Travesties
09 Oct 2022 - 29 Nov 2025
- Tom Stoppard play, and one of my favorites, I've seen it live at least twice and have the script kind of memorized. Maybe it's the name.
- I can sort of see myself in the narrator, Henry Carr, a pompous twit blithering on about his youth when he hobnobbed with people of significance – getting their meanings and memories all scrambled in the process.
But I digress. No apologies required, constant digression being the saving grace of senile reminescence.
I learned three things in Zurich during the war. I wrote them down. Firstly, you’re either a revolutionary or you’re not, and if you’re not you might as well be an artist as anything else. Secondly, if you can’t be an artist, you might as well be a revolutionary... I forget the third thing.
Artists have a chit from Matron – for life (paraphrasing)
My dear Tristan, to be an artist at all is like living in Switzerland during a world war. To be an artist in Zurich, in 1917, implies a degree of self-absorption that would have glazed over the eyes of Narcissus.