Here is a passage from
this portrayal of the immensely influential - and personally quite peculiar - British philosopher Derek Parfit - it appeared in
The New Yorker a few years back.
"Sometime after he gave up the idea of being a poet,
Parfit developed a new aesthetic obsession: photography. He drifted into
it—a rich uncle gave him an expensive camera—but later it occurred to
him that his interest in committing to paper images of things he had
seen might stem from his inability to hold those images in his mind. He
also believed that most of the world looked better in reproduction than
it did in life. There were only about ten things in the world he wanted
to photograph, however, and they were all buildings: the best buildings
in Venice—Palladio’s two churches, the Doge’s Palace, the buildings
along the Grand Canal—and the best buildings in St. Petersburg, the
Winter Palace and the General Staff Building.
I find
it puzzling how much I, and some other people, love architecture. Most
of the buildings that I love have pillars, either classical or Gothic.
There is a nice dismissive word that applies to all other buildings:
“astylar.” I also love the avenues in the French countryside, perhaps
because the trees are like rows of pillars. (There were eight million
trees in French avenues in 1900, and now there are only about three
hundred thousand.) There are some astylar buildings that I love, such as
some skyscrapers. The best buildings in Venice and St. Petersburg,
though very beautiful, are not sublime. What is sublime, I remember
hearing Kenneth Clark say, are only the interiors of some late Gothic
cathedrals, and some American skyscrapers.
Although
he admired some skyscrapers, he believed that architecture had
generally declined since 1840, and the world had grown uglier. On the
other hand, anesthetics were discovered around the same time, so the
world’s suffering had been greatly reduced. Was the trade-off worth it?
He was not sure.
He believed that he had little native talent
for photography, but that by working hard at it he would be able to
produce, in his lifetime, a few good pictures. Between 1975 and 1998, he
spent about five weeks each year in Venice and St. Petersburg.
I
may be somewhat unusual in the fact that I never get tired or sated
with what I love most, so that I don’t need or want variety.
He
disliked overhead lights, in which category he included the midday sun,
but he loved the horizontal rays at the two ends of the day. He waited
for hours, reading a book, for the right sort of light and the right
sort of weather.
When he came home, he developed his photographs
and sorted them. Of a thousand pictures, he might keep three. When he
decided that a picture was worth saving, he took it to a professional
processor in London and had the processor hand-paint out all aspects of
the image that he found distasteful, which meant all evidence of the
twentieth century—cars, telegraph wires, signposts—and usually all
people. Then he had the colors repeatedly adjusted, although this was
enormously expensive, until they were exactly what he wanted—which was a
matter of fidelity not to the scene as it was but to an idea in his
head."
Labels: Parfit, philosophy
