![]() ![]() ![]() For a while I became kind of fascinated with the recurrence of this motif throughout the history of literature – the ‘ubi sunt’ tradition in Latin poetry, the prominence of ruins and decay in Anglo-Saxon literature, and then eighteenth-century poets like Schiller comparing the relative aesthetic poverty of the modern era to the imagined splendour of ancient life. And taken out of context, this disillusionment might be straightforwardly nostalgic – the ‘beautiful world’ might be imaginatively located in some specific historic moment – or it might be vaguer and more diffuse. Obviously the phrase connotes a certain disillusionment with contemporary life. In the autumn I did actually get to visit the Biennial, and it was around that time that I decided to use the same title for my book. That was during the summer of 2018, when I started work on the project that would later develop into this novel. That broadcast, an episode of the Saturday Review, used an audio clip of Ian Bostridge and Julius Drake performing Schubert’s D677, which I thought was surpassingly beautiful. I first came across the phrase when I was listening to a BBC radio broadcast about the Liverpool Biennial. May we start with the title of the book? (Your notes to the text tell us that it ’ s a translation of a phrase from a poem by Schiller, later set to music by Schubert and then taken as the title of the 2018 Liverpool Biennial, which is where it caught your eye.) I wonder what connotations it has for you, and what feelings and thoughts you think it might prompt in readers? ![]()
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