Comments 1983

The other day, I got tipped by a taxi driver. I got him, he was talking about the weather and I said, “Well, at least we don’t have earthquakes and typhoons in this country.” We talked for a bit and then stopped talking. He took me to the destination, which is £1.40. I got out the money, he said, “Governor, make it a pound.” Governor is a word that’s used for very senior people. I said, “It’s £1.40, isn’t it?” He said, “Make it a pound, a pound’s all right.” I said, “Thank you very much.” I paid him a pound, so I was tipped.

Labour of love. In the 1920s, the musical director of Sadler’s Wells, Vernon Corri, C-O-R-R-I, it was a struggling opera center then. He wanted to put on a performance of Tristan. Of course, his orchestra was very small and he spent over a year re-orchestrating the pool score of Tristan for his little orchestra of ’26. He wrote out all the parts himself for one single performance. It’s this sort of unselfish idealism that perhaps produced the final effect of the big grants, which were made to Sadler’s Wells, and which gave it the impetus to continue today.

There was an advertisement a little time back, which ran to the effect that if you subscribed a pound a week now, your small children age, say, five and six would be seen through a private school and a university by the company concerned. I thought, “Well, a pound a week, even if it’s for 10 years, that’s only 3,000. Surely, how could the company do this?” I asked the man well up in finance and he said, “Oh, yes, they’ll do it.” I said, “Well, how can they do it? How can they make a profit and how can they afford to do it? How could they pay it?” He said, “Well, there’s just one thing, you’ll be dead. It’s a life insurance policy.” That’s an example of something which is left unsaid.

Another example is the cat and the monkey in the fable. The monkey shouts at the cat, “Come on, get those chestnuts out of the fire.” The cat said, “Well, it burns my paw. “The monkey shouts, “I always seem to be associated with absolute idiots and cowards bleating and whining about it. Why are the chestnuts in there? They’re there to be got out, to be eaten. Why don’t you get them out?” He shouts and the cat finally is pushed into getting them out and burning his paws. Something’s left unsaid. It’s covered up by the monkeys shouting, which is that you are going to eat the chestnuts too, why shouldn’t you get some of them out? In the same way, the demands of the world sometimes are shouting at us so powerfully and overbearing, mixed up with insults and challenges and so on and we quite often, are unable to sit for a moment and just think what the actual situation is.

I’ve never learned to draw. One time in middle life, I thought, “Well, I’ll take a few lessons and it will enable me, help me to appreciate art and so on.” I went to a friend who’s an extremely good amateur artist. After retirement, he’s become a professional and quite a successful one, but at that time, I just knew he was a very good amateur. I told him I wanted to draw heads and I had drawn a few. I showed them to him. He looked at them. He said, “Well, before you learn to heads you’ve got to learn to draw a box. Practice drawing a box and show it to me.” I started this and then I thought, I don’t want to do this. This is ridiculous, you see. I can see the block of the head all right. Marcus, of course, he’s an engineer, he’s probably got a bit engineering-oriented. I don’t want to do that. I’ll draw heads. I drew the heads and I made no progress at all, but I realized I wasn’t going to listen to him. I asked another friend who’s a crack architect. I said to him, “Now, will you find me a first-rate art teacher, teacher of drawing who would give me a lesson and I don’t mind if it’s expensive, once a week.” He found me this man. I went to his studio. He’s a well-known artist, but he agreed to give a lesson. He sat me down in the studio. He said, “Well, you’ve got to learn just to draw ordinary things first, before you get onto your heads. Now, look at that box and draw it.” I drew the box and then I drew the chairs and the tables because I was paying heavily for this. It was no use paying if you don’t do what he says. When it was a question of instruction from a friend, although it was exactly the same instruction because he was a friend and I wasn’t paying anything, I thought, “Well, it doesn’t matter. I’ll do as I like.” In the same way some teachers in anything, it’s very often better to be on a formal basis, than someone one knows well.

Wilfred Trotter, a great surgeon and philosopher of a bit earlier this century, a pupil of his told me a story about him. A neurologist named Mash, I think had diagnosed a tumor on the left side of the brain, but Trotter looking at the symptoms decided it should be on the right. They had a dispute, not in front of the patient, of course. Trotter said, “Well, I’m the surgeon, I’m going to operate on the right.” The neurologist Mash said, “Well, may I come and watch the operation?” “Certainly.” He operated on the right with the neurologist watching and the tumor was there, looks like a little pigeon’s egg, according to the surgeon who told me. There it was where Trotter had predicted. The neurologist said, “I’m going to give up neurology,” and Trotter without moving a muscle just carrying on with his operation without looking up, he just said, “Don’t give it up, take it up.” Beds of roses. People in this country live in a bed of roses, but they tend to say, “I don’t like pink.” Decorators, A lot of jobs now are done by very small firms of two or three people, often a single operator. The house next to me was going to be repainted by a man working alone. He brought with him a sizable cassette player. I thought, “Well, are we going to have to put up with something perhaps for a week or so,” but in fact, it was nearly all Bruckner symphonies.

Conviction. A very good scholar of the Indian philosophy Vedanta told a spiritual teacher, he said, “I think now I can meet any doubt that can possibly come up. I know how to meet it.” The teacher didn’t look very impressed with this. The scholar repeated emphatically, said, “Any possible doubt that comes up, I’m sure I can meet.” The Yogi, again, looked doubtful, but he didn’t say anything and the subject dropped. Later on the scholar, he lost his daughter of whom he was very fond and he found that his faith was disturbed. He went to the Yogi and he explained what had happened. The Yogi said, “Yes, the real doubts come not from the minds of other people, but from within ourselves. The real question for a scholar is not whether he can convince other people, but whether he convinces himself.”

Computers. Roger Penrose at the Oxford Mathematical Institute, he says that many people tend to be overawed by computers. They think that because computers can perform routine calculations so much more quickly than they can, that the computers must be cleverer than they are. In fact, despite their incredible speed, the computers of today are almost unbelievably stupid. If such a concept can be applied to them at all and are totally lacking in any kind of common sense. They are just so much faster at being mindlessly stupid than any of us can hope to be.

© Trevor Leggett