Tonight, thanks to a tip from MC (to whom thanks), we watched Ron Howard’s 2001 biographical drama, A Beautiful Mind, based on the life of John Nash, A Nobel Laureate in Economics (well, if improbably, played by Russell Crowe). With a brilliant mathematical brain, Nash comes under academic pressure to produce. The stress induces paranoid schizophrenia, leading on to increasingly frequent and ultimately continuous delusional episodes. His wife and young child struggle to cope. He is incarcerated, treated, released, suffers a relapse, becomes inadvertently violent, gradually comes to terms with his delusions (ultimately cohabiting with them), and in later life is rehabilitated at Princeton and awarded the Nobel accolade for his youthful original work on governing dynamics. I don’t want to give too much away, but the film uses the oldest trick in the book, POV (point of view – think The Sixth Sense or Shutter Island), to draw viewers into a delusional world, then jolt them back into reality. There was a discussion afterwards about mental illness and concepts of reality. The person suffering the delusions perceives them as being real. Which reality is the more valid and on what basis? The film also raises the issue of evolving societal attitudes. In past times a Nash might have been considered a seer or a prophet or a saint (indeed, at the beginning, at Princeton, he is half-mocked, half revered for displaying the eccentricity of potential genius). And when does treatment become persecution, or do both attitudes necessarily co-exist?  The film was criticised for its ‘poetic licence’ (for example, the real Nash suffered only auditory delusions, Crowe’s Nash sees people as well as hearing them), but that debate is something of a red herring. Like Shine, the film works as a plausible portrayal of a difficult condition and reminds us that all too often genius comes at a heavy price. (Postscript: here, thanks also to MC, is an article about the real John Nash by his biographer, Sylvia Nasar.)

This evening we watched Bertrand Tavernier’s magnificent 1989 film La vie et rien d’autre (Life and nothing but). It is 1920. In a northern France still bearing the livid scars of war Commander Dellaplane (Philippe Noiret at his best) is in charge of attempts to rediscover the identities of both the dead and the living (former soldiers suffering from amnesia). It is a massive task – Dellaplane cites a figure of 350,000 ‘missing’. At the other extreme, Perrin is charged with finding a genuinely unknowable corpse for the monument to the unknown soldier at the Arc de Triomphe – a task Dellaplane had refused on deontological grounds.  Given the 350,000, it should be a relatively simple job, but ‘Paris’ has imposed conditions; in particular, the unknown soldier must be known sufficiently to be certain that the dead man is French. Into the desolate scenes of death and destruction wander a rich young Parisian, Irène (Sabine Azéma), looking for her husband, and a simple country girl, Alice (Pascal Vignal), looking for her lover. Irène and Alice are drawn together in their common quest, whilst Irène and Dellaplane become increasingly attracted to one another and Dellaplane gradually realises that the two women are almost certainly looking for the same man. The portraits of the three protagonists are beautifully drawn and the backdrop is poignantly portrayed. (A sculptor proclaims that never since the Greeks has there been such demand for public sculptures.) The film includes a historically faithful reconstruction of the ceremony to choose the unknown soldier – a private has to place a bunch of flowers on one of eight coffins. The government is represented by André Maginot, then the Minister of Pensions. This scene and Maginot’s presence remind the viewer that no matter how well the wounds may heal, they will be opened again less than two decades later: the protagonists’ pasts are also their futures. There is a good analysis of the film and its themes here.

Thanks to a tip from AT (to whom go grateful thanks) I am reading Richard Nixon’s Six Crises. It was written in 1962, after Nixon’s 1961 loss to John F. Kennedy and in part in response to the latter’s 1957 Profiles in Courage, which was said to have greatly improved Kennedy’s image. In a foreward Nixon explains that ‘if the record of one man’s experience in meeting crises – including both his failures and his successes – can help … then this book may serve a useful purpose. The 1948 Hiss case (the first ‘crisis’ recounted in the book) brought the then unknown junior congressman Richard Nixon into general public view for the first time. Inadvertently or not, the telling impression he gives is, in the words of Dwight D. Eisenhower, of ‘a man who has a special talent and an ability to ferret out any kind of subversive influence wherever it may be found, and the strength and persistence to get rid of it.’ (Nixon proudly quotes this description himself!) Nixon’s account faithfully reproduces the paranoid atmosperics of Washington politics in the late 1940s, in the heyday of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Alger Hiss (picture) was a high-ranking and well-regarded State Department official with a distinguished career who was suspected of being an active Communist sympathiser and alleged to have been part of a spy ring. Judging from the Wiki account, the doubts about what exactly might have occurred rumble on and may never be entirely clarified. Nixon provides some lucid insights (particularly about the judiciary and the press) and aphorisms (‘in politics, victory is never total’). There is a wonderfully unselfconscious irony when he regrets that there were so few television sets in American homes in 1948 (notoriously, his physical appearance on the now ubiquitous TV sets in US households in the first ever televised presidential debates was supposed to have cost him the 1960 Presidency race). The publicity the Hiss affair generated pushed Nixon into the Senate in 1950 and the Vice-Presidency of the United States from 1952 to 1960. He served as President from 1969 until he resigned in 1974 and died in 1994 at the age of 81. A Presidential pardon, time and his subsequent humility put his achievements into perspective and rehabilitated his reputation to some considerable extent but could never get rid of the odour of the Watergate hearings, the threat of impeachment and his resignation. Hiss, meanwhile, was sentenced to five years imprisonment for perjury in 1950 and released after 3 years and eight months on good behaviour. He published a book, re-married, crowed publicly on an ABC programme when Nixon failed in 1962 to become Governor of California, was re-admitted to the Massachusetts Bar in 1975 and wrote an autobiography in 1988. He died in 1996 at the ripe old age of 92, protesting his innocence to the end. That somebody will one day make a film addressing these two lives in parallel seems to me to be inevitable.

We are at last heading south, to our Italian bolthole. At the Swiss border a guard congratulated us on our ‘collection’ before carefully placing the 2013 vignette in place on our windscreen, bringing the collection up to eight. Eight! Whatever they may say about built-in obsolescence our trusty car, with us since 2005, seems somehow so far (touch wood) to be set steady for a few years yet. I wonder if what we are doing is, from an ecological, as opposed to more narrowly economical, point of view a good thing. But we have both inherited from our parents a loathing of throwing away something that is still good or still works. Sorting out their effects after my parents died I found myself in a quandrary as to what to do with the pieces of string and old keys that my father had religiously saved and hung in his garden shed. In the end, the string went, but I still have the biggest bunch of keys you ever did see.

We spent this Maundy Thursday at the funeral of a much-loved aunt-in-law, Liliane Van Gehuchten. She passed away last Sunday at the ripe old age of 87. Her husband, Pierre, passed away in October 2011, and there was a strong sense of a chapter of life being closed, for Liliane and Pierre had been a beautiful and much-loved couple. A dynamic and constantly optimistic woman with an intellectually and culturally voracious appetite, Liliane was the co-founder, in 1967, of a Belgian organisation, Connaissance et Vie that has since gone from strength to strength (and is, I should note in passing, an excellent example of a civil society organisation). The ceremony recalled, through the fond memories of her son, daughter-in-law, grand-daughter, nephews and nieces and friends, a beautiful life richly lived, full of intellectually dynamic relations with art and artists, sculptors, writers, poets, journalists, philosophers, theologians, priests and monks. Her love of music was reflected in the extracts from Bach and Pergolese sung by, among others, the daughter of a friend, Pauline Claes, and her love of literature and poetry through the reading of an extract of Yves Bonnefoy. Personally, I have great memories of Liliane and Pierre’s infectiously warm and good-humoured hospitality – dinner parties often followed by a digestif while listening to one of Pierre’s latest musical enthusiams. But if I had to sum up Liliane in one quality, it would be ‘optimism’. She always saw things positively. In a beautiful end to a beautiful life, Liliane died peacefully, surrounded by her loved ones. When the doctor passed by a few hours before the end and asked her how she was, she summoned all of her strength and said ‘Je vais très bien’.

This afternoon I accompanied the EESC’s Vice President with responsibility for budgetary affairs, Jacek Krawczyk (Employers’ Group, Poland) on a visit to the Berlaymont to see the European Commissioner with responsibility for budgetary affairs, Janusz Lewandowski (picture), to present the Committee’s draft 2014 budget. Jacek Krawczyk pointed out that, whilst the Committee has continued to honour its legal obligations (particularly salaries and rent payments) and continued to respect its treaty-based obligations in terms of advisory work, its budget has decreased in real terms for a third year and is now well under its 2009 level. This has not been easy but it has been done, in good faith, because the EESC’s members have collectively decided that the Committee must set a good example in a period of sustained austerity. That the Committee has been able to do such things is a tribute to its political and administrative maturity.

Two facts of political life at the EESC are that members come and go (there is about a thirty per cent turnover rate with each new mandate) and that office holders change (this is strongly ingrained in the Committee’s culture). Today I attended a bitter-sweet occasion. Leila Kurki (Workers’ Group, Finland), who has served the Committee well as a committed and active member and as a dynamic President of its Section for Social Affairs and Employment, said farewell to her staff. Leila’s term as Section President will shortly come to an end, but she will also shortly thereafter be leaving the Committee. It was typical of Leila’s attentiveness that she had a word to say about each of the members of staff who had worked with her and a simple but symbolic present for everybody. We will miss her.

President Obama?

Long before Barack Obama won a historic second term as President of the United States of America, American media pundits were speculating about a Hillary Clinton Presidency in 2016, as this post recalls. But as an article by Edward Luce in this morning’s Financial Times reports, the speculation is not just about 2016 but, rather, a cycle of presidencies between two Democratic dynasties. Thus, the thinking goes, Hillary will probably win in 2016, and already has Barack Obama’s tacit support as the heir presumptive. But what happens next? Hillary will turn 69 in October 2016 and so would be 73 by the end of her first term. Assuming she were not to seek re-election, she would also want to provide a Democratic legacy. Who better than another very popular and strong woman, Michelle Obama, who would be 66 in 2020 – young enough for two terms, perhaps? And then she could be followed by Chelsea Clinton. This could go on and on!

A friend and some time flat-sharer, knowing how much I like Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers’ Egyptian Reggae has found me a link that goes one better: an original sand dance, a Wilson and Keppel Sand Dance, from 1934, to be precise. I forbid anybody to watch the clip and not be cheered up. It’s an illustration of how clever and funny music hall could be and as good a way as any to start an icy Monday morning. Thank you, J!

Today, Palm Sunday, marks the day Jesus rode into Jerusalem, his humility symbolised by the fact that he rode in on a donkey, and his triumph symbolised by the palms strewn on the road before him – or, at least, that is what I always thought. That he did ride into Jerusalem is confirmed by all four gospels, but the symbolism of the episode may contain more nuances than I, at least, realised. First, that donkey. In the customs of the time, the donkey was a symbol of peace, not humility. If Jesus had been hell-bent on triggering a war or a revolution he would have ridden in on a horse. The fact that he came in on a donkey could therefore have been intended as a strong symbolic message that he came as a Prince of Peace. Second, in the traditions of the near East of that time it was customary to cover the path before somebody thought worthy of high honour. It was a sort of red carpet of the time.  Only the gospel of John specifies palm fronds. Third, the palm represented triumph and victory in the Greco-Roman tradition but eternal life in the Egyptian tradition and simple rejoicing in the Jewish tradition. The palms were just as likely to have had Jewish symbolic value as Greco-Roman. All this by way of saying that somewhere around the thirteenth century the portrayal of Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem became far more triumphalistic than had probably previously been the case. In the original scenario, Jesus came in peace and rejoicing and his ‘victory’ was more about souls than hearts. Whilst on the subject, in the 16th and 17th centuries straw ‘Jack ‘o’ Lent figures were stoned and abused and then burnt on Palm Sunday, as a sort of conflation of Winter and Judas Iscariot.