Link: living with the Stasi

Thoughtful reflection on living under surveillance and on East Germany, by Neal Ascherson:

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2030955,00.html

Tolkien and Tennyson

I was listening to Radio 3's Drama on 3, which consisted of dramatised readings of Tennyson's sea poetry - largely because of the sheer brilliance of the acapella/ folk trio Coope, Boyes and Simpson, who were singing sea songs (much as I love Tennyson, I find Enoch Arden rather tiresome)

The play, if that's what you'd call it, concluded with Crossing the Bar, and though the later literary reference this usually throws up for me is 'Anne of the Island', it suddenly struck me that this voyage into death is really rather like the voyage from the Grey Havens into the West.

Well - I'm not claiming it as a direct influence; in any case both of them are playing with (a) a fairly natural metaphor and (b) a number of older images, such as the voyage of S Brendan, that Breton legend about the ferryman who took the dead in his boat to Little Britain, and, I bet, also the ship of souls in Dante's Purgatory (which is itself riffing on similar voyages, most noticably as a blessed counterpart to Charon's boat, though here a sea under God's good heaven replaces the underworld river).

And maybe I should stop typing/ free associating.... I have an interview for a scholarship tomorrow, and I've also just finished redrafting a thesis chapter - though I bet my supervisor will still think the conclusion is too 'preachy'. Sigh.