A quick entry on a few obituaries I've found moving recently, Patrick Leigh Fermor and Cy Twombly, men of the old-school they don't make 'em like that variety steeped in a vigorous classicism and a seemingly indefatigable capacity for making connections between things that ought not to be connected.
I'd seen Cy Twombly's work before I actually saw it. I'd seen a few pictures somewhere, walked past the Studies of the Temaire at the Art Gallery of NSW around 2003, was vaguely aware of the name. But on a trip to London in 2004 I was gobsmacked by Twombly's work when I read an exhibition catalogue that was a permanent fixture on (or beneath) my brother's coffee table. I was slowly killing an afternoon, waiting for something or someone when I picked it up in an incidental reach of the arm. Within moments, I was sstruck dumb by the realization that there was an artist who in a weird twist of genealogy had, even years before I was even born, pinched and funneled all my ideas about ancient history and classical mythology and art and how human experience of the present can be illuminated by the human experience of the past in one mighty flash of everything all at once that Twombly has at his best.
Scrawled across the painting of Twombly's I've seen the most in person, the Quattro Stagioni in the Tate Modern, are the words "Ah, it goes, is lost," which struck me as being a great cry of loss in both the realms of the personal and our shared experience, speaking of the human experience as we grow, lose our old selves to our new selves in a constant cycle of remaking and reshaping, as violent and destructive as it is beautiful and nurturing. Spring's torrents are soon winter's dearth (death?) But there is also something else to Twombly's work, which speaks of how humans experience history, the giant thing of the past, both chasm and monolith, both noise and silence. "Ah, it goes, is lost..."
I know far less about Patrick Leigh Fermor, but was struck by obituaries by James Campbell in The Guardian and one by Christopher Hitchens at The Slate. In particular, I liked the story of his wartime mission to kidnap the German general Heinrich Kreipe, who was then overseeing the Nazi occupation of Crete. The mission was successful and the kidnapping party hid in a cave until it was safe to move the general to Europe. Looking out onto snow-capped mountains, bored, the general recited a few lines of Horace's ode 1.9, Ad Thaliarchum. Leigh Fermor said later, "As luck had it, this was one I knew by heart" and when the general's memory ran out, he carried it on until its end (this happens a lot among my friends, you know, recital of Roman poets in Latin from memory. What do you mean, this doesn't happen in the circles you move in...?)
Roman poets, love of Greece, wanderers, married to European aristocrats, dead in the same week...
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