Saturday Evenings: Stay In, Sit Up and Switch On

One thing about life (mine and everybody else’s) I know for sure is that I do not know and I will continue not to know. What I mean is that my knowledge will always be finite and limited. There will always be more things I will not know about than things I will.

This is what Bryan Magee, historian of philosophy and subject of a recent article in The New Statesman by former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, calls “permanent exclusion from the understanding of total reality”. For Magee, accepting this status is the first step towards wisdom. I agree. To me, wisdom is not the mere pursuit, acquisition and retention of knowledge but also the landing that permits access from one set of stairs to the next.

I have been thinking about knowledge and its close cousin, belief, recently. The former has always felt like a process, an incomplete, messy, chaotic process. The more you know, the more you realise you do not know. Knowledge can be equally frustrating. You have understood the content, you have analysed the form and still… there is a missing piece in the puzzle.

Enter belief, not only of a religious nature, but of any type. Belief points at confidence in a certain type of truth that is not immediately susceptible to rigorous proof.

Whereas knowledge, both the acquisition and application of it, is chiefly empirical, belief needn’t be. If someone in the Middle Ages had written about a flat surface on which people swiped their fingers and hands to turn virtual pages in order to access information, I doubt people at the time would have come up with words such as: e-reader, smartphone or tablet. Yet, centuries later it is for us to make that connection. If we do that, are we not, however, marrying a contemporary concept to a loose and up-for-interpretation ancient one? From this point of view, this “marriage” is speculative as we do not know what people in the Middle Ages would have called these devices if they had had the chance.

I see knowledge like a river: running, shrinking, expanding, going up or coming down, never ecstatic. Belief, on the other hand, carries with it a level of persuasion, especially on the part of the believer.  Knowledge is risk because it never leaves us on terra firma. On the contrary, the acceptance of a proposition (let’s call it concept or theory) propels us further forward in search of the next challenge. Of course, certain arguments have been closed through the acquisitions of knowledge: the Earth is round and not flat, the moon rotates around the Earth and our planet circles the sun. But there still is a great deal of theories that challenges us.

This is where belief comes in. It offers succour amidst so much head-scratching. If climbing up the stairs of knowledge is satisfying, resting on the landings between floors is heavenly. Careful, though, a short break is advisable, but prolonging one’s respite might make us too “comfortable”, dull our senses and kill our thirst for knowledge. Which, lest we forget, is finite and limited.



As usual, I will take a month off during Easter and shall be back mid-to-late April. Wish you all the best.

© 2016

London, my London

34 Tite Street might not sound like the sort of address your brain registers immediately as worth remembering for any particular reason. But if I were to add the following quote: “A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing”, then, you might be in a better position to have a go at guessing who I am writing about.

Or perhaps not. After all, Oscar Wilde, the author of the quote above, was such a prolific writer that it would be hard for anyone to keep up with all his witticisms and putdowns. On cynicism, though, he nailed it. This was not just a throwaway phrase (I do not think he ever said anything that was unintentional or accidental) but an acute observation of the society in which Wilde lived.

Wilde was on my mind as I cycled on Battersea Bridge Road towards Beaufort Street en route to Portobello Road from Brixton Market. It was only a fleeting thought, however, caused by the familiar sight of the sun-drenched Embankment on my right. I had been on this very road a few days before as part of my three-stadium bike-tour. Seeing the long straight thoroughfare again reminded me of Cavafy’s poem The Place. That’s when Wilde made his unplanned cameo. CP Cavafy, one of the most important Greek poets of the 20^th century had been heavily influenced by William Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde.

It was not just the combination of cycling near SW3, where Wilde’s former residence, 34 Tite Street was, and the Irish poet’s influence on the Greek one that reminded me of The Place. It was also some of the lines from the poem which suited the flat-looking and almost noise-free streets I was biking along. Drayton Gardens, Gloucester Road and Princes Diana Memorial Playground lent themselves to the nostalgia-coloured verses: “You shall not find new places; other seas/you shall not find. The place shall follow you/And you shall walk the same familiar streets/and you shall age in the same neighbourhood/and whiten in these same houses.” I kept thinking of the lives lived behind the high-ceilinged, oak-floor terraced houses that flanked me along the way. It always happens when I am out and about in London, whether on foot or bicycle. I often wonder: who lives behind that closed door? What are their lives like? What are their dreams and hopes?

I had asked myself the same question when I was in the triangle formed by Brixton Road, Coldharbour Lane and Atlantic Road and I asked myself the same question as my two-wheeler touched down on Portobello Road.

It was a Saturday which could only mean crowds. Having been so far on a Zen-like trip from Brixton to Holland Park, facing the full force of a market day in west London all of a sudden jolted me out of my reverie. Then again, this was Portobello Market, a place where since the 1940s “rag and bone” men and antiques dealers have become the raison d'être of this fashionable part of Notting Hill (yes, that Notting Hill, Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant’s Notting Hill). Another reason why this part of London is so renowned is its vintage clothes shops on Pembridge Road.

The best way to enjoy the market for me was to get off my bike and saddle-push it all the way from the start of  Portobello Road down to the A40 (Westway). It was difficult to walk, especially once I went past Westbourne Grove. The further into the market I ventured, the denser the crowd, the more varied the stalls and the higher the volume of people’s voices. As I neared Westbourne Park Road music made an appearance in the form of reggae. It is worth noting that the worldwide famous Notting Hill Carnival takes place in this area every year at the end of August. The largest street festival in Europe, this is a celebration of Afro-Caribbean traditions and cultures that has been going on for more than fifty years. As I came out at the other end of Portobello Road, looking for Ladbroke Grove and a way to get on to the canal path, Camden-bound, I looked back and could not help thinking about what must have motivated Notting Hill’s screen-writer Richard Curtis to “whiten up” not only the cast, but also the neighbourhood in the movie. There they all were, the vendors, the costumers, the tourists, the locals, all mixed, todos mezclados, different but mixed. I got back on my bike and cycled off.

I wonder what lives are lived behind that door

© 2016

Next Post: “Saturday Evenings: Stay In, Sit Up and Switch On”, to be published on Saturday 19^th March at 6pm (GMT)