Astounding Magazine - Inspirational Short Stories

Author :R.J. Xavier

I would like to write in this magazine, articles that readers find interesting and useful. This magazine is about literature, the arts, science fiction and history.

The Night

Many years ago I was returning home one night when I realized that I had misplaced the key. Forcing my way in would mean the wrath of the landlord so I wondered how I could get in. The only way was to get the duplicate key from the landlord who lived five miles away, but I could not go there. For civil disturbances in the night had led to the imposition of a sudden curfew, which meant nobody could be on the road after 9:00 PM, and it was 8:58 PM. Could there be a locksmith nearby thought I, but before I could walk to the gate the watch beeped 9:00.

The night was infinitely dark and strange, it seemed that everyone had gone to bed, and switched off all the lights. The road was deserted except for a lone cow and the yellowish light of the distant lamp post in the junction showed that the cow was half asleep, but even that was not clear for cows always look like that. A blue green firefly, very rare for this part of the country flew and disappeared behind a leaf, which made me aware of the garden. Flowers that bloom at night are usually white, and most have a fragrance. Overhead there were more stars than I had ever seen, and there was a particularly bright reddish star that didn’t blink. Could it be the Planet Mars, the one they called the red planet, did someone say, or did I read somewhere that stars blink while planets don’t, or did I just imagine that now. Or could it be Venus, but did I read somewhere that Venus is called the morning star and could be seen only in the early morning. My knowledge of astronomy, like so much else was incomplete, but still I did know more than most people. And didn’t Newton himself once say something like “Knowledge is an endless beach and all I do is pick a pebble here and a sea shell there”. Or was it Michael Faraday, and was he also British. All these thoughts made me tired that I sat down in the garden and couldn’t remember anything after that except the ground felt hard on my head, an annoying cricket made an annoying noise, the smell of grass and marigold flowers and once I imagined that the cow was in the garden.

The hoot of an alarm made me jump, and for a moment I was horrified to find that I was not in bed but outside at night. I went to the gate to see what made that noise, and found that it was the siren for the midnight shift. Although all factories are closed during the curfew, some crucial industries get special permission to operate. And nearby a food boutique was open, it was the factory canteen and although an independent entity, it has permission to sell only to factory workers. I felt hungry and a cup of hot tea would be good in this cold night, but they serve only factory workers and I had to walk alone in at night during a curfew. I had to walk about one Kilometer and I would not have gone 50 feet when a stray dog baked at me in the most annoying manner, this made all the watch dogs in the neighborhood to bark together. I walked quickly, and sat in the boutique chair in the most factory like manner I could imagine.

I ordered food from a woman who served as the waitress, cashier and manager and tea maker at the same time and seemed to be the only person there. She was a woman of maybe 45, and though plainly dressed and sober looking, she looked and spoke in a confident manner, and was no doubt intelligent. Half way into my meal she asked me from where I was from, and I told her what had happened. She said there was a room which I could use and said “the night shift break is at three when the buffalos come swarming in and making a big noise but till then you could sleep in the room if you want for there is nobody else here to disturb”. I almost accepted, but then refused and lied that I thought of a way to get in, thanked her, paid the bill and started walking back. On my way back the stray dog started to bark again, which prompted the watch dogs some of whom now started to howl, and I regretted not having stayed at the boutique. Back in the garden I didn’t feel sleepy but looked up to see whether I could identify any stars. The Great Bear looks more like a Saucepan than a Bear, and Orion is not even aligned, but the Milky Way could be seen clearly, a spectacular whitish path of countless stars just one of which is the Sun. Up ahead what looked like a dim star moved steadily. It moved too slowly for it to be shooting star, which is fast but fleeting. For a moment I thought it could be an aero-plane flying high up and listened but there was no sound, and I felt certain that it was a communications satellite for even the smallest satellite could be seen from earth when the sun reflects upon it.

I sometimes carry with me a bag which is filled with painting material, so I decided to paint the landscape at night. Very few people paint at night for the colours are dull and it is difficult to tell them apart, but since I was not sleepy I could do nothing else. They are more or less black and white paintings but they still look quite good. Eventually I was so exhausted that I fell asleep. The next day I found the key, it had fallen near the gate so there was no incident with the landlord who would have been really annoyed if he found out that I had lost the key. It was a troublesome night without proper sleep, still I did learn a lot that day.

Marooned

Marooned in a Lonely Island

Seeking a Friendly Ship,

Waters of Silver Ripples,

And Beaches of Branchless Trees.

A Sun that Burns the Skin

Clouds that Embrace,

Parrots that Speak Bloody French,

God ! Am I going Insane.

Is that a Damn ship out there

Will it hit the Damn Reef

Will my Dum Dog greet me

Dammit, it’s the bloody Spanish

Behind this Coconut Jungle

And Creepers of Blue Lilies

And Past that thorny hell bush

Is a Jungle of Great Trees

Trees of Giant Timber

A Jungle of Tamarinds

With a Saw from the Damn Wreck

Could I Build a Two Masts Brig

Robert Louis Stevenson

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), wrote three famous stories and a book of children’s poetry that is now considered by many to be a classic. They are Treasure Island (1883), The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Kidnapped (1886), and A Childs Garden of verses (1885). Treasure Island is perhaps the most popular adventure story ever written, it is also the most dramatized story in any language, the most translated, and the probably the most liked sea story for both adults and children. Jim Hawkins the teenager tells the story of a treasure hunt. Long John Silver, the one legged sea pirate with a hook for a hand, and an annoying parrot is very intelligent, tactful, opportunistic, and sensible and is not always bad, especially when it suits him is probably one of the most popular characters in fiction, perhaps as popular as Oliver Twist, David Copperfield or Tom sawyer.

Billy Bones the paranoid (with reason) ruthless, secretive first mate of the pirate ship who knows where the treasure is, but has a kind side in that he is never bad to Jim Hawkins. Strangely he carries in his chest everywhere he goes a sea shell, perhaps showing that even the worst of men have a kindlier side. The wealthy squire is lazy, not very intelligent and pushy at the same time. Dr (and magistrate) is intelligent, fair and fearless but so serious that he could spoil your party if you bother to invite him. Then there is Ben Gunn who is marooned in the island for so long that he looks and moves like an animal. Israel Hands is the cunning, ruthless, treacherous coxswain of the ship who is one of the few characters who are all bad.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hide is a story about the duality of human nature, being both good and bad. There are passages in this book that are so well written and so down cast and morbid that when you read it in bed on a bright sunny afternoon, you look out of the window to see whether it is raining outside.

The Childs Book of Verses has many wonderful poems and has always been in print. But perhaps the most moving poem is his epitaph in Samoa, where he is buried in a Hill.

Under the wide and Starry Sky

Dig the Grave and let me lie,

Glad did I live and gladly die,

And I laid me down with a Will

This be the verse you grave for me:

Here he lies where he longed to be

Home is the Sailor home from the Sea,

And the Hunter home from the Hill

Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh, Scotland to a famous family of Light House Engineers. His middle name was originally Lewis but Robert changed the spelling while keeping the pronunciation. His father wanted him to follow his profession but constant ill health forced him to an indoor job, so as a compromise he studied law at the University of Edinburgh.

He was called to the Scottish Bar in 1875 but much to his father’s dismay made little effort as a lawyer and decided to make his mark in the world of literature. He traveled widely all his life in search of a warmer climate that suited him, and in France he met Mrs. Fanny Osbourne (1840-1914), who was ten years his senior, and was separated from her husband, and had three children. Stevenson followed her to California in by an emigrant ship called Devonian, traveling second class for the sense of adventure, but also to save money. He traveled overland from New York to California by train, but fell very ill and was nursed to health by some ranchers there. He wrote about this experience in Amateur Emigrant.

By December 1879 Stevenson recovered enough to continue his journey to San Francisco, where he was desperately poor and struggled “all alone on forty five cents a day, and sometimes less, with quantities of hard work and many heavy thoughts.” He fell ill again but in 1880 he married Fanny after the divorce was finalized. Stevenson’s early published works An Inland Voyage, (1878), and Travels with a Donkey in the Cervennes (1879), were based on his own adventures. This was followed by a constant stream of essays and articles, but success eluded him until Treasure Island was published in 1883. Stevenson was vivacious, and had a strong voice and gestures, but he was abnormally thin, and was in constant ill health. In the late 1880’s he left California for a holiday with his family in the Polynesian islands of the Pacific, fell in love with the islands and never left.

His first widely popular book, Kidnapped (1886), is the story of young David Balfour who goes in search of his fortune, and is tricked by his uncle to board the ship Covenant, to be sold into slavery in the West Indies. He eventually escapes with the help of a man named Alan Breck, and gets mixed up in a desperate adventure. This story is written in Stevenson inimitable writing style. G.K. Chesterton once said of Stevenson as a man able “to pick the right word at the point of his pen” and in this story we see what he meant. But apart from the beginning and the very end the story does not have a “plot”, but is more of a wanderer’s story. More than half it is more or less going from one place to another, in the Scottish heather trying to avoid the Red Coats.

In one chapter the Covenant hits a reef and sinks and David finds himself alone in an island, with nothing to eat and constant rain. Eating clams and leaves and berries some of which makes him ill, he hopelessly wanders around the island. Far away in the mainland houses can be seen with smoke blowing from chimneys, but he can’t find a way to get to it. One day he sees some fishing boats and desperately calls for help, but rather than coming to rescue him they point to something in the sea. Angrily, he inspects it closely and finds that a path connects the island to the mainland and he runs along it and soon reaches the mainland. Then he realises that he had been in a tidal island all the time, for when the tide comes in the path disappears under the water, only to reappear when it goes out. The story ends with David getting half of the estate from his uncle with Alan’s help, and the two friends go their separate ways.

Astounding Magazine - Inspirational Short Stories

I would like to write in this magazine, articles that readers find interesting and useful. This magazine is about literature, the arts, science and history.

To measure the World

Once men tried to measure the Earth
Its length, its weight and it's distant Moon
The transit of Venus gave the length to the Sun
Now all heavenly bodies had a place to move from

A strange young man walked north from London
Meticulously measuring and making adjustments
And by measuring the angle of the sun
The length of the Earth came like a bun

To Weigh the Earth do you need a Scale
A Big blue Mountain would tell the Tale
The angle of it's feeble pull
Will weigh the Earth like a Bull

The following article is based mainly on a book that won the Aventis Prize for Science Books, and has been re written for easier reading. The poem was written by me.

A man named Richard Norwood walked north from the Tower of London to York, a distance of 208 miles. It took him two years to repeatedly stop and measure his way with a chain, making the most meticulous adjustments for the rise and fall of the land and the meanderings of the road. Then he measured the angle of the Sun at York and again a year later on the same day at the same time measured the angle in London. From this he calculated the length of a degree (and so the circumference of the Earth) as 110.72 Km. Incredibly he was off by only a trifling 600 yards (to a degree.)

In 1687 his Masterwork of Navigation was published as Seaman’s Practice. Norwood returned to Bermuda with his wife and family to become a successful planter. As a young man he had traveled to Bermuda to try to make a fortune by scooping pearls off the seabed. He intended to do this by using a diving bell modeled after Halley’s device but the search failed, for there were no pearls on the seabed, and anyway the diving bell didn’t work. But while crossing from England by ship his two young sons had so successfully traumatized a young vicar named Reverend Nathaniel White that he spent the rest of his career persecuting Norwood in any small way he could think of.

Meanwhile a man named Jean Picard used an incredibly complicated method of triangulation using the moons of Jupiter to arrive at a more accurate figure of 110.46.
But it was based of the assumption that the earth was a perfect sphere which Newton now said it was not. According to him the earths spin made it bulge near the equator so a degree was longer at the poles and shorter near the equator.




The Wooden Tri Plane

Many years ago I visited a shop to buy a walkman which cost about 700 Rupees. In the same shelf there was a plane that had a price tag of 2500 Rupees. I asked the salesman what it was and he showed it to me. It was a small model Aero-plane with a wing span of just 5 inches. It was not a toy for it was an exact model and had to be carefully assembled together. I wondered who on earth would buy such a thing, and then I realized it was a collectors item. Perhaps a man who worked for an Airline as an Engineer would use it to show his friends about a plane he used to repair, or perhaps the retired Air Force General would keep it on his table, or a collector who had a fascination with planes.

I decided to make a plane like it with wood and sell it for 1500 Rupees. The trouble is I knew nothing at all about woodworking, and I didn’t know anyone whom I could ask. But in the library I found a book about woodworking, it was a wonderfully written book with clear pictures. The tools you need are simple. There is the hand saw which is used to cut planks but this is usually not needed when making small items because the wood can be cut to size in the wood mill. But its cousin a small saw that resembles a hacksaw but is much smaller and cheaper than it, is still needed. The chisel which is used to sculpt wood by hitting the handle with a hammer or applying pressure is a basic tool for woodworking. (But I didn’t use it much for I used the saw to cut the wood to size and the Rasp to shape it). A rasp which is actually a sought of file, but with bigger grooving. When used in a similar way to a file it scrapes off wood very efficiently. Although it was not mentioned in the book I found the normal file, which is usually used only on metal very useful for smoothing the surface. And the vice which is tightened to the table is used to hold the wood firmly when cutting it with the saw, or working on it with another tool. The vice is usually quite a heavy tool, but a small vice which cost only about 250 rupees is perfectly adequate for this purpose. A hand drill is useful, and of course the hammer which was already there.

I wondered where I could buy these tools, and found a stretch of road about a kilometer long, and on both sides of the road there are shops that sell only wood working tools. I bought all the tools I need for less than 1000 Rupees. I found it incredible that a man could start business in one of the main areas of commerce by reading a book, or by getting a few tips from a carpenter, and buy all he needed for just 1000 rupees. If as I hoped I could sell my plane for 1500 rupees, I would have most probably covered all the cost in the first transaction, but the tools would still be there so from the second plane onwards I would make a big profit.

The next step was to find a plane to make. I have an old encyclopedia which has pictures of aircraft and under “Historic Aircraft of World War I” I found a red Tri-plane (three wings) that particularly appealed to me. It was the Fokker Dr. 1 Tri-plane flown by Baron Manfred von Richthofen (1892-1918), the World War I German flying Ace, who as leader of an air group called the “Flying Circus” personally shot down 80 Allied planes. Richthofen served in the cavalry and infantry before entering air service in 1915, and was known as the “Red Baron” for the color of the plane he flew, but was shot down in aerial combat possibly by Captain A. R. Brown of the British Air Force.
I first built a plane to get familiar with the tools, considering I worked on it without a plan it still looked quite good. To build an exact model I needed details like the wing span, the length and width of the fuselage, size and shape of the tail fin and other details. I wondered from where I could find such specialized details. Incredibly in a book I found in the Library on Aircraft there are diagrams of planes giving these details. I drew these diagrams by hand and set out building the plane. I wanted to build a plane with a wing span of 10 inches.

I used mahogany for it is easy to work on. I bought a plank from the wood mill but it was too thick. There is a machine in any wood mill called a Plainer-thicknesser that is used to plain wood to the required thickness. I plained it to a fraction of an inch and drew the three wings on it, held it in the vice and used the small saw to cut it. Then I used the rasp for the slight tapering effect on the top of the wings, and the file to smooth it. In a similar way I cut the tail sections, the propeller and all the other sections except the fuselage from the same plank of wood. The tail sections were a little thinner so I used the rasp and file to make it thin. I bought a square pole and used the thicknesser to make it to the size of the front end of the fuselage. The fuselage tapers up and becomes smaller as it nears the tail section, all I had to do is to cut this part with the small saw and use the rasp and file to shape it.

The small teeth of the small saw cuts the wood rapidly and does not hold the wood and get stuck like the hand saw. The design simplicity of this plane is amazing, a big plank could be used to cut any amount of wings and other parts except the fuselage, and the fuselage itself is just a square pole, so any amount can be cut from a long pole.

Many people think to cut a wheel you need a wood lathe, but it is not so. I drew the wheel on the plank and cut slightly around the line of the wheel, and a few stokes of the file towards the line made a really good wheel. The axel was also made in a similar way, and I used the hand drill to make a hole and connect the wheel to the axel. The wheel and the propeller were movable parts.

I pasted all the parts with glue and painted it red, and when I painted the Iron Cross on the wings, fuselage and tail it looked incredibly good. I felt really happy at having made a model plane that actually had the same energy of the real Fokker Dr.1 flown by the “Red Baron.” The next day I wanted to take it to shops and show it as a sample of what I could build if they were willing to sell. But that evening a friend visited me with his son, and when I showed it to them, his son begged me to give him the plane. I reluctantly gave it thinking that I would be able to make another for now I knew how it was done. Soon after they left I felt a great sense of loss, and sadly never built a model tri plane again. For something more important came up and soon responsibilities overwhelmed me. And I lent some of my tools which were never returned. I feel the wooden Tri Plane is just at the edge of my hands, but I never really manage to make one. But one day when I am a little less busy I will make one for my son, and I am sure I can make many more and sell it at a profit.


The Cold Past

The ice age a terrible reality in Earths history has never touched men for we evolved and lived in an age of exceptionally mild weather. In 1815 a volcano erupted in a small island in the pacific, it took many months for the news to reach England but by the time it did the Thames had frozen. 1815 was known as a time of extremely cold weather, crops failed everywhere and there was widespread famine. In Ireland the famine and the associated typhoid epidemic killed sixty five thousand people. It was known as the year without summer. The year became popularly known as Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death. It was a dreadful year in every sense of the word, but incredibly the world wide temperature had fallen only by less than 1 degree.

The volcanic eruption had spewed so much ash and dust to the atmosphere that it blotted out the sun, and lead to weather that was the coldest in living memory. But the global temperature had fallen by less than one degree. If the entire history of the earth was two hands stretched wide and if the beginning of the earth was the tip of the left hand, all complex life forms would be in the right hand. And all human history could be erased by a single stroke of a medium sized nail file. During this unfathomable time span, ice ages have come and gone, wrecking havoc in countless eons in countless ages.

But why do ice ages come and go, why does the climate change so abruptly without any outside stimulus. The answer is both simple and complex. The earths orbit around the sun changes from elliptical to nearly circular to elliptical again, this leads to the coming and going of ice ages roughly once every eighty thousand years. But this alone does not explain an ice age for the earth’s orientation to the sun, its tilt, pitch and wobble also determine the frequency and intensity of an ice age. Changes in the suns radiation level could also trigger an ice age, and the worst ice ages are triggered for this reason.

In between the ice ages there are periods of extreme heat where both the arctic and the Antarctic melt completely. A world of extreme heat is as bad as a world of extreme cold. A super ice age could turn the earth into an ice ball and wipe out all life except some microorganisms. In this event evolution would take a different path, because it is largely a matter of chance, it is unlikely that animals of the kind found on earth would be created again, or as Darwin would have said Evolve again.

Astounding Magazine - Inspirational Short Stories

1

Author:R.J.Xavier

I would like to write in this magazine, articles that readers find interesting and useful. This magazine is about literature, the arts, science and history.

The Painter

Many years ago I tried my hand at painting, like most people who start out my paintings weren’t always good, and many of them were just plain bad, but of course they all looked good to me. I was one of the people in this world who can’t see anything bad in anything they paint, (many people have this weakness but for them it is not anything they paint but anything they do) and unfortunately I had this weakness. It was perhaps an inability to judge rather than a high opinion of myself, in any case it felt good to draw hundreds of paintings almost as good as Vincent Van Gough and a few even better than him. So I wanted to see the Director of one of the few companies that buy paintings. It was perfectly built building with several floors of Teak and it did not have an elevator but a finely built staircase. In every floor there were marble statues and paintings of every kind, oils, acrylics, water colors and drawings that took my breath away.

But there was also a certain coldness, perhaps it was the air conditioning, but the receptionist was so distant that I felt she would have regarded me a little better if I had worn shoes and worn my best shirt. And the sales girl though friendly was nervous, and I wondered whether it was my overly enthusiastic way of speaking or whether she was looking over my shoulder to see if someone was coming. And strangely there were few people in the building but the people who worked there. Assertiveness is something I was practicing on then, and I wanted to give the impression I was important in case they take my position lightly, so in my best voice I asked the sales girl how many paintings they sold everyday. She thought about it for a minute and said “the question you must ask is how many paintings we sell a month”. The manager of the fifth floor a big middle aged man with a thick moustache spied on me, perhaps he was worried I would lift a painting, he walked up to me and was engaged in small talk, but lost all interest in me when he realized that what I really wanted to do was to sell rather than buy, and he walked away without a word.

But what really surprised me was the director, a women of such singular plainness that I wondered whether she was perhaps the principal of a leading girls school who was a near relative of the director, who was standing in because the director was ill. She considered the paintings poorly and at first rejected one of the paintings, and seemed to accept the other three. She considered again and rejected another, and a while later decided all four were not good. She said that compared to the paintings they had on display some by well known artists two of my paintings looked childish, and the other two looked like posters so the customers might think they are not genuine paintings. What I really wanted to ask her is which customers was she talking about for in the three hours I spent in the building I hadn’t seen any. Then she said “I could accept it but they would end up in a corner in this building and probably get lost”. And then she said in her perfect accent “If you come again make sure you make an appointment first.” But what really blew the wind off my sails was as I was walking away the paintings tucked and heavy in my hands she asked in a very firm voice “weren’t you the one who called and complained about our water color paper.”

About three years earlier I did complain but I was impeccably polite and I did not know that she was the director. I went home disappointed and did not paint for another week, but then a strange thought came to my mind. What if the director was right, what if my paintings were really not good. And in any case assuming that she accepted it, and it was eventually sold to a customer (I get my 70 percent and the company gets 30 percent only if a customer buys it), I would make very little money on it because the materials used for fine art are very expensive, and in the island I live in few people would buy a painting and the few that do would pay very little for it.

I decided to paint something that would cost very little, but at the same time look as good as an expensive painting. I tried for a month but could not achieve it, but one day in a small shop I bought a pen, which was only as expensive as an ordinary ball point pen but the flow of ink was so fast that it could be used for quick drawings. I used this pen to draw on paper larger than the A4 size. I also developed a quick method of drawing which meant my output would be at least 5 drawings per day. My drawings resembled etchings and had a strange energy to them, and as far as I know I am the only person who uses this method of drawing.

When the director saw my drawings it only took her a few seconds to accept all ten. And a customer bought all ten the very next day. The drawings cost only a hundredth as much as my earlier paintings and I can draw fifteen times as many, and because it is so cheap almost everyone wants to buy. And the lesson I leant from it is “if at first you don’t succeed try again, but make sure you use a different method and also you never fail until you fail to try”

Paul Cezanne

Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) is one of the Post Impressionist painters that many people have not heard of. He was known as the “hermit from Aix” and he lacked confidence and resolve to become a successful artist. His friend Emile Zola, who later became the well known novelist, encouraged him to go to Paris.

In Paris he visited the Louvre and copied the work of Titian, Rubens and Michelangelo. Cezanne’s early work suggest that Impressionism which had broad prominent brush strokes, bright colors and which sometimes had a rough look that made it look incomplete even when the artists had finished painting was something that came naturally to Cezanne. For although he had a strong artistic sense, he lacked the discipline and concentration needed to paint like the old masters. But more importantly, according to Zola, although he did not pursue it further Cezanne had been a promising poet during his days at College Bourbon, so impressionism which is all about painting from ordinary life would have appealed more to him.

Portrait of Achille Emperaire (1867-1870), drawn when he was 28 years old shows a man sitting in a chair, it’s a proud solemn face but with a kind expression on it, it’s is perhaps how many people would imagine a good king to be, but the body is disproportionately small and frail. This is a portrait of a fellow student at the Atelier Suisse, a hunch backed dwarf who Cezanne greatly respected. Like most of his paintings at that time it was rejected by the Salon of 1870.

Some of his paintings look utterly ordinary, but are very pleasing to the eye. The Chateau de Medan, (1879-1881), was Zola’s summer house in Medan. It was painted when Cezanne was 41 years old and is a painting of a river behind which there is a riverbank. The river bank appears quite steep and climbs up to a group of trees and houses. These too appear to be on a hill which climbs up to a cloudy sky. The composition in this painting is simple. There is no aerial perspective in it, which makes things that are further away to fade. Perhaps this is a conscious decision by the artist to make it more interesting, or perhaps it was drawn in bright sunshine which reduces this effect. The brush strokes are prominent and are slanted to one side. The colors used are minimal. There is an inviting green for the trees which covers a big portion of the painting. There is yellow ochre for the river bank, and a lighter shade of it for the houses.

The river is painted as a shadow of the trees and the riverbank and so has only these two colors applied with horizontal brush strokes. The roofs of the houses are a dull pink, except one big house in the right hand corner which has a blue roof. The sky itself is cloudy, so is mostly white, with touches of light Prussian blue. The only other color in this painting are touches of yellow for the top of some trees. One reason this painting looks so good is we have all been to a river that looks like it, perhaps it was during childhood, perhaps we never really went there but saw it somewhere and imagined that we did. And this is one of the characteristics of Cezanne’s paintings which although sometimes painted in an utterly ordinary painting style manage to capture the interests of the beholder.

The Sea at L’Estaque, 1876, is an even better painting for in it the composition is also good. The landscape is diagonal to the sea, and jagged tree trunks are used to create tension. In it you get the strange feeling of sitting on the branch of a tree, which is on the top of a hill and looking down at the trees and houses and the sea stretching below. Like so many of Cezanne’s paintings it has even lighting, which makes it pleasant for there are no dark gloomy areas in the painting.

Cezanne’s Still Lifes are perhaps the best paintings of its kind by any artist. The gorgeously painted fruits, the tables, parts of chairs, the unarranged table cloth, the pots, bottles, fruit baskets are so skillfully painted that, when you see such a picture you get the feeling that it was partly copied or at least inspired by Cezanne. Basket of Apples 1890-1894 (detail) is a good example of it, but still it does have the drawback of not having the great emotional content of many of his landscape paintings.

Near the end of his life Cezanne did endless paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire. These had a strange cleverness to them. In these Linear perspective, which makes things that are nearer bigger and things that are far away smaller, seems to have been ignored but somehow the paintings seem just “right”. Perhaps different colors were used to get this effect. It seems clear that no other artist used this technique before or since. Among the last paintings he did was Mont Sainte-Victoire, Seen from Les Lauves, 1904-1906, it seems part abstract, squres of color could either be houses, trees or even rocks, the mountain itself is not clearly defined and seems to merge with the sky in the left hand corner. The sky has large patches of green, there are dark areas of the painting that could be almost anything. Taken in parts it is a messy painting, but when it is held at a distance and viewed in its entirety, it seems the most powerful, and the most beautiful picture he ever drew.

Of Singers and Songs

A song is the window to the soul and the singer is the person who takes us there. About one in 30 people can sing quite well. They can sing in a tune well enough that only an expert can find anything wrong. Their timing is good enough that only a good drummer can spot it. About one in 300 people can sing so well that even a professional can’t spot anything wrong with the tune but can spot other mistakes in the presentation. About one in 3000 people can sing so well that that even a professional would find it difficult to find anything “technically wrong” with it. So are one in 3000 people really good singers? The answer is no.

Some really talented singers sing in such an icy manner that it all but freezes the audience. They do not capture the emotions of the listeners or excite them. Sometimes the song is just plain wrong for a particular audience. The energy of the song is transferred by the singer to the audience, so a singer who does not have an enthusiasm or liking for the song does not connect with the listener. Some singers have unusual voices that somehow capture the imagination of the audience. Perhaps it is certain vulnerability in the voice that people like. So some really popular singers don’t have “good” voices in the traditional sense of the word, so in some strange way a bad voice can be an asset.

A colleague of mine goes to singing auditions all around the country but gets rejected in the first round every time. His timing isn’t perfect, and the voice is rough and low, and there are times when he is off pitch, but he sings with such enthusiasm that it is very entertaining. A singer like this cannot make a mark in the music industry, but for pure entertainment value he is much better than many well known singers on Television. And it is a pity for singing is all about entertaining.

What was said above about singers can equally well be applied for songs. Songs create a world of their own, sometimes happy and at other times sad. Some really good songs leave an after taste that makes you want to hum it on your way home. Some hit your mind in a strange way but it is difficult to say just how. Some beats make you tap your feet and some make you stand still and think. Lyrics play an important role in any song, some lyrics are really good poems, but some that have a direct meaning are still very good. Many of the Beatles songs fall into this category. Some are really short stories like Kenny Rogers “The Coward of the County”. It is true that different people like different songs, but a really good song would be liked by everyone, which goes to show that in a very fundamental way we are all alike. And when a good really good song meets a really good singer – we have a Number One.