Rough Ideas

by Stephen Hough

  And she was right. The next morning the rain was still pouring down and, as I reached the concierge at my hotel, I asked him if he had a hotel umbrella I could borrow. ‘We have none left here, sir, but I could get mine for you from my car in the garage. It’ll just take a few minutes.’ I was amazed at his generosity and was not quite sure what to say. Then immediately an elderly lady, standing with her husband to the left of us, said, ‘I’ll just run up to our room. I have a spare umbrella up there which you can borrow. We don’t need it today.’ In the end I just decided to take a run for it, splashing my way across the road to the hall, but I thought about this later in the day. Such totally open-hearted warmth and magnanimity seemed to me uniquely American. A hotel employee in London might help you out, but it would be done (or most likely not) as a servant obeying a master – with impeccable grace, but full of non-spoken baggage about who was in a superior position of power or duty. That morning I just experienced spontaneous acts of kindness, from two people, in the space of fifteen seconds.

  Then there was an occasion at Kennedy Airport. I got onto the plane for the long flight to Seattle and, planning to spend the journey working, I reached into my briefcase to retrieve my computer. An empty space. I’d left it at the security point. The last few passengers were getting on the plane. What was I to do? I explained the situation to the flight attendant and she let me leave the aircraft to go to the boarding gate.

  ‘Be quick, though. We’re closing the doors in ten minutes.’

  I raced up the ramp and approached the man who was tapping my flight’s final details into the computer at his desk.

  ‘I’ve left my laptop at security. Could you possibly phone there to find out if they’ve found it?’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir. I have no way of doing that now.’

  ‘But what am I to do?’

  ‘You can go online and file an enquiry there. It’s nothing to do with us. Different department.’ He said all of this without looking at me, engrossed in his task of closing the flight. No empathy, no attempt to help.

  A woman was standing by and overheard this exchange. ‘I’m on the next flight to Seattle. I could go and retrieve your laptop and bring it with me.’

  I was dumbfounded. ‘Are you sure? That would be amazing!’

  ‘Of course. It’s no trouble at all. I have a few hours before my flight. Describe it to me and tell me where you’re staying in Seattle.’

  ‘Oh goodness, no! I can arrange for it to be collected from you.’

  We exchanged email addresses and I gave her my hotel details. The following morning my laptop was at the front desk. It had been hand-delivered by this stranger after midnight on her way (out of her way) home.

  I might be wrong (I hope I’m wrong), but I can’t imagine such natural, unforced, spontaneous acts of sheer generosity happening in Europe.

  Thanksgiving for Thanksgiving

  Once a year, at the dark end of November, Thanksgiving Day arrives in the United States. It’s one of those marvellous reminders of the good sort of innocence and naivety you can find in that country – like the unembarrassed willingness of audiences to cry at beautiful music, or to stand up and cheer after a performance. People think of America as the ultimate place of modernity, but there is much there that clings on to older fashions and customs – like journalists who write for the New York Times being required to refer to Mr Hough. And you’re more likely to see shirts and ties and polished wing tips on a special occasion at an American university than at a British one.

  Thanksgiving is one of those traditions that it is impossible to conceive of being invented today – it would be considered sentimental, meretricious, priggish, phony. But it remains as fervently observed as ever, a day in the year for a total shutdown of work and a putting aside of cynicism, if only in name. Yes, it’s an occasion to stuff ourselves like turkeys, to loll around in a drunken stupor, to gorge on pumpkin and pecan pie, but the word is so direct – Thanksgiving – that it’s almost impossible not to be directed to its original intentions in some small way.

  As adults we often long to recover the delights of childhood but find that part of our weary maturity has remained adolescent as we grow up, with all the lanky arrogance of the teenager who has just read his first chapter of philosophy and feels ready to give a lecture on it. The immaturity of those pre-college years can stick with us and risk our being ingrained for life with habits of scoffing and scepticism. Actually I think it has affected the whole of society in some way, with a Monty Python-like response ready for every innocent or tender situation.

  Dag Hammarskjöld, the Secretary General of the United Nations from 1953 to 1961, whom President John F. Kennedy called ‘the greatest statesman of our century’, gave us one of the pithiest quotes of wisdom I’ve come across: ‘For all that has been – Thanks. For all that shall be – Yes.’

  Willa Cather, Thanksgiving, and the soul of America

  I recently re-read Willa Cather’s My Ántonia. She is one of my favourite authors and one of the few who can bring tears to my eyes. I think that we can understand America much better after reading her, not just because she writes about pioneers and the rich land for which they felt the compulsion to be ‘thankful’, but because she highlights important aspects of the American experience. One of the common themes she returns to is the poignancy of leaving a small community (village, town, city) and moving to a bigger one … and then going back to the old one again as a changed person.

  Lucy Gayheart is a late novel dealing specifically with this topic, intriguingly combined with a musical theme. Simplicity or sophistication; the world of soil and sweat or the subtlety of intellectual and artistic pursuits; salt of the earth or spice in the sauce. It ends up being an analogy of the universal experience of leaving the parental home, finding our own more ‘sophisticated’ way of doing things, and then (sometimes too late) realising that there was wisdom at the old hearth after all.

  It is common to hear disparaging remarks about the boring Midwest, even (especially) by Americans. The two coasts are glamorous, their history stretching back in the West to the Spanish missions and in the East to the pre-Revolutionary settlers. Movies, finance, intellectual pursuits, tourism, museums, government, beaches. The middle seems dull, conventional and provincial in comparison. In reality there is something of a foundational significance about the Midwest. It is the bread basket, the reservoir, feeding not only stomachs but somehow the soul of the country. Its determined, heroic spirit is filled with a goodness that is at the roots of America itself. Cather understood this profoundly and although she lived most of her life in the very centre of New York’s intellectual hotspot, Greenwich Village, she wrote with passion about the heroism of ordinary folk and about Nebraska where she had spent her formative years.

  Parents teach us to say ‘thank you’ from an early age and it often becomes a habit, a turn of phrase with little meaning, but Thanksgiving is an annual opportunity to discover once more that gratitude is not only a matter of justice (everything we have in life is a gift) but of joy. Dignum et justum est – it is right and just to give thanks, and doing so makes the gift itself more precious.

  Working hard by letting go

  Monks in the Middle Ages spoke of work as prayer. Farming, studying or building, the rhythm of the toil was meant to lead to contemplation – not as a distraction from the task at hand but a heightened form of concentration and reverence.

  To work hard is not to wrinkle our brows, tense our muscles, and lose sleep; it is rather to relax into full attention and focus – whether that work is washing dishes or operating on someone’s brain. In the same way as the body’s muscles gain power and endurance when they are loose, so our minds expand and our memories increase in capacity when we approach our tasks with gently confident absorption.

  To aim at perfection in our tasks is fine as long as it does not require or envy the perfection of others; we should seek to find fulfilment in the very act of doing something with no other purpose th
an the good of what is at hand. This can truly become something exciting. That homework waiting to be done (and it has to be done anyway) can be a path to joy. Try it out first of all with something simple: go to the sink in your kitchen and wash something with care, love, complete attention, and to perfection. Not only do you now have a clean cup, but wasn’t it fun too! Now take something you like to eat – a chocolate bar, for instance. Eat it with complete focus on what you’re doing; chew slowly and enjoy the sensation in every part of your mouth. Take a full minute doing it and feel your body tingle with delight. Our bodies, paths to our souls, are crying out to be touched. They are like neglected old people who are never visited in their homes and long for company and stimulation.

  It brings us back to that wise, old, hackneyed chestnut: to live in the present moment. A whole philosophy has been created out of the observation that the past and the future are phantoms; they don’t exist. Only the now exists. Yet how often do we sit having a meal looking forward to the next meal and not enjoying the present one properly? Or we walk through a museum and never really look at anything in detail. We stand before one painting and have our eye on the next, or on the guide book, or on the gift shop, or on the attractive person who has just entered the room … and we miss out on them all. Or we read something on the internet or in a book like this and take nothing in, but are just aware of a sort of daze of distraction and dissipation, flipping aimlessly from one thought to another.

  We should eat and read and, indeed, do everything with meditation and love, our senses as windows on our souls. Not because we ought to (Father Gerard Hughes SJ spoke in his writings about a ‘hardening of the oughteries’). No, a bush in full bloom demands our full attention, in the present moment, because it is a wildly erotic, stimulating sight of cataclysmic power.

  So to music. Just as we draw sound out of our instruments rather than pushing it in, so when we begin to study a piece of music we should stand before it, empty but attentive, waiting for its inner life to be revealed to us. One of the dangers in listening to too many recordings of a work we are learning is that we can be prevented from a personal exchange with the composer. We have already arrived at the house with second-hand baggage rather than being free to accept the unique hospitality that every piece will offer to us.

  Unless we play an electric instrument, our pianos or violas or oboes will be slightly different every day, the wood slightly older, the humidity or temperature marginally changed. They exist in the present moment too. And the musician playing will be different too: you are a few seconds older now than you were when you began reading this paragraph.

  The final irony is that we ‘play’ our instruments (what a marvellous verb that is in this context), but we have to work very hard in order to acquire the skill to master them. Yet if we can play and work (and taste and see) with full attention, we might be closer to the sort of contemplation that those monks were aiming for when Gregorian chant was contemporary music.

  Pascal: the brilliant sun or a warm fire?

  Curiosity is only vanity. Most frequently we want to know only to talk. Otherwise we should not take a sea voyage in order never to talk of it.

  Blaise Pascal, Pensées no. 152

  Although this aphorism is meant to guide us on an ascetic path to humility – to avoid boasting and tittle-tattle – there’s more there than meets the eye. Firstly I think it can be turned upside down and used as a path to sensual delight in the material world, probably to the horror of its author. Indeed, if we cannot take delight in a ‘sea voyage’ without feeling the need to speak about it, the problem is not so much with the ‘talking after’ as with the ‘taking of’. We should be able to do many pleasurable things and take joy in them for what they are … in that very moment. The danger outlined by Pascal is not so much one of pride or vanity, but of lack of gratefulness and ‘presence’.

  Second, never mind our talking about them. To listen patiently and kindly to someone else’s enthusiasm for something that delighted them is one of the chief ways to build friendship and trust. But I get the feeling Pascal is interested only in his own holiness, his own avoidance of sin, his own relationship with God. Why do I fear that in keeping his own counsel – in his own room, mortified and pure – he might well have missed that encounter with the living God after all? His intellectual brilliance was like the sun, but sometimes we just want to sit by a warm fire.

  Monks do it best

  And I don’t mean religion.

  I don’t drink liqueurs often, but when I do I like Chartreuse the best – the strong, green one, of course, made to a secret recipe by French monks for over four hundred years. And when the great gurus of scent, Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez, published their Perfumes: The A–Z Guide, their top choice for a lavender cologne (it happened to be among the cheapest too) was one made by the monks of Caldey Island, off the coast of Wales. Painter Fra Angelico and composer Tomás Luis de Victoria, clerics both, were arguably the greatest artists in their fields in their era, and let’s not forget that hospitals, schools, universities and hotels all began, in idea and realisation, with those cloistered men and women.

  I’ve stayed at quite a few monasteries in my time and they are full of surprises. The first being how hard these men work – in the field, around the property, in the school. Then the surprise of how ‘normal’ most monks are. There is usually a ‘no nonsense’ quality to their kindness – an infinite willingness to listen, if combined with a sometimes brusque unwillingness to indulge. There are exceptions, but there’s usually a lot of joy bouncing off the stone walls, despite the general rule of silence: humour and words need not necessarily be inseparable companions. And, as monks will offer hospitality to anyone of any faith or none for only a voluntary donation (however small, if you can’t afford more), monasteries are still the best bargain around for a weekend away from it all.

  The traditional rule for monks had them rise in the middle of the night for an hour of prayer known as Vigils – sleep broken because the world and humanity is (still) broken. I was heartened recently to read that at Caldey (the place with the best lavender perfume) it was the favourite hour of the abbot. He wanted the community to hold up in prayer all those who were restless, lonely, in desperate situations, in hospitals, in prisons … in their darkest hour in that darkest hour. This is a custom hard to imagine in the secular world: a group of sleepy men or women getting out of warm beds every night of the week to trek down to a frostbitten chapel to spend an hour in distant solidarity with those in pain of various sorts. It’s easy to see this as a waste of time, but so many things of value in our brief lives could be viewed that way. Music merely evaporates into thin air but what riches it leaves behind.

  So perhaps it’s comforting to know, when next we lie awake with insurmountable worries at three o’clock in the morning GMT, that a few craggy old men on a craggy island off the ancient coast of an ancient land are wishing us well, and they’re making quite an effort to do so. And perhaps in our own sleepless moments, if we join in solidarity (it need only be a few seconds) with all the millions around the world who suffer, we become monks ourselves, alight in our bedrooms across the darkened wastes. Just don’t try to make your own Chartreuse!

  Myself or my brain

  It’s axiomatic to think of the human body as flesh and blood, but what about its status as dust as its atoms disappear in the renewal of themselves, apparently every seven years or so. Not one flake of the flesh that today is me, Stephen Hough, writing these words, will exist in another decade. All body cells will have been replaced and thus I’ll be completely different … but really the same, if a little ‘older’. I knew about this but I hadn’t quite understood the idea that it happens to our internal organs too – even our brains. And if we have had, say, a kidney transplant twenty years ago and that organ has replaced itself around three times since the operation, it is still not ‘me’ but the donor; even if the donor is now dead, his or her DNA is living on in, and giving life to, another body. Mi
ne.

  Thinking of brain transplants takes us to the world of science fiction, but with our own renewable brains is it really plausible to accept blithely that our consciousness (our ‘us-ness’) resides there in some simple, materially quantifiable measurement? As we ponder this, plunging with our brains ever deeper into those same brains’ transience, can we not see a glimpse of the possibility of immortality? A ‘me’ somehow alive, conscious, clinging on to identity outside (inside) the flying, dying atoms?

  Daring to hope in Alzheimer’s despairing inner world

  I read an article once by Father Daniel O’Leary in the Tablet magazine – a beautiful, provocative, moving meditation on Alzheimer’s disease called ‘Silent Grace of Forgetting’. All of us face the possibility of dementia in varying degrees, either in our own future lives or in the lives of those we love. Its threat is to suck out the personality of the person, leaving behind an empty husk or, worse, a familiar body filled with unfamiliar malevolence – a strange enemy impersonating a dear friend. It’s disturbing when it’s not damned terrifying.

  In his article Father O’Leary dared to explore a possible spirituality behind this dreadful disease, the need for our care-filled reverence, for us to be the memory for the person, ‘to hold the fragments of a life together’. He points out that ‘it is not our minds alone which make us human’, and makes the further incarnational point that it is ‘through the senses that the inner shrine is reached … The graciousness of the carer’s eyes … the touch of the friend’s hands … the dignity of the helper’s composure [and] of the carer’s voice, the radiance from his or her physical presence.’