penny dropping

travel like
I bliss out on people’s smiles. Everyone here is a pleasure to see, because each face is one I might not have seen if I had not come. Each corner I turn is a revelation, like a new layer of scenery in a Restoration play, because just think if I had never rounded that corner. This feeling is familiar. A chance meeting on the street on an unhappy day. A tramp bearing red lilies, a dog in a jacket.

stamps
I found a small shop, with a sign out front saying stamps. Inside was a wall of dark wood pigeon-holes full of yellow paper and lever arch files, and a man behind a dark wood desk. He was large and flaky-faced, with a navy suit and a walrus moustache. I asked him for stamps to Australia. He explained that stamps had just gone up yesterday. The day before yesterday, said an equally barrel-form man in red beard and brown cardigan who swept in from another room. Yesterday, the day before yesterday, they wondered and dithered together. I said I would take five, at the new price. The handlebarred man opened a clothbound book and a slew of stamps of all denominations scattered out. What’s all this, he blustered, and sorry, I was interrupted in the middle of something, said redbeard. The first man busied himself with tweezers, organizing the stamps back into their paper-banded rows, finding my five 37p stamps. I remembered I had no cash. He directed me to a post office five doors down.

penny dropping
A little knowledge, I know I know, but I don’t have a lot. What else has a person with a dinky, complacent liberal education got to work with? All I can do is synthesise disparate facts like mad, and take wild guesses, and hope to fill in the gaps as I go. How does one “do” Europe? I want to see a play (I can only afford one) and I can’t decide between Euripides’ Hecuba, or Tristan and Yseult or The Cosmonaut’s Last Message to the Woman He Once Loved in the Former Soviet Union. And that, there, is a pretty good illustration of my dilemma. But to consider the twentieth century alone: for the greater part of it, people must have felt like dice in a cup. Every time they thought they knew the world, and their place in it, and what you can expect of human decency, they were swept up and rolled and spat out again. “We didn’t trust anybody who hadn’t been in the war,” says Hemingway of Paris in the twenties. Understandable—could they even be seen as the same species, people who hadn’t had their sense of meaning tested that way.

I found a portrait in the National Portrait Gallery of a woman I’d never heard of, a painter called Anna Zinkeisen. It’s a self-portrait in a modernist utopian style. I think she’d made herself resemble Artemisia, her painting smock looked very Renaissance drapery. Anyway, it was grand and beautiful. The picture was painted in a disused operating theatre. In the mornings Zinkiesen would nurse soldiers, and in the afternoons she would paint their wounds for the Royal Academy of Surgeons. The paintings that came before and after this portrait don’t bear thinking about. And in the same gallery was a display of photographs by Lee Miller. As a model she was a photography icon in her own right, but as Vogue war correspondent in World War Two she was among the first to photograph the atrocities of the battle fields and, eventually, the camps. It’s the combination of her status as a great beauty and her photo journalism that get to me. Because how some people saw what everyone saw then, and could still find beauty and art important—I wonder at that commitment. Pitching the best of human culture, the love for fineness in the world, against the stupidity, cruelty, crass politicking of it all.

I don't know if non-Europeans can understand that. Can I paraphrase you, M? You said that Australians and Americans didn’t understand Schindler’s List or Life is Beautiful. We saw them and thought, well, it wasn’t all bad. Some people did good things in a bad situation, and that makes it all ok. Europeans saw those films and said, nothing can ever neutralise what happened, but we can acknowledge some people’s attempts to transform it. Here, the darkness of the wars of the twentieth century is an immediate fact. It suffuses everything. If any poetry is possible after Auschwitz, it must always be an antiphonic response to those horrors. I can't go to a gallery, or open a book, without it being there. It's important to know that.