Strait is the Gate

The list of things I haven't read is getting longer not shorter.

I am shamed slightly visiting my busier friend who has a more time-consuming job than me and notice he has War and Peace on the arm of his settee with a bookmark in it. I'm never going to read that now and my knowledge of Tolstoy will remain at the film of Anna Karenina and the knowledge that all happy families are the same but unhappy families are unhappy in different ways.

Wide reading and breadth of knowledge of music and painting is desirable and admirable but I wonder if there comes a time, and if I've arrived at it, when one no longer sees the whole contents of the library or music shop as things to be explored. Eventually one learns that there are things you simply aren't going to like and one's system closes down in defence against them, often to one's detriment but sometimes necessarily.
Whereas I once had symphonies by Mahler, string quartets by Shostakovich, LP's of music by Schoenberg, an intention to carry on reading Proust, perhaps give Gogol a go or do Dostoyevsky, I'm no longer sure and Verklaerte Nacht hasn't been played for maybe thirty years.
This isn't because I'm essentially unadventurous. I was as avant garde as the rest of them in the 70's with my treasured Faust Tapes, my later taste for Schnittke and I trooped through the Royal Academy for Sensation with everybody else and enjoyed it very much, along with The Maybe and supporting artworks at The Serpentine Gallery. I have the Konkrete Kanticle LP and the New Formalist anthology. It's a wide church and I'm very glad it is.
But the more you like the more you need and my student days taste for reggae meant opening a new pile of records with Dennis Brown, The Mighty Diamonds and such adding to my 30-odd Gregory Isaacs albums and then extending to The Jolly Boys on their previous visit to these shores in the 90's and then the rest of World Music opened up with The Bhundu Boys, South America and then Indian ragas and the great Rajan and Sajan Misra, for examples. When does anybody get time to play all of these records and read all of those books.
So eventually a bit of editing out becomes necessary and it's easy to make do with what little jazz I ever liked- Fats Waller, Lester Young, Satchelmouth and my dad's old Humph records. I'm with Larkin in not needing the noise John Coltrane made encroaching onto my playlist. Not when one could satisfactorily spend the rest of one's life just listening to either Bach's keyboard music or Handel's operas. That is notwithstanding Sibelius, Monteverdi, Byrd and Tallis, the monumental Magnetic Fields, T. Rex, David Bowie, soul and reggae and discovering remarkable treasures like Reynaldo Hahn's A Cloris, findable elsewhere here on this site.
Will I ever read any more Gide, whose beautiful novels made him such a favourite once. And, for that matter, Turgenev, George Moore, Maupassant, Zola or Balzac. This autumn is already looking booked up with Stephen's Fry's second volume of memoirs, Larkin's Letters to Monica, poetry from Heaney, Muldoon and James Sheard following on from the Kierkegaard I'm just finishing, the biography of Marvell that's coming and half price PNR's that always seem to turn up on their impressive two monthly cycle a little ahead of when they are expected.
So, sadly, the door seems to narrow as one realizes that not everything is any longer part of a big exciting world waiting to be explored. No, I haven't read Dan Brown or Harry Potter or Frederick Forsyth and however many people think I ought to give them a go, there are always others who advise that it won't be worth my while. It isn't healthy to close the door on anything but, however enthusiastically John Peel used to explain that he was more interested in the music he hadn't yet heard than the music he had, I'm not going to gamble the Vespers of 1610, Spem in Alium, Al Green and Electric Warrior against a blind hand. I'm not going to pass up Hamlet, The Whitsun Weddings and Dubliners in the hope that I might find something better elsewhere. I just don't think I would.
One used to, once, go into a bookshop or record shop, when one went into such places regularly, thinking that anything was possible and everything that was available was worth consideration and no doubt there will be much I leave untouched that would have made a great impression. But I listened to the first weekend of the Proms- well, obviously only a few minutes of the Wagner- and I realized that I didn't personally need Mahler's symphonies any more, and I'm happy to stay mostly with the operas I know. The door is always slightly ajar as Radio 3 stays on and offers up a variety of possibilities from its endless stock, the book review pages of newspapers highlight novels and other books that might sound worth a look.
But, more or less, one might have found one's ground by the middle of middle age and, although it might be a bit of a shame in some ways and a terrible thing to say, one knows what one likes and can embark on some enjoyable later years of relative philistinism, buy a symbolic pipe and slippers and become safely entrenched in one's own comfortable opinions, prejudices and tastes.