READINGS OF THE WORK BY PHILIP HARVEY

Email from Max Richards, 5 th April 2011: This is the title of a short essay in Craig Raine, Haydn & the Valve Trumpet , Faber 1990. Read it, accept it, and call off your projected gathering on the topic! On the other hand, read it, demolish it and then do your thing... Just chanced on my copy of Raine in a box tother day, and only just now looked down the contents page. How goes it, anyway? To my surprise I spent time Sunday morning in the Castlemaine Anglican church, because my friend Lorender Freeman of Barkers Creek is a keen Anglican there, and an old longlost friend who now lives in C., was to be playing the cello with a small group for just that session. Bob Long, doctor and cellist. The session was for children first, and they sat on the floor up front and were engaged in conversation by the junior priest. The senior one is the great Rev Ken, whose surname will come to me in a moment. Ken has done much for J. S. Neilson in the past and introduces art and lit i...

 News reached us this weekend of the death of our dear friend Max Richards. He died as a result of head injuries sustained after being hit by a car on Wednesday morning, while walking his dog Pink in the Capitol Hill district of Seattle. To attend to the shock of this terrible news I have been re-reading many of his recent emails and posts, in order to hear his voice and sit with his steadying patterns of thought. In particular I have spent time thinking about Max’s long interest in religion, of faith lost or found. He gave a paper at the Carmelite Library in the last couple of years on this subject, as expressed in Victorian poetry. The last book recommendation he gave on Facebook was ‘Absence of Mind : the Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self’, a set of lectures given at Yale   by Marilynne Robinson, that takes to task the way secularists wish to displace religion with science. Her book is withering in its dismissal of the attitude that we can ...