Oh, Babe, What Would You Say on Sunday

Having established chess ratings of over 2000 in two disciplines, I was taking Classical towards 1900 before the gas ran out and I fell back alarmingly. Yesterday's racing was no better on a good day for Mr. Henderson but not for me, who took 22/1 about Doddiethegreat only to see him held up off the pace and put in a good finish far too late. I'll hope to be having Fun, Fun, Fun at Exeter shortly but it wouldn't be fun- or at least not of interest- to win all the time.

As ever, a variety of interests provides worthwhile things in other spheres. The wireless played W.F. Bach this morning,

 and so that was added to a spending spree that might not be over yet.

95% or more of the Bach we hear is by J.S. and the several others are possibly overlooked by being lesser Bachs and they might have bigger reputations of their own without the family associations but Wilhelm Freidemann can have some shelf space alongside C.P.E. and J.C., just nowhere near as much as J.S.

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Bookwise, next up could be some Joyce I don't have. Only because I didn't know it existed. It gets in ahead of Keats's letters which come with glowing reports but reports possibly from Keats admirers and I don't know if I am sufficiently such a thing to need several hundred pages. Being favourite among the Romantic poets doesn't put him very high among favourites overall.

The Kundera festival is set to come to an end anytime. Unbearable Lightness is confirmed as the choice, not least for the lines just lifted and inserted into C20th,

History is as light as individual human life, unbearably light, light as a feather, as dust swirling into the air, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow.   

 

It turned up just at the moment when, reflecting on war poets, the vast weight of events and the seeming inevitability that all things, including the literature produced by them, could not have been otherwise, they aren't at all, are they. 

Seen from the opposite direction, it all hangs by a thread, doesn't it. But how are we to know, either way. 'Contingency' is the theme that recurs throughout Kundera and I'm very tempted by it. Like the 'travelling coincidence' in The Whitsun Weddings, it might appear that's what we are all a part of and literature is our futile attempt to make sense of it, however satisfying it can sometimes be. 

I don't know if that's consistent with my non-belief in coincidence, that they are mathematical certainties and not in the least supernatural. The main thing is that it all gives us reason to expend words in the general direction of thought and if enjoyment comes of that then we can expect no more than that.