On our various visits to Sicily over the last decade or so we have visited places featured in the detective series “Montalbano”. We sat behind his desk in his office, we admired his house on the beach at Punto Secco and wondered if we could buy it if it ever came up for sale. We would have liked to take a look inside but it was not possible. We had lunch in one of bis favourite restaurants and one or two of our group even went for a swim in the little bay, emulating the actor’s morning dip - not me, I hasten to add!
This morning I read about The Hardy Way, described as “challenging, coastal and literary”, which runs from Higher Bockhampton to Stinsford Church, both in Dorset, presumably pointing out Hardy landmarks along the way. A different sort of pilgrimage from the Camino de Santiago.
There was a time I would have recognised the places, had I gone on such a pilgrimage. I read an awful lot of Hardy when I was in the sixth form. Not as much, I suspect, as a former colleague of mine who grew up in Wessex and had at least one Hardy text a year as a set book thought her school days. In fact she confessed to being surprised when she went away to university to find that reading Hardy year on year was not compulsory in all schools throughout the UK.
Ir’s an odd compulsion that we have to somehow make the protagonists of novels more real by visiting the places where they might have existed.
Another human foible is attributing value to works of art in a sometimes arbitrary fashion. Here’s a link to an article about a Rubens painting which might not be a Rubens painting after all. The depiction of Samson and Delilah was purchased by the National Gallery some forty five years ago for a silly amount of money. Now it seems that art historian claims to have demonstrated that it is a twentieth century copy of a long lost painting. And suddenly, boom!, its value is decreased. But does a painting become any less impressive just because it’s a copy? After all, paintings by artificial intelligence are beginning to sell for silly money.
And there have been incidences of paintings done by small children selling for large amounts of money. In such a case it is often a parent stopping a child adding any more daubs of colour to a painting and turning it into the mess of grey and brown that some infant art works turn into. Having said that, both my smallest granddaughters produce fine pictures, unlike the smallest grandson who took a long time progressing from grey daubs, the result of mixing ALL the available colours, to recognisable images.
In the final analysis, surely the important thing is that we recognise the ‘bits of beauty everywhere’ that Madeleine Peyroux sings about, wihout necessarily ascribing a specific value to them.
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
