I stroke her and dribbles, so if I am not careful the ink runs. Were later eyes to read it they might think I wept, but I do not weep and there will be no later eyes. This is a private diary, a letter to myself, I squirm at the thought of anybody else prying … I could not write if I thought that it …
Normal then … ah then I might have wept. Tears of grief and rage that anyone let alone a boy who ought to be innocent and grateful for the wonders the world would offer him should instead bend his talents to their destruction. Could study to abolish these complex works of the human mind in all their beauty and elegance. Oh, I know that most of them might seem to be simple practical daily managing of the banal business of life. But even the dreariest are programs of the heart. I would like to sit him in front of his own beloved work and make him watch one of these malignancies slowly and inexorably eat it away. Make him create more and have them eaten away. A kind of Sisyphean hell. Except Sisyphus had the respite of walking down the hill, looking at the flowers, the sky, smelling the air, deliberately sauntering perhaps, before he had to push his stone back up it again, and I would give this boy no respite. And that would not be bad enough, no, nothing would be bad enough for the hackers and crackers. The black-hearted blackhats.
But he was a beautiful boy and kissed his mother sweetly when he came to touch her for money.
I think of all the young men who worked for me in the heyday of my business. So clever, yet so oddly malformed. Thinking they could program the whole world to their will, yet not knowing a fraction of what was in that world they so insouciantly believed themselves to have mastered. Consider the word hubris , I said to them. Increase your vocabularies, spiritual as well as mental.
I remember how surprised they were by the spaces I provided for them to work in, the lofty ceilings and arched alcoves, the old books, the furniture delicately fashioned by long-ago craftsmen who thought no detail unimportant, no skill too refined, as indeed do my young men in their sphere, though they did not see the connection between themselves and ancient skills, they expected bareness and bright colours, synthetic surfaces and formless shapes, the architectural idiom of tomorrow, at least as guessed at by the latest young designer.
I had in mind the study of St Augustine, as painted by Carpaccio in the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, in Venice. Not to copy but to emulate. Its clarity and richness, the sense of it as a fruitful working place with books all about and wondrous objects as well, an armillary sphere (do you know, I said to them, that the word armillary is to do with bracelets, precious objects that go round arms, and they gave one another there-he-goes–again looks), a shell, candlesticks held out from the walls in shaggy paws. A mappemonde. I have a picture of the painting before me now. There are sheets of music and a bell, a statue of the risen Christ on an altar in a sort of apse, and a figurine of Venus on a shelf. This is after all St Augustine, who famously prayed for holiness against the sins of the flesh, but not just yet.
I had carpets on my floor, dim glowing old Turkish ones, worn into rich ancient colours – aren’t they just a bit, well, shabby, said one of my young men – in spirit suiting an Augustinian study, but not true to Carpaccio; his painted work table and bench, the chair and prie-dieu, are raised each on their own dais, for this is a Venetian study, contemporary with the painter, and prone to flooding. Never mind that Augustine wasn’t in Venice, but in Hippo in North Africa, and that his century was the fourth, the fourth into the fifth. A Venetian study in the fifteenth century is a perfectly appropriate place for him. Anachronism is not a concept that would have occurred to Carpaccio; there is a continuity of scholarly life that sees Augustine at home in a Renaissance
Normal then … ah then I might have wept. Tears of grief and rage that anyone let alone a boy who ought to be innocent and grateful for the wonders the world would offer him should instead bend his talents to their destruction. Could study to abolish these complex works of the human mind in all their beauty and elegance. Oh, I know that most of them might seem to be simple practical daily managing of the banal business of life. But even the dreariest are programs of the heart. I would like to sit him in front of his own beloved work and make him watch one of these malignancies slowly and inexorably eat it away. Make him create more and have them eaten away. A kind of Sisyphean hell. Except Sisyphus had the respite of walking down the hill, looking at the flowers, the sky, smelling the air, deliberately sauntering perhaps, before he had to push his stone back up it again, and I would give this boy no respite. And that would not be bad enough, no, nothing would be bad enough for the hackers and crackers. The black-hearted blackhats.
But he was a beautiful boy and kissed his mother sweetly when he came to touch her for money.
I think of all the young men who worked for me in the heyday of my business. So clever, yet so oddly malformed. Thinking they could program the whole world to their will, yet not knowing a fraction of what was in that world they so insouciantly believed themselves to have mastered. Consider the word hubris , I said to them. Increase your vocabularies, spiritual as well as mental.
I remember how surprised they were by the spaces I provided for them to work in, the lofty ceilings and arched alcoves, the old books, the furniture delicately fashioned by long-ago craftsmen who thought no detail unimportant, no skill too refined, as indeed do my young men in their sphere, though they did not see the connection between themselves and ancient skills, they expected bareness and bright colours, synthetic surfaces and formless shapes, the architectural idiom of tomorrow, at least as guessed at by the latest young designer.
I had in mind the study of St Augustine, as painted by Carpaccio in the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, in Venice. Not to copy but to emulate. Its clarity and richness, the sense of it as a fruitful working place with books all about and wondrous objects as well, an armillary sphere (do you know, I said to them, that the word armillary is to do with bracelets, precious objects that go round arms, and they gave one another there-he-goes–again looks), a shell, candlesticks held out from the walls in shaggy paws. A mappemonde. I have a picture of the painting before me now. There are sheets of music and a bell, a statue of the risen Christ on an altar in a sort of apse, and a figurine of Venus on a shelf. This is after all St Augustine, who famously prayed for holiness against the sins of the flesh, but not just yet.
I had carpets on my floor, dim glowing old Turkish ones, worn into rich ancient colours – aren’t they just a bit, well, shabby, said one of my young men – in spirit suiting an Augustinian study, but not true to Carpaccio; his painted work table and bench, the chair and prie-dieu, are raised each on their own dais, for this is a Venetian study, contemporary with the painter, and prone to flooding. Never mind that Augustine wasn’t in Venice, but in Hippo in North Africa, and that his century was the fourth, the fourth into the fifth. A Venetian study in the fifteenth century is a perfectly appropriate place for him. Anachronism is not a concept that would have occurred to Carpaccio; there is a continuity of scholarly life that sees Augustine at home in a Renaissance
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