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12 November, 2023

“If this isn’t nice, what is?” Getty 

The Red Queen Fallacy

One of the “central delusions” of 21st-century living, says Brian Klaas on Substack, is what I call “the Red Queen Fallacy”. This is the notion, named after the perpetually running character in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, that life is a “frantic race to keep up”. You know the mentality: “If you’re not hustling, you’re falling behind.” We fill our calendars to make ourselves feel busy. We keep on top of our emails to maintain “inbox zero”. Those not on the treadmill are viewed with suspicion: the person who wanders aimlessly is an “eccentric”; the solo diner a “weirdo”. This approach has “massacred” our ability to be alone with our thoughts. In one study, scientists put individuals in a room with nothing but a button that would deliver them a painful electric shock. Given the choice of either sitting quietly or electrocuting themselves, 67% of the men and 25% of the women chose the latter.

The paradox of this “checklist existence” is that “doing more often means savouring life less”. We don’t treasure interactions with people, because we’re always thinking about the next interaction. We don’t look at natural beauty with a sense of awe; we look at it through our smartphone as we take a picture. We all know, deep down, that these are the moments we should cherish. But we don’t. Shaking ourselves out of our hyper-active mindset isn’t easy – mortgages have to be paid, children looked after. But we should at least do our best to enjoy the bits of life that are actually enjoyable. Kurt Vonnegut said his uncle had a good approach. “We could be drinking lemonade in the shade of an apple tree in the summertime,” the author wrote, “and Uncle Alex would interrupt the conversation to say, ‘If this isn’t nice, what is?’”

THE FLAT This two-bedroom apartment spans the lower ground floor of a Victorian townhouse just off Hackney’s London Fields. Terracotta floor tiles flow through the property, which contains two double bedrooms, both looking out over an expansive shared garden. In the kitchen, bespoke charcoal-dyed ash cabinetry is topped with a black poured-concrete worktop, and in the living room, a wide bay window with original timber panels allows natural light to pour in. Hackney Central overground station is a five-minute walk. £875,000.

Yuriy Dyachyshyn/AFP/Getty

Even Zelensky’s advisors think Ukraine’s in trouble

Wall-to-wall coverage of the war in Gaza has concealed an uncomfortable truth about the one started by Vladimir Putin, says Thomas Fazi in UnHerd: “Ukraine – and the West – are losing.” Even the most ardent supporters of the “maximalist victory-at-all-costs narrative” are now starting to admit that the Nato-backed counteroffensive has failed – that despite billions of dollars and tens of thousands of casualties, Ukraine has made barely any territorial gains, while Russia continues to make “significant advances”. Volodymyr Zelensky’s former presidential advisor Oleksiy Arestovych has called it a “disaster”.

Ukraine’s commander-in-chief General Valery Zaluzhny says the war is at a stalemate, and that “there will most likely be no deep and beautiful breakthrough”. He also points out that Ukrainian casualties are unsustainably high. “Sooner or later,” he says, “we are going to find that we simply don’t have enough people to fight.” Meanwhile US support for Ukraine is “nearing its expiry date”. President Biden is struggling to get Congress to approve his latest round of funding, and a Trump election victory next year would all but guarantee an end to American aid for Kyiv. The one person who seems unwilling to face reality is Zelensky. In a recent interview the president rejected the idea that the war has reached stalemate, and reaffirmed that he is not prepared to negotiate with the “fucking terrorist Putin”. Several of his advisors told Time Magazine that their boss was deluding himself. “We’re not winning,” said one. “But try telling him that.”

Philip Roth with Nicole Kidman on the set of The Human Stain (2000)

In its mid-2000s pomp, the literary agency run by the ruthless, all-conquering Andrew Wylie felt like the centre of the world, says Alex Blasdel in The Guardian. “Staff might encounter Philip Roth wandering through the hallways; Al Gore or Lou Reed might be on the other end of the telephone.” At Christmas parties, Hermès neckties were given to the gentlemen and cashmere scarves to the ladies; Wylie himself would “greedily dig the last of the caviar out of the tin with his finger”. In one “now legendary” incident, Roth phoned up and was greeted by an assistant called Andrew. Assuming it was Wylie himself, Roth boasted “that he had just gone to bed with the female lead in the movie being made of his novel The Human Stain, Nicole Kidman”. The embarrassed underling offered to put him through to his boss. 

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Vanessa Kirby and Joaquin Phoenix in Ridley Scott’s forthcoming Napoleon film

The grubby little Corsican who changed history

Napoleon Bonaparte is considered a “titanic figure of French history”, say Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland on The Rest is History. But he wasn’t really French at all. He was born in 1769 on Corsica, which had been annexed by Paris that very year. When his middle-class family sent him to a military academy on the mainland, he had to take an “intensive course” in French first. Short and with a thick Corsican accent, he was “almost certainly bullied at school”. He got into fights and wrote gothic novels. But he was talented: he became an artillery officer and, still in his early twenties, masterminded a victory over the British Navy when they occupied the city of Toulon.

Napoleon was “not a man for the ladies”. His first, short-lived engagement was with Désirée Clary, the future queen of Sweden, whom he mocked “because she didn’t play the piano well enough”. But when he was promoted to commander of one of France’s armies, he met his great love, Josephine, in Paris. She had no teeth, on account of eating so much sugar from her family’s plantation in Martinique, but was known as a “very accomplished performer” in the bedroom. Initially, she wasn’t keen on Napoleon; she said he came from a “family of beggars”. But they eventually married, despite him turning up two hours late to the ceremony after being “distracted by his war plans”. His wedding gift to her was a medallion inscribed: “To Destiny”.

↯🤤 One of the things that particularly obsessed Napoleon was “the zigzags”, a mysterious sexual technique of Josephine’s. To this day, no one knows exactly what it was.

Getty

These “relentless depictions of horror” aren’t news

For the first time in my life, says Simon Jenkins in The Guardian, “I cannot watch – or read – the news”. For more than a week I haven’t seen anything from Israel or Palestine, and I’m afraid doing so has “made me feel better”. I would normally consider this shocking – we owe it to humanity to pay attention to inhumanity, “wherever it occurs”. But what we have today is something different: “the most intensive 24/7 coverage of extreme violence that I can recall”. The evening news has become a ghoulish, tabloid nightmare, where “facts and their informed interpretation” have been replaced by endless vox pops with people on the ground, the better to “stir the emotions”.

This is a terrible thing. These interviews are inevitably with tearful, rubble-dusted victims or indignant combatants, rather than decision-makers or experts, meaning viewers are drawn into “arguments fuelled by heat not light”. And all this horror in turn fuels a dangerous instinct: blame. But what are we meant to do? “Should we shout, march, write, shut up?” And after blame comes despondency. What’s the use of all this? I cannot see how “relentless, real-time depictions of horror” are helping any of us. It doesn’t increase public understanding of what is happening; it merely adds to “anger, discord and mental distress”. I would love to watch the news. “What is being shown is something different.”

📱😵‍💫 It’s far worse for those who get their news on social media, says Mary Wakefield in The Spectator. Scroll through Instagram and you’ll see: “an Israeli child hostage; the perfect pumpkin spice latte; bodies in the rubble in Gaza; try this simple cure for neck pain; corpses; old school reunions; severed limbs; cake”. What is this “drip-feed of horror”, mixed in with “friends and ads and selfies”, doing to the developing brains of our kids? “I don’t expect anyone has any idea.” But it can’t be good.

Aperol by the pool: a big no-no. Getty

What Nicky Haslam really finds common

One hundred and forty years ago, says Helen Rumbelow in The Times, Oscar Wilde gave a lecture to a group of art students at their club in Soho. His message: “Everything popular is wrong.” I thought of this earlier this week when, opening Instagram, I saw the designer Nicky Haslam with his latest list of things he finds “common”. On this year’s tea towel – the 84-year-old Etonian prefers “drying-up cloth” – we find such social sins as “grieving”, “podcasts” and “Aperol anything”. But while some see the dinky socialite as a kind of “bouncer at the velvet rope of British class boundaries”, I think he’s up to something more sophisticated.

Haslam, whose mother was a goddaughter of Queen Victoria, is not waging the war that Nancy Mitford began in 1955, when she listed the direct forms of words used by the upper classes (“napkin”, “what”) alongside the affected euphemisms adopted by arrivistes (“serviette”, “pardon”). Some are still at it – in diaries published in 2020, Sasha Swire (aka Baroness Swire) describes her proletarian friend David Cameron arriving at her Devon manor house and saying of one of her farm outbuildings: “You could put a snooker table in there!” Swire muttered to her husband: “So home counties.” But Haslam’s list is different. He’s a snob, yes, but what he finds “common” is not so much the aspiring middle class as the creeping influence of America. “Grieving” is fine, of course, it’s just the performative kind you get on so many “podcasts” that bothers him. To resist such things, says Haslam, is to “stay British, and to stay classy”.

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

Blaise Pascal, 17th-century French mathematician

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