1

Why Europe is important and will

always remain so 1

WILD air, world-mothering air,

Nestling me everywhere,
That each eyelash or hair
Girdles; goes home betwixt
The fleeciest, frailest-flixed
Snowflake; that s fairly mixed
With, riddles, and is rife
In every least things life;
This needful, never spent,
And nursing element;
My more than meat and drink,
My meal at every wink...

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Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote the above

beautiful poem comparing Mary to the air
we breathe. It has all his characteristic
soaring vision, beautiful word music,
astonishing coinages and archaisms

together with an informed and

passionately expressed theology.
Europe is also like this: it is all around us.
Something we sup in with our mothers
milk and breathe out all our life. For those
who know her, Europe exerts a
fascination which lasts a lifetime.
I am a British citizen, born in the South of
England in 1955, in the twilight following
the war. I have the experience of living in
half a dozen countries and cultures. And I
am also partly of Norman extraction.
When you live abroad and especially
when you live in Europe - each small act
of communication is an act of European
solidarity and friendship: a reaching out
to a well-liked but unknown partner and
companion on the way.
There is really nothing else like it; except
that this same spirit of cooperation,
cordiality and hospitality is widely

encountered among young people and

many not so young ones with the same
vibrancy, the world over.
You notice it in small gestures of courtesy
in airport lounges, when speaking to Help
Desks operating from exotic locations,
and in the many fervent and sincere
people one may encounter quite by
chance or at the most by a shared
interest in or concern about something
on the internet.
We are all Europeans now; for it is from
Europe (and I suppose also, America, but
Europe was an object of fascination for
Americans which helped to foster this
vision) that the idea of European and
humanitarian solidarity comes.
Today, friendship, cooperation and a
concern for the next country along is
indeed a global brand. There is not much
difference between Costa Coffee in
Budapest and Costa Coffee in Basingstoke

except that in England, the pastries are

infinitely better...
In the Georgian version of Costa, the
chain of coffee shops known as Entre,
one finds in summer Russians, Ukrainians,
Iranians, Israelis; as well as Europeans of
every hue.
I have encountered French people,
Egyptians, Camerounais and Finns in
Tbilisi; and Frisian Islanders beautiful,
magnificently strong and blonde girls in
the Isles of Scilly. I always remember
encountering an Indian gentleman in a
shop near Reading Station in the UK.
They had been giving him a bit of trouble,
and I looked into his eyes, reading a
history of rejection and hurt. The
sympathy and empathy I felt was so
intense that could be likened to someone
breaking an egg over my scalp.

So yes, we are brothers. And yes,

humanity is for real. And shining very
strongly in this constellation of humanity
is Europe: like Venus, a beautiful and
paradoxical symbol to guide us through
the many dark nights of the Western
soul...
*
Today I went to a Hungarian
haberdashery shop for nothing more
profound than an improved draw-string
for a pair of new swimming trunks. I
noticed the Single Market: they were
made in Ireland and proudly bore the
logo, ONeill. But the existing string was
a little too long and made me think that I
was a tennis shoe.
The proprietor and I were already fast
friends: I had previously bought some
black fabric for the school computer room

windows, as part of my world mission to

encourage language learning via the
projected computer screen...
She welcomed me with aplomb and
allowed me to park my bicycle in the shop
itself. I told her that this would not be
allowed in England; and thought vaguely
of Carlo Curley, who was apocryphally
reputed to have driven his car into a New
York church and left it there while he
practised complex Bach Trio Sonatas...
Soon a panoply of possible solutions in a
wide variety of colours and styles was laid
out on the sacred cutting table. I made a
shrewd choice about length and a modest
one about colour; and she charged me a
derisory sum.
As she packed away her wares, she
mentioned that she knew me from church

(in Hungarian, the word for church is

temple which speaks volumes about
the Hungarians sensitivity to cultural
nuance); she enquired about my plans;
and she asked me (using my phone and
Google Translate) how much the
swimming trunks had cost. Never before,
it seemed, had she used this system for
communication; and she seemed quite
buoyed up by the experience; missing out
the spaces between the words, however...
I told her how, uniquely for a small
church, we are to have a new pipe organ
in the coming months and that I will be
allowed to play it when I am in the area.
She knew that already, of course...
With the seamstresses, again, a ball.
Jokes, miming, mantic utterances eagerly
awaited, in appalling Hungarian from me:
these are the order of the day. I salve my
conscience at their low or non-existent

prices for a remarkable variety of subtle

and accomplished mending jobs
sometimes with ice creams, or once,
Ukrainian chocolate from Georgia. The
type Ivanishvili made his fortune from. It
is never all bad...
*
I suppose Europe first impinged upon me
when I saw the Concorde aircraft on a test
flight above Bristol in 1970. I knew its
name betokened cooperation with France,
and had somehow picked up that this
cooperation was key to Harold Wilsons
approach, which he made explicit in his
still very readable white heat of
technology speech of 1963.
Within a few weeks I was in Portugal, as
the result of a scholarship essay on
Portuguese art. I had done the research in
the Christmas holidays of 1969. To this

day I remember inscribing my name in

the Victoria and Albert Museums National
Art Library readers book on 29 December
1969. Somehow, precociously, and deep
down inside, I knew then that the old
order was on its way out: I would grow up,
and something pristine and important
would die with my aging, and maybe in
the outside world as well.
I was allowed to take the train from
Cascais to Lisbon and view the Nuno
Gonalves pictures of the Portuguese
court at the height of the Portuguese
maritime empire under Henry the
Navigator, all on my own. I was just
fifteen.

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Portugal was still in the grip of Salazar,

who was to die later that year. The
museum staff and circumambulating
Portuguese were cordial and helpful: and
so at a very green age, I obtained, alone,
an encounter with a fine manifestation of
Europes soul. Gonalves remains
unstudied...
*
At my school Reading School, near the
Thames river in mellow and
unadventurous Berkshire my ineptitude
in languages shaded, as I grew older, into
a small and gradual confidence, much
kindled and abetted by our astonishing

11

and caring French teacher, Neville Hart.

Hart was the brother of a well-known
British TV personality of the time, Derek
Hart, who presented a hands-on
childrens art which was immensely
successful. Neville was as modest as his
brother was famous; and he is etched in
my memory for the trip he made with
certain invited pupils to the Maison
Franaise in Oxford.
Here we heard the widow of Boris
Pasternak recite many of her brothers
poems in her own translation, in both
Russian and English although I realized
later that her Englishings contained a
measure of willful recreativity that can
obscure the thrust of the original Russian.
But the impact of this on a sensitive boy
in during an lite and heightened evening

12

visit to a fabled location can be well

imagined:
Winter Night
It
At
A
A

swept, it swept on all the earth,

every turning,
candle on the table flared,
candle, burning.

Like swarms of midges to a flame

In summer weather,
Snowflakes flew up towards the pane
In flocks together.
Snow moulded arrows, rings and stars
The pane adorning.
A candle on the table shone
A candle, burning.
Entangled shadows spread across
The flickering ceiling,
Entangled arms, entangled legs,
And doom, and feeling.
And
Two
And
Like

with a thud against the floor

shoes came falling,
drops of molten candle wax
tears were rolling.

And all was lost in snowy mist,

Grey-white and blurring.
A candle on the table stood,
A candle, burning.
The flame was trembling in the draught;
Heat of temptation,
It lifted up two crossing wings
As of an angel.
All February the snow-storm swept,
Each time returning.
A candle on the table wept,
A candle, burning.
1946
Translated by Lydia Pasternak Slater

13

I saw in a flash that Russia, too, was part

of Europe, and that it exerted a fateful
charge of the most obscure and exciting
kind. It would be many, many years until I
explored the original, in Tbilisi, in lessons
I arranged, according to my own desired
programme, so that I could see and taste
the great Russian words in the original...
*
In the present confusion about Brexit, it is
good to realize that nothing is more
important than Europe. It has been there
in all the states of soul which we have
experienced or are likely to experience,
and we have thus no choice but to hang
in with it.
To pretend arguing upon a spurious
allegiance to an ill-understood neo-liberal
politics and economics (or alternatively,
upon the temporary exhaustion of the
European mind...) that globalization has
changed all this, and that Europe counts

14

no more well this is some nameless

Greek crime, ironically: either ritual
castration or some injury to the
omphalos; and pretty nasty and
psychologically unpleasant, whichever
way you look at it.
Just because the psyche (or the Freudian
id ) is rampant in these defining days of
the new century, of the new millennium...
this does not mean...that we must give in
to it.
We should view it with all the detachment
and caution of the master psychoanalyst.,
The great British historian, Norman Stone
presently in Turkey albeit once an
adviser to Mrs Thatcher, whom some say
helped spawn the Hydra-headed monster
of competitive market capitalism (now in
the kind of cul-de-sac you may find
through careless driving through a
Lancashire cotton town) put it like this:

15

I was very near to tears. I still do not

know what it is about: Central Europe.
At the time, the youthful professor was in
a Hungarian prison as the result of a
minor scrape, and had been listening to
Bachs Saint Matthew Passion.
He has of course devoted his entire
career to finding out since....
*
We too, must hang in with Europe, that
shaper of lives and destinies, wherever
we are and whatever our stake in the
game may seem to be. It is really too
important to be left to the people of
Sunderland: ignorant that in 700 and
not so far from their town of cloth caps
and whippets as Professor Steven
Fielding puts it Bede and Cuthbert and
Aldhelm and the Durham Gospels and the
Codex Amiatinus had already made
Englands early and magnificently

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enduring contribution to that same

European world...
Our renewed contribution can still be
made; and Europe requires that all her
countries make the same effort. It is not
an argument about getting back: it is an
argument about recreating, with all the
skill of our time; and an argument about
putting back...
So long as Russia is under the grip of a
delusional nationalism, of course, the
available alternatives are really too awful
to contemplate...

17

Neville Hart, (d. 1993)

Codex Amiatinus, 692

The text of the Samuel Barber setting of Gerard Manley Hopkins

Heaven-Haven (A Nun takes the Veil) - presented to accompany
this paper, is given at the YouTube site where this performance is
hosted, as follows :
1

I HAVE DESIRED to go
Where springs not fail,
To fields where flies
No sharp and sided hail
And a few lilies blow.
And I have asked to be
Where no storms come,
Where the green swell
Is in the havens dumb
And out of the swing of the sea.
"Heaven-Haven (A Nun Takes the Veil)"; for mixed chorus (SATB,
divisi) a cappella; poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins; music by
Samuel Barber (choral setting by the composer of his song, Opus 13
Nr. 1); 1961.
Performance: From the album "Samuel Barber, William Schuman:
Choral Music"; sung by The Joyful Company of Singers; Peter
Broadbent, director; ASV label.
N.B.: This performance shared solely according to the provisions of
the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5
License. NOT for sale. For personal, educational, and noncommercial use ONLY.

*
Martin Smith
(on the One Hundred and Second Anniversary
of the Sarajevo incident of 28 June 1914, which
provoked the First World War...)

Matszalka, North-East Hungary