A Merchant of Venice: manners makyth man

Portrait of Iseppo da Porto and his son, Leonida (another Veronese currently in the National Gallery, viewed in my lunchhour). So affectionate; such wealth - the fur trimmed capes (of both of them); the boy leaning into his father's body, hands clasped and the lines of their arms mirroring the movement of the fabric. Da Porto was one of Vicenza's richest citizens. He was a silk merchant - responsible no doubt for the importing some of the fabulous fabrics worn in Veronese's paintings....
He looks an upright man. What makes a man? The motto of New College, Oxford: Manners makyth man - has to mean profoundly i.e. not that not merely manners but one's manner towards other people - the way you treat other people - defines you.
Struck by Alain de Botton's remark in A Week at the Airport about a pilot that he met during his stint at Heathrow. He is in awe of this man.

"I looked at his steady, well-sculpted hands and thought of how far he had come since childhood.
...
He, too, must be capable of petulance, of vanity, of acting foolishly, of making casually cruel remarks to his spouse or neglecting to understand his children. There are no directional charts for daily life. But at the same time, I was reluctant to either accept or exploit the implications of this knowledge. I wanted to believe in the capacity of certain professions to enable us to escape the ordinary run of our frailties and to accede, if only for a moment, to a more impressive sort of existence than most of us will ever know."

I don't 'want to believe' - I certainly do believe that professional callings can lift you into a different stratum of being: piloting hundreds of passengers through the air certainly does. People entrust their lives to you; literally put themselves at your mercy.

This is living in one sense at a frontier - negotiating a knife edge between life and death. Facing up to responsibility; putting yourself on the line.

Medics handle this too, of course, particularly people who deal with trauma injuries and heart conditions. Have to think that daily contact with this transports you into a different space: after repeated contact with sudden death, you have to think differently about the world.

Back at Mad Men: Don Draper has had a breakdown. He has become an alcoholic. Strayed across the line into dependency. A tragic dichotomy: he looks iconic, so handsome, so whole - and is apparently fatally flawed.

NOTES:
Haven't thought at all about people who help you travel - or enable you to travel. Pilots, guides, bus drivers....

A Heathrow diary and inner demons

Monet/Gare Saint-Lazare

There've been famous reviews of Alain de Botton but whatever one thinks about him -the jury's out as far as I'm concerned - his A Week at The Airport has interesting reflections on travel, in particular airports. We rush through unseeing, intent on reaching our destination - steeling ourselves to endure a crowded, long flight - imagining that we will be dicing with death in the air.  But airports can be extraordinary structures - like the new Terminal 5.

"The mighty steel bracing of the airport's ceiling recalled the scaffolding of the great nineteenth-century railway stations and evoked the sense of awe - suggested in paintings such as Monet's Gare Saint-Lazare - that must have been experienced by the first crowds to step inside these light-filled, iron-limbed halls pulsating with strangers, buildings that enabled a person to sense viscerally, rather than just grasp intellectually, the vastness and diversity of humanity."

Like Paddington - such promise of adventure - sunshine - the sea - home. More on this here.

The best/most appealing airports though, in my experience, aren't the ones that awe - but the ones that are small and in which you can step almost immediately from one world into another. Remember waving goodbye to someone at Nantes and watching him waving back as I progressed almost to the departure gate; Tobago  - stepping out into colour and heat, the blue sea in the distance, the departure hall with sparkle (purple tinsel - did I imagine this?) Newquay - just so small. From plane to car park and the drive home in a few steps.

Even taking a bus from the plane to the terminal at the end of a journey can be exhilarating, rather than a tedious final stage to the exit. It involves stepping on to the tarmac and actually making contact with a new or familiar land - a blast of heat as you step off the plane always exciting.

De Botton also talks about people setting out on holiday having made endless arrangements but forgetting that they themselves, their thoughts and inner demons, are going too. Shades of Cavafy and Ithaka.

"As David lifted a suitcase on to the conveyor belt, he came to an unexpected and troubling realisation: that he was bringing himself with him on his holiday. Whatever the qualities of the Dimitra Residence, they were going to be critically undermined by the fact he would be in the villa as well.  He had booked the trip in the expectation of being able to enjoy his children, his wife, the Mediterranean, some spanakopita and the Attic skies, but it was evident that he would be forced to apprehend all of these through the distorting filter of his own being, with its debilitating levels of fear, anxiety and wayward desire.....

We cannot enjoy palm trees and azure pools if a relationship to which we are committed has abruptly revealed itself to be suffused with incomprehension and resentment."

End the day with an episode of Mad Men: Don Draper drinking after his daughter discovers him in flagrante delicto with the neighbour's wife.  He is spiralling down into despair.

The bar here seems an entire world. It's in Manhattan and the best kind of bar. Dark. With a bank of bottles. At best, bars promise something - a journey - not just a drink. A passage to another frame of mind.