The Teacher's View

H Is For Hawk

2022-01-07T13:34:00.000-08:00

In these days of climate change and wholesale destruction of nature, we hang all hopes for the future on nature’s resilience. That resilience is the theme underlying Helen Macdonald’s memoir H Is For Hawk (Grove Press, 2014). Hers is a triangulated story shifting from her father’s death to the life of Arthurian legend writer T.H. White to Macdonald’s training of Mabel the goshawk, the medium-large raptor Accipiter gentilis of the title. If these seem like strange bedfellows, Macdonald makes these transitions smoothly and by the end of the book, weaves a story of personal redemption and self-discovery that is both wise and profound.

T. H. White also wrote a book about raising and training a goshawk, and Macdonald turns to the celebrated author’s book as a guide for her own journey with Mabel. He was not as prepared as Macdonald, and therefore his account is more fraught with difficulty and disappointment. Yet he is a touchstone for Macdonald, a connection to an experience with an animal who has as much to teach her trainer as her trainer has to understand this predatory bird. With a goshawk, however, there is no taming her nature; Macdonald, with great difficulty, simply trains the bird to follow her own instincts as a hunter of prey, and human and hawk learn to work as a unit on the hunt.

Macdonald’s father was a photojournalist who died in 2007. She recounts his passing while on the job, and how she had to go with family members to pick up his belongings and find his car, which had been towed away when he did not return to pick it up while covering his final story. Macdonald was very close to him, and the loss is almost overwhelming. Part of her own training is to learn to live with loss and grief. She recounts how her father taught her patience as the most important virtue. He tells her that one must be willing to stay still and wait for her moment, much like a piece of reindeer moss can survive “just about anything the world throws at it” and remain resilient. It is ironic that she finds herself staring at the moss when her mother informs her of her father’s passing.

The life of an Astringer—a solitary trainer of goshawks and sparrowhawks—is a lonely one, and Macdonald describes her daily life and routines with Mabel in poetic and deeply harmonic language. The setting of the book is the Brecklands, a place known as the broken lands, and the area lives up to its name. She clings to the words of Marianne Moore: “The cure for loneliness is solitude.” She tells us she has learned to hold tight and survive, much like the security of the jesses, leather straps that bind the hawk to the Astringer. Her twin brother did not survive the difficult birth that brought Macdonald into the world.

Macdonald is so good at distilling the wisdom she absorbs from training Mabel. She tells us there are two things she has learned about training hawks: the Astringer must learn to become invisible, and the way to a hawk’s heart is through positive reinforcement with food. Hawks are not social animals like dogs or horses. They are predators, and their predatory nature is bred in their bones. She equates training goshawks with “white-knuckle jobs” as described by her father. These are dangerous journalism assignments. Her father’s defense against the fear is to “look through the viewfinder” and stop being involved. Instead, become the witness. “All that exists is a square of finely ground glass and the world seen through it,” he tells her. His advice in stressful, dangerous situations is to be mindful of “exposure and depth of field and getting the shot you hope for.” Macdonald sees her father’s work in each photograph as “a record, a testament, a bulwark against forgetting, against nothingness, against death.”

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Rooted in her father’s philosophy is one that Macdonald also discovers in nature when training Mabel. The world is forever; we are only a blink in its course. Macdonald references Henri Cartier-Bresson, the great French street photographer, and his photographs of a decisive moment. A good photograph means being open to all life offers and in an intuitive moment, click the shutter to capture. If one misses the moment, it is gone forever. Our lesson is to live in that moment—no past, no future, only the here and now.

Throughout the book, Macdonald’s writing is poetic and beautiful. She writes: “There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realize that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realize, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, though you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of the space where the memories are.”

She also does not neglect the mythological elements of hawks and falcons, one that has played out over millennia: in ancient shamanic traditions in Eurasian cultures, “hawks and falcons were seen as messengers between this world and the next.” Mabel comes into Helen Macdonald’s life right at a time of need, and in working with this intense and intelligent animal, she finds peace and purpose in her life. She illuminates a culture that most of us never experience: training a fierce and intense goshawk to hunt with her human counterpart. In the end, Macdonald comes to understand the overwhelming grief and loss inherent in this life. Her story is extraordinary and extraordinarily beautiful.

January Reading: Humble Pi

2022-01-02T12:07:00.001-08:00

December Reading

2022-01-01T18:22:00.003-08:00

Difficult Light

2021-12-04T09:57:00.000-08:00

One cannot discuss Tomas Gonzalez’s work without invoking the name of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. In Gonzalez’s novel, Difficult Light (Archipelago Books, 2020), the influence is evident in his narrator, David, an aging artist and writer who has suffered a lifetime of tragedy and now lives out his days in central Colombia. He reflects on the ghosts that haunt him and the inescapable certainty that in blindness, his best work as an artist is behind him. He can no longer paint due to macular degeneration and has turned to slow and painstaking writing with his fountain pen and magnifying glass, leaving pages of his life for his housekeeper to organize. This spare and beautifully written novel is full of requiem and solitude and loss.

In the period of middle-age from which the central storyline is told, David and his wife Sara face a tragedy all parents fear: the impending death of their son, Jacobo, a young man suffering greatly from the horrific pain of an accident that has left him paralyzed. He and his brother, Pablo, embark on a final journey from New York to Oregon, where Jacobo has decided to commit assisted suicide. David and Sara wait by the phone, a hopeless and helpless vigil because they cannot accompany their sons due to the legal ramifications of what is to come; however, they support his wish to escape the unrelenting agony of his daily life.

These scenes are intercut with David as an old, nearly blind man living in Colombia without Sara, who has died. He walks in solitude through the gardens and orchards she tended, a silent memory of the scope and shape of his life, his family, his work.

In his private reflections, David finds unbearable truths. “It’s a cruel cliché,” Gonzalez writes, that “the last thing you lose is hope.” Pain is a constant and unrelenting companion, embodied in the physical suffering of Jacobo and the spiritual suffering of his father. Gonzalez fills his novel with the quiet sorrow of his characters. Their moments of relief are all too fleeting: massages help free Jacobo for brief periods so he can find sleep; the substance of David’s memories of Sara and their love bring some comfort to his bereaved state.

Gonzalez lingers on a quiet meditation of summer and light, something that is slipping away from his narrator. David reflects that “it was summer and the days were long. In summer at a certain point you have the illusion that the days last forever. I didn’t want night to come, because then I’d have to acknowledge that time was passing; that life was passing over us, crushing us with its wheels and gears.”

He has the epiphany that “Affliction is not motionless; it is fluid and unstable, and its flames, which are not orange and red but blue, and sometimes a horrible pale green, torment you sometimes on one side of the body and sometimes the other, sometimes forcefully gripping your whole body until you find yourself silently screaming like that Munch painting where a person is wailing on a bridge.”

This is the torturous physical pain of Jacobo and the psychic pain of his father, and neither can be ameliorated in this life. They must be accepted as the human condition—our lives are both torment and triumph over the torment. Jacobo describes his pain as someone “punching him endlessly in the stomach” or “crushing his toes in a vise.” These are pains from regions where the nerves have been severed, yet the pain persists. In this life, pain is inescapable.

In this quiet, elegiac reverie, while waiting for the inevitable death, we get to the heart of the human condition: to live in the realm of sorrow and suffering. Indeed, life is suffering, but it is in his memories of making love to Sara that David finds redemption. We love each other physically, spiritually, and in the end, that love will bring us home.

Jim Morrison of the Doors gave us the lyric, “No one here gets out alive.” Tomas Gonzalez begins his novel with William Blake’s words: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: infinite,” from which the Doors took their name. Both have purchase in this discussion of Difficult Light: if we are creatures fated to move from existence to oblivion, we must reckon with the clarity that only comes at the end of our journey. It is only in retrospection and reflection that we understand how and why we’ve lived.

Thanks-Giving

2021-11-26T13:50:00.002-08:00

In our lives, we are all the keepers of stories. These narratives tell us where we came from and who we are. They also hint who we will become.

Yesterday, we gathered with family for Thanksgiving. We told stories, some old and often repeated down through the years, and some new and tinged with sepia sadness at those no longer present, who live on only in our memories. They are our recent losses, those of blessed memory. Of course, we were also creating stories in present tense, right then and there: my grand-niece’s first Thanksgiving. Stories multiply and branch out from other stories to become trees reaching down to the past and up to the future.

As I watched people, I could read them as stories. Or, at the very least, I could imagine them as characters in a larger fabric of our existence: a crazy quilt of many colors, a host of fall-colored autumnal trees, strong and true.

Then, last night, I dreamed I told too many stories. I had revealed too much, giving away secrets and the keys to the kingdom. I awoke before the consequences of my storytelling were known.

But to reach maximum velocity, a story must put someone at risk: the characters, the narrator, the storyteller. Conflict and jeopardy rule the day in a good story. They are the building blocks, the central core of any narrative, in truth or imagination. Therefore, a storyteller must be brave. We cannot tremble in darkness, nor should we shun the light. Stand tall and simply tell it straight and true. Relish the recitation; revel in its revealing detail. The story is us. And the keeper of stories is a trust sacred to this world. For the storytellers and the stories, we give thanks.

Dear Memory

2021-11-19T18:02:00.000-08:00

In this haunting and luminous work, Victoria Chang gives us a series of epistles and found collages to address the melancholic remembrances of things past. Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief (Milkweed Editions, 2021) is an elegy and lament for the dead and gone: her ancestors, her teachers, and friends. She quotes poet Mary Jo Bang: “What is an elegy but the attempt / To rebreathe life / Into what the gone once was…” The book is filled with light and shadow, the pneuma of humanity and the human condition. More poetry than prose, the book is a connotative tour de force of what it means to be alive and to live with the breath of memory and regret.

Chang is a poet, a teacher, and program chair in the Creative Writing Department at Antioch University. She believes in writing that puts language at risk, allowing words to build into something beyond the self. She asks: “Can I be the hawk and the storm that tries to murder the hawk?” The question is fraught with danger. She confronts and sifts through memory and goes directly to how our lives often play out in the blood, the DNA of who we are, and what we do with our brief time in this human epoch. She documents the sorrow and grace of her existence, both visually and in words. “Perhaps something never happened if no one remembers it,” she writes. “Perhaps there’s no truth. Just memory and words.”

Coupled with her words are these haunting collages, many composed of documents and paper fragments of her past. She writes dialogue with her mother directly in the spaces on each picture as if conducting an interview. Other collages are family photographs, some with faces etched out as if demonstrating how they dwell in the shadows of her history. Collectively, the collages tell the parallel story; they weave into and out of the word-epistles. The letters and the collages are rare jewels. They both enhance and magnify the threads that bind the story together from word to image. Her poet’s sense of the spare and lyrical is ever-present in the art and the words.

Often, Chang’s language stuns us with its beauty and insight. “Maybe our desire for the past grows after the decay of our present, she writes. “When the present is more than we can hold, it turns into history. And the future turns into water. The water between your countries.” It is this water that her family journeyed over to find their destiny. Chang feels her place in America, but the book she creates also pays homage to those who made that journey and who, in turn, made her a unique part of a new nation, a new home. This is an immigrant story, and Chang pays artful attention to this most American of ideas. She wonders if memory is different for immigrants, “for people who leave so much behind. Memory isn’t something that blooms but something that bleeds internally, something to be stopped. Memory hides because it isn’t useful.” It is clearly the calling of the poet-artist to bring the memory forward, to shine light, muted or harsh, to illuminate the darkness of experience, of grief, of sorrow, of regret.

There are gaps in her family history that she does not fully understand and wants to explore. Memories, dreams, reflections, all kaleidoscope together in the form of questions she did not ask at the time, or did not find the answers to later. “The things that didn’t matter at the time are often the most urgent questions after someone has died,” she writes.

She devotes much to a discussion of silence and grief. What is not said speaks volumes. It is silence that cannot be undone, and in that way, Chang tells us, it is like death. The story ends when no one remembers the words, the people in the photographs, the significance of things. But the dead are wise. They know things. “By the time we die,” Chang writes, “we know everything we need to know.” Those of us left behind must wonder what the dead have taken with them. It is up to the living to remember the strands of the story and continue it.

Chang circles back to writing at the end. She recognizes that dragging a “not-yet-ready memory” into the light is often painful. It is difficult and lacerating. “More and more,” she writes, “I think writing is not a choice but an act of patience. An act of listening to silence, into silence.” It is in silence that, paradoxically, we hear voices. In silence, we communicate with the dead, with our own souls, and where the world is still enough to hear our own breath rushing in and out of our lives. It takes bravery and courage to listen to the silences and become aware. Victoria Chang models such heroism for us, and the result is a shimmering and beautiful book.

Anvils, Mallets & Dynamite

2021-11-16T10:20:00.002-08:00

Jaime Weinman, in his book Anvils, Mallets & Dynamite: The Unauthorized Biography of Looney Tunes (Sutherland House, 2021) takes a deep dive into the legendary and wildly popular Warner Brothers cartoons created between 1930 and 1963 featuring Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Sylvester and Tweety, and the irrepressible Foghorn Leghorn among a host of others. The cartoons were created to be the hors d’oeuvre to the main course of whatever Warner Brothers picture was scheduled at the local movie theater, but most of us of a certain age remember Bugs and company from Saturday mornings on one of the big three networks back in the day.

I have some specific memories of these beloved cartoons. While my mother slept in, I would take some money from her purse and bike to the local Alta Dena bakery for a dozen chocolate and a dozen powdered donuts. While my siblings and I munched away, we watched the Road Runner continually outwit Wile E. Coyote, leaving him smashed, bashed, and broken. We watched while Bugs dressed as a woman to seduce the rather thick Elmer Fudd and send him off to hunt Daffy instead of Bugs, thoroughly convinced it was duck season instead of “wabbit” season. No Beanie and Cecil for me, and Scooby Doo’s stoner act got old quickly. Bugs Bunny, the trickster extraordinaire, never seemed tired. Considering we were watching cartoons created in the 1940s and 1950s, our interest never waned even as we watched from the far future of the late 1960s and 70s.

Looney Tunes could be violent, and the popular characters rarely faced consequences for their actions, but we loved them. Weinman theorizes that kids did not always connect with Looney Tunes characters “because we know that nothing has consequences for them, and they seem to know it too.” I admired Bugs’ facility with words, his ability to con Porky or Elmer or Daffy, and always come out on top. Rarely is he flustered or thrown off his game. Weinman believes the cartoons adopted an “anything for a laugh” philosophy, which “isn’t what we expect of first-rate art.” Is a cartoon first-rate art? Arguably, yes!

Weinman goes on to write that “To celebrate the greatness of works of art, you have to acknowledge their limitations, the sides of the world that they don’t or can’t see. Looney Tunes cartoons leave out a lot of human experience, and speak to only one kind of mood. But what we ask of art is not that it tell us everything, but that it tell us something, that it have a style and a viewpoint that makes sense to us. Every good Looney Tunes cartoon has that.”

The book offers a deep and well-researched history of the cartoons, along with how characters were perceived by the public, which ones became popular, and which ones were eventually phased out. There were also several instances in their long history that characters were subtly, or even dramatically altered when different animation teams and producers took over. Many of the most successful characters had speech impediments exploited for humor, something in our more careful age would not fly. But these “vocal quirks” endeared them to audiences over generations. It is also interesting to note which characters the studio thought would be the breakout stars. For instance, they placed their faith in Daffy Duck as the definitive Looney Tunes cartoon character. Of course, Bugs Bunny changed that. The cartoons also attacked common themes in the culture, like hunting as a sign of manliness. Porky Pig destroyed that fanciful notion, as did Elmer Fudd in his hunting cap, chasing both Bugs and Daffy with disastrous results. However, Weinman points out that what makes Looney Tunes great is the ability of the writers and artists “to portray the maximum amount of comedy violence while still being charming, fun, family entertainment.”

Of course, the cartoons were produced during some of the most fraught times in the twentieth century, and they often reflected those crises specifically or tangentially. When the cartoons were combined into packages and sold into syndication, several were removed for their overt racism. They were singled out for their racist stereotypes and black-face gags, wholly inappropriate today and in the late 1960s and 1970s when they were a major block of Saturday morning programming for kids.

So what happened to Bugs and the gang? Well, the syndication packages were divided and reassembled and then redivided again. Many are available on YouTube. Check your local listings, as the saying goes. The characters did return to prominence in the Space Jam movies, the most successful project for Looney Tunes since the original Warner Brothers cartoon studio shut down.

If you are a fan of the cartoons, Jaime Weinman’s book is a must-have. For the casual cartoon connoisseur, or someone who remembers the taste of chocolate and powdered donuts on a Saturday morning along with the telescoping concentric circles receding into the distance with “That’s all Folks!” that marked the end of each cartoon, this is an insightful and interesting book, as much about childhood and memory as American culture and a rabbit, who despite the odds, always came out on top, the trickster heading off into the sunset, on top of the world.

Burning Boy

2021-11-07T19:07:00.002-08:00

What makes American writer Stephen Crane unique, according to Paul Auster, author of Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane (Henry Holt and Company, 2021), is the cinematic nature of his art. It is “as if each sentence were a small work in itself, a separate photograph or drawing to be contemplated for a moment before the next one replaces it.” This is “what one might call a cinematic style before the language of movies had been invented.” This is not a style found just in Crane’s masterpiece, The Red Badge of Courage; his cinematic style can be found throughout his work.

Auster attributes this to the way Crane saw his world. “Every sound triggered off a color in his mind,” he writes, and he found it strange that others did not have a similar reaction. Sounds could be colors, but he also found color in emotions and “various shades of thought. These responses were felt deep within and absorbed into Crane’s body, which was the site of a constant inrush of raw sensation, and not only can traces of these collisions between the outside and the inside be found all over his work, it seems perfectly plausible that a man with such a finely tuned nervous system should have been known for his darting, restless, inconstant personality.”

Crane left behind no journals or notebooks to let us know what he was thinking and feeling when he wrote and lived. Everything comes down to his writing—his journalism, novels, and most especially, his short fiction, albeit it an original story or a retelling of his life experiences. So Auster relies on the letters, journals, recollections and unpublished memoirs of others to fill in the considerable gaps in Crane’s life. He also devotes a sizable portion of the real estate in this comprehensive and exhaustively researched book to lit-crit analysis and evaluation of the writer’s oeuvre. His audience is “the invisible army of so-called general readers, that is, people who are not academics or writers themselves, the same people who still take pleasure in reading old standbys such as Melville and Whitman…” His concern is that Crane is no longer read by anyone anymore. Crane has a place in the American canon, and although he is best known for The Red Badge of Courage and Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, Auster discusses the full range of Crane’s work, including his startlingly dark and beautiful poetry.

Crane also died young of tuberculosis and other ailments that robbed him of life at the age of 28. “When an artist dies at such a young age,” Auster writes, “it is impossible not to wonder what kind of work that artist would have done later in life.” Auster convinces the reader that Crane packed a full life into his years, but they were not always pleasant. He battled constant financial jeopardy, and he wrote much of his work in a frantic effort to stave off the bill collectors and debts he accumulated.

Stephen Crane was born into a large family of fourteen brothers and sisters. His hallmark traits were stubbornness and absolute truthfulness. He did not take to college and found “Humanity was a much more interesting study.” He read voraciously on his own and worked as a journalist to get more experience in the world and to practice his craft. Auster sums up his style this way: “Crane’s obsessions and stylistic trademarks: an abundant use of color imagery to express both emotional states and sensory experiences, a gift for unexpected metaphors and jolting similes, an animistic view of the natural world (the trees, stones, and plants in the woods are alive), a dispassionate approach to character that posits the isolation of the individual in the face of an indifferent universe, and a close scrutiny of the metaphysics of fear, the same fear that runs through every paragraph of The Red Badge of Courage…” He did his best work when “he was afraid, trembling in his bones and scarcely aware of what he was doing—or why he was doing it.”

When writing a biography, one can become an apologist for the subject’s bad behavior. Auster does a little of this with Crane. He claims that Crane did not “hate people who were not like himself. He simply did not understand them, and rather than make the effort to penetrate their thinking or attempt to see the world through their eyes, he stood back and watched, either with indifference (immigrants) or fascination (Indians) but nearly always with a sense that the person he was looking at was alien to him, an inscrutable Other.” One would expect Crane to observe and report, the twin responsibilities of a journalist. He was also a product of his time.

Crane was a man with a strong creed to which he swore absolute fidelity: “we are the most successful in art when we approach the nearest to nature and truth.” Auster does an excellent job of getting to Crane’s “nature and truth,” even if the windows into the interior were limited to the work and his letters. He recognizes Crane’s obsession with death and dying. He offers up the central events of Crane’s life, especially when he nearly drowned off the coast of Florida, an experience that became the basis for his short story, “The Open Boat.” We learn of his consorting with prostitutes and his battles to be with his companion, Cora. He walks us through the final days as the writer slipped away, giving us his most poignant last words: “I leave here gentle, seeking to do good, firm, resolute, impregnable.”

Paul Auster demonstrates the value and necessity of Stephen Crane’s work. His writer’s philosophy to “strip it to the bone…” and “say as much as you can by saying as little as you can,” resonates today. However, Auster also reflects on Crane’s larger importance to our culture as he writes the last sentences of this book in the early days of 2020: “[Crane’s] books are being forgotten again. It is a dark time for America, a dark time everywhere, and with so much happening to erode our certainties about who we are and where we are going next, perhaps the moment has come to dig the burning boy out of his grave and start remembering him again. The prose still crackles, the eye still cuts, the work still stings. Does any of this matter to us anymore? If it does, and one can only hope it does, attention must be paid.”

Land of Childhood

2021-10-19T11:59:00.004-07:00

Claudia Lars, author of Land of Childhood (iUniverse, 2003), has constructed a memoir that evokes all the nostalgia, poignancy, and sheer joy of being a child in her native El Salvador. It is a warm and beautiful place, a sensual feast for the reader. Lars is one of the greatest writers to come out of Central America, and this book, along with her fourteen books of poetry, has been enjoyed by generations. For English language readers, this book, translated by her granddaughter, conveys all the richness and beauty of the land along with a plethora of memorable characters who enrich the story with their presence. Each one teaches the young Lars (real name, Margarita del Carmen Brannon Vega) about life and its truths. This edition also includes a helpful glossary.

The book is constructed in vignettes, scenes of daily life in the small villages in the Salvadoran countryside. Lars is a child of an Irish father and a Salvadoran mother, and her history is steeped in story. Each vignette expands the narrative until the cataclysmic finale and the end of her childhood.

She opens the book with a meditation on the old family house, the strength of its foundations, its “comfortable simplicity.” Guests come and go in addition to family members who have various roles to play in governing the land. Her first character is her grandfather, a “primitive being” in his simple life. His Indian blood makes him sensitive to those who have less, and he often opens his doors to wandering tribes looking for shelter. From these guests, Lars learns a lot about life. It is a peaceful, bucolic existence, with time for beauty and observation.

In juxtaposition to the slower-paced life of the old house is the smoking volcano, the rumblings, the lava-spewing in the distance. It is a reminder that at the horizon, something is always bubbling and oozing and threatening. The world is always changing. For children, though, this is the land of adventures, where every day is summer, and fruits and traditional dishes are plentiful. Lars learns the medicinal properties of plants and herbs. She watches her aunts cook and clean and keep the old house going. She studies her grandparents, the Indian grandfather with the more refined Spanish grandmother, a sort of yin and yang.

Her father is Patrick, an Irishman born in America. He is restless and was a rebellious child, growing into adulthood sailing around the world on cargo ships. He fell in love with tropical America, first in Panama, where he was given the title of “bachelor of the street,” and then in El Salvador.

This is a book about how children used to occupy themselves without screens and devices. Lars has ample time in her young life for wonder and investigation. She and her playmates find ways to entertain themselves. She loves books but she also loves nature and beauty. There are mysteries in her life, questions that will not result in clear answers, but the magic of the moment is appreciated for its own value. She recounts dozens of stories, like the one where her sister gets her head stuck in a metal, helmet-like soup tureen while they are playing soldiers. It is a moment of panic, but the episode offers its own logic and lesson. Since Lars had a hand in the mischief, she sustains a spanking by her grandfather (how would that go over today?), but her sister comes into her room late that night to offer a bouquet of flowers. “I didn’t want Grandfather to punish you,” she says. Lars struggles with her pride. She puts on a brave front and says the punishment did not hurt her. “Maruca placed her cheek against my lips, silencing my words and, after gently stroking my hair, quietly said good-night.” No one spoke about the incident in the morning.

Lars does not spare the darker nature of childhood, the bullying, the unfairness of things. But these are the stumbling blocks on the path to wisdom. Children must experience the dangers, the near-misses of childhood. That is the only way to grow up and become an adult. But this is an idyllic childhood, and the events as described lead to a resounding and frightening conclusion that takes her into adulthood.

Her final vignette is for her mother, a discussion with the dead. “I want to tell you—my beloved dead mother—words I dared not speak before, but that vibrated in the depths of my secrets like little bubbles of love. I regret not saying them sooner…Nonetheless, I know that silence, that guardian of dreams and songs, was never a cause for misunderstandings between us.” Her mother was the tranquil, flexible sounding board for Lars’ more stormy, childish explosions. She lauds her mother’s patience, and has come to believe that her mother embodied the “land of my first joys.” Those joys are evident on every page of this memoir. It is a gorgeous, heartfelt book by a great, underappreciated writer from a small country with big dreams. It is time to share this book with the world and make it required reading everywhere.

The Snake Pit

2021-10-16T15:39:00.000-07:00

Mary Jane Ward began a movement in America to examine mental health facilities’ far from adequate care. Her novel, The Snake Pit (The Library of America, 2021), did for those imprisoned in these facilities what Upton Sinclair’s book, The Jungle, did for the meat-packing industry. Her work influenced generations of writers who came after, including two who wrote the most famous novels of mental illness, Sylvia Plath’s, The Bell Jar, and Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. In its newest incarnation, the 75^th anniversary edition published by The Library of America with an afterword by Larry Lockridge, readers once again have the chance to immerse themselves in the frightening world of this autobiographical novel complete with a Reader’s Guide and documents from the notable film version of the book in 1948 starring Olivia de Havilland.

Virginia is the central figure and narrator of the novel. Other characters are shadowy ghosts on the stage of multiple wards. Each is distinct in behavior and attributes, but they are not fully developed characters. They flit in the shadows. Their indistinctness is a hallmark of Virginia’s view, one clouded by shock therapy and drug-induced lethargy. Larry Lockridge writes in the afterword that “In someone for whom the center doesn’t hold, other people…are insubstantial and disappearing.” Even Robert, Virginia’s long-suffering husband is “shadowy.” In consultation with the doctors, he is Virginia’s advocate, but we get only fragments of his life outside of the institution. What is he up to? Is he her advocate, or is he colluding with the doctors?

The book shifts the narrative with Virginia sometimes speaking in first person, sometimes in second or third person, often within a single paragraph. Her mental state is constantly in flux, and her illness makes her an unreliable narrator. Occasionally, she confuses her thoughts with her vocalization—is she speaking aloud or just thinking in her head? The interior monologue might have been voiced or not; her shattering realizations about her condition may be limiting her speech or allowing her to speak all too candidly. She is locked in the confusion of mental suffering, merging back and forth from clear light and a shadowy netherworld. For the first fifty pages of the novel, she is unsure where she is: a hospital, a school? Only in a moment of clarity does she realize she is in a ward of “women who were insane and she was one of them.”

In this place, the patients wear the soiled rejected clothing of previous patients. Virginia’s coat has a stain that appears to be vomit. She asks for her things, her clothes, her glasses, but she is repeatedly denied. When she is given her glasses, it is a reward she is told she has earned. The patients have few rights, few privileges, no privacy, and little comfort. They are treated like animals by the staff; the good nurse is an exception, never the rule. Every evening, patients are forced to drink paraldehyde, a hypnotic with a strong odor that lingers in their pores and permeates the wards. Each patient is assigned a job. Virginia must mop the floor but continually confuses the wet, dirty mop with the clean, dry one. She is too addled by her illness and treatment to remember which is which. The patients must line up to use the toilet booths. These are wooden closets with no toilet seats, toilet paper that must be requested from a nurse, and no privacy. Virginia is literally afraid of falling in. Time becomes fragmented in this surreal environment, and she is no longer sure when she arrived at Juniper Hill. Often these gaps in memory are the result of electro-shock therapy.

Virginia empathizes with her fellow inmates in their shared plight, even as they take cigarettes and food from her. She progresses from one ward to another, eventually landing in Ward One. Is this the last stage before she is set free? She is moved yet again to another ward. Nothing is clear except that she is a prisoner.

One patient Virginia connects with is Gloria, a friend and companion. But in the shifting of patients between wards, she loses track of Gloria until towards the end of the novel when she encounters her on the hospital grounds. She is changed, a gruesome shadow of the person she was.

In treatments and daily existence, the patients hope the nightmare will soon be over. But the suffering feels endless, a prison of one’s worst fears. Virginia comes to believe that “You could say anything here so long as you did not say the truth.” The patients try to act and say what they think their custodians want to hear just to be set free. Their efforts fail.

What has caused Virginia’s breakdown that leads to her incarceration? The answers come in fragments of Virginia’s shattered psyche. A fiancé who died, Robert’s best friend: did her substitute marriage to Robert lead to her downfall? Was the death of Gordon Timberlake the cause of the psychic implosion? Her treatment fails to get to the bottom of the situation. Virginia must try to heal herself.

Ward has some beautiful writing in all of this darkness. One night finds Virginia gazing at the night sky. “And the stars had been shining for the first time since last February. You can go along for weeks maybe months without thinking about the stars,” she says. “They are there, on clear nights, and you can look at them and say there is the Big Dipper. You may, if you are not in a hurry, hunt for the Pleiades; but you do not think much about the stars. They are always there.”

Virginia was a published novelist before her hospitalization, but when she is finally allowed pen, paper, and a typewriter, she can only imitate others: Hemingway and O. Henry. She has lost her own words in a kind of internal aphasia. She ponders the edge of the abyss upon which she stands, asking, “was there a time when you saw, as if at the end of a dark hallway, the light of the outside, a time when you knew you hung at a balance and that such a little push, one way or another, would determine your life?”

Mary Jane Ward’s summation of the plight of the mentally ill is so precise, so spot on. They are excluded from a world “in which sanity was taken for granted. In the world outside, people longed desperately to be millionaires, movie actors, club presidents and even…novelists.” Virginia was somebody once, and she can only hope to return to that life again. For now, though, she is trapped in the snake pit. Ward includes the source for her title: “Long ago they lowered insane persons into snake pits; they thought that an experience that might drive a sane person out of his wits might send an insane person back into sanity.” Virginia has been thrown into such a pit of vipers, but the shock is her discovery that she could get well.

In such bleak darkness, hope.

Time

2021-10-06T10:52:00.004-07:00

Art courtesy of Dreamstimes

“Wonder is the source of our desire for knowledge.” Aristotle

Time is passing. We know this. We feel it in our bones. We hear it in the work of great artists like Shakespeare. Whenever I give a workshop on time management, the room, virtual or physical, is packed to the rafters. Students want to know—how does one manage time? How does one fit all of life into a twenty-four-hour day?

The bottom line: we don’t manage time; we manage ourselves. As Carlo Rovelli and Alan Lightman tell us in recent books, time is not constant and is not what it seems. Time is part of “that vast nocturnal and star-studded ocean of all that we don’t know,” according to Rovelli.

In his book, The Order of Time (Riverhead Books, 2018), Rovelli presents the theoretical physics of time and the universe. He is the head of the Quantum Gravity group at the Centre de Physique Theorique of Aix-Marseille University. He begins his book with a simple fact: time passes faster in the mountains than at sea level. When the Apollo astronauts returned to Earth, they were older than the colleagues they left behind. This difference might be measured in nanoseconds, but it is there nonetheless.

We do not need to go back to the past to find accelerated aging among astronauts. A recent study utilizing Scott and Mark Kelly, twin brothers who are also astronauts, revealed that after a year in space, Scott was older than his Earth-bound sibling. However, after the mission, he quickly reverted back to match Mark. It took eight months.

Rovelli makes a key point that time bends with gravity or lack thereof. The closer one gets to Earth, all processes, including aging, are slower. If one were to travel to the edge of a black hole, the apotheosis of gravitational pull, time would appear to stand still. Large masses, like planets, slow down time in their vicinity. This leads to Rovelli’s next point: planets far away have their own time. However, it is more than just gravity. Light travels to us at 186,000 miles per second. If we were to look across the galaxy at a planet four-light years away from us, what we see through the lens of the telescope would be what happened four years ago. The way time behaves on that planet would add an additional wrinkle to the scenario. And this is not just a phenomenon of space; even across the room, we see the person waving at us nanoseconds after the wave because it takes time for the light to reach our eye and the messages to be sent to the brain, and only then is there recognition, and we wave back.

In pop culture, Star Trek, in all its iterations, is where most people encounter the narrative concept of time travel. The original series began with the voice of Captain Kirk defining the ship’s mission: five years to explore the galaxy. But on a five-year journey to the stars, that means five Earth years. On other planets in other systems, time might be faster or slower. So an interstellar traveler might return after five years but be 100 years older or five minutes older. We exist in our own bubble of time corresponding to Earth time. The rest of the universe moves to its own dance party. The conclusion is clear: time is not a constant and not a reliable measure across the galaxy. The whole question of when, meaning time, is more about where, as in location. Location and gravity determine time.

Aristotle was the first to ask about the nature of time. His conclusion was that time is the measurement of change and things change constantly. Rovelli draws the line between Aristotle’s work and Sir Isaac Newton, who believed time was an entity that runs even when nothing happens. In the end, what we know is that time is not definitive. In fact, past, present and future are not clearly delineated in the equations of the universe. Rovelli brings his thesis home like this: “the entire evolution of science would suggest that the best grammar for thinking about the world is that of change, not permanence. Not of being, but of becoming.” And all of it seems to be moving toward entropy. Clean laundry starts becoming soiled the minute it leaves the dryer. A clean house will become dusty again. It is the law of the universe. Rovelli says Einstein questioned the concept of past, present and future. Those designations might only be a persistent illusion.

To read Rovelli is to be both reassured that there is an order to the universe, and to be greatly disturbed at the immense size and complexity that eludes total understanding. Late in the book, he quotes Hugo von Hofmannsthal: “Everything slips through our fingers. All that we seek to hold on to dissolves. Everything vanishes, like mists and dreams…”

Alan Lightman is an American physicist who is both a scientist and a brilliant writer. His book, Probably Impossibilities (Pantheon Books, 2021), dovetails nicely with Rovelli’s work. He subscribes to the idea that the universe is moving toward entropy, and he discusses time’s arrow, the “forward direction of time is determined by the movement of order to disorder.” However, Lightman leaves room for the metaphysical in his study of the cosmos. He brings to the table the story of his own out-of-body experience where life is “a brief flicker in the vast chasm of time.” He goes on to write that, “My fleeting sensation included infinite space. Without body or mind, I was somehow floating in the gargantuan stretch of space, far beyond the solar system and even the galaxy, space stretched on and on.” He sees in this fever dream himself as a “tiny speck, insignificant,” a sensation that is both “liberating and terrifying” for him.

Lightman emphasizes that we are all composed of atoms. Our minds are collections of atoms “fated to disassemble and dissolve” at the end of our days. Yet after we are gone, we remain. Our atomic components continue on to mix with other atoms and form new life, new structures, always renewing and rejuvenating the universe. However, our consciousness ends. Because of that, he has chosen to live in such a way “as to maximize my pleasure and minimize my pain.” Science becomes life philosophy, and that the value of Lightman’s work in this book. It is not just science, but a humanist view. He breaks this down into two schools of thought: the Mechanists who believe that we are made up of processes subject to the laws of chemistry, physics and biology; and Vitalists who recognize a special quality of life, a spiritual force beyond analysis or explanation. This, then, is the soul, or pneuma, as the Greeks named it, meaning “breath” or “wind.” It is for the combination of science and spirit that I seek out Lightman. His work is transcendent and deeply moving for his humanity. I am comforted by the fact that everyone who has ever lived still remains present at an atomic level. We are part of everything there is, and in a sense, our atoms are immortal even if our consciousness is not.

This does not stop Lightman from questioning where the dead are now. This explanation of atoms free-floating through space-time does not assuage his sorrow and longing for those he has lost. On many days and on many roads, he finds it hard to fathom that they no longer exist and he can no longer communicate with them. Life is a dream, really, and Lightman cites no less an authority than Emerson: “Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to the illusion.”

This is the dilemma of conscious beings: we must witness and reflect on the spectacle of existence, even as our own light fades and consciousness dissolves. This is human truth, but Lightman does not neglect his science. If space goes on and on to infinity, he posits, there should be an infinite number of copies of us out there. “Because even a situation of minuscule probability,” he writes, “like the creation of a particular individual’s exact arrangement of atoms—when multiplied by an infinite number of trials, repeats itself an infinite number of times.”

Alan Lightman is a scientist, a physicist, and man who deals daily with star dust and the laws of thermodynamics. Yet, he is also a man, lying in a hammock, pondering the stars. Every book he writes is a winner, and this one is no exception. Following up on his book, Searching For Stars on an Island in Maine (Vintage, 2019), Probably Impossibilities again explores the plight of a human being in the universe. Along with Carlo Rovelli, the two books give us the science and the humanity, and we are richer for the journey.

A Friday Night Return

2021-10-01T20:53:00.000-07:00

AP Photo / Bloomsburg Press Enterprise, Jimmy May

Years ago, there were Friday night football games, the marching band, cheerleaders, the smoke from hamburgers grilling out back of the snack bar, and that was the end to another busy week in the fall of the year. Now, I hear echoes through the trees of the marching band and the roar of the crowd at my old high school just a few blocks away from my apartment. High school football and smoke in the air: nothing changes but everything.

“Notes on books, culture, and the life of the mind,” reads my blog tagline. Well, I’ve been overwhelmed by all the life lessons lately, frantically scribbling away in journals and notebooks but not for publication. What is this life? What will happen next? I could only ask my notebooks. I wanted answers, and until I found them, I did not feel I had the courage to speak. I had forgotten the prime directive of my own teaching philosophy: the questions are more important than the answers. The answers will always exist, but if one does not ask the right questions, the answers will never be found.

The last few years have been a crisis of faith for everyone. Most of us were left to ponder: where are we going? Is the spirit of America dead? What if we discover that the spirit has always been dead, that “all men are created equal” are just pretty words? Maybe there is no equality and no justice, no liberty and no allowance for freedom. Or, that we are slaves to our fears, our prejudices, our narcissism. To the immigrant yearning for a better life we offer only the whip or the gun. We sow the seeds of violence and celebrate the bloody harvest. We are unwilling to reach out a hand to those in despair. That is what we have become, a nation armed to the teeth against the Other. A people too selfish and narcissistic to see we are all dreamers; we are all here in search of a better life.

We should be striving for a more perfect union. Perfection may be unattainable, but like most sentences, in that one, the verb is the heart of the matter: striving. To paraphrase King, we may not get there in our lifetimes. We may never get there, but we continue striving. Always.

“I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen rain,” goes the lament. Depression is the black dog that follows us home and threatens never to leave. Anxiety wakes us in the middle of the night and disturbs our vague and restless dreams. “I grow old…I grow old.” We do and we are. We are old before our time. “Would it have been worth it after all, would it have been worthwhile, after the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets, after the novels; after the tea cups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—and this, and so much more?”

America is a colder place: 700,000 of us are gone from this autumnal world. Where do we go from here? The only answer, the best answer I have, is onward, while the ghosts flow in and around each of us and fall behind. We try to carry some essence of them with us but it is like trying to transport the ocean to the desert with only our cupped hands. It is too much to carry. It is a futile enterprise on the way down to our own dusty deaths.

Yet, there is hope. There is life and there is what remains. We are more resilient than we know.

At the dawn of the new year, my grand-niece was born. Charlotte Ileana, named for that patron saint of English literature, Charlotte Bronte. I have watched Charlie discover her world. In her face, I see my niece, her husband, his family, and my lost father-in-law. She has not dared to eat a peach, as Eliot writes in his poem, but she did try mango the other night with hilarious results. Mango and the world are her frontiers in these early days of her life.

So it is time to pick up that thread that connects us. The thread always seems ready to snap. Our humanity is always in danger of fading away. But this is life and this is us, and we are striving to bring about that most American of dreams: a more perfect union. That is the only struggle that matters now.

This is a time for wonder: “Do I dare disturb the universe?” We have no choice because we are alive and among the living.

As for the blog, look for more notes on books, culture, and the life of the mind. If I find a few answers in the smoke and fire of daily life, I’ll post those too. “Let us go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky…” Onward!

Be Brave

2020-10-30T12:00:00.002-07:00

Shores of Avalon

By Tina Malia

Be brave my love

The time has come

To cross the Tintagel Sea

The fragrant air, the apple blossoms

Have all been beckoning

And there we'll stand

Looking out upon the world that we've known

All fear will be gone

When we reach the shores of Avalon.

You'll be greeted there

By maidens fair

With eyes of the royal sea

In the garden they will braid your hair

With violets and rosemary

And there we'll stand

Looking out upon the world that we've known

All fear will be gone

When we reach the shores of Avalon

Feel the wind on your face

As we cross the stormy sea

Close your eyes, don't look back

There's nothing left to see

The other night you came to me

Like an angel you appeared

And we climbed the endless sky

And held each other near

And there we'll stand

Looking out upon the world that we've known

All fear will be gone

When we reach the shores of Avalon

Be brave my love...

There are wars and the utter silences after. We know instinctively when things are at an end. This is the moment, the reckoning. These moments cleave the present and the future: it is and then it becomes something more and life moves on.

So all fear goes. We take comfort in how many moments there have been as Earth loops endlessly around the sun.

Keep looking on. What's done is done and gone. Let it go; it was never ours to hold anyway. We are but travelers in this land, ghosts that pass through and beyond.

Mythology teaches us the mysteries of this life. These are the fundamental stories. What do we learn? Violence is our nature, and we must resist it; wars are inevitable; they are costly, and they rob us of our sons and daughters, and in the end, our humanity. Yet, without wars, we would have no heroes. We would lose our shot at taking up the flag of decency, of humanitas, which in the end, is the only flag that reigns supreme. To carry that flag out into the world is the only heroic act.

Somewhere in this world, people are being slaughtered. People are oppressed, brutalized, destroyed. For them, we stand. For them, we must be brave and confront the darkness.

In our dreams, we rise. We live our stories. We must be brave to sing the journey through and give full throat to our valiant spirits. We sing of the mystical island of Avalon and the Wise King as we wait for the return. We stand, waiting, for the Kingdom of Humanitas to come.

Living With Fear and Uncertainty

2020-10-28T12:44:00.004-07:00

“Knowledge is the knowing that we cannot know.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson--“Montaigne; or, the Skeptic”

Ralph Waldo Emerson would have made a great Zen poet. He lived through the Civil War, a time when America’s future was anything but certain. He also survived the early deaths of his father and his first wife.

As a student, he showed little promise and graduated near the bottom of his class at Harvard Divinity School. He was described at the time as “tubercular, restless, and already questioning the religion” he was studying. It was after his wife’s death that he quit the ministry and pursued his life of the mind.

The rest, as they say, is history. His collected writings run to forty volumes, and he is considered the father of Transcendentalism and American philosophy.

Sometimes, the smartest thing to do is admit your own ignorance. Begin in humility to learn, to study, to be open to the world. As Emerson can attest, it is a beautiful life in all its sadness and joy.

“When inspiration has become hidden, when we feel ready to give up, this is the time when healing can be found in the tenderness of pain itself…A warrior accepts that we can never know what will happen to us next…But the truth is that we can never avoid uncertainty. This not knowing is part of the adventure. It is also what makes us afraid.”

Pema Chodron--Comfortable With Uncertainty (Shambhala, 2003)

Chodron is a rarity: an American Buddhist nun. She lives and teaches in the cold and beautiful isolation of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.

Our journey in life is always fraught with uncertainty. Push on and persevere; since not knowing is our constant companion, let go of fear and trepidation. It is in the midst of uncertainty that the interesting stuff happens. See this period of change as an opportunity to grow and find wisdom. Never fear the better you to come.

“We fear many things. We fear illness and death. We fear losing our job or falling into poverty. We fear change—a new career, a new home, a new marriage. We may fear being alone, or we may fear other people. And then there is the fear of not being accepted by others—by our families and friends, our colleagues and neighbors, by society at large…fear is a tremendous and complicated power. It is silent yet devastating, leading to anxiety and ultimately, depression. When you are consumed by fear, your judgment is distorted; you become frozen by doubt, unable to make the simplest decision.”

Simon Jacobson--Toward a Meaningful Life: The Wisdom of the Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson (Harper Perennial, 2004)

Jacobson’s writing comes from the wisdom of a revered figure, Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson. His work resonates far beyond the constructs of Judaism.

Cast your fate to the wind. Let it go, let it fly. The engine of your intellect is fired by imagination in the face of fear and uncertainty.

There is a quote, attributed to multiple thinkers and passed around social media and into at least one film: “Things will be all right in the end, and if they are not all right, it is not the end.”

Embrace fear.

Embrace uncertainty.

Live large.

Blindness by Jose Saramago

2020-10-26T16:01:00.002-07:00

“If you can see, look. If you can look, observe.”

The Book of Exhortations as quoted by Jose Saramago

“Blindness is also this, to live in a world where all hope is gone.”

Jose Saramago

“Fortunately, as human history has shown, it is not unusual for good to come of evil, less is said about the evil that can come out of good, such are the contradictions of this world of ours…”

Jose Saramago

I just finished reading Jose Saramago’s Blindness (Mariner Books, 1995). I am tired of the destruction-of-society-and-culture narratives. Real life is terrifying enough; human behavior is too violent in reality. Fictional narratives can only heighten the trepidation and fear we are now experiencing every day.

In Saramago’s novel, a pandemic of blindness grips the world. The white haze comes on with devastating suddenness, and as the plague spreads, chaos ensues. There are no answers as to what this is or why it is spreading so fast. The military funnels victims into an abandoned mental hospital in a vain attempt to prevent the spread. The soldiers guard them from a distance and are not afraid to gun down the sightless as they approach the fence to demand food and water. The imprisonment is a colossal failure, the virus spreads, even to the soldiers, and the result is mass hysteria and human destruction. Inside the hell of the mental hospital, the patients brutalize each other—rapes, food hoarding, outright murder—and this violence becomes commonplace. Excrement accumulates in the halls and bathrooms; the people track it around the complex on their feet and clothes until every person is shit-smeared and defiled. Human degradation is the rule, not the exception. Of course, none of the victims are fully aware of what they are subjected to because of their blindness, but they are aware enough to know the dire jeopardy in which they find themselves. Only one character has sight, the wife of a doctor, a former ophthalmologist no less, who claims to be blind so she can stay with her husband in the asylum. It is through her eyes that we see the terrible conditions and dire circumstances within the various wings of the hospital.

Saramago writes in blocks of text without paragraphing of new ideas. The dialogue among the characters is linked together in single sentences and paragraphs with only commas separating the speakers, resulting in long passages of voices where it is sometimes uncertain who is speaking. No characters are given names. Instead, Saramago uses their occupations or roles in the story: “the doctor,” “the girl with dark glasses,” “the doctor’s wife,” and “the boy with a squint.”

The novel remains sickening and haunting, but it is a strange horror story that hits all too close to home right now. Exploring fictional sociological disintegration is not something to delve into during this time of real danger and crisis. Some may enjoy this, and certainly, Jose Saramago does cut down to the bone of human animalistic behavior. But he also fails to answer the fundamental question: what are we to learn from this novel? It is certainly not escapist fare, and philosophically, Saramago offers us the fragility of the human condition and Man’s inhumanity to Man, but he spares us no words of comfort or resolution—there is a sequel, Seeing (Harvest Books, 2007). Characters are simply trapped in this hellish landscape unable to regain their sight or equilibrium. It is a horrific world terrible in its scope and devastation.

The World-Weary Eyes

2020-10-24T14:48:00.002-07:00

Here is another tragic heroine of modern poetry, our Sappho, Anne Sexton. She died October 4, 1974, a suicide.

I think of the great Peter Gabriel song, “Mercy Street,” based on her poem. It is a dreamscape of horror and melancholy.

Of what do we dream today? What follows across the blue-black night sky? Owls and peacocks, and multi-lateral corruption of the soul. The night whispers the future, a story, one more to tell.

* * * * *

This is the only thing that matters, this pen scratching across the page. Others have written about this across the years, the fear, the danger, the loneliness. Here, there is nothing new. It’s just the banality of evil. Why are we surprised that the world is corrupt and dark? The world mirrors the human soul. We are the things we build.

We dream of the goodness of human beings, but is that who we are? We are a selfish animal. How do we rise from this muck? How do we climb out of the fetid hole? It will take a man and woman to bear witness. It will take bonding in action to create a better world. Then this good virus has to spread; we must become infected with the divine spirit of Earth and sky, tree and bird. We must feel the surge of the Earth. Breathe.

There is a life mysticism, the coincidental confluence of divine light and air. Look back into the persistence of memory. There is the human story waiting for us to pick up words like autumn leaves. Tell us, the world says; tell us again.

We take nothing for granted because evil is nothing if not resilient. We are living through a reckoning of American life; we are poised on the precipice. Do we fall into the abyss or experience a renaissance?

There is so much to read, so much to experience, so many stories to tell.

* * * * *

Anton Chekhov stares out from a photograph taken of him by his brother, slightly colorized. Arresting. Mesmerizing. Note the world-weary eyes. He is such an astute observer of human life, human foibles, human misery. I cannot stop looking at those eyes. All the Russian 19^th century novelists and playwrights offer stories that cut to the bone.

What is it about the 19^th century? The world became aware of Man’s inhumanity, his propensity for violence, his bloody intentions, his avarice, and deceit. It is as if the sin of Eden finally came to its ultimate, evil fruition, and was followed by the descent into bloody desecration in the great wars of mammoth machines and bombs and waves of bloodshed in the 20^th century. Welcome to hell on Earth.

As a traveler, I would like to make it a regular stop on the time-line railroad to see that 19^th century world. The morale of America must have been at the same level, or lower, than it is now. The world must have been in just as much jeopardy. The human animal must have been just as much of a threat. Man has always been a threat. In the 19^th century, he was redeemed, at least in part, by Emerson, Thoreau, the great poets and seers of an age. We need such an age again.

History should be taught that way: put on the virtual reality goggles and walk the streets of America; see Yosemite Valley as the Indigenous People did, before white men and industry tried to ransom it off into development hell. Walk the Civil War battlefields then and now. Compare. Never again.

So much history takes place in a single area. What if we could see it all at once, like some high-tech diorama. Questions: why is America such a violent place, and where does this violence originate? William Blake would argue human violence and cruelty originate not in nature, but in the human brain.

The 19^th century feels like a watershed moment, a confluence of everything: philosophy, reason, religion, nature, human endeavor, art, literature, and culture. We cannot discount evil; human treachery is always with us.

Chekhov’s eyes tell us he knew this; he saw it. That is what makes him so compelling to read. He bore witness to an age, and his stories live.

Anne Sexton: “In my dream, / drilling into the marrow / of my entire bone, / my real dream, / I’m walking up and down Beacon Hill / searching for a street sign— / namely MERCY STREET. / Not there.”

We Are All The Catcher In The Rye Now

2020-10-09T17:37:00.001-07:00

“Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around—nobody big, I mean—except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be.”

Holden Caufield from J.D. Salinger's The Catcher In The Rye

Are we telling a story or are we careening downhill hellbent on sailing off a cliff? Is the death march to destruction a kind of nihilistic event lacking coherence?

I really don’t know anymore.

Stories have plots and characters, heroes, and villains. Our current story has one, incoherent sociopath who defies all logic. He is the villain without conscience. He is the priest who worships himself and chaos.

His chief acolyte bleeds from his eyes and has flies in his hair. What a spectacle! What a great, villainous sidekick to evil incarnate.

The plot, however, makes no sense.

These evil-doers don’t measure up. They are not smart enough to be coherent. The garage-sale Mussolini and his stuffed shirt fly-boy cannot even get on the same page.

Seduced by the dark side? That denotes consideration and movement. No, they are a discordant cacophony of emptiness. They know no other dance except the single-dimension danse macabre. They strut and preen and bluster through the hall to peals of laughter and pungent ridicule. They have their impotent, flaccid henchmen, stiff-arming their allegiance to their own hollow-king.

Sound and fury, signifying nothing. These are men without a country; these are rebels without a cause trapped in their own befouled gene pool. Separate them. Challenge them. They fall down. They cannot hold up. They are afraid of their own shadows. They think strength in numbers will save them. A white hood will keep their identities safe. Their masculinity needs a prop: a long gun or a big knife. Like their leader, size is everything.

History has seen these self-serving crybabies before. It never ends well for them. They are the waste kings on the dump of a larger, better, and more worthy story, a tale of hope and human achievement. They are the hollow-king’s hollow men.

Take your shiny boots and unearned military medals and go home. Practice your salute and your cowardice from the safety of your secret gardens. Your time has come to get off the stage. Your day, so short and murderous, is done.

We have lost so much—hundreds of thousands of dead; millions infected; millions, going back through history, enslaved, maltreated, brutalized, and killed. American innocence is dead.

But it is not too late to seek a better world, Tennyson reminds us. “We are not now that strength which in old days / Mov’d earth and heaven, that which we are, we are: / One equal temper of heroic hearts, / Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will / To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

Let us gather in a field of rye at the edge of a cliff, a silent army of the righteous, to profess our faith in the future, to dream our dreams of love and redemption, and to save ourselves from the fall. We hold in our hands a flock of white birds. Release them to the promise of the sky to consort with the angels. Believe.

Talking To Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell

2020-10-04T17:17:00.001-07:00

I spent a good part of last week reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Talking To Strangers: What We Should Know About The People We Don’t Know (Little, Brown and Company, 2019). His work draws heavily on facts and data to come to his astute conclusions about human behavior. The book is insightful and engaging. He explores coincidences, and he mines the connections that coalesce into sociological events and their consequences. “Prejudice and incompetence go a long way toward explaining the social dysfunction in the United States,” he writes. That is an accurate assessment in light of recent events.

Throughout the book, Gladwell follows a line of inquiry that can be best summed up: why do human beings behave the way they do, especially in their interaction and communication? He examines lying, specifically, “Why can’t we tell when the stranger in front of us is lying to our face?” He looks at specific cases, delving into spies and dictators who create their reality and believe their own lies. Fidel Castro and Cuban agents played the U.S. diplomatic and espionage communities. The former Soviet Union did as well. But, we also played them in return. Agents became double agents; spies in the upper echelon of the CIA were tasked with finding the identity of a highly placed mole in their midst, which in many cases turned out to be the lead investigator. A spy in search of a spy who was, in fact, that spy.

Hitler pulled the wool over the eyes of diplomats all over Europe. He fooled many British aristocrats who advocated for appeasement, much to the detriment and near collapse of their country. The Brits assumed they had a personal relationship with Hitler, and that he would honor that relationship by not invading the rest of Europe. Of course, he did precisely the opposite. All the information these diplomats and spies gathered on Hitler did not tip them off to his intent; instead, they turned a blind eye to his encroachment into other countries until it was almost too late to save themselves. He concludes with a powerful statement: “We have…CIA officers who cannot make sense of their spies, judges who cannot make sense of their defendants, and prime ministers who cannot make sense of their adversaries.”

In this study of how we read people, Gladwell says, one of our problems is default to truth. Despite blatant or subtle evidence, we assume the person we are dealing with is honest and trustworthy. That is never a safe assumption. Instead of applying scientific principles to our study of other human beings—gathering evidence and evaluating behaviors until we reach a conclusion—we “start by believing. And we stop believing only when our doubts and misgivings rise to the point where we can no longer explain them away.” To discard objectivity is ludicrous and dangerous. Trust no one should be our motto until they have earned our trust.

Gladwell examines a multitude of cases to support his conclusions. He begins with Sandra Bland, a young Black woman whose arrest for a minor traffic infraction in Texas explodes into a murder. He follows up with the Jerry Sandusky molestation case, an analysis of the plot of an episode of the NBC sitcom, Friends, the Amanda Knox trial, the Stanford rape case, and the interrogation and subsequent breaking of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, one of the most senior Al Qaeda members who masterminded the September 11^th attacks and planned several more attacks around the world. Then, in the conclusion, he circles back to Sandra Bland to thoroughly analyze the transcription of how a failure to communicate and deescalate the situation led to murder.

The attempt to comprehend the Other misses the nuances, or in some cases, the outright message the person sends in words and behavior. A person might say one thing, but behavior and speech reveal another intention. Transparency is key. Our facial expressions give us away and reveal our attempts at manipulation. People often display mismatched behaviors—Amanda Knox displayed the characteristics of guilt when she was not. Bernie Madoff exhibited confidence and steadiness with his clients while his pyramid scheme was collapsing all around him. Mismatching is another way we fail to pick up on the message conveyed. The last third of the book, Gladwell devotes to the brain and perception, and how our ability to pick up on specific cues can be altered by alcohol, drugs, and preconceived beliefs.

Talking To Strangers is an in-depth analysis of communication—verbal, physical, behavioral—and how we often miss the cues and tics that indicate a lie or deception. We give ourselves away with our expressions, our language, and our movements. Malcolm Gladwell offers strong evidence that nothing is as it seems, and coincidences and incongruences are not to be ignored. They tell the story even when we insist we are telling the truth.

Existential Dread

2020-10-02T17:20:00.002-07:00

With the late night-early morning announcement of the president’s COVID-19 status, we face many questions.

1. What other members of the administration are positive and showing symptoms?

We hear that individuals who traveled with the president are positive; others are negative, including family members. We also know, as of this morning, that Joe Biden tested negative. The important word from now on is transparency. We know a number of people are sick among the president’s advisors. That fact, in and of itself, is alarming. We need to know all the facts as we face uncertainty about who is running the country.

2. Is this Trump’s way of getting out of the remaining debates after his poor performance last Tuesday? Or, is this a way for the president to drop out of a race he knows he is losing?

Anything is possible when the administration is not forthcoming about the extent of this crisis. But here is the thing: Trump has locked himself into a losing strategy should the remaining debates take place. If he comes out and observes the rules agreed upon by both candidates, he looks soft and cowed. If he comes out with another shrill, hysterical performance where he allows no one to speak, the moderator or Joe Biden, he will lose votes. His only way out of this mess he created is to get out of the debates altogether.

He is losing the race according to most polls of likely voters. But I do not think he is ready to throw in the towel yet. His ego won’t let him. His plan has been in place for a long time now: call the results into question and scream that the election was “rigged.” He wants to foment chaos and violence so he can argue he should remain in power to control the uprisings that will ensue and to ensure his autocracy.

3. Will he emerge after a short period of time and say COVID-19 is not a threat and more of a hoax?

He has proclaimed this from the start. It might work to his advantage to declare himself sick only to rise again after a few days, a sort of “Jesus moment.” He is, reportedly, showing symptoms of the disease. If he is sick, and his condition worsens, that will disrupt his preferred narrative. Because he has been so reckless with his rallies, and he rarely wears a mask in public, it would seem true to the nature of the virus and its spread that he would eventually become sick. Science, something the president has held up for ridicule and scorn, is clear that this is a deadly disease easily spread from human to human. Again, transparency is key, and if the administration is not forthcoming, then we must rely on journalists to get the story and keep us informed.

4. Does the president’s illness threaten our national security and our financial stability?

Yes, and this is the most immediate threat. A president who is in quarantine or the hospital and showing symptoms of a disease that can be fatal to patients in his demographic makes our country weak and vulnerable at the moment. This is another reason for transparency and a clear signal of who’s in charge. The Constitution allows for a temporary transfer of power, but Trump has to let go of the reins and allow Mike Pence to assume his responsibilities. It is unclear if he is predisposed to do this.

The financial impact is clear even in the early morning hours when this story broke. Stock market futures declined almost immediately. In the economy, everything is connected. If this is handled correctly, with clear leadership and factual accounting, that will keep investors on an even keel, but Trump, even as he crows about his economic prowess, has not been a failure with the resulting unemployment and near-depression level decline. So as we move through this crisis, we can only hope that the market settles down.

5. Could Trump use this to postpone the election?

The president has said the election should be postponed until “people can vote safely.” There is no evidence that voting is dangerous as long as we maintain social distancing and wear a mask. Based on these previous comments, he wants to postpone the election and stay in power. This is something Rudy Giuliani tried to do as the mayor of New York after 9-11. Constitutionally, he cannot postpone the election, but that does not mean he won’t try.

Democracy is not a point of perfection. It is always a work in progress. Living in a democratic society requires diligence and constant vigilance to maintain the freedoms so often taken for granted. We are going through a period of intense growth and consequential challenges while also facing a referendum on the mistakes made in the past. It is our American reckoning for atrocities like slavery, violent racism, war, and destruction of our environment. We have elected a pathological liar who obfuscates and assigns blame for his atrocious missteps and incompetence. He is, by all measures, the worst president in American history, and we are left on the very brink of the precipice.

Poor Banished Children of Eve

2020-09-30T16:34:00.000-07:00

It is the dusky shadows of an ancient September. My grandmother sits on the porch of her house, reciting the rosary in monotonous, sepia tones:

“Hail Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy, our life, our sweetness, and our hope. To thee we cry, poor banished children of Eve…”

I was often pulled into this ritual. She would hand me one of her spare strings of beads, and I would take my seat in the autumnal twilight, sinking into the recitation, the circular rhythm. In the span of my childhood, I went from not understanding the words I breathed, to comprehending their significance, to finding them anachronistic. Yet, there is a comfort in prayer, a reassuring spirit in following through:

“Glory be to the father, and to the son, and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end, Amen.”

Except worlds do end, and begin again.

My grandmother is gone. The house is unrecognizable, altered by another owner. And I am middle-aged. The ritual remains lodged in the shrouds of memory. Yet, it is once again September. In September, we use to go to play at my grandmother’s house after school. That, too, is a strand of memory broken.

Our rituals have all been broken. This only adds to our feeling that the world has turned upside down. We do not leave our homes now. We avoid contact and protect ourselves. My ritual is to rise in the morning, go to my desk, bring up a student’s face on my screen, and work with her for an hour on her essay. Later, I will pull up another face to discuss her struggles in her classes, the learning strategies and work-arounds that will help her get back on track.

Despite all our devices, our methods of communication allowing one person to see another in pixels on a screen, we are lonely still. It feels as if the world is ending, but as my friend, William Michaelian, wrote recently:

“The end of the world is a strange and beautiful place. It keeps growing, and it keeps ending. And as it ends, it gives birth to countless new beginnings.”

To do this, we may have to let go of cherished rituals: family dinners, baseball games, the rhythms and milestones of the workweek, the long walk at twilight. We must adapt and change our colors, and recognize that we see the world differently now, and there will be new rituals to embrace. “And as it ends, it gives birth to countless new beginnings.”

I do not pray anymore. Mumbling words without the strength of conviction is an exhausted ritual I can do without. I love silence. If she were still alive, I would gladly go sit on my grandmother’s porch with her. I would tell her how the world has changed. She would tell me the torch has been passed. And then she would say her prayers while I take in the gloaming in silence, feeling the wind on my face.

I have been dreaming of her lately. Or, I should say, in the dreams, she is dead as she is in real life, but I dream of her house. I am there again. The house is empty, but the same as when I last was there. I am responsible for repairing and renovating it, for keeping it preserved. There are the gardens, the fruit trees, the lawns, the two-story house itself. I rise every morning at dawn to walk the property, a single house on three connected lots. I water the vegetables and flowers, mow the grass, prune the trees and shrubs in season. If there is something to repair, the materials appear, and I can put it right again. There are no other people in this dream. I am the sole survivor of some colossal ending. It is strange and discomforting. I do not leave the property, and a ten-foot wooden fence protects the place from intruders. I can see only the sky above. Nearby houses are shadowy and undefined. What kind of dream is this? Purgatory? Heaven? When does solitude become loneliness?

There is no one left to perform the ritual, no mumbled prayers to Mary, the Mother of God. I am not interested in continuing the nightly prayer. I am more interested in the Orthodox Jew, swaying back and forth in prayer. I am more interested in the Buddhist, in the lotus position, humming, gone into another plane of existence. I am interested in the Muslim, on his knees, facing Mecca, which may be a million miles away on the other side of the globe, yet he is tethered to it by a strong and indestructible fiber of the heart. Finally, I am the one who spans the distance and lands somewhere between agnostic and atheist. I know the world is a sacred place. I know that divinity lives in all things. And I know that we do not end. We are transfigured at the moment of death—we become light and air.

So I am thinking of past Septembers. We just observed Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, a moment we should all reflect upon, not just our friends in Judaism. The world needs to recognize the pain and suffering we cause each other, the way we are hell-bent on destroying who we are and what we have built with our own hands as well as the pulsating Earth beneath us.

My grandmother, in an afterlife of her own construction, is probably sitting on her porch in some other unreachable dimension, mumbling her prayers and letting the beads slip over her fingers, keeping count of decades and prayers. That is her path now.

I stay up late into the warm fall night, remembering all of it, the way we live, the poor banished children of Eve.

Let's Save Vroman's Bookstore

2020-09-28T12:17:00.001-07:00

Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena, a cultural landmark in Los Angeles, is in trouble and needs help. Founded 126 years ago, the bookstore remains the largest and oldest bookstore in southern California. Sales during the pandemic have dropped forty percent, threatening the future of the enterprise. Here is the message sent out today to customers:

Vroman’s has always had a truly special relationship with our customers. Today, we are asking for your help.

As you can imagine, the past few months have been the most difficult in our company’s 126-year history. Virtually every retailer—large and small—has struggled as never before. Our foot traffic and sales are improving, but still down almost 40%, which will not keep us in business. If Vroman’s is to survive, sales must increase significantly from now through the holidays.

We’re doing everything possible to provide the beautiful array of holiday merchandise you love and our holiday shop will soon be in place. We’re also working hard to expand our website and make more of our gift merchandise available for online purchasing and curbside pickup.

You, our valued customers, will make the difference as to whether we can continue in business.

In short, we’re asking our community to return to shopping at Vroman’s – whether online with delivery or curbside pick-up, or in-person safely in our stores.

Shop online with curbside pickup or call us to place an order
Return to shop in our stores with our new health and safety measures in place, understanding that capacity must be limited to ensure social distancing
Shop in-store on weekday mornings, rather than busy weekends or afternoons
Shop early before the December holiday crowds – the stores will be far less crowded in October and November

We also need your help to get the word out. Please reach out to your friends and contacts to share the following messages:

Vroman’s needs your support to stay in business
Please shop now for books, gifts, and gift cards with Vroman’s and encourage your friends and associates to do the same
Download these shareables and help spread the word! Use the hashtag #ShopVromans and post on your Facebook, Instagram and Twitter accounts. Don't forget to tag us! (Twitter: @vromans / Instagram: @vromansbookstore / Facebook: @vromansbookstore)

We first opened our doors in Pasadena in 1894, and we’re proud to play an important role in our community—as a place of gathering, culture, jobs, and, through our Vroman’s Gives Back program over the years have donated more than $750,000 to local charities. Our customers and community are at the heart of all we do.

There is no way we can adequately express to you our great appreciation for your loyalty and business. We are indebted to the many generations of customers who have made our 126-year legacy possible and we want to be here for you, for generations to come.

As we do all we can to ensure safety and convenience, we can’t wait to welcome you back. We truly appreciate your support during this critical time and always.

For a history of this great Los Angeles institution, here is an excerpt from their website:

Vroman’s Bookstore was founded in 1894 by Adam Clark Vroman. Born in 1856 in La Salle, Illinois, Mr. Vroman moved to Pasadena, California in the late 1800s hoping the weather would improve his wife Esther’s health. Sadly, Esther died two years later, and the brokenhearted Mr. Vroman sold his beloved book collection to raise the capital to open a bookstore.

Mr. Vroman loved books and loved giving back to his community. He helped to rescue some of the old Franciscan missions from decay, helped establish the Southwest Museum (now part of the Autry Museum), and he was a great supporter of the Pasadena Public Library. There’s even a story of him loaning money to a competitor, and helping him establish credit with vendors, so that the man could start his own bookstore.

Mr. Vroman was also a passionate photographer, specializing in scenes of the American West and his portraits of Native Americans, notable for the respect he showed the people. Ansel Adams called Mr. Vroman one of his influences, and Mr. Vroman’s work hangs in both the Huntington and the Southwest Museum.

When Mr. Vroman died in 1916, he left the bookstore to longtime employees, one of whom was the great grandfather of the current owner.

Vroman’s Bookstore holds an important place in Southern California’s history. For many years, Vroman’s was the largest bookstore west of the Mississippi, and it continues to be the oldest and largest independent bookstore in Southern California. During World War II, Vroman’s donated and delivered books to Japanese Americans interned at nearby camps, returning on several occasions despite being fired upon by camp guards.

Through the years, it has continued to be an independently owned family business, now consisting of two Vroman’s locations, two Vroman’s boutiques located at LAX airport, and an ecommerce site. In 2009, Vroman’s bought another beloved independent bookstore, Book Soup in West Hollywood, after its owner died and the store was in danger of closing.

Mr. Vroman's legacy of philanthropy continues into the present day. Throughout the years, the store has supported a variety of causes and institutions through food drives, holiday gift drives free hiv testing, bone marrow donor match drives, pet adoption days, mentoring and support for local girl scout troops, donations for charity raffles, school book fairs, and the Vroman's Gives Back program. Vroman's Gives Back is a charitable program that donates a portion of customers’ purchases to local nonprofits, including public radio stations, arts centers, family services, and programs supporting literacy, the homeless, and animal welfare. To date, Vroman's has donated over $765,513.59 on behalf of our customers.

Vroman’s is also famous for its world class author signings and events. The store hosts over 400 free community events a year including children’s storytimes, trivia nights, craft classes, bake-offs, and special launch parties, and has hosted such authors as President Bill Clinton, President Jimmy Carter, Irving Stone, Upton Sinclair, Ray Bradbury, David Sedaris, Salman Rushdie, Walter Mosely, Joan Didion, Barbara Walters, Anne Rice, Neil Gaiman, and Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

In 2008, Vroman's was honored with the Publishers Weekly Bookseller of the Year award. The annual award is chosen by a panel of industry professionals, and honors the very best bookstores in the country. Criteria for the award include clarity in mission and vision, expertise in buying for its target markets, innovation, successful events, and business efficiency. Vroman's has also been recognized throughout the years for our excellent customer service, our extraordinary staff, our extensive book inventory, and our wide range of gifts, ranging from stationery, cards, and fine writing instruments to jewelry, handmade gifts, fair trade merchandise, candles, purses, scarves, and much more!

Vroman’s is a Pasadena institution, a literary landmark, a community center, and a wonderful tradition. We hope you visit us soon!

Nicotine

2020-09-26T16:22:00.001-07:00

Vroman’s Books in Pasadena, the oldest and largest independent bookstore in Los Angeles, hosted a discussion last Thursday night of The Nicotine Chronicles (Akashic Books, 2020), edited by Lee Child and featuring new work by David L. Ulin and Joyce Carol Oates. All three writers were on hand for the discussion. The book is part of a five-book set from Akashic Books on addictions. Titles include The Cocaine Chronicles (2011), The Speed Chronicles (2011), The Heroin Chronicles (2013), and The Marijuana Chronicles (2013).

In his introduction to the book, Child writes that nicotine can be found in potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant, but one would need to eat an enormous amount of produce to reap the benefits of the drug. The only delivery system that guarantees maximum bang for the buck is to inhale the smoke from burning tobacco leaves. Do it that way, and the drug is flowing through the highways and byways of the body in ten seconds. Nicotine improves fine motor skills, attention span, cognitive abilities, long and short-term memory, lessens depression, delays, or even prevents Alzheimer’s, and decreases the risk of developing Parkinson’s.

Child said he moves through his day in a cloud of marijuana and tobacco smoke and said Thursday night that he could not function without them. For that reason, he wanted to edit this anthology. The project excited him because he could draft an all-star team of writers to contribute. David L. Ulin, who has edited several anthologies, said he liked editing anthologies because one did not have to come up with an entire book of original material. It is a true group project. Joyce Carol Oates talked about researching vaping and chose to write about the subculture of that controversial activity. She has never inhaled a cigarette and is a confirmed running and fast-walking addict. But she was fascinated by the subject nonetheless.

This series of five books is all about addictions. Alcohol, drugs, gambling, sex, shopping, behaving recklessly—all are part of the human condition. Child made that clear Thursday evening—“Marijuana is one of my necessary food groups,” he joked, and he was seconded by Ulin, who said Child was a “man after my own heart.” For emphasis, Child stated that nicotine is ferociously addictive, and for him, to get the benefits, he had to accept the delivery system as part of the bargain.

Oates addressed her addiction to running and fast-walking. Her day would not be complete without this exercise in her schedule. Ulin is also a confirmed walker, usually in the mornings. He bemoaned the recent fires around Los Angeles and the poor air quality, which prevented him from taking his morning stroll. He has felt grumpy and out-of-sorts over the last few weeks as the fires raged out of control and the air was filled with chunks of ash.

Ulin told a story of going to a party when he and his wife first moved to Los Angeles. Almost immediately, they realized they were not in the same “pay grade” as their fellow partiers. His wife, a so-called “social smoker,” went to bum a cigarette from two women standing off by the pool smoking. When she came back, Ulin noticed a look on her face. When he asked what was up, she said the two women were Faye Dunaway and Jacqueline Bisset. Child added that he has met many famous people when smoking, and he counts that as one of the perks. Ulin went on to say that as a small child, he thought four things made a boy into a man, as he observed from his father: shaving, driving, smoking, and reading. He is no longer a smoker, but his life involves all of the other activities.

As for Child, his lesser vice includes coffee—in fact, he has two machines on his kitchen counter. Without coffee, nicotine, and pot, he would not be able to function. This has always been the case for him. He started writing when he was out-of-work and needed to put food on the table. He took matters into his own hands, sat down, and created the Jack Reacher series of novels, and from there, his career took off. He attributes his success, in part, to his vices, and to paraphrase those philosophers, the Doobie Brothers, what were vices are now habits, deeply ingrained in how he works and moves through the day.

The trio discussed writing the stories in the collection, and the art of writing in general. Ulin says he often focuses on a single scene. He feels that is his métier, although he mainly writes nonfiction. Oates sees the short story as a single moment in time. They both hold up Hemingway as the model short story writer. Sometimes an entire world can be illustrated in three pages; that is what Hemingway was good at, and what all other short fiction writers aspire to. Oates said she recently taught Hemingway’s short story, “Indian Camp,” and thought it was the best of his short works.

It was an interesting and lively discussion, convenient because there was no traffic to fight to get there on time. The event was recorded and can be accessed in replay. Ultimately, this series of books centers on the fact that we all have addictions that get us through the day. Rather than taking up smoking, one audience member suggested in the chat that maybe nicotine would go well in brownies. Child responded that he would weigh 400 pounds if that were possible.

Nicotine’s delivery system is an unfortunate problem. Until there is a quicker way to get it—an injection?—we will have to make do with eating more vegetables instead of burning tobacco leaves, unless we throw caution to the wind and give in to our addictions.

Fighting The Wind

2020-09-24T13:55:00.002-07:00

I awoke from troubled sleep thinking of Miniver Cheevy and Don Quixote. In all of this “Make America Great Again” nonsense, America seems fixated on a past that never existed. There was no perfect America. America, and democracy, have always faced challenges and difficulties. It takes work to be free. We have, indeed, lost something along the way, but no cheap slogan will heal our divisions now. No stuffed shirt, with a fake tan, and bird’s nest hair will fix what is broken.

“Miniver Cheevy” is a poem by Edward Arlington Robinson from his classic The Town Down The River. In it, Cheevy spends all his time dreaming of the knights of old. He despairs his current situation, weeping he was ever born. He lives fully in this dreamscape past, which only exists in his mind: “When swords were bright and steeds were prancing,” as Robinson characterizes it. He clings to the “vision of the warrior bold,” even while he timidly approaches his real life, one far less colorful and exciting. He does not want to put the effort in to change; he just wants everything to be as it was, but what it was consisted of a fantasy. A Neverland.

He also traps himself in thought. He mulls over in his brain the dearth of heroism, the “gold he sought,” and his misery without it. He is the classic negative version of the man of thought, a person who spends so much time dreaming that real life in the present leaves him in the dust. The poem ends with a taut summation:

Miniver Cheevy, born too late, / Scratched his head and kept on thinking; / Miniver coughed, and called it fate, / And kept on drinking.

Don Quixote also dreams of a past that never existed. He longs for chivalry and the knight hero who vanquishes his enemies. Cervantes was genius enough to devise a new genre in literature, the novel. But his true gift to the canon is Don Quixote himself, a classic character, so much a part of literature and culture that his name has become a touchstone. Quixote is a fool, a dreamer, an anachronism. He refuses to see the world as it is, and instead, constructs a world of fantasy and imagination. Of course, everyone is familiar with the classic phrase “tilting at windmills.” In Quixote’s mind, those windmills must be challenged. Quixote’s idealism must be protected and nurtured, even though it is misplaced in time and truth.

Don Quixote ends his life with an epiphany—his magical world does not, could not, exist. We learn that a life of make-believe is no life at all. This makes Cervantes’ work not a comedy, but a tragedy. Quixote is both a sad figure, broken and disappointed by the end, and a painfully comic figure, a misguided nincompoop exposed by his fallacies and the wit of his sidekick, Sancho Panza. The windmills are unvanquished, as enemies often are in real life. We must live with our disappointments, our dreams, our Sturm und Drang of daily life. The struggle continues.

Why was I dreaming of these two characters from literature? It is easy to romanticize the past. “The world is too much with us; late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers,” another poet, William Wordsworth, wrote. We look around us and see the dark clouds on the horizon, the coming eclipse at noon. We fear the shadowlands, the islands of our desperation. Why can’t the world be the way we want it? Why are we so afflicted? We see ourselves as the biblical figure of Job, a righteous man tortured by Satan until he curses God for his misfortune. Like Miniver Cheevy, Job rues the day he was born into this valley of tears.

Yet, this is life. Good or bad, reality or dream, the past is past. We are here, now, and only in this moment can we act. Many people refuse to believe any action in the moment can alter what is to come. But that is our fate as finite beings, to “rage against the dying of the light.” We cannot “make America great again.” Historians will define the nature of epochs. We see the past as some perfect land, and we cannot help ourselves but want to get back to it. The past of our dreams does not correspond to history. And it is irrelevant anyway because it is gone.

I do not want to be Miniver Cheevy or Don Quixote. There are enough dragons and windmills to go around these days, and they are real. We must fight in the moment for what is sacred to us, what we want to happen in the now. If chivalry and honor return, it is because we have made it so. If we have the future of our choosing, then we have acted in the present tense. That is all we can do. To those who are like Job, no one ever said this would be easy. No life is free from sorrow and angst.

I do not want my life to be caught in the web of the past, afraid to confront the present and what is to come.

From Edgar Lee Masters and The Spoon River Anthology, come the words of his character, George Gray:

I have studied many times / The marble which was chiseled for me— / A boat with a furled sail at rest in a harbor. / In truth it pictures not my destination / But my life… / To put meaning in one’s life may end in madness, / But life without meaning is the torture / Of restlessness and vague desire— / It is a boat longing for the sea and yet afraid.

This is truth. The only response to it is to act now.

The Smallest Lights In The Universe by Sara Seager

2020-09-20T16:02:00.000-07:00

Astronomers tell us that every atom of our being originated with the celestial cataclysm of the Big Bang. And every element and fiber, sentient or not, also has its origins there. We are a multiverse of chemistry and matter, a plethora of particles and nuances. When we look up to the heavens on an end-of-summer night, we see ourselves reflected back in the light of the stars.

Sara Seager, in her book, The Smallest Lights in the Universe: A Memoir (Crown, 2020), has spent her career visualizing distant galaxies to find exoplanets, bodies that orbit distant stars, not unlike our sun, and who mirror the planets in our own solar system. “There might be thousands of billions,” she writes, all “circling our galaxy’s hundreds of billions of stars.” Hers is a study of light and dark, combing through space to get a clear glimpse of one of these exoplanets that might share some secret of what exists there at the very edge of what we see through the lens of a telescope. To find this mirror earth would require us to see the “smallest lights in the universe.” She searches for chemical signatures of life—water, oxygen, and other elements, but life elsewhere may not even incorporate the same elements as Earth.

Seager traces her life from the moment she knew she wanted to be an explorer of the stars. On a camping trip as a child, she leaves her tent one night to gaze at the sky above her. “My heart stopped,” she tells us. “All these years later, I can still remember the feeling in my chest. It was a moonless night, and there were so many stars—hundreds, perhaps thousands—over my head. I wondered how such beauty could exist, and I wondered, too, why nobody had ever told me about it.” She goes on to trace how in science, one investigation leads to another. She has the epiphany that “scientists are explorers,” and she must follow her interests up into the heavens.

An important person in her formative years is her father. He was a medical doctor who helped her focus on the things that matter, but she learns that “where you are changes everything.” The first great tragic loss of her life is when he is diagnosed with cancer. He tries to comfort her with platitudes: “Death is a part of life…We start to die the day we are born.” To the end, he supports her pursuit of her vocation. “When the door of opportunity opens, you have to go through it,” he tells her as she contemplates taking up a challenging position at MIT. As he approaches death, he pulls her to his side to tell her, “You are the joy of my existence. You are the best thing that has ever happened to me, and you have exceeded all expectations.” His loss profoundly affects Seager, and through her strong writing, impacts the reader as well.

The second major loss of her life is that of her husband, Mike. They meet and form a bond, one that helps her navigate her world. Later in life, she realizes that she is on the autism spectrum; in her days with Mike, she can be a bit standoffish and a loner. He helps her socialize, and the two often journey into the wilderness to hike and canoe. Together they have two sons, Max and Alex. Their family is an even-numbered unit, complete and whole. Mike takes care of most of the home duties leaving Seager to pursue her career. Yet, he, too, is diagnosed with cancer, and as he fights the greatest battle of his life, Seager struggles to hold things together. Her sons are very young, and she tries to shield them from the coming death. The boys see the toll the disease takes on their father. Seager wants them to remember their father. She tells them that “memories are important,” and “All things live until they are forgotten.” In the end, Mike’s passing leaves them an odd-numbered family, a group of three. From studying her own grief through the lens of life after Mike, she realizes that we do not lose the dead all at once. “You lose them a thousand times,” she writes, “in a thousand ways. You say a thousand goodbyes. You hold a thousand funerals.”

The saddest moment in the book and the most life-affirming is when she must let go of Mike’s memory to start a life with a new man, someone she was not looking for, nor did she think she would find. In many ways, he seems like a better match for her, or maybe it is just that she has been changed by the confluence of elements in her life. She is different, shifted, more light and sure of her world.

“I don’t think it’s an accident that there’s a mirror at the heart of every large telescope,” she writes at the end of the book. “If we want to find another Earth, that means we want to find another us. We think we’re worth knowing. We want to be a light in somebody else’s sky. And so long as we keep looking for each other, we will never be alone.”

The strength of Sara Seager’s writing is the way she takes us into her life. We gaze through the mirror lens to see the poetry of the stars, and through the light, come to see ourselves.

Stressors

2020-09-16T17:05:00.000-07:00

Out here in the smoke and flames, the California State University system has announced they will be online for the spring 2021 semester. Now the wait begins to see what the University of California system and the private colleges decide to do. There is Covid-19, the raging fires, the civil unrest, the increasingly armed and dangerous conflicts between citizen groups, and the abject, duplicitous administration in Washington. All this and the switch to remote learning: is it any wonder students and teachers are stressed?

Across the country, parents, students, and teachers are trying to figure all of this out. Parents are trying to balance their new roles as teachers’ aides while continuing to work from home. Teachers are dealing with their children at home while attempting to teach others. Older siblings, at the expense of their own learning and course work, take care of younger brothers and sisters so parents can work at home or in person at a job site. This means that Zoom sessions often have chaotic backgrounds and noise, with several people in the household logged on to remote classrooms. Bandwidth is precious and often limited, knocking students off in the middle of a lesson or exam. Students continually struggle for equipment, textbooks, resources, and a stable internet connection. Reported absenteeism is high while some college students are withdrawing and taking a leave of absence. In many cases, teachers must revise methods and curricula on the fly, leading to even more confusion.

The long-term consequences of all of this are clear. There will be lasting damage as Covid-19 continues to interrupt the focused, intensive, sequential education of students. Will these students return in a safer time? Will they have the financial resources to wait out the virus and continue their education? For students in their formative years of elementary education, we are looking at the possibility of a generation of disenfranchised, under-educated students who will go on to drain federal and state resources as under-performing working adults, leading to unemployment, discontent, and anger. There is a psychological impact in addition to the physical impact on a student due to the virus and the existential threats like fire and civil unrest. And when does civil unrest become a civil war? We may need an answer to that question very soon.

We are especially vulnerable to high unemployment for graduating college students, even with a paradigm shift from traditional majors like English and philosophy to job-ready majors like social work, nursing, and criminology. They will attempt to enter the workforce during a tighter economy and job market. Will graduates be able to find employment with pay equal to their qualifications and college degrees? Will they be financially secure enough to begin repaying their student loans? Recovery from the impact of this disease may not happen quickly, even with a vaccine and people returning to some sense of a normal life. Normal may be a relative term in the post-Covid-19 world.

There are far too many unanswered questions regarding what will happen between now and November, or now and January. The problems Americans face will not be resolved immediately with a new president or a different party in control of the House or Senate. To get out of this mess, we will need new, strong, consistent leadership and planning. It will take a herculean effort of ordinary people pulling together in a united front for the good of the nation. We have been able to pull that off only on very rare occasions in the past. Does America have what it takes to pull itself out of such a deep hole this time?

What we are in now is survival mode. We are trying to keep the ship afloat, but the water is rising. In the last few days, it feels as if our survival mode is slipping slowly toward anarchy.

With all of this, and trying to educate and be educated, I ask again: is it any wonder teachers and students are stressed?