Days Like These

7 October 1942

ERNEST JUNGER,

writer and Wehrmacht

officer, writes in his journal:

"A strange gentle restlessness woke me in the early hours. Sometimes one feels that the body is trying to say something, trying to speak to us; but, with our artificial lives, we no longer understand its language, any more than we would the words and phrases of an old peasant who might come to town to explain to his employer the uncertain state of the harvest. We would soothe him with some money, as we do the body with pills. In both cases, what is really needed is to spend more time in the country - that is to say, closer to nature and the elements."

8 October 1791

MOZART

(pictured), writes to his wife about his new opera

`The Magic Flute':

"I went into the wings for Papageno's aria with the Glockenspiel, because I felt an impulse to play the instrument myself. I played a joke on Schikaneder [who played Papageno]: where he has a pause, I played an arpeggio - he gave a start, then looked off-stage and saw me. When the second pause came, I did nothing - so he waited and would not go. I guessed what he was thinking and played another chord. At that he hit the Glockenspiel and said "Hold your tongue!" Everyone laughed - I think this joke made many people notice for the first time that he's not actually playing the instrument himself."

9 October 1975

SIR PETER HALL,

then Director of the National Theatre, writes in his diary:

"To No 10 tonight for a dinner the PM was giving to honour Karamanlis, the Prime Minister of Greece. After the dinner we stood around chatting on - so one of the PM's private secretaries informed us - one of the most valuable Persian carpets in the world, woven about 1520. Ash and wine were falling on it. Roland Penrose [art historian, founder of the ICA] was in a high state of rage that there isn't one single piece of modern art or modern decoration in the whole of the public areas of No 10, just 18th-century portraits, discreet representations of William Pitt looking romantic, and even discreeter photographs of this century's incumbents on the staircase. He's right. But then the place is not designed to express any single person's taste. It looks like what it is: a temporary abode."