Frankly, you can keep Van Morrison, Jim Morrison and all that moody attitude. In between the 'day job' of engineering such twaddle as Dark Side of the Moon, Norman 'Hurricane' Smith made use of Pink Floyd's tea-breaks by using the studio time to make some vaudeville masterpieces. I've continued to celebrate that he did by adopting one of his titles.
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Meanwhile, back with the reading list. An old Michel Eyquem, Seigneur de Montaigne, won't ever let you down. I should have gone straight for the 1344 pages of the complete essays rather than the mere sampler of the Selection because if you're going to have any of somebody you like you might as well have the lot. Any selection, or 'selected', is somebody else's choice and you might have chosen differently. I'd like to decide for myself.
It's not as if I didn't know about Montaigne, or you didn't either. Shakespeare did, too, we are told. It's not a tip. I've only just caught up with Rilke, through Martyn Crucefix's relaxed (I think) translations of the Duino Elegies. I've known 'about' him for decades without knowing much about him.
To get involved with these things needs a trigger, and luckily I've had them recently.
Montaigne is not the least bit forbidding to read, which being C16th and in translation, you might think he would be. At least in the Screech version, combining three available texts like a compact variorum edition, he is clear, eminently sensible and, like it says, like he's sat next to you on a quiet afternoon, maybe having a Guinness or two.
Every essay I've read so far makes me want to quote him. I'm not going to do that, of course. I only wish one could not only upbraid the Stoics for their ultimate absurdity - who had come out of Daisy Dunn's book on Pliny so well- and accept mortality so equably without any of that terrifying stuff from Larkin's Aubade.
I wish such renowned classicists as Boris Johnson had read and understood a fraction as much of Roman literature as Montaigne had, like his unarguable objections to cruelty to animals invloved in the hunt.
Never mind persuading Workington, Bolsover and parts of the North East of England to vote for that vague, mumbling pack of lies that constituted a General Election campaign. Any party that thinks it's okay to charge around the countryside hoping to murder our fellow animals for fun is unelectable.
I was once sent a box of books by someone who was off-loading them and I was grateful for many of them, and they've been of much use but On Hunting by Roger Scruton, was, I'm sure, put in among them as a wind-up. It wasn't given house room here for long.
Montaigne would not have voted Conservative.
But I'll quote him On Drunkenness. It's good for you, once in a while. Don't worry about it.
But it's a mistake to refine the palate to appreciate only good quality wine because you will then only be disappointed by ordinary wine,
To be a good drinker you must not have too tender a palate. The Germans enjoy drinking virtually any wine. Their aim is to gulp it rather than to taste it. They get a better bargain. Their pleasure is more abundant and closer at hand.
Philosophy can be dull reading. In fact, it's bloody dreadful but Montaigne is bright and refreshing, more than 400 years on. Like a crisp Soave.
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So, actually, Montaigne and Rilke will keep me going for a while even if they seem like occasional reading. I'm subliminally looking for something else. The pile on top of the CD shelves only consists of the second half of the Northanger Abbey/Persuasion double-header and Jane's first book didn't do enough to make me weant to read her last; Les Monnayeurs in French so I can see what Camus really wrote except it's been so long since I read The Counterfeiters, I've forgotten where, and the long halted biography of Delmore Schwartz that got left behind when more important things arrived.
Please don't make me have to go back to Proust.
Perhaps the purer form of music, rather than books for the sake of books, is actually a higher form of detachment from the worldly world that only ever disappoints us.The Beethoven Piano Sonatas by the completely brilliant Stephen Kovacevich arrived a few days ago. 9 CD's. Surely that's enough for a while.
