What is Culture For?

by The School Of Life

  The twentieth-century English writer Virginia Woolf did not enjoy good health. In an essay titled ‘On Being Ill’ (1930), she lamented how little we tend to clearly grasp what illness really feels like. We casually say we’re not well, or have a headache, but we lack a focused vocabulary for our ailments. There is one large reason for this: because of how little illness has been written about by talented authors. As Woolf remarks:

  English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache. It has all grown one way. The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry. There is nothing ready made for him.

  This turned out to be one of Woolf’s great tasks as a literary explorer. She brought into focus what it’s like to be tired, close to tears, too weak to open a drawer, irritated by a pressure in one’s ears or beset by strange tremors in one’s chest. Woolf became the Columbus of illness.

  One effect of reading a book that has devoted attention to noticing such faint yet vital tremors, is that once we’ve put the volume down and resumed our own lives, we find ourselves responding to precisely the things that the author would have noted, had he or she been in our place. With our new optical instrument, we’re ready to pick up and see clearly all kinds of new objects floating through our consciousness. Our attention might be drawn to the shades of the sky, to the changeability of a face, to the hypocrisy of a friend, or to a submerged sadness about a situation that we had previously not even known we could feel sad about. A book will have sensitised us, stimulated our dormant antennae by evidence of its own developed sensitivity. Which is why Proust proposed, in words he would modestly never have extended to his own novel, that:

  If we read the new masterpiece of a man of genius, we are delighted to find in it those reflections of ours that we despised, joys and sorrows which we had repressed, a whole world of feeling we had scorned, and whose value the book in which we discover them suddenly teaches us.

  These lines connect up with an equally prescient quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1888 essay ‘Self Reliance’:

  In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts.

  It isn’t just ourselves we learn about through culture. It is also, of course, the minds of strangers, especially those we would not ordinarily have ever learnt much about. With our optical instruments in hand, we are able to learn about family life in Trinidad, about being a teenager in Iran, about school in Syria, love in Moldova and guilt in Korea. We get taken past the guards right into the King’s bedroom (we hear him whispering to his mistress or doubting his attendants) and the pauper’s hovel, the upper middle-class family’s holiday villa and the lower middle-class family’s caravan.

  Thanks to all this, we have a rare opportunity to spare ourselves time and error. Literature speeds up the years: it can take us through a whole life in an afternoon, and so lets us study the long-term consequences of decisions that, in our own cases, would work themselves out dangerously slowly. We have a chance to see in accelerated form what can happen when you worry only about art and not so much about money, or only about ambition and not so much about your own children; what happens when you despise ordinary people or are disturbingly concerned with what others think. Literature helps us avert mistakes. All those heroes who commit suicide, those unfortunate demented souls who murder their way out of trouble and those victims who die of loneliness in unfurnished rooms are able to teach us things. Literature is the very best reality simulator we have – a machine that, like its flight equivalent, allows us to safely experience the most appalling scenarios that would, in reality, take many years and great danger to go through, in the hope that we’ll be ever so slightly less inclined to misunderstand ourselves, swerve blindly into danger or succumb before time.

  Encouragement

  In England in the 1880s, a group of art lovers – most of them young, forward-looking and metropolitan – began a movement known as aestheticism. Their core belief was that in a rapidly secularising world, culture could provide us with a new moral framework; it could, as religion had once done, guide, inspire and console us. In particular, it could play a vital role in encouraging us to be good, because beautiful objects and environments were not, in the eyes of aestheticists, merely meaninglessly pretty. They were goads to virtue. The aestheticists believed – as the Ancient Greeks had done before them – that beauty was synonymous with goodness, while ugliness was an incarnation of corruption.

  This analysis transformed badly designed objects and environments from unfortunate eyesores to political priorities; after all, they weren’t just ugly, they might make us bad. Cities, houses, chairs, plates and teapots needed to be attractively made, in order to generate the right sort of atmosphere around which good lives could unfold.

  The aestheticists were easy to mock. Many of them had somewhat earnest and precious airs. The satirical magazine Punch took regular aim at them. In one cartoon, an ardent young couple examine a teapot they have received as a wedding gift: ‘It is quite consummate, is it not!’ exclaims the bridegroom. ‘It is indeed!’ replies his bride, ‘Oh Algernon, let us live up to it!’

  George Du Maurier,

  ‘The Six-Mark Tea-pot’,

  Punch, 1880

  The idea of ‘living up to’ a teapot sounds daft, but it contains a not-at-all inane background thesis: that the quality of designed environments matters because we are hugely vulnerable to the suggestions emanating from them about how we might behave, and more broadly, who we might be. In degraded, battered, run-down streets (and in a lesser way, around ugly tea-pots), it is easier for hope to escape and for the worst sides of our nature to come to the fore, whereas on dignified thoroughfares (and around well-made tea pots), our better aspects are seductively invited to flourish.

  This degree of aesthetic ambition would not have sounded in any way strange to the Zen Buddhist philosophers behind the Japanese tea ceremony. These theorists paid acute attention to the design of the teacups and teapots, because they felt that they could operate as powerful visual reminders of prized Zen tenets about modesty and forbearance. Minor blemishes were deliberately allowed to remain on cups so as to remind drinkers that imperfection is an inevitability to which we should graciously accommodate ourselves. The glaze was unevenly applied and the overall shape often a little wonky, so as to nudge us towards a serene acceptance of our own flaws. The cups were conceived of as small lessons of wisdom embodied in ceramic.

  If a teacup can have the power to affect character, then so too must the most imposing of all the arts: architecture. In 1961, the government of what was then East Pakistan and is now Bangladesh started the construction of a new parliament building in the capital city, Dhaka. The country was deeply beset by economic problems and by intense ethnic rivalries; its administrative system tended to corruption; it was horrifically exposed to catastrophic cyclones and floods. But rather than try to reflect the actual country, it was decided to commission a building – by the great American architect Louis Kahn – that could present a vision of the country as it might and could be in the future.

  Philosophy in a teacup

  Kahn’s complex of buildings in Dhaka (overleaf) are emphatically solid and enduring; they can bear the assaults of storms and floods; the logical, geometrical forms speak of a world in which civil servants and administrators make coolly rational judgements in the national interest, without reference to personal benefit; in the light-filled chambers and lobbies there will be careful, serious discussion of long-term solutions; the parliamentarians and civil servants will become like the building and, via them, so too will the nation.

  Louis Kahn,

  National Assembly Building,

  Dhaka, 1970

  The building is intended as a kind of seduction. Generally we think of seduction only in its worst versions. But there is a good version in which we are gen
tly but persuasively enticed to let go of our normal habits and develop in a hopeful direction. Seduction works not by sternly telling us to do something but by subtly conveying how nice it might be if we did so. It lures our senses and our imaginations; it foregrounds certain moods (unpanicked, sincere, quietly dignified) and gives us greater confidence in them; it implies that they are, or should be, normal. In the company of the right building (as in the company of the right friend) we find it easier to become the better versions of who we really are.

  The Parliament building in Dhaka, like many a beautiful city, street, chair or teapot, matters because of its skill at encouraging the better sides of us. This is no idle or dispensable project. We are always on the verge of forgetting the lessons in goodness and fulfilment we know in theory – and lie at the mercy of messages whispered by our environment. We need to build lives in which we can arrange around us the kind of art that will daily bring the best sides of us to the fore.

  Appreciation

  At the centre of our societies is a hugely inventive force dedicated to nudging us towards a heightened appreciation of certain aspects of the world. With enormous skill, it throws into relief the very best sides of particular places and objects. It uses wordsmiths and image makers of near genius, who create deeply inspiring and beguiling associations – and it positions works close to our eyelines at most moments of the day. Advertising is the most compelling agent of mass appreciation the world has ever known.

  Because advertising is so ubiquitous, it can be easy to forget that – of course – only a very few sorts of things ever get advertised. Almost nothing is in a position to afford the budgets required by an average campaign, something overwhelmingly reserved for those wealthy potentates of modern life: nappies, cereal bars and hand sanitisers. This has a habit of skewing our priorities. One of our major flaws as animals, and a big contributor to our unhappiness, is that we are very bad at keeping in mind the real ingredients of fulfilment. We lose sight of the value of almost everything that is readily to hand, we’re deeply ungrateful towards anything that is free or doesn’t cost very much, we trust in the value of objects more than ideas or feelings, we are sluggish in remembering to love and to care, and are prone to racing through the years while forgetting the wonder, fragility and beauty of existence. It’s fortunate, therefore, that we have art.

  David Hockney,

  Three Trees near Thixendale, Summer,

  2007

  One way to conceive of what artists do is to think that they are, in their own way, running advertising campaigns; not for anything expensive or usually even available for purchase, but for the many things that are at once of huge human importance and yet constantly in danger of being forgotten. In the early part of the twenty-first century, for example, the English artist David Hockney ran a major advertising campaign for trees.

  Albrecht Dürer, Great Piece of Turf, 1503

  Pierre Bonnard, Woman with Dog, 1922

  Mary Cassatt, Mother Playing with her Child, 1899

  At the start of the sixteenth century, the German painter Albrecht Dürer launched a comparable campaign around the value of grass (top left). In the psychological field, the French painter Pierre Bonnard carried out an exceptionally successful campaign for tenderness, turning out dozens of images of his partner, Marthe, viewed through lenses of sympathy, concern and understanding (top right). In an associated move, the American painter Mary Cassatt made a good case for the world-beating importance of spending some time with a child (bottom).

  These were all acts of justice, not condescension. They were much needed correctives to the way in which what we call ‘glamour’ is so often located in unhelpful places: in what is rare, remote, costly or youthful. If advertising images carry a lot of the blame for instilling a sickness in our souls, the images of artists reconcile us with our realities and reawaken us to the genuine, but too-easily forgotten, value of our lives.

  Consider for instance Vanessa Bell’s quiet picture of her daughter sitting in an arm chair, concentrating on the book she’s reading (overleaf). It’s a seductive scene – but the charm Vanessa Bell is interested in isn’t expensive or remote. The room might have a few more books in it than our own, but the details, which are lovingly picked out, are modest: a simple rug, a plain vase, a few flowers. And the centre of the allure is the daughter’s intent attitude, with her feet slightly tucked together. It’s not fake glamour: it’s a genuine highlighting of something lovely that we can directly pursue at little cost, if we want, in our own lives.

  Vanessa Bell,

  Interior with the Artist's Daughter,

  c. 1935–36

  Art doesn’t have to tantalise us with alluring visions of things we can never attain. It’s capable of drawing our admiration to the easily forgotten, but very real, charms and dignity of everyday life. And it can – in this way – usefully reconcile us to the unavoidable imperfections of existence – a job that’s not all it could be (but does have some genuinely nice moments); a relationship that’s certainly not ideal – but does contain much that is, in less dramatic ways, quite pleasing; things which we could value more justly, perhaps, if more often, works of art shone their spotlight of loving admiration upon them.

  Art can do the opposite of glamorising the unattainable; it can reawaken us to the genuine merit of life as we’re forced to lead it. It is advertising for the things we really need.

  Perspective

  Because of the way our minds work, it is very hard for us to be anything other than immensely preoccupied with what is immediately close to us in time and space. But in the process, we tend to exaggerate the importance of certain frustrations that do not, in the grander scheme, merit quite so much agitation and despair. We are inveterately poor at retaining perspective. Here, too, culture can help – by carrying us out of present circumstances and reframing events against a more imposing or vast backdrop.

  Some extremely worrying-sounding things are, always, happening in the world. We are surrounded by a media industry that knows it must scare us to survive and that the one thing (despite its overt commitment to free speech) it must always censor is the idea that things might, on balance, be OK. One place we can turn to for relief is in a resource that powerfully reminds us that extreme difficulties are never new, that the worst sounding troubles can be survived and that it has (extraordinarily) often been a lot worse even than this. That antidote goes by the name of history.

  When political events seem to have reached a new low, we might – for example – turn to the writings of the ancient Roman historian Suetonius. Born towards the end of the first century AD, Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus was an imperial administrator, chief secretary to the Emperor Hadrian and the first historian to attempt an accurate biographical portrayal of the rulers of the Roman Empire, from Julius Caesar down to Domitian. It’s a shocking story. Suetonius’s book, The Lives of the Twelve Caesars (121 AD), amounts to a catalogue of extraordinary follies and crimes of the first twelve men to rule the western world. Amongst them, we find:

  JULIUS CAESAR: A thief, a liar, an egomaniac and a murderer.

  CALIGULA: A notorious psychopath who, to quote Suetonius, ‘condemned [people] to the mines, to work at building roads, or to be thrown to the wild beasts; or else he shut them up in cages on all fours, like animals, or had them sawn asunder. Not all these punishments were for serious offences, but merely for criticising one of his shows, or for never having sworn by his Genius.’ We also hear that the method of execution he preferred was to inflict numerous small wounds, but to avoid all major organs, and that he often gave the command: ‘Strike so that he may feel that he is dying.’

  NERO: Of him we hear that he: ‘devised a kind of game, in which, covered with the skin of some wild animal, he was let loose from a cage and attacked the private parts of men and women, who were bound to stakes’, and that he wandered through the streets at night randomly murdering strangers and throwing their bodies into the sewers.

  VITELLUS: His ruling
vices were gluttony and cruelty. He banqueted three or four times a day and he survived by taking frequent emetics. He used to give himself a treat by having prisoners executed before his eyes.

  DOMITIAN: ‘At the beginning of his reign he used to spend hours in seclusion every day, doing nothing but catching flies and stabbing them with a keenly-sharpened stylus’.

  Though Suetonius writes about grotesque people – who were also at the time the most powerful people on the planet – he can leave us feeling remarkably serene. We might read him tucked up in bed, after news of the latest catastrophe. The experience is strangely reassuring, because at heart, it is a narrative of resilience.