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Notebook: Fergus Butler Gallie

by
17 January 2025

ISTOCK

Robed in splendour

THERE is something very melancholy about fast-melting snow. That’s an observation worthy of Eeyore, though I don’t mind the comparison, as he’s by far the most compelling of A. A. Milne’s characters — the Solzhenitsyn of the Hundred Acre Wood.

Still, such momentary mental idlings cannot suppress the truth of the observation. Perhaps it is the dissolution of magic. On the eve of the Epiphany, the parish was decked in a magnificent white robe; between the eight-o’clock and the ten-o’clock, however, it was gone. I went into church in the midst of Narnia, and left it to return to the grit, wet, and cold of Britain in 2025.

Melting snow is the most appropriate weather for the New Year. It is, after all, an inherently anti-climactic time. As December ends, I see adverts on the Tube in which people with grim smiles tell revellers not to enjoy themselves too much. It puts me in mind of the attempt by the Soviets to make New Year the primary celebration of this time of year, Christmas and the Epiphany being too, well, Godward.

By the end of the USSR, the State was continuing to produce posters advertising the inevitable march of Soviet progress into a new round of the sun, even when there had long since ceased to be any such thing whatsoever. The Soviet New Year was marked then by false smiles that hid the melancholy of decline, much as our New Year does now.

 

Neo Puritanism

JANUARY itself, in whose grasp we now so firmly find ourselves, is a much-maligned month. The secular world views it as a little Lent: a time for self-chastisement and purity of living. In this, as in so many things, it is wrong (although it is amusing to note how stubbornly it still repeats the patterns of religious living — just without the hope of truly holy joy). Contra the world, January is the time when we most need cheer, frivolity, and the comforts of good food and drink.

It also contains some of my favourite feasts: the Epiphany; the Conversion of St Paul; Hilary; Agnes; Charles, King and Martyr. Not to mark them properly would be a great shame. Amid the melting snow, melancholy is permissible; self-inflicted misery is less excusable, and less attractive.

 

Through a glass, darkly

I SPENT the transition from December to January in an appropriately melancholic place. People say that Venice is a city of love, but I think it much more a city of melancholy: the sort of beauty that only a sense of sadness can really bring. All this sounds very down in the mouth, but, of course, it isn’t really: as Eeyore knew, melancholia and unhappiness are not the same.

Izaak Walton, author of The Compleat Angler, wrote of “learn[ing] to affect an holy melancholy” as the real route to proper contentment. He spent much of his time around clergymen, many of whom had suffered awful privations at the hands of the rebels during the Civil War. “A prayer book now shall be my looking glass,” Walton wrote. As another year passes, and we all, short of portraits in the attic, become older, it is not a bad New Year’s resolution.

 

Eyes down

THE Prayer Book, of course, keeps 1 January as the Circumcision of Christ. With no BCP communion to be found in the whole Lagoon, I satisfied myself with a visit to Tintoretto’s painting of the circumcision at the Scuola Grande di san Rocco. It is part of his series depicting the key events of the incarnation. In the back of each are his trademark strange, almost ethereal figures. They, I suppose, are us: shadows in the background, defined, in the end, by our proximity to the Christ-child.

David Bowie said that Tintoretto was a “proto rock star”. Certainly, he still has star appeal. Even on the last day of the year, the upper hall of the Scuola was filled with people, there to gaze upon the great painted ceiling, considered by some to be his masterpiece.

His admirers wander the floor of the hall, holding mirrors. They have to hold them at a strange angle, hoping to catch a glimpse of Christ or the saints, unblemished by their own reflection. There is probably a sermon in that. What results is a strange, shuffling dance reminiscent of the scene in Joseph Roth’s novel The Radetzky March in which partygoers learn of the death of Franz Josef mid-conga-line, and people try not to bump into one another while maintaining their vision above. There is a sermon in that, too, I suspect.

 

Long shadows

THE point of rock stars is, in part, to achieve some sort of immortality — or at least a permanence in a transitory world. Yet the Most Serene Republic of Venice which Tintoretto so effectively adorned was not long for the world. Perhaps it was always destined to become one with the shadowy figures at the back of his paintings: beautiful and, doubtless, pointing us through that beauty to some deeper divine truth; but metaphysical, ethereal even, rather than tangible.

What happened politically seems to be mirrored in the city today. I never take photos of Venice: they never do it justice. It is no surprise, then, that the back streets of San Marco are so full of souvenir shops with shelves of little campanili or bubbles of Murano glass. Each is its own attempt at capturing and containing that which defies either process.

Yet, as always, when I visit Venice, I have brought something of it back with me. This time — my first January visit for years — it is melancholy. Back home, the shadows of the Serenissima grow ever longer over our own necrotic body politic. So, too, do those of the USSR and Austro-Hungary. It all feels very 1989, or 1918, or 1797, depending on your particular preference. Those things that we took so much for granted now seem like they might not last even the season that we have been allotted.

As I write, an archbishop has finally departed, a Prime Minister equivocates, and a billionaire circles. There is something very melancholy about fast-melting snow.
 

The Revd Fergus Butler Gallie is Vicar of Charlbury with Shorthampton, in the diocese of Oxford.

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