Nice to be a part of this, Nineteenth Circle https://www.nineteenthcircle.co.uk/ - a group of 19th Century-specialist performers who are producing a variety of interesting projects to expand interest, range and complexity in the canon of the 19th c - are doing video readings with artists, musicians and writers with their favourite letters from the time period. They asked me, very generous, and I chose the famous letter Johanna Schopenhauer wrote to her son Arthur, basically calling one of the intellectual giants of the modern age an annoying, big-headed jessop. I like this letter so much because Schopenhauer is the thinker who switched my focus to serious reading and thinking beyond instinct and conformity, and who put me into philosophy as an undertaking. Yet, within a few years, I had given that up, and it was precisely because of what was intimated in this letter. There is lived wisdom and there is a intellectual brilliance. It is a balance, I think. But I met, and perhaps was myself, lots of young Schopenhauers, who were very clever but not very clever. Schopenhauer’s philosophy is monumental, it changed the world, its influence on say Freud and Wittgenstein alone altered the modern mind, but that didn’t stop him being, when young, a proper fish. Lessons to learn.