Whispers

08 Tuesday Jan 2019

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I’ve been without a car now for more than a year. After I discovered that the new catalytic converter needed to make my ageing Chrysler PT Cruiser roadworthy again would cost more than the vehicle was worth, I decided it was time the old charger was put out to grass. I’m glad it went to a good home – a nice chap from Wanstead who converts them into customised off-road rally cars – rather than a breaker’s yard.

I thought about getting a replacement, but as the weeks turned to months, I realised I was managing perfectly well without one. I had rarely driven into central London, as parking – if you can find a place – is prohibitively expensive, and as of 8 April, my car would have been subject to the new emissions levy, in addition to the congestion charge.

Most of my car journeys were short local runs that I could have made on foot or by public transport. And if I need a motor for a weekend jaunt, I can rent one for less that it used to cost me to park outside our house for a year.

Of course I miss the car occasionally, especially waiting for a bus on a cold, rainy night. The sense of movement within a space that’s your own, the power of the 2-litre engine, the lights glowing on the dashboard, the radio, the comfortable seat with the armrest down…

But there are compensating benefits. You can’t read while driving, as you can on public transport. Walking, or travelling by bus, you notice things you wouldn’t from behind the wheel; snatches of conversation, street markets, curious architectural details, ghost advertisements fading on walls, small signs of the changing seasons…

And then there is the financial saving: insurance, road tax, MOT, servicing, repairs, AA membership, petrol and parking permits added up to something in the region of £2000 a year. That was a significant burden lifted.

Nor could I ignore the environmental impact of driving: the carbon emissions, the air pollution, the contamination of soil and groundwater by fuel and particulates, the flooding caused by people paving over front gardens to create off-street parking, and the hideous mess that traffic congestion has made of our towns.

To escape from the computer, get some exercise in the open air, and do something to help the environment, I volunteer once a week at a local nature reserve. I could hardly be unaware of the irony of driving the 4km there and back.

Now I get the train. It’s just two stops, and takes only five minutes, followed by a pleasant 1km walk through the woods from the station to the containers where the volunteers meet, so I’m getting some exercise before I even start work.

Of course, it is easy to manage without a car if you live in a major city with decent public transport. A fascinating map posted on Twitter by David Ottewell, head of data journalism at Reach, shows the proportion of commuters across the UK who drive to work compared to those who walk, cycle or use public transport. It’s very revealing: outside the big cities, most people drive.

They don’t really have much choice. Public transport in rural areas, and on the margins of our smaller towns and cities, is sparse, infrequent and unreliable. If we want to persuade people to be less dependent on cars, we need to provide viable alternatives.

Bridge Over Troubled Water

16 Saturday Jun 2018

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I was delighted last week to receive a copy of A Country to Call Home, an anthology of specially commissioned short stories, poems and flash fiction responding to the experiences of young refugees and asylum seekers. Edited, like its predecessor A Country of Refuge, by Lucy Popescu, it is published by the crowd-funding pioneers Unbound.

The brilliant array of contributors includes Hassan Abdulrazzak, David Almond, Moniza Alvi, Simon Armitage, Adam Barnard, Tracy Brabin, Tony Bradman, Sita Brahmachari, Eoin Colfer, Brian Conaghan, Kit De Waal, Fiona Dunbar, Miriam Halahmy, Peter Kalu, Judith Kerr, Patrice Lawrence, Anna Perera, Christine Pullein-Thompson, Bali Rai, Sue Reid, S.F. Said, Jon Walter and Michael Morpurgo. The former Children’s Laureate Chris Riddell has provided haunting illustrations for every piece, while the beautiful painting that forms the cover is by Haymanot Tesfa.

There are stories of home and of homesickness; about people trafficking and life in the refugee camps; about persecution and imprisonment; about prejudice, indifference and official inhumanity; and about the fortitude needed to survive these experiences.

Written for Alan Kurdi, the Syrian Kurdish boy whose body, washed up on the shore of Turkey, momentarily aroused the conscience of many in the UK, Kit de Waal’s ‘Did You See Me?’ imagines the dreams, aspirations and day-to-day reality that preceded a life lost at sea. Simon Armitage’s darkly poetic reworking of the passage in Virgil’s Aeneid on the crossing of the Styx evokes the grim sea journeys undertaken by many refugees, while Michael Morpurgo’s ‘Locked Up’ chillingly depicts the gratuitous brutality of the UK’s immigration officers.

Difference can be the source of richness: something to be celebrated, not feared

Brian Conaghan’s poem ‘Just Another Someone’, with its parallel voices juxtaposing the experiences of refugees from Nazi Germany with those of today’s asylum seekers, reminds us that exile is not a new phenomenon. The comparison is reinforced by Popescu’s interview with Judith Kerr, the celebrated author of the Mog stories and When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, who came to this country as a child in the 1930s. Kerr’s recollection that ‘people were so kind to us during the war’ chimes with my own father’s experience, and makes one wonder what has happened to this country in the intervening decades.

Aimed at both children and adult readers, this courageous book counters the negative stereotypes propagated by some politicians and sections of the press to demonise the most vulnerable people on the planet, which is why I am proud to have supported it. Instead, it challenges us to look, to see, and to recognise our common humanity.

In his contribution to the anthology, S.F. Said, author of the best-selling children’s novel Varjak Paw, recalls his delight as a child reading Watership Down to discover that the mythical rabbit hero El-ahrairah had an Arabic name with which he could identify.

‘Children’s books can be bridges connecting people,’ he reflects, ‘showing them that however different someone else might be, the things that unite us are greater than those that divide us. And that difference can be the source of richness: something to be celebrated, not feared.’

A Country to Call Home: An Anthology on the Experiences of Young Refugees and Asylum Seekers is published by Unbound, price £9.99

A Winter’s Tale

12 Monday Feb 2018

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Ian Bostridge: Schubert’s Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession (Faber & Faber) 

I have only recently caught up with Ian Bostridge’s penetrating, erudite and wide-ranging exploration of Schubert’s greatest song cycle, Winterreise, though it was published in 2015. I once had the privilege of hearing Bostridge perform the ‘Ur-Winterreise’ – the 12 songs Schubert set first before he discovered the rest of the poet Wilhelm Müller’s cycle and expanded his work – in the atmospheric setting of Wilton’s Music Hall in Limehouse.

Composed in 1827 during the last full year of Schubert’s brief life, Winterreise is considered the pinnacle of the Lieder repertoire. The almost unremitting bleakness of this 24-song cycle, in which a rejected lover stumbles through ‘the blinding, blank, hallucinogenic whiteness’ of a frozen landscape, has been no obstacle to its enduring popularity.

‘Nothing is funnier than unhappiness’

For many listeners, the cycle is a tale of lost love, or an expression of existential alienation in a hostile world. Müller’s poems offer no clue as to the background or occupation of the anonymous protagonist, but it is clear that his position is an insecure, marginal one. The very first song, ‘Gute Nacht’, begins with the lines, ‘Fremd bin ich eingezogen/ Fremd zieh’ ich wieder aus’ (I arrived a stranger/ As a stranger I leave). Bostridge plausibly suggests that he may have been an itinerant tutor, who, like Saint-Preux in Rousseau’s Julie, ou la Nouvelle Heloïse, has fallen in love with a pupil of higher social rank; the second song, ‘Die Wetterfahne’, refers to her as a ‘rich bride’.

The wanderer’s exclusion from society is most explicit in the 17th song, ‘Im Dorfe’ (‘In the Village’), in which he imagines the villagers smugly snoring in their warm beds, dreaming of material gain, while their dogs rattle their chains and bark at the intruder. Appropriately, the song features prominently in Michael Haneke’s 2001 film of Elfriede Jelinek’s chilling novel The Piano Teacher.

In this light, Schubert’s wanderer can be seen as the ancestor of the outcasts of literary modernism such as Camus’ L’Étranger and Wilson’s The Outsider. I had not known, before reading this book, that Samuel Beckett was a great admirer of Winterreise, though given the mordant humour of Müller’s poems and Schubert’s settings, it comes as no great surprise. As Nell remarks in Endgame, ‘Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.’

A winter of discontent

To this personal and social alienation, Bostridge adds a political dimension, locating the cycle amid the clampdown that followed the defeat of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna, in which demands for democratic reform were ruthlessly put down in both Austria and the fragmented German states – a repression satirised by Heinrich Heine in his 1844 poem Deutschland: Ein Wintermärchen (Germany: A Winter’s Tale).

Müller’s political sympathies are well attested. In a prefatory letter to the second volume of his travelogue Rom, Römer und Römerinnen, he lamented ‘the great Lent of the European world’, in which ‘he who cannot act… can only mourn.’ Similarly, his wanderer, ‘so wild and daring’ in battle and storm, feels his weariness and pain when, in the 10th song, ‘Rast’ (‘Rest’), he lies down in a charcoal burner’s hut.

Speculating why Müller chose a charcoal burner’s hut (as opposed to, say, a shepherd’s), Bostridge embarks on an invigorating discussion of this ancient industry, a topic that particularly drew my interest as I had come across it recently while researching my film on the Great North Wood that formerly covered much of South London. The trade, which once provided much of Europe with fuel, had always been a marginal, disreputable one, conducted at a distance from human habitation because of the smoke and soot it generated; with the Industrial Revolution, the ready availability of coal had also made it an obsolescent one.

Graph showing changes in fuel use in England, 1561–1859

Changes in fuel use in England, 1561–1859, from Ian Bostridge, ‘Schubert’s Winter Journey’

Bostridge finds a further political resonance in the reference. Müller was an admirer of the Italian revolutionary society that his hero Byron had joined, the Carbonari – whose name means ‘The Charcoal Burners’. The Carbonari had been the driving force in a series of uprisings in 1820–21, and among their objectives was the overthrow of Austrian rule in Italy. For a German poet and an Austrian composer, this was incendiary stuff.

To what extent did Schubert identify with Müller’s radicalism? In 1820, he was present when the police detained his friend Johann Senn for seditious activities; Senn was imprisoned for 14 months while Schubert, accused of using ‘insulting and opprobrious language’ to the arresting officers, spent a night in the cells, from which he emerged with a black eye. And when he first encountered the Winterreise poems, it was in the radical journal Urania, which had been banned by the Viennese censors. For both poet and composer, then, the cycle may have been a lament for the political winter that had engulfed Europe.

The undiscovered country

When Müller decided to expand his cycle from 12 to 24 poems, he interspersed the new verses in between the old. Schubert left the 12 songs he had already composed in their original order, altering the key of the last, ‘Einsamkeit’ (‘Loneliness’), to avoid a sense of closure at what now became the mid-point of the journey, and setting the new ones in the order they appeared. The result – whether by accident or design – places the most extreme states of mind towards the end of the cycle, intensifying the feeling that the wanderer is moving ever further from everyday life – and even from sanity.

The 20th song, ‘Der Wegweiser’ (‘The Signpost’), resumes the steady walking pace of ‘Gute Nacht’ and ‘Einsamkeit’: ‘Was vermeid’ ich denn die Wege,/ Wo die ander’n Wand’rer geh’n?’ (‘Why do I shun the paths/ Where the other travellers go?’). Like many others, I imagine, I have often asked myself this question in the course of both my literal travels and my journey through life. Such is the resonance of Winterreise almost two centuries after its composition.

The last lines of the song, repeated in a whisper over a relentless, tolling G and followed by a cadence of sombre finality, are: ‘Eine Straße muß ich gehen,/ Die noch keiner ging zurück’ (‘I must take a road,/ From which no one returns’). Given that Müller was steeped in English literature and had translated Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, it is not far-fetched to suppose that he intended to echo Hamlet’s ‘undiscover’d country, from whose bourn/ No traveller returns’.

From here on, there is no going back: the wanderer is irretrievably lost, and the songs become increasingly hallucinatory. In the hymn-like ‘Das Wirtshaus’ (‘The Inn’), he mistakes a lonely graveyard for an inn where he might find shelter – but the rooms are all taken, and he must trudge onwards. In a fiery burst of ‘Mut’ (‘Courage’), the singer declares, ‘If there’s no God on Earth/ We must be gods ourselves!’ anticipating, as Bostridge notes, Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, almost word for word, by half a century.

A parhelion, or sundogs, over Fargo, North Dakota

A parhelion, or sundogs, over Fargo, North Dakota

This hysterical bravado collapses into the numb resignation of ‘Die Nebensonnen’ (‘The False Suns’). Against hushed, awestruck chords, the wanderer observes three suns in the winter sky – an optical illusion caused by sunlight refracted through ice crystals, and known as a parhelion. Oddly, Bostridge’s absorbing discussion of the phenomenon – and its appearance in literature – makes no mention the ‘three glorious suns, each a perfect sun’ that appear before the battle of Mortimer’s Cross in Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part 3.

‘Die Nebensonnen’ is the cycle’s tragic nadir, in which the singer parts company with all hope as he watches two suns set, and wishes the third would do so too, leaving him in darkness.

The turn of the screw

Then, over a monotonous open-fifth drone on the piano, the wanderer meets the first human being he has directly encountered on his journey, an organ grinder, or Leiermann. The German Leier is cognate with the English word ‘lyre’ – but this is not the elegant instrument of classical antiquity that graced the Biedermeier furniture of the early 19th century, but a clapped-out, tuneless hurdy-gurdy.

A hurdy-gurdy

The instrument, its strings sounded by a wheel operated by a crank handle, was already outmoded by Schubert’s day; like the charcoal burner, the Leiermann is a practitioner of a dying trade.

Who is he? Death? Or is this most impoverished and broken-down of itinerant musicians the wanderer’s alter ego? (Not long after completing Winterreise, Schubert composed his terrifying setting of Heine’s ‘Der Doppelgänger’.) The old man’s fingers are numb with cold, his collection bowl is always empty, and no one listens to his tunes. Dogs snarl at him, as they did at the wanderer in ‘Im Dorfe’, marking him as another outsider. The singer addresses him as ‘Wunderlicher Alter’ – the adjective wunderlich translates as strange, odd, but it can also mean wondrous – and asks him to accompany his songs. (Matthias Loibner, a virtuosic champion of this disparaged and underrated instrument, has done just that to great effect.)

And so ends Schubert’s great song cycle, with this bleak, enigmatic little ditty. Yet despite the desolation that Winterreise evokes, its stark beauty and depth of human feeling makes it one of the most uplifting experiences that any art has to offer – and Ian Bostridge’s absorbing book contributes significantly to our understanding of its many subtle resonances.

Life in Limbo

20 Wednesday Sep 2017

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Jenny Erpenbeck in conversation with James Runcie at the British Library, Monday 11 September, 2017

The current refugee crisis is without doubt the greatest political and moral challenge to face Europe since the fall of Communism, and nowhere more so than in Germany, with its own troubled history of totalitarian government, division, and mass displacement. It was therefore fascinating to hear one of the country’s finest novelists, gently but adroitly prompted by the writer and broadcaster James Runcie, reflect on the issue at the British Library last week.

I reviewed Jenny Erpenbeck’s first three novels for the Independent and the Financial Times, and was present when she was awarded the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for her fourth, The End of Days. It has been inspiring to follow her development from the author of a brief, haunting debut novella, The Old Child, which dealt obliquely with the suppressed trauma of East Germany, to one of the most ambitious and accomplished novelists writing in any language today.

I read The Old Child (Die Geschichte vom alten Kind) in the German, and can vouch for the fidelity not only to meaning but to nuance and sonority of her superb translator Susan Bernofsky, who has worked closely with the author on all her books. Erpenbeck’s style is unique: clear and limpid, yet suffused with a sense of the immanence of history shimmering just beneath the surface of people, places, words and things.

Her latest novel, Go, Went, Gone, was inspired by the 2013 sinking of a refugee boat in the Mediterranean and the presence of a camp of refugees from Guinea, Ghana, Sierra Leone and Mali in Berlin’s Oranienplatz before the city authorities whisked them out of sight and into hostels.

Born in East Berlin in 1967, Erpenbeck was already 22 when the Wall came down. Her own experience of living in two completely different societies taught her that ‘things change quicker than you ever expect,’ and gave her some insight into the refugees’ alienation. All her books, moreover, have explored the themes of exile, transition, loss, and memory, which are central to the refugee experience.

Erpenbeck wanted to know about the lives they had left behind, ‘the things that were normal before they had to leave. They have to try to forget what they lost, but also memory is all they have. So there is a struggle between forgetting and remembering.’

Refugees, she explained, must cross several different kinds of borders: ‘real borders, the border of language, the border of law, the border of skin colour and all the racism that goes with it, and the border of becoming visible – to be really seen for who they are, what lives they are allowed to live.’

She spent a year talking to them, accompanying them in their daily life, including visits to government offices, lawyers, language classes and so on. Central to their predicament – and to the novel – is Germany and the European Union’s refusal under the ‘first country of entry’ rule to allow them to take paid employment until – and unless – their application for residency is granted. Erpenbeck was interested to know how they spent this enforced idleness. ‘This is the time when they’d start to have a real biography, but they have got stuck,’ she says. They are in limbo – ‘empty time’– while the rest of society are living in normal time.

Employment is also related to the ability to learn a new language. The novel’s title, conjugating the verb ‘to go’ (the satisfyingly alliterative Gehen, ging, gegangen in German) alludes to language learning, which, as Erpenbeck pointed out, is also a question of being involved in the life of a country: ‘If you’re allowed to work it’s easy to learn the language, but if you’re excluded it’s much harder.’ And in the hands of bureaucracy, language becomes a weapon to reinforce that exclusion. ‘They have to learn bureaucracy,’ Erpenbeck says. ‘Language is never a coincidence.’

The novel’s protagonist, Richard, is a professor of classics facing retirement. His occupation allows Erpenbeck to draw on two great classics about transition: Homer’s Odyssey and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Many refugees, she pointed out, are arriving from cultures whose history pre-dates that of the ancient Greeks by 2000 years. Richard also has to reinvent himself as retirement robs his life of structure, meaning and social contact; facing this void in his own existence, he feels a connection to the refugees, and discovers a new sense of purpose in helping them.

With the possibility that the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) – despite infighting and waning support – might win a seat in the Bundestag for the first time in next Sunday’s German election, Erpenbeck’s message, that ‘how you see someone defined as a stranger defines who you are’, seems more urgent than ever.

Since completing the novel, Erpenbeck has spent two years in activism, assisting refugees. ‘Only if they survive Germany now,’ she says, ‘will Hitler truly have lost the war.’

The War on Silence

24 Monday Jul 2017

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During the recent spell of warm weather, I have enjoyed a few pleasant summer evenings contemplating our garden from the patio with a glass of chilled white wine. All too often, however, I have been driven indoors to escape the sound of radios blaring from open windows and balconies. I don’t want to listen to saccharine soft-rock ballads and the vacuous, patronising banter of the presenters under any circumstances, but I particularly don’t understand why people need this aural backdrop when surrounded by birdsong and the sound of the breeze in the trees. These are music enough for me.

I rarely feel any need for background music, or any other aural diversion. When my car radio packed up recently, my initial annoyance was soon replaced by pleasant surprise at the time it gave me to think. Did I really want to listen to a repeat of Moneybox Live anyway? I suppose I’ll get it fixed, but I’m in no hurry. I appreciate that music may enliven repetitive manual tasks, and even improve one’s efficiency in performing them, but when writing or editing, it can only be a distraction from the close attention needed to do the job properly. And the idea that anyone might want background music while reading is utterly incomprehensible to me. Just why?

The problem seems to be not just the scarcity of silence in the modern world, but an active hostility to it. Fearing silence, many people seem to feel a need to surround themselves with an incessant flow of sounds – in restaurants, bars, in their cars, on their phones, in parks and public spaces. For others like me, this constant bombardment by unwanted music is an invasion of our personal space – and it’s getting harder and harder to escape it.

I used to love pubs; these days, I tend to avoid them. Do hospitality and catering colleges teach that speakers should be placed on every wall and in every corner, no more than five feet apart, lest any unfortunate customer miss out on the full volume – or any dissident evade the aural brainwashing and enjoy the now almost mythical ‘quiet pint’? Combined with the vogue for not having any soft furnishings, this causes the sound to ricochet around the bare walls, forcing customers to shout and creating a strenuous, almost aggressive atmosphere more appropriate to a gym than a place of rest and relaxation.

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‘All the resources of our almost miraculous technology have been
thrown into the current assault against silence.’
Aldous Huxley, ‘The Perennial Philosophy’
_____________________

More than 70 years ago, Aldous Huxley noted in The Perennial Philosophy (1946) that ‘all the resources of our almost miraculous technology have been thrown into the current assault against silence.’ He understood the connection between this constant barrage of noise and the consumer economy. ‘Spoken or printed, broadcast over the ether or on wood-pulp, all advertising copy has but one purpose – to prevent the will from ever achieving silence… The condition of an expanding and technologically progressive system of mass production is universal craving.’

Huxley was writing just over a decade after George Owen Squier established the Muzak corporation (named by analogy with Kodak) in 1934 to deliver piped music to factories to increase workers’ productivity, and subsequently to shops to manipulate consumers’ moods and increase their spending.

In Manifesto for Silence: confronting the politics and culture of noise (Edinburgh University Press, 2007), Stuart Sim argues that ‘Noise is used extensively as a marketing tool (bars, restaurants, public spaces in general, radio, television, film), as a way of stimulating consumption… Such marketing techniques work to homogenise behaviour and restrict individualism; thus to resist them is to make a political statement.’

The problem is compounded by the fact that – like the soma-numbed denizens of Huxley’s Brave New World – we have internalised this consumerist agenda and come to accept it as the norm. We have grown afraid of the silence within ourselves, so that whether at home or on the move, our reflex action is to fill every moment with aural distraction by resorting to the radio, television or Smartphone. Having trained the public to expect constant aural stimulation, commercial interests can now claim that they are merely giving them what they want. Why else pipe music into spaces where we are not expected to linger for more than a few moments, such as hotel lobbies, lifts, corridors, and even lavatories? The assumption would appear to be that just a few seconds’ silence is liable to generate unease.

I’m not a total purist in such matters. There are bars and cafés where well-chosen background music is an agreeable part of the ambience. At least you can choose whether to go into a particular café or not. But canned music has become all but ubiquitous: in banks, shops – including, unbelievably, bookshops –and practically every other public place. In Belgium they even pump it into the streets from little loudspeakers attached to the lampposts. Canned music in hospitals, GPs’ waiting rooms and dentists’ surgeries is particularly invasive, as you have no choice but to be there, and are unlikely to be feeling your best in the first place.

Canned music colours our experience, imposing an irrelevant – and at times jarringly inappropriate – mood. A perky song playing in a café when you’re breaking up with a lover, or in a motorway service station on the way to a funeral, offends by its grotesque inaptitude; a steroid-pumping dancefloor mix is hardly conducive to a reflective cup of coffee in the morning. And where do you go for a quiet drink after a concert or recital when you want to linger in the afterglow of the music you’ve just heard, and not have the experience dissipated immediately by someone else’s choice of aural wallpaper?

Pipedown, the campaign against piped music that numbers Stephen Fry, Joanna Lumley, Alfred Brendel, Lesley Garrett, Philip Pullman, Simon Rattle, Mark Rylance and Prunella Scales among its supporters, points out that many illnesses and disabilities – including autism, Asperger’s syndrome, tinnitus, ME and general hearing difficulties –can be aggravated by exposure to canned music, and that its use therefore contravenes the Disability Act of 1995 and the Equality Act of 2010.

_____________________

‘I refuse to die to this music.’
André Previn
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For me, listening to music – including recorded music – is an active choice. I give it the full and undivided attention I would give a book, a play or a film. I can therefore understand why musicians of all genres dislike canned music, since their training and instincts dispose them to listen rather than to screen it out. ‘I can’t close my ears,’ Daniel Barenboim said in a 2006 Reith lecture in which he mounted a scathing attack on this ‘absolutely offensive’ practice which, he argued, degrades music and encourages people not just to neglect the ear but to repress it. On board an aircraft when it ran into turbulence and the crew piped ‘soothing’ music through the public address system, his fellow conductor André Previn complained, ‘I refuse to die to this music.’ And Alex Kapranos, of the Scottish band Franz Ferdinand, in his entertaining gastronomic travelogue Sound Bites, opines that the only appropriate soundtrack to fine dining is the gentle murmur of conversation and the quiet clink of glasses and cutlery.

But nowhere, it seems, is immune. Even in libraries, canned music is recommended because people, we are told, find silence alienating. In October 2008, Andy Burnham, then Culture Secretary (now Mayor of Manchester), remarked that ‘solemn and sombre’ libraries should be ‘a place for families and joy and chatter. The word chatter might strike fear into the heart of traditionalists but libraries should be social places that offer an antidote to the isolation of someone playing on the internet at home.’

What Burnham failed to recognise is that libraries have long been an engine of the social mobility his government claimed to support: one of their principal purposes was to make the pursuit of learning available to children – and there are still many – who could not afford to buy books and whose homes were too crowded and noisy to allow them to study without distraction.

Burnham’s association of silence with the sombre and noise with joy is revealing. In A Book of Silence (2010), the writer Sara Maitland describes her own personal quest for silence, and examines our society’s ambivalence towards it. As she points out: ‘We have reached a point in contemporary Western culture where we believe that too much silence is either “mad” (depressive, escapist, weird) or “bad” (selfish, antisocial)…’

Noise is equated with sociability – but the noise with which we now surround ourselves is not that of human interaction, but of withdrawal: the television that precludes the need for conversation in the home, the canned music that makes it impossible in the pub, the headphones clamped to ears in public places…

Real, intense communication is punctuated by periods of silence and reflection, rather than the constant babble of what anthropologists call phatic communication – small talk to you and me. Of course small talk has real value in making strangers feel at ease with one another, but we only establish proper friendships when we move beyond it. Taken too far, phatic communication becomes nervous chatter, a substitute for communication.

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‘Silence is the element in which great things
fashion themselves together.’
Thomas Carlyle
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Silence is also essential for contemplation, reflection, and creativity. As Carlyle wrote in Sartor Resartus (1836), ‘Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together.’ During the 1950s, the travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor found it necessary to retreat to the Benedictine Abbey of St Wandrille de Fontanelle in Normandy to finish a book with which he was struggling. In A Time to Keep Silence (1957), he records how at first, he found the silence of his cell oppressive, and suffered from insomnia, nightmares and daytime drowsiness. Then, as the ‘hundred anxious trivialities that poison everyday life’ fell away, he experienced a renewed energy for reading, writing, and exploring the surrounding countryside.

Fermor and Maitland’s rigorous, quasi-mystical pursuit of silence, which arose in both writers out of personal crisis, is probably not something that many people will either want or be able to put into practice, but what Maitland calls the ‘bits and pieces of silence woven into the fabric of each day’ are to be cherished, not feared and obliterated.

Our inability to tolerate silence for even a short time is, I believe, a symptom of neurotic anxiety; it is almost as though we are suffering from a mass outbreak of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. It is not merely our addiction to noise that is at issue here, but a wider craving for constant stimulus. Consumerism has infantilised us, and we can go nowhere without our toys. Travelling on the East Coast Main Line from London to Leeds recently, I was struck as I walked along the train from the quiet coach to the buffet car how almost every passenger was hooked up to some device: laptops, iPads, DVD players, Wiis, each in their electronic cocoon, oblivious to the afternoon sunlight slanting across the fields outside the window.

At what cost? ‘I see patients deafened by inner and outer voices and sounds and just the sheer perennial pollution of irrelevant stimuli,’ writes the philosopher and psychotherapist Piero Ferrucci in Psychology Today. ‘If we lose our inner silence, we lose our very self.’ He suspects that we fear silence because it ‘reminds us of solitude and death’. But, he suggests, ‘how about facing the fear? We might find out that, instead of fearing silence, we enjoy it.’

Silence should be the default position, music a conscious choice, to be enjoyed in all its richness because it is not commonplace; increasingly, background music is the default position, and silence an extreme, eccentric – and usually expensive – choice. I believe we should be looking to build intervals of silence into our everyday lives, and to restore respect for silence in public spaces. Resist the temptation to turn on the radio first thing in the morning, just as you might resist the temptation to light up a breakfast cigarette; hold on to the silence as long as you can. Turn off the TV unless there’s something you really want to watch.

And maybe we should all have at least one ‘unplugged’ day a week. Switch off the iPhone, put the iPad away in a drawer, turn off the radio, and listen to the wind in the chimney, the sound of the rafters settling, the rattle of rain on the window, the foxes barking in the garden, the hoot of a train in the distance… and the silence.

What have we got to be afraid of?