Life, death and sport: The best culture is not divorced from life, but our most profound way to make sense of it

Harry Eyres:

Maybe I've overvalued culture, retreated into its ivory tower too much as an escape from noisy, messy reality. I remember driving along the Westway out of London, past rows of what the cartoonist Osbert Lancaster called "bypass variegated" semi-detached houses, designed "to achieve the maximum of inconvenience ... [using] the least attractive materials and building devices known to the past", while listening to Mozart or Beethoven and finding the coexistence of angelic beauty and aesthetic disaster hard to reconcile.

Of course the best culture is not divorced from life, but the most profound way we have of making sense of it. Two of my musical highlights this year were dark, rich confrontations with mortality as interpreted by artists bringing all their life-experience to bear on music of almost unbearable poignancy: in one case by a young composer, aware of his limited time and raging against the dying of the light, the other by an elderly one looking back with nostalgia and infinite regret, but also with warmth and love.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at January 8, 2013 1:52 AM
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