Sunshine & Showers

Contrary to appearances, I've been away most of this week in Mid-Wales. It's handy the way Blogger will let you schedule posts in the future -- it keeps things ticking over. I'll get around to reading any comments as soon as I can.

Unfortunately, the week began with some appalling and tragic news from the family of one of my oldest friends; please don't ask, as I'm not going to talk about it here. However, the reverberations from this devastating bombshell continue, and I keep catching myself brooding about families and relationships, mortality and rebirth, and the way we all try to steer a steady course through a constant bombardment of surprises and setbacks. The imperative to "keep on keeping on" can sound idiotic, but it's all we've got. Gramsci's stoical formula -- "optimism of the will, pessimism of the intellect" -- is the best anyone has to offer on the subject, I'm afraid.

It may be my puritan soul speaking here, but it seems to me that there is a profundity about Bad News with which the joy of Good News can rarely compete. Good News is generally about beginnings, hopes, and sometimes well-deserved success, though the best Good News is always a miraculous escape or an unexpected, life-changing gift. Good News, as we all know, is relatively rare, and its effects are short-lived; it's a counter-intuitive experience, and the fear of "tempting fate" through enjoying good fortune is deeply ingrained (at least, in those of us of Scottish descent).

Bad News is what most of us have come to expect, and is usually about endings, frustration, or disappointment. But the very worst Bad News has the dispiriting effect of confirming the futility of our best efforts, and invests the world with a malevolence; it underlines the fact that catastrophe will, one day, overtake us all. To keep on keeping on can come to seem overwhelmingly pointless. Despite our love for new things, fresh starts, rebirth, and the remarkable persistence of life in an indifferent universe, I suppose our hearts can't ignore the deeper, levelling tug of entropy.

Easter, of course, is all about this tussle between life and death, decay and resurrection. I have always found the idea of the Christian Easter ritual of Tenebrae very moving, in which candles are extinguished during the night-time service, one by one, until the last one is concealed beneath the altar, leaving the church in darkness. A bible is slammed shut, and then the single lit candle is returned to the altar, and everyone leaves in silence. As a piece of symbolic theatre, it's hard to beat. That astonishing piece of polyphony, Allegri's Miserere, was composed specifically for this service in the Sistine Chapel, and it was long forbidden to perform it anywhere else or to transcribe it. Famously, the 12 year-old Mozart wrote it down from memory in April 1770, after one hearing, leading to its publication in England by Charles Burney in 1771.

The view from my bedroom on Monday

Anyway. April in Wales is a season of sunshine and showers, of sudden transfiguring sunlight and brooding hilltop clouds (though, as it happens, we've had an unusually dry winter across Britain, and drought threatens). It's good to pull on some boots and walk across an open landscape for no better reason than the pleasure of it. As I said to the owner of our holiday let, to my amazement I had realised that we've been coming to the area once known as "Radnorshire" every year at Easter for over thirty years now. We like it. I expect and hope that we'll be back next year.