Why Steve Jobs will
be remembered long
after A N Wilson
The Cafe 2
Gay marriage
Get on yer bike
Beijing style, and
remember the kitchen sink
Alison Prince
TT racing on Arran?
The Cafe 2
To attempt to answer Bob Low’s question (19 October) the argument is about whether gay people who are religious, and whose church is willing, should be allowed to have a religious marriage; currently they are not. Some churches wish to do this, as an expression of their understanding of equality. That the Catholic Church should not wish to undertake such marriages is entirely consistent with its teaching; that it should seek to prevent other denominations from having that right seems to me ungenerous.
Peter Hancock
I’m reminded of a New Yorker cartoon. An old couple sit in their New York apartment. She’s reading the paper. ‘I see they are proposing to allow gay marriages!’ she exclaims. ‘The poor dears’, he replies – ‘haven’t they suffered enough?’.
Marc Lambert
Unlike many publications SR doesn’t have an online comment facility – we prefer a more considered approach. The Cafe is our readers’ forum. If you would like to contribute to it, please email islay@scottishreview.net
Today’s banner
An autumn day in Peebles
Photograph by
Islay McLeod
Why Steve Jobs will
be remembered long
after A N Wilson
Catherine Czerkawska
Too many people are bedevilled by demands that everything they do must
be ‘relevant’ to some external imperative, although what that might be is never quite defined.
However great their achievements at the peak of their powers, politicians and similar public figures tend to retire and fade away from the immediacies of public life. Musicians, actors, royals frequently keep doing whatever they do and are celebrated in death, even at an advanced age. But among politicians, there are a few notable exceptions.
I can’t imagine anyone forgetting about Tony Benn, but that’s because he’s still in the public eye, at the age of 86, and is known and loved by the young, perhaps even more than by the old. He’s become not just an icon, but an institution. Still being interested and involved and passionate helps. Anyone who can write about the ‘flame of anger against injustice and the flame of hope’ instead of the usual stuff about the world going to hell in a handcart, from an 80-year-old perspective, is quite hard to ignore.
As for Steve Jobs, he may well have faded into obscurity with the years, but it wouldn’t have been a foregone conclusion. He was an intensely creative person, who reflected intelligently on the process of design and still found the time to give good advice to those coming after. He designed beautiful and useful and desirable things, even when they weren’t absolutely essential. But then if you are reading this, you are presumably in possession of at least one useful but inessential gadget. He contributed to the democratisation of the online world, of which even the Scottish Review is a part. The downside of this is, of course, that we have become uncomfortably reliant on it.
Too many people are bedevilled by demands that everything they do must be ‘relevant’ to some external imperative, although what that might be is never quite defined. The market? The opinions of the latest focus group? As a Buddhist, Jobs spoke about the pursuit of wisdom, the need to know yourself; the idea that it is only by following your deepest intuitions, and finding out what you are truly meant to do and be, that you can contribute meaningfully to society. In an intensely material world, he and those who worked with him seemed to value a combination of function and style, things useful and beautiful, no less than William Morris in a previous generation. For who really needs a pair of hand-printed curtains or a stained glass window, any more than an iPhone or a Mac?
As I said in my earlier piece, it is easier to promote this philosophy if you aren’t short of a bob or two. But he had at least known what it was to be poor, unlike Rugby and Oxford-educated Wilson.
Finally, anyone who can say – in the face of his own death – ‘Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart’ – has got to be on the side of the angels.
Catherine Czerkawska is a playwright and author
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