January is a hard month. Primrose intentions and naive desires in the direction of positive action are insufficient counterweights to the heavy pull of psychic gravity in this leaden time. Not even a proper hard winter to punctuate the season, but an unpleasantly balmy half-spring without delight of birdsong or the anticipation of lengthening day. One of my New Year's resolutions had been betrayed within the first week. In order to combat the erratic tendancies of a grasshopper mind, I had sworn to myself to read only one book at a time; before the cock had even thought of crowing, I had at least six on the go.

My son, William, had (upon promptings) got me Michael Burleigh's "Sacred Causes" for Christmas. I had read and hugely enjoyed his "The Third Reich: A New History", which is one of the few books on this obsessive period of history which tries to get to grips with the psychology of the Nazi phenomenon. Burleigh convincingly argues that Hitler's political success was largely attributable to the quasi-religious nature of the National Socialist movement. In the absence of real religion, people were drawn to what was essentially a crazy pseudo-religion in order to fill an existential void in their lives. "Sacred Causes" explores and develops the relation between religion and politics "from the European Dictators to Al Qaeda". He deals with Stalin's Soviet Union, Hitler's Germany, Mussolini's Italy, Franco's Spain and on to modern terrorism. He makes the same telling point for all of them - that these various ideologies are each in their way a perversion of a true religious instinct. The basic point he is making is that the rise of secular deities is the inevitable corollary of a godless society. There are passages, however, where one gets the impression that he is not always entirely honest with the reader and that tendentious opinion masquerades as disinterested history. I would prefer him to hoist his colours squarely to the mast. Chapters on Franco (relatively generous to the Caudillo) and on Pius XII (a straight exoneration) suggest that he has his own political angle - anti-fascist but right-wing conservatism with a strong sympathy for religion in general and the Catholic Church in particular. I got about half way through and skipped to the end. He does a job on Irish Nationalism, but reveals a vaguely unpleasant vindictive streak, which smacks of old-fashioned racism:

...dingy Irish theme bars are ubiquitous in Europe, with their fake swirling Celtic tat and Guinness, and giant monitors for football and rugby, Gaelic or otherwise, which only partially drowns out the relentless mindless gabbling known as "craik".

We all have our red lines and Guinness ( surely not "fake"?) is one of mine!

Carol got me Hilary Spurling's "Matisse the Master", the second volume of a thorough and thoroughly engrossing biography. I enjoyed the first volume, "The Unknown Matisse" and am looking forward to reading how Matisse "made art modern". I've flicked through the pages and had a good look at the pictures, which confirm my "préjugée favorable" for Matisse. I cannot claim to "understand" modern art, the point of which is anyway largely to by-pass the normal, literal-minded process of comprehension. Matisse, however, always gives the impression of a man with a good heart, whose paintings somehow nourish something positive and human in all of us. It's a book which is probably best read on holiday or at least in fine weather, so I have a couple of months grace!

Another Christmas gift was Alan Bennett's "Untold Stories". It contains in part a family memoir and also extracts from his diaries. I have a sneaking suspicion, probably unfair, that the memoir is likely to be more of the same - ironic tales of his northern youth and its snobbish lower-middle preoccupations. I had a good dip at the diaries. I'd read some of the entries before, as they appear annually in the London Review of Books, to which I am an intermittent subscriber. [I'm never quite sure about the LRB. Does it make me feel more intelligent or more stupid? Does reading it make me smart? Does the fact that much of it is over my head make me dumb? In fairness, it contains some brilliant articles, but also a lot of self-important hack-work. You take what you need and you leave the rest - as The Band said.] I know the diaries are good because I'm slightly envious - a sure sign of quality. They're tremendous fun and genuinely interesting. In a way they bear out what my mother said about education: "It makes your life more interesting." An obvious, though unfashionable position.

Meanwhile, I've been having a go at a Penguin edition of "Karl Marx, Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Anthropology". This is research, you understand, for an entertainment I'm preparing, but don't hold your breath. I can't help feeling that the totality of Marx's work is an attempt to give a sort of spurious nineteenth century scientific respectability to a very basic ethical prejudice - that rich people should not be horrible to poor people. The tone of his writing combines stilted verbosity and aggressive indignation, a sort of pre-emptive strike against any mild-mannered and reasoned criticism. His "philosophy" seems to be the philosophy of the bottom-line: that the material world does not flow down, as it were, from some abstract ideal, but rather, the cultural and ethical dimensions of life are exclusively a function of the material conditions which enable them to come about in the first place. The material comes first, the fancy stuff only after. You can sympathise with his intolerance of a presumed ethical superiority based on nothing other than a healthy bank balance; at the same time, you can discern already the cynical justification for the cruellest and most inhuman regimes. " No petty-bourgeois sentimentality here. We're laying the foundations of a better society!" I got distracted from Marx, but I'll be back.

Then... my Finnish culture guru, Jari Peteri, dropped off a book in my locker at work: "Kollektivt Självmord" (Collective Suicide) by Arto Paasilinna. Most works in Finnish are translated into Swedish, Finland's second language, which, in theory at least, means I can read them, but reading Swedish is always going to be harder work than reading in your own language. Anyway, I've got through a couple of chapters. Basically it's a spoof on Nordic depressivity. Two suicide candidates bump into each other just as they are trying to kill themselves. Discovering that they are kindred spirits , they set about creating an organisation for effective and efficient mass-suicide with all the advantages a pressure-group can provide. I laughed out loud, but it might turn out to be a one-joke-book.

I then went off to Scotland to clear out Mum's flat before selling it. Not something I was particularly looking forward to. However, I also took the opportunity to visit my daughter Victoria, who was keen for me to meet her new boy-friend. Either through nature or nurture, Victoria has inherited from me a profound sense of inquiry as to the nature and purpose of existence. Her boy-friend had adopted the seemingly pragmatic attitude - "Given that the mystery of life is unfathomable, why worry about it. Just get on with it." Which begs the question of what "it" may be. Generally "it" constitutes the pursuit of an unsatisfactory hotch-potch of contradictory ambitions and the cultivation of a jumble of fantastical illusions and fantasies. Personally, I am convinced, like Socrates, that the unreflected life is not worth living and that, even if there is no pat answer to the "question" of life, an attitude of, how shall I put it, deliberate agnosticism, an open sense of "not knowing", is essential to retaining our humanity.
With these thoughts in mind, I sought to arm myself for potential debate by digging out books which had strongly influenced me in my youth.

Knowing P. to be a keen mountaineer, I went first of all to W.H. Murray's "Mountaineering in Scotland" (see earlier posting). Murray incorporated his climbing activities into the broader context of a spiritual quest for beauty and truth. This attitude somehow nourished me, despite my ghastly adolescent affectations of hard-boiled cynicism. In the chapter entitled, "The Evidence of Things Not Seen", Murray writes of a vision of other-worldly beauty:

It is this that Goethe calls "the open secret." It is this that mountaineers style "the mystery of the hills." Put more broadly, it is the mystery of the universe, of which the forms of man or mountain may be likened to veils that reveal its being yet mask its very essence. Ask Nature what she does and we are answered , as Faust was answered:

So at the roaring loom of Time I ply

And weave for God the garment that ye see Him by.

If the answer be taken to heart our understanding of mountains is broadened and deepened toward the understanding of all things created; but the point of its last line strikes home only when applied to oneself.

In other words the search for meaning and purpose is ultimately an inquiry into the nature of the self.

I then turned to Alan Watts. I had stumbled over beat-Zen in the writings of Jack Kerouac and had gone on to read Watt's "Way of Zen" as a primer for imaginary hip conversations with my intellectual friends. What I discovered was a brilliant populariser with a deceptively pellucid prose style. I was led on to read more - "The Wisdom of Insecurity", "Myth and Ritual in Christianity", " The Taboo against Knowing Who You really Are" and "This is It". "This is It", what a brilliant title! It matched entirely my own sense of not experiencing the full depth of the miracle of my own existence. Of course, the notion that there is an "I" which is in some way seperate from my existence is the very misunderstanding from which Zen seeks to awaken us. An enlightened individual participates in a cosmic consciousness, seeing his ego for what it really is - "a persona or social role, a somewhat arbitrary selection of experiences with which he has been taught to identify himself. (Why, for example, do we say "I think" but not "I am beating my heart"?)" Re-reading these words again now, I can sense how even the idea that I am not my thoughts has a curious, but specific effect. How strange to be alive!

To be continued.