In a Stefan Zweig short story found amongst his papers at his death in 1942 the narrator meets the world chess champion on a cruise. He also meets a man who spent months in solitary confinement under interrogation by the Gestapo and whose only source of sanity was a book of great chess matches that he had smuggled into his cell.In his head herpeplays classic matches of the Grand Masters hundreds and hundreds of times. Inevitably, the world chess champion and the Gestapo escapee face each other in chess combat.

Nowadays, travel is less exotic. You might not find a world chess champion on a commercial cruise liner. In his place you would find a retired couple who thougth the best way they could spend their well earned cash was browsing through the same international brands, coffee shops and fast food outlets that are available to them in their nearest decent sized town in Bedfordshire or wherever. In place of chess, this retired quantity surveyor and his wife might be hunched over an i-pad or a blackberry.

Today the commercial world requires us to aspire to what is dreadfully, mind-numbingly familiar. The alien has been almost entirely eradicated from the landscape. Even our cinematic escape into Elizabethan London or Regency Cheltenham will have William Shakespeare saying that some wench was “awesome” and Jane Austen as some feisty post-modern feminist with attitude. We have been locked into a new confinement of persistant and tepid familiarity and we have no set of Grand Master duels to escape into.

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Computers in schools are rubbish. They were mass shifted in by naive, chip on the shoulder, middle aged politicians in the 1990s who didn’t understand them and thought they would solve the problem of education. Now pupils do not think, they google; they do not write; they cut and paste; they do not construct essays; they assemble them; they do not think about a mot juste; they pick it from the computer. When I hear the injunction for a child to do some research on line, my heart sinks.

And then we have too much information. It depresses us, slows us down, wastes our time, makes us less creative, punctures every conversation with someone wanting to check something on his smartphone. In the same way as jokes are for people with no sense of humour and Valentine’s Day is for those with no sense of romance, information is for people unable to do conversation.

The silhouette of youngster or oldster bent over a smart phone has become iconic. Like the Madonna and Child or Massacio’s version of th expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise, those shapes you would recognise through a glass darkly; you recognise also the fall of the shoulder of an archetypal browser caught in the flagrante delicto of information retrieval, the emblematic sorry act of the age.

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January 7

I sometimes wonder why I bother going into cafes. I have better coffee at home, the comfort of my stuff around me, use of radio and telly and I am allowed to move around freely there. In the cafe where I sit alone with a black americano reading the paper on Saturday mornings there are almost no advantages. The other customers mostly annoy me, or at best I am indifferent to them. I take no pleasure in hearing others’ conversations. Dogs get in the way or smell. Toddlers are an obstacle on my path and babies a noisy nuisance in their bulky vehicles. The waiters or waitresses have no privileged relationship with me. It may well be that what I inwardly prize is the superficiality. Surface as a quality is, of course, much undervalued.

Ideally, they would be huge wooden marionettes serving me, nothing too technological, but great lifesize dolls with painted features and just the slight differentiation in the genders, a fuller lip and longer lashes for the female. Though nothing to give rise to any lasciviousness on my part (this is too early in the morning and they are, after all, wooden marionettes, albeit lifesize). All the customers would be wooden marionettes too. Just one or two of them scattered around and none of them sitting in my favourite seat by the window. There would be a sound track playing, just in range, of some tinkling teaspoons and crockery and the hint of some birdsong behind. The soundtrack could be on a loop of such length that its familiarity would comfort rather than irritate. The crescent rolls and chocolate breads would also be made of wood. I suppose, to fit the mood, that my newspaper would also require a universal, archetypal set of contents. I would not like any breaking news to threaten my placidity. It would be in this place that I would ideally sit with my americano on Saturday morning.

Such a cafe would, I realise, be quite an enterprise to create, and not, I am aware, a workable business proposition.

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We are mostly in two minds when we are not in three. Five minutes later our three minds are forgotten and we have three different minds. We cross the room at speak to someone and we shift again, those other minds forgotten. This mutability is what we are.

“Je ne puis asseureur mon object. Il va trouble et chancelant, d’une yvresse naturelle… Je ne peins pas l’estre. Je peins le passage : non un passage d’un aage en autre ou, comme dict le peuple, de sept en sept ans, mais de jour en jours, de minute en minute. Il faut accomoder mon histoire a l’heure. Je pourray tantost changer, non de fortune seulement, mais d’intention. C’est un conterolle de divers et muables accidents et d’imaginations irresolues et quand il y eschet, contraires ; soit que je suis autre moymesme, soit que je saisisse les subjects pour autres circonstances et considerations.

(Montaigne. Du Repentir)

I cannot fix my object. It’s unclear and swaying with its own natural drunkenness… I don’t depict things as they are: nor even the shift from one age to another, or, a generational shift, as they call it nowadays, but from day to day or from minute to minute. I have to fit my history into time. I could at any time change not just through chance but also through intention. It’s a set of varied and changing accidents and unresolved imaginings, as often as not self-contradictory; either I am another, or else other circumstances and considerations shift my view on things.”

(Montaigne. On Repentance.)

Mutability is all. A person is not rubbish. He is legion. But that that does not help us when we want some certainty.

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