March 2010
31 March 2010
The Christian Paschal festival took its name from the Hebrew word "Pesach", meaning "Passover". Our word "Easter" comes from the Old English word "eastre" which was a pagan festival held at this time of year in honour of the goddess of dawn. When Christianity came to this part of the world, it was natural for the two festivals (both happening at roughly the same time), to be joined. Easter Sunday is the first Sunday after the full moon that occurs from March 21st onwards. Easter Sunday cannot be earlier than March 22nd, or later than April 25th.
There is an old story that the sun danced on Easter Day. It is mentioned in a poem about a bride by Sir John Suckling:
"But oh, she dances such a way
No sun upon an Easter day
Is half so fine a sight."
This reminds me of the old country legend that farm animals used to bow down on their knees at midnight on Christmas Eve. It is the subject of a great poem by Thomas Hardy which ends:
"I should go with him in the gloom
Hoping it might be so."
Happy holiday!
23 March 2010
I have lived long enough now to be able to look back over the world events of my lifetime, and wonder which will turn out to be truly significant. I watched Neil Armstrong step onto the surface of the moon . (I remember sitting in front of a small black and white TV with my American neighbours - their mother made apple pie; my mother made apple crumble). Later, the Iron Curtain came down with the Wall in Berlin. Closer to the present was the attack on the Twin Towers in New York.
I often wonder at the changes that happened in the vast country I grew up to know as the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was a mystery to us, and its death possibly makes it more mysterious for us now. The arrival of a new leader in Mikhail Gorbachov marked the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union, and he introduced two Russian words into the English language. The first "Glasnost" has, for us, the meaning of public openness, of accountability, of a softening of ideological rigidity. However, in Russian the word derives from "glas" meaning "voice", and "glasit" meaning "say" or "read." In Russian then, "glasnost" means no more than "publicity". The other word was "Perestroika" which means "reorganisation" or "reconstruction." There is no hint in the word of what kind of reconstruction was implied - no hint of an abandonment of a whole system. Perhaps, in the West, we read more into the words "glasnost" and "perestroika" than was ever there...
16 March 2010
When I was quite young - maybe thirteen or fourteen - I used to take the bus into town, and go into the National Gallery at the bottom of the Mound. I remember going again and again to see one painting: a painting of trees in blossom by Vincent van Gogh. (It is at the RSA in London at the moment, but it will be back soon!)
Anyway, one week - from saved up pocket money - I bought a set of watercolour paints. Thinking I would be the next Van Gogh, I tried a couple of things - they were not very good, and the paints ended up in the bottom of a drawer. But, I never forgot the paints: they had such fantastic names (yellow ochre, Prussian blue, cadmium red!)
In any culture or society, colour tends to carry meanings or suggestions (eg "It was a black day for Scotland.") In some Higher English classes just now we are reading and talking about the novel The Great Gatsby. In this novel, F Scott Fitzgerald uses colour to suggest certain things - green for jealousy and money (the colour of dollar bills), white for innocence and purity, etc.
The writer John Berger has written that cadmium red is "the colour of childhood innocence." Howwever, if you go darker you get the red used in the paintings of Caravaggio. Here is John Berger again:
"Perhaps my favourite red is Caravaggio's. He uses it in painting after painting (The Death of the Virgin in the Louvre for example). The red by which you swear to love forever. The red whose father is the knife. The red which Naguib Mahfouz was thinking about in Cairo, when he wrote 'The beloved may absent herself from existence, but love does not.' "
Now, Caravaggio...
09 March 2010
Lachrymose is an adjective meaning tearful. It can also mean "tending to cause tears."
The word comes from the Latin noun "lacrima" meaning "a tear."
In a recent exchange in the letters page of The Guardian newspaper, the novelist Martin Amis was accused of being unfeeling. He responded by saying that, on occasion, he had been "lachrymose."
02 March 2010
Gargantuan is an adjective meaning huge or enormous.
It came up in my S1 class last week. (Several pupils knew the meaning!)
The word comes from the name of a character in a book by the old French writer Rabelais: Gargantua was a giant king known for his huge appetite. The Collins dictionary notes that some people maintain that gargantuan should be used only in connection with food.
Interestingly, Rabelais is mentioned by one of my favourite poets, George Barker, in his great poem To My Mother, which starts:
Most near, most dear, most loved and most far,
Under the window where I often found her
Sitting as huge as Asia, seismic with laughter,
Gin and chicken helpless in her Irish hand,
Irresistible as Rabelais...