Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Philistines …

… The Art of Destruction — Theodore Dalrymple. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

I remember it still: the gilded frames and pastoral scenes going up in flames. Only one picture was saved from the general conflagration and I have it on my wall, now worth, in nominal terms, at least 20,000 times what my father gave for it at Sotheby’s during the War (the Second World War, that is). Even at the age of nine or ten I knew that burning paintings was the wrong thing to do, and I asked my father not to go ahead. The wrongness, as I conceived it, had nothing to do with economics or fear for my inheritance, of which I had absolutely no conception at the time, although I would not be quite frank if I did not admit that I now slightly regret the frivolous disappearance in acrid smoke of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Be that as it may, I suggested to my father that if he didn’t like the paintings any more he should give them away rather than burn them. But my father, who was a brilliantly gifted but strangely flawed man, knew best, and he lit the fire. A nine or ten year old boy was wiser than a fifty year old man.

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