Ian on Sunday

I find it difficult to convince friends – or anyone – that poetry is worth reading.

My tutor at Cambridge, Professor Nick Hammond, authority on the history of ancient Macedonia and on the life of Alexander the Great, used to coach me on what he called “exercises of the mind.”

There are few problems in Guyana which are more intractable than the problem of bureaucracy in all its deadly guises.

In a recent column I mentioned Nick Hammond who was my tutor at Cambridge.

These days, as increasing age makes the discovery of new lands much less likely, it remains perfectly possible to voyage in the mind as adventurously as ever by reading books and talking to good friends.

Winston Churchill, exasperated by opposition politicians constantly questioning his policies and his own credentials and frustrated by having to consult and compromise on measures which in his judgement were straightforward and ripe for introduction without hesitation, once exploded: “Democracy is the worst kind of government!”

There is a book of great beauty given to me as a Christmas gift by my wife: A River Runs Through It, by Norman Fitzroy Maclean published first in 1976.

Frederick Winslow Taylor, who as a young foreman in a Philadelphia steelworks in 1880 started measuring work performance compared with time taken to do the work, was the first time and motion study expert, the man who pioneered the science of efficiency in management. 

These are not my own insights but I make them my own and am pleased to pass them on.

Isaiah Berlin was in my view the most distinguished political philosopher and historian of ideas of the 20th century.

Seamus Heaney, the great Irish poet, whose marvellous collection of essays The Redress of Poetry I like to re-read, writes that W H Auden’s elegy for Yeats was “a rallying cry that celebrates poetry for being on the side of life, and continuity of effort, and enlargement of the spirit.”

Amidst my most surprising possessions are 66 letters from Don Bradman.

One of the most serious aspects of life today is the widening gap between talk and action.

It is hard to claim that GuySuCo’s losses on the scale now obtaining – leading to the diversion of precious taxpayer’s revenue from education and health for instance – can be sustained much longer.

In Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Edward Gibbon, writing about the reign of Titus Pius, commented in passing that history was “little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.”

At a time when one is still shaken by the death of Derek Walcott – the thought which diminishes us that he will never again decipher the beauty of the world for us – let us celebrate poetry – “the bread that lasts when systems have decayed.”

“You have been watching West Indies cricket for 70 years – give me three outstanding memories,” a friend asks me.

Leave aside the interminable bungling and set-in-stone ill-will which to one’s endless dismay characterise Guyana’s public space – and concentrate instead for your soul’s content on the many wonders which cross the mind on a daily basis.

I am 84, I have lived through a couple of valleys of death.

Many people go to the ends of the earth to find beauty.