A similar motive can be observed in David Hockney, an English artist who grew up in Yorkshire and found his way to California - a place that for many artists of the twentieth century was the equivalent of what Greece and Rome had been to their nineteenth-century predecessors. Portrait of an Artist is not a social commentary on West-coast life; it was not intended for the man in the pool (80). It was back in Britain that the
lessons of sensuous ease and delight in elegant swimming pools needed to be taken to heart. A Californian might say, on contemplating the picture, 'that is me', but it was the narrow-minded Yorkshire businessman who was being prompted to take the work to heart and recognize an invitation to inner reform along the lines of, 'that should be me'.
We shouldn't conclude that the south gets forgotten by accident. The demands of life in colder climates means that we lean on the values of the north for good reasons. One of the central dilemmas of being human is how we can properly deal with an intrinsic tension between reason and the body, between instinctual and intellectual life. In many places and for long periods of history, it has seemed obvious that there was no option for societies but to organize themselves against the inadequacies of climate and geography. Great achievements of science, technology and enterprise have been concerned with escaping from bondage to nature. Animals have been domesticated and put to work; rivers have been dammed, canals dug, marshlands drained and forests cut down so that crops could be grown in previously unpromising places. Most of culture has been devoted to the task of overcoming the limitations of our untouched state in the service of our flourishing.
A welcoming, trusting delight in nature has been the exception. Historically, it has been odd for people in the north to want to wear loose-fitting clothes, eat simply prepared seafood on open terraces and take strolls by the seashore. It takes a lot of order and reason before a section of society decides that the proper aim of existence should be unity with nature.
A good life must surely contain a judicious balancing of the contrasting claims of the south and the north. For many of the world's inhabitants the balance has swung towards an excess of artifice, so our need for the past 200 years has been to find ways of doing justice to our instinctual, pagan needs. There is no universal solution for what we lack and what art we should therefore surround ourselves with; it will depend on what is unbalanced within us and in which direction we are listing. We should make a careful survey of our inner geography before judging whether we belong to the group that would benefit from leafing through a recipe for Elizabeth David's slow-cooked squid and tanning ourselves imaginatively around the Santa Monica swimming pools of David
Hockney's California.
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It's in rainy England that we need this most.
80. David Hockncy. Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures j. 1972
Nature is not only an agent of life - it is also the force that will lead us to death. When we say we need to live 'according to nature', this means not only opening ourselves up to the passions of youth and the beauty of sunlight, but also an acceptance of autumn and decline.
There is a technical sense in which we know we must die, but this is not at all the same as being conscious of our own mortality day to day and in a sensory way. Every mouse and giraffe will die. but, we suppose, such creatures are not preoccupied with their own ends. However, to live as rational, conscious beings 'according to nature' means having to approach the future in the knowledge that our lives will draw to a close, that we will be ripped away from our loved ones, that our bodies will suffer shocking indignities, and that when such matters happen is almost entirely beyond our control. This is perhaps the hardest thought to keep in mind. We rarely let it enter our consciousness; it catches us sometimes in the early hours, but we are masters of its brutal denial.
Anticipating Autumn
The concern we repress is not just about the specific last moment of life. It is with the fact that we will age, lose our health, become wizened and frail. Our current phase of life is transient, and in retrospect it will appear fleeting. To the twenty-year-old, the thousands of hours spent being seven feel like almost nothing. To the fifty-year-old, the whole decade of their twenties may seem like a fleeting moment. We face the strange but deeply significant fact that the issues that loom so large in our lives today, the days that seem to spread out and the hours of intensity or listlessness, will all eventually be minute, scarcely remembered details of a distant past.
Art here too can help, for it is an imaginative force that goes ahead of the present and prepares our rational and sensory selves for where nature will eventually lead us. In Jan Gossaert's portrait of an elderly couple, each face shows, in slightly different ways, the weight of the life they have led (81). They do not look particularly happy, either with themselves or with each other, but neither do they seem disenchanted or depressed. On the man's cap there is a small golden badge, on which is wrought an overtly erotic image of a much younger, naked couple. The badge is like a memory, now small and far away, of the couple as they were at the very start of their relationship. This is an image to be looked at not in old age, but in youth. Art can bring us news of the future.
In 1972, the psychologist Walter Mischel of Stanford University conducted a now-famous experiment at the Bing Nursery School. Children were shown a marshmallow, and told they could either eat
You too will end up a little like this.
81. Jan Gossacrt. An Elderly Couple detail right), c. 1520
Keeping our lime- bound selves at the front of our minds.
82. Ian Hamilton Finlay, Little Sparta, Dunsyrc. Scotland. 1966-2006
83. Ian I lamilton Finlay, El In An a Jki Eg), 1976
it right now, or, if they waited a further fifteen minutes, they would he given an additional marshmallow. Only about a third of the children were able to delay gratification long enough to get the additional treat. This simple observation has profound implications: it suggests that for some people the future seems more real than it does to others. The ability to wait depends on the degree to which what will happen later carries weight in our minds. The tact that later one will think, 'I wish I hadn't eaten that marshmallow because then I'd now have two' can be more or less powerful, depending on the mind. The children who delayed had a more realistic, intimate connection with who they would be in the future; they were skilled at picturing time. This is a faculty that art can help us with.
The psychologist's experiment reproduces in miniature, and at the level of childish wants, the same theme that art addresses on a grander scale and in an adult mode. A picture such as that by Jan Gossaert seeks to show us a future state of our own existence. This is the point of the golden badge: if they were once a version of you, the youthful beholder, and are now like this, then you too will one day be a version of them. Recognize this now while there is still a little time.
Art rectifies the failings of our minds: we are simply not very good at grasping the fact of ourselves as time-bound creatures. We don't know where we are truly heading and how long we have until we get there, and we forget where we have been; eighty years is just too many for one imperfect mind to hold together vividly without help. As in so many other areas, warning is key. Time loses some of its power if we are ready for it. We will make wiser decisions now if the reality of our future, or at least the likely path that life will take, is made vivid and powerful to our minds in the present. Thus a valuable project for artists is to act as a herald, and art is a support to our fragile imaginations.