Once More With Feeling

I’m very pleased with myself at the moment having cleaned all the fans in the house (yes, the great put-the-house-in-order operation is on-going) and finished The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives and all this in one morning. (Oh, and I listened to a fair slab of Vaughan Williams’s Sir John in Love, but that’s for a later post.) As I’ve mentioned before Hillenbrand’s book is both heavy-going as reading and literally heavy – handsomely illustrated and printed on expensive-looking paper it weighs a ton, a factor which played some part in my determination to finish it whilst I was still in KL so I could leave it here, saving us a bit of baggage space, and freeing a bit of shelf back in Singapore. There was lots to learn from The Crusades in terms of detail but, of course, I’ll forget all that rapidly enough to feel the need to re-read it in a couple of years, though I’m not terribly likely to actually commit myself to do so on a page-by-page basis.

In the broadest of terms I suppose I learnt from reading the book what I already knew: the whole business of the Crusades left a scar on what might broadly be termed the Muslim psyche that is yet to heal, being deeply associated with the injustices of colonialism. Despite being a Muslim, I don’t feel this injustice as it was not perpetrated on me, but I know about it. This raises the interesting question of whether we can genuinely know something without feeling it, and whether the depth of our feeling about something is in some mysterious way associated with the depth of our knowledge. (And what does that curious metaphor, depth of knowledge, really point to in terms of actual knowingness?)

This idea of learning from what you read has been on my mind regarding Ackroyd’s London: The Biography, which I will certainly re-read, but in a dipping-in fashion. I certainly did learn stuff, in terms of detail, that I was not aware of before, and which will, I suspect, stick. Ackroyd has a way of making the ordinary extraordinarily curious so that the fairly obvious becomes the oddly intriguing. One example: it never occurred to me before that the lighting of the great cities was for quite a long period completely uneven, being dependent, as it was, on a variety of what we now term service providers who were, understandably, providing different services. (I assume this applies to most cities – Ackroyd looks in some detail into how it applied to London quite a way into the twentieth century.) It was only when the different qualities of light began to involve problems of vision for drivers of vehicles that things, in this case the light, became evened out.

I also encountered material I was familiar with but, in this case, the writer made me feel much of this powerfully and, in the process, sort of transformed the knowledge, at least for the time of reading. I suppose most people, certainly the English, are aware of the dreadful conditions under which the children employed by the chimney-sweepers of nineteenth century London laboured. Ackroyd touches on this in one of his later chapters and does so to devastating effect. I suppose it’s partly because he’s obviously not harping on the suffering involved that the suffering comes over with such intensity. In fact, this is true of how he deals with the sheer human misery of life in the city for many of its inhabitants throughout the book. The power and intensity of this material is also related, I think, to the way the writer links those sufferings to the joys and the sheer energy of the city. There’s a stunning moment when the dancing of deprived children in some parts of the city is described. The image lingers, though I’m not at all sure what it means, or what I now know. But whatever it is, I know it feelingly.