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David Langwallner tends to your literary health: a personal prescription, with some aphoristic and aesthetic comment
We are all in varying degrees of lockdown, deeply worried about the sustainability and survivability of the profession and, more personally, of our good selves and our loved ones. In this crisis, we also worry about how to function in difficult if not incomprehensible times without abandoning our sense of professionalism and integrity. How to adapt and survive and provide an ethical and competent service remotely? Almost a contradiction in terms.
Let us not focus here on the awful particular and particulars to come. Our esteemed Chair with her customary sense of balance and rectitude has issued strong statements and positive suggestions about money, support, conduct of hearings, and health mental and otherwise.
Putting fawning aside, my mission here is to support this agenda in a different way. Japanese guidebooks to wisdom and simplicity and meditation help, as do turmeric and chili recipes. I have recently recommended to Chambers the splendid book Norwegian Wood: Chopping, Stacking, and Drying Wood the Scandinavian Way. You cannot cut wood in overcrowded conurbations and, with decamping like Wittgenstein to a wood on pain of potential arrest, how best to cope?
With restrictions and emergencies to come I suggest we read some books and texts, to use a fashionable vernacular. To supplement the advice of the Bar Elders this reading list for literary health for lawyers contains a personal selection of the popular and grand, serious and light. Films and music too.
The List
And a couple of bonus music tracks – the always-relaxing Glenn Gould Plays Bach or Bob Dylan’s Love Minus Zero.
Perhaps we could start a shared cultural competition to keep us occupied.
David Langwallner is a graduate of the Harvard Law School and the London School of Economics. He is a barrister at 1MCB and was 2015 Irish Lawyer of the Year for his work as director of the Irish Innocence Project.
We are all in varying degrees of lockdown, deeply worried about the sustainability and survivability of the profession and, more personally, of our good selves and our loved ones. In this crisis, we also worry about how to function in difficult if not incomprehensible times without abandoning our sense of professionalism and integrity. How to adapt and survive and provide an ethical and competent service remotely? Almost a contradiction in terms.
Let us not focus here on the awful particular and particulars to come. Our esteemed Chair with her customary sense of balance and rectitude has issued strong statements and positive suggestions about money, support, conduct of hearings, and health mental and otherwise.
Putting fawning aside, my mission here is to support this agenda in a different way. Japanese guidebooks to wisdom and simplicity and meditation help, as do turmeric and chili recipes. I have recently recommended to Chambers the splendid book Norwegian Wood: Chopping, Stacking, and Drying Wood the Scandinavian Way. You cannot cut wood in overcrowded conurbations and, with decamping like Wittgenstein to a wood on pain of potential arrest, how best to cope?
With restrictions and emergencies to come I suggest we read some books and texts, to use a fashionable vernacular. To supplement the advice of the Bar Elders this reading list for literary health for lawyers contains a personal selection of the popular and grand, serious and light. Films and music too.
The List
And a couple of bonus music tracks – the always-relaxing Glenn Gould Plays Bach or Bob Dylan’s Love Minus Zero.
Perhaps we could start a shared cultural competition to keep us occupied.
David Langwallner tends to your literary health: a personal prescription, with some aphoristic and aesthetic comment
Chair of the Bar reports back
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