Advent 23

Volume 23 (Vase to Zygo): Venice.

And so we reach the end of the text entries in Dave's Big Book of Knowledge. Tomorrow we have only the Index and Atlas to work from. Don't worry it will all come together seamlessly. Have I ever let you down?

I have never been to Venice but it's on my list this, 'city and seaport of Italy, occupying one of the most remarkable sites in the world'. If the pundits are to be believed I will need to get my skates on as the place is drowning under the twin burdens of climate change and tourism.

the mind of a cad and the pen of an angel

The appearance on page 63 of Venice gives me the opportunity to return you to quite possibly my favourite author, Simon Raven. Evelyn Waugh is demonstrably a better writer but we are talking about my middle-brow prejudices and so Raven gets the prize. He was a dilettante spendthrift who plied his authorial gifts in the service of earning money and his later works betray haste and some laziness. However his ten novel sequence Alms for Oblivion is an underrated and massive fictive achievement. Had my doctorate not been about Shakespeare, I would have chosen Raven as my subject. Anyway in the tenth and final instalment of that roman fleuve, The Survivors, Raven deploys Venice as a magnificent extended metaphor for the dying world of elegance. I was going to quote the final paragraph of the novel here but I will leave it for you to read the entire sequence yourself. You will thank me. Instead I will give you an extract from the brilliant and acerbic Introduction that Raven himself contributed to the 1998 reprint of Alms for Oblivion. I have quoted these lines before in these pages, but, hey ho, it is my blog after all.

The cry, 'If I can't, you mustn't', had some trace of justification, however sullen and unlovely the sound of it. Nowadays we hear instead an even less lovely cry, 'If I don't want to, you mustn't': i.e. 'It is just possible that I am, after all, missing out on something of value which you have been shrewd enought to detect and I haven't, and that wouldn't be fair and equal, now would it?' Once upon a time, however strong and righteous you considered your message, you scorned to become a pest: in 1998, however trivial your grievance, you find yourself encouraged and even 'morally obliged' to become not just a pest but a pestilence.