Travelling around as much as I do, I am constantly being told ‘Mind the gap between the platform and the train’. The phrase recently became mutated in my brain into ‘Mind the gap between the pretence and the reality’, reminding me how much and how often we substitute the semblance for the real thing. The playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht said that reality is not about the way things really are; it is about the way real things are. There’s an important difference. If we try to represent the way a thing ‘really’ is, we are bound to invest it with our own interpretation. If, instead, we stand back and consider what is real, what is true, what is beyond controversy and beyond debate, we have the chance to arrive at something of real value.
     The famous painting The Ambassadors by Hans Holbein depicts two men standing nonchalantly, surrounded by emblems of wealth, prestige, substance and power. If we had not been told the title of the painting, we would merely see two men of the Elizabethan era, vaunting their own self-importance, eager to show their best side to the world, keen for the painter to show them in the grandest possible light. Once we know the title, we see them as specific personages, representatives of their monarchs or their states. Their power and significance is inescapable, and seems permanent.
     But Holbein is more clever than we at first realise. He has introduced a third level of meaning. Painted at the feet of these men is a dark smudge which seems incongruous, until we turn the picture to one side and view it from an angle: the smudge becomes a skull beneath their feet, and is a reminder of the transitory nature of human existence, of what the first degree lecture means when it says:

A time will come, and the wisest of us knows not how soon, when all distinctions, save those of goodness and virtue, shall cease, and death, the grand leveller of all human greatness, reduce us to the same state.