Popped into the launch of Brian Turner's new book on Monday night: Into the Wider World - a back country miscellany.
Turner is a treasure and the book a treat.
By turns lyrical, provocative, caustic, curmudgeonly, truthful, and celebratory, it's a hymnal to life, to friendship, to the land upon which we live and so often take for granted, or worse, seem determined to desecrate.
It is also a corrective, an invitation to meditate on values, morality and society.
And it is, of course, skewed, as its title might suggest, by Turner's great passion, and his almost indecent eloquence in giving voice to the vast and silent landscape: he speaks here for the mountains and running streams, for rocks and forests and tussock-strewn ranges.
In short, for the back country.
But to more urban considerations, a performance of Carmina Burana at the weekend had me musing a little on the intersection of art and society.
If poets find themselves, doubtless sometimes by default, acting as the insistent conscience of the collective soul, then our symphony orchestras are the exuberant expression of a special and privileged communal heart.
Carmina Burana was composed by the German Carl Orff.
It requires a full orchestra, supplemented by an enlarged percussion section, soprano, tenor and baritone soloists, and a full choir and chorus.
On Saturday night, it was performed in the town hall by Dunedin's own Southern Sinfonia, the City of Dunedin Choir, St Paul's Choristers and the Southern Children's Choir.
You can understand why some people consider the orchestral arts the ultimate realisation of civilised society.
Saturday's concert was a wonderful occasion in all sorts of ways.
I do not feel qualified to comment on the finer musical qualities of the performance but at the most personal and visceral of levels, I can say that it moved me greatly and caused me to reflect on what such enterprise says about how we are as people; what makes us tick; and beyond the mere necessities of life how we choose to organise and express that: at one level, a phenomenon - based on collaborative interdependence and an intricate, interwoven collective interplay of talent, discipline, hard work - that speaks to all the senses, and that arguably, at another level, imbues that word "society" with real meaning.
Fills it up; colours it in.
Not all people believe in society, of course.
It was Baroness Thatcher, as prime minister of Britain during the early '80s, who famously said, "There is no such thing as society."
Many people believed it then and believe it now.
They look at their rates bill and they see only the bottom line.
The symphony orchestra is the perfect antidote to the self-interested individualism that lies behind that sort of sentiment and no self-respecting city should be without one; just as no town of substance should be bereft of a municipal art gallery; no place worth its salt can be without a town hall.
So it is good that Dunedin has them all.
We are very happy to have them.
Our far-sighted forbears provided them for us.
We should use them and nod gratefully to the rafters in appreciation of their perspicacity.
But we should remember that these are experiences enjoyed by a privileged minority - according to taste, means, culture, education and simply inclination - and underwritten by the largesse of the greater community.
Orchestras are quite possibly the most heavily subsidised of all the activities that we might broadly include under "leisure" or "entertainment".
This particular concert was generously supported by the National Business Review, but without major funding from Creative New Zealand (your taxes and mine), the Dunedin City Council (your rates and mine), the University of Otago (your taxes and mine) and the Community Trust of Otago, as well as a large number of private sponsors (your wages and mine?), the Southern Sinfonia could not function.
Different people attend different temples.
A great many people do not go to the symphony.
They rarely have reason or opportunity to attend the town hall; they do not frequent art galleries, yet year in, year out, this silent majority contribute through their taxes and their rates to these social enterprises from which they could be said to benefit in only the most tenuous of senses.
It was indeed a privilege to be at the town hall on Saturday night, to experience the symphony orchestra in full flow, in harmony, in concord.
Yes, concord.
Yet concord depends upon the widespread acceptance of an unwritten - and often unacknowledged - contract: one through which society recognises and embraces a full range of partly publicly-funded and subsidised infrastructure and activities.
And not just those prized and enjoyed by a comfortable and articulate elite.
Simon Cunliffe is assistant editor at the Otago Daily Times.
