Crannóggy Island

This autumn's news is much like every autumn's. Wars drag on, prices climb, politicians quarrel, and the experts cannot agree whether the end will come by fire, flood, or algorithm. We scroll, we worry, and we go to bed feeling that someone ought to be doing something about it. Yet for Snoopy...   The Dance Goes On Snoopy is wonderfully subversive. The world is full of people who need a cause, a campaign, a grievance, or at least a strong opinion about the state of civilisation. Snoopy needs a pile of leaves. He dances in it, throws himself about with abandon, and finally announces, “I’m hooked on autumn!” Those who know him will know he’s hooked on all the seasons. We have made happiness an extraordinarily complicated business. We pursue it through self-fulfilment, personal development, lifestyle choices, and the careful cultivation of our own importance. Snoopy finds it in the garden, courtesy of a season he did not invent and a tree that has not consulted him about it...

  On the meaning of life, the wisdom of hindsight, and the necessity of dancing. Snoopy has been thinking. A dangerous habit for a beagle and a ruinous one for a philosopher. In one cartoon he tells Woodstock about a fruit fly with twenty-four hours to live, whose only regret is that it didn’t know at nine o’clock what it knows at the day’s ending. In another, wearing a scoutmaster’s hat, he leads a troop of small birds up a hill in search of an objective and, when one asks a question, confesses that he has no idea what the meaning of life is. In the third and fourth images, the world is falling apart, and he dances. Lucy is baffled. Surely, she feels, there are graver matters to attend to. Side by side, the four contain a fairly complete theory of the human condition. We climb hills without knowing why. We gain the wisdom to understand the climb only when the daylight starts to fail. Throughout, we have to decide whether we can enjoy ourselves before someone explains the whole b...

 

Six weeks without a post. Illness and family troubles have kept me occupied with the inconvenient business of being a human being. I had hoped to spend my time arguing about the state of the world, rather than being reminded of my own small place in it. Unfortunately, Providence has a habit of interrupting one's plans without first consulting one's editorial calendar. But I am back, and have an article to prove it. I trust the world has managed to muddle along without my assistance, though I cannot guarantee that it has improved in my absence. Normal service, such as it is, resumes below.  Apologies to the Cressie and Lain for the images. One fears you may both be overcome by an attack of the vapours! Introduction One doesn’t expect to find a statue of a naked, golden Donald Trump inside the European Parliament. Yet, for three days earlier this month, there he sat in all his glory in Strasbourg. A gilded figure more than two and a half metres tall, covered in 23-carat gold leaf...