The FT, the world soul and all that

On the back of the Life and Arts section in the weekend FT, they have the same three columns. Presumably, when bored plutocrats get restless on a Sunday afternoon, have done screwing the mistresses after a week of screwing the proles/taxpayers, they can get a little aspirational consumerism and aspirational anti-consumerism. A bit of hormesis does you good..

Those three columns-
a) "The Fast Lane" by some guy called Tyler Brule, who spends most of his life in airport departure lounges or five star restaurants, and who spends ages comparing Singapore Airport to Swiss chalets etc. Every bit as edifying as it sounds. Reminds me of the John Hurt character in "Contact"- dying and eking it out by never touching down.

b) "How to Give It", where in a different worthy answers the same questions "which is the first charity you can remember supporting?" "is it more important to give time or money?" and so forth. It throws up the occasional interesting idea, and if gets the noblesse oblige juices of a junior alien overlord going, then well, that defers the revolution by a nanosecond more.

c) [the point of this post] "The Slow Lane" by Harry Eyres, where you'll get paens and threnodies and elegies for this or that. Eyres covers all sorts of 'dissidents'. Frexample, he did a good piece on Ivan Illich recently. Of course, you can dismiss all this as feelgood flannel, and say that Eyres is only published to make readers feel good about themselves and their paper, before returning to the real work of screwing the proletariat and sending a death threat to every insect the following day. That's as maybe, but the stuff is still worth reading.

Here is an example from the January 3/4 issue

"The writer I find most illuminating on all this is the maverick American psychologist James Hillman. Hillman draws attention not just to the individual human soul, the locus of salvation or damnation for Christians, but to the world soul, anima mundi. According to Hillman, psychotherapies will never work unless they "take into account the sickness of the world... you have to see that buildings are anorexic, that language is schizogenic, that normalcy is manic and medicine and business is manic".
John Keats said that the world was the vale of soul-making. Now we need to reverse that saying. To restore our own souls we need to stop destroying the world's soul, which includes the habitats, eco-systems and species under the kind of threat that neither Keats nor Freud ever envisaged."

Possibly related to:
Don Delillo's World Hum
Leonard Cohen's Blizzard