Nelly and Monsieur Arnaud

"At least you're feeling something. I never made you feel that way."
"You wouldn't have enjoyed it."

Last night was the final offering of the Seattle Art Museum's spring film series, "Cinéma de Paris" -- Claude Sautet's 1995 film, Nelly and Monsieur Arnaud (final offering other than a make-up showing of another, earlier-scheduled Sautet film in June).  I left the theater more optimistic about humanity's potential for civilized behavior, if perhaps with less optimism for humans' ability to find lasting happiness with one other.

M. Arnaud is a retired judge and businessman, now probably in his sixties.  Nelly is a young married woman, employed part-time and burdened with a husband who has been unemployed for a year and who spends his days watching TV.  (He reports, one day, that a guy came by selling encyclopedias, and that talking to him was pretty exciting.)

Arnaud meets Nelly through a mutual friend, is obviously attracted to her, pays off her overdue rent, and hires her to edit and type his memoirs.  Nelly is fascinated by his intelligence, his restraint, his humor, and his erudition.  Maybe by his wealth, as well, although this point isn't emphasized.  She divorces her husband, who accepts her decision with regret, but placidly.  Placidity seems to be his defining characteristic.

The movie is a love affair between Nelly and M. Arnaud, a love affair that gives no hint of any overtly physical relationship.  Early in the movie, Arnaud assures her that she needn't feel threatened.  Nelly replies with deadpan humor that she sees no reason why she would be.  She has an affair with Arnaud's publisher -- a man who appears a perfect match for her -- but ultimately breaks it off because of her confused feelings for Arnaud.  Both -- elderly man and young woman -- love each other.  Neither can hide that fact, but neither seems able to make it explicit -- even verbally.

This is a movie of quiet conversations --  often humorous, often perceptive, always intelligent.  No car crashes, gun play, or thrashing around beneath the covers.  But the film is never dull, never boring.  It engaged my attention, my sense of humor, and my sense of the tragic -- and apparently those of the entire audience -- from beginning to end.

Eventually, as the relationship between Nelly and Arnaud seems to have reached an uncomfortable stasis, Arnaud's former wife -- twenty years after the divorce -- appears on the scene as a deus (dea?) ex machina.  Arnaud announces to Nelly -- hours before departure -- that he and his ex will attempt a reconciliation, in the form of a months-long trip around the world.  He will continue paying Nelly as she finishes work on his memoirs.  She will have full access to his Paris apartment.  She smiles and wishes them well.  He looks uncomfortable.

Nelly sits in the empty apartment -- all the emptier for the fact that  throughout the film, Arnaud had been selling off the enormous book collection that had lined the walls, apparently attempting to turn over a new page in  his life.  Nelly's ex-husband has remarried.  The publisher -- who had not reacted well to her breaking off with him -- refuses to see or talk to her. 

Nelly is left all alone, having sacrificed, one way or another, at least three potential romantic relationships.  When last seen, at the airport, Arnaud's former wife appears jubilant -- Arnaud himself, far less so.  As my viewing companion remarked, things didn't bode well for Arnaud's renewed marriage.

But this is the way life goes, Sautet shows us.  At least we can be civilized about it, and avoid deceiving ourselves.  We can enjoy what we have, while we have it -- realizing that it may be all too transient. 

Two thumbs up from this cinematically-uneducated viewer.

PS -- The high point in the film -- for this audience in the Northwest Corner -- came when Arnaud tells Nelly sadly that his grown son has disappeared to the ends of the earth -- he's off in Seattle, working for Microsoft.

Contested conventions?

Both Republican and Democratic party leaders seem upset by the chaos that's surrounded their nominating process this year, according to the New York Times.  They wring their hands, trying to figure out how to make everything go more smoothly in 2020.

Chaotic?  Not really, not by historical standards.  In 1924, the Democrats took 103 ballots to nominate John W. Davis -- a candidate no one really wanted and that few recall now.  He lost in November to a more vibrant and dynamic Republican candidate, Calvin Coolidge.

That convention was an extreme, but until very recently every convention was a contested convention.  Few states held primaries, and many state delegations arrived pledged to their governor or senior senator -- usually a holding pattern designed to give the state some  leverage in the ultimate decision. 

Today's politicians -- and public -- shudder at such "smoke-filled rooms" and behind the scenes horse-trading.  Maybe they're right.  But it's doubtful that a Donald Trump would have been nominated by party regulars negotiating over shots of whiskey.

Today's system doesn't really make sense from a theoretical perspective.  A political party is a private political organization of members with similar political briefs who supposedly place candidates reflecting their views before the electorate.  Primary elections transfer the choice of delegates from party activists to everybody willing to call himself a party member, at least for a day.  And -- as the Republicans note with concern -- in many states, the primary voter need not even register as a party member.  Independents, and even Democrats, are entitled to vote in those Republican primaries.

(In Washington and California, in all elections except presidential, political parties no longer have any official standing in elections.  Elections are, in effect, non-partisan.  The two candidates for each position with the highest number of votes -- regardless of party -- run against each other in the general election.)

The Times observes that politicians could go either way, four years from now -- give the general public even greater say in choosing convention delegates, in order to stoke enthusiasm; or, give choice of delegates back to party officials, at least to some extent, and allow those delegates to choose the candidate at the convention itself.  This latter approach restores to the party some control over its own destiny.

I lean toward the latter, primarily because an organization formed to promote certain political beliefs should be able to choose the candidates who accomplish that objective.  When political conventions were still meaningful, both parties still included members with a variety of competing policy approaches, but more or less unified by the party's overall political direction (i.e., conservative or liberal).  But the successful candidate represented -- usually -- the majority of the politically active members of the party.

The primaries may have been "exciting" this year, but the Republican party was captured by a non-politician whose proposed platform (insofar as any existed) poorly represented the rank and file of the party, and the Democrats came close to nominating a candidate who had never before called himself a Democrat.  Assuming without deciding that party government is good and useful, I can't believe that what we have seen this year has been a desirable approach to party government.

And you just want "excitement"?  Conventions of both parties never lacked for excitement -- even as recently as the 1960s.  If the networks have archived footage of the events of some of those conventions, they would make interesting and enjoyable viewing today.
------------------------
"Mr. Chairman, I move to postpone indefinitely enforcement of the vows and promises made in the preceding blog post."

"Without objection, it is so ordered."

Just shut up

I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.
--Blaise Pascal

Every writer needs an editor.  My last three essays were each intended to be a quick comment on a quirky thought.  Each turned out to be endless in length, turgid in style, and inconclusive in conclusion.  Having no editor to clip my wings, I resolve to clip 'em myself.

From now on, I'll make my point, and then stop.

Like this.*
--------------------------------------------
*(But we both know I'm lying.)

Deciding to do the inevitable

Should you go to law school or medical school?  Do want to go to Paris or to Madrid for vacation?  Do you want pie or cake for dessert?  These are the kinds of decisions we make daily, the routine (and not so routine) decisions that guide the direction of our lives.

But neuroscientists, studying our brains, have discovered something disconcerting.  The electrical activity in the brain representing, say, a trip to Madrid fires immediately before you make the conscious, supposedly reasoned decision to go to Madrid.  As an article by Stephen Cave in this month's Atlantic puts it:

The conscious experience of deciding to act, which we usually associate with free will, appears to be an add-on, a post hoc reconstruction of events that occurs after the brain has already set the act in motion.

These neuroscientific findings are but the latest justification for abandoning our traditional belief in free will, and accepting our scary role as part of a deterministic universe.  Everybody's life, according to determinism, is predetermined by the structure and physiology of his brain -- every decision, minute to minute, proceeding according to cause and effect. 

And since each person's actions are pre-determined reactions to his environment, including the actions of other persons, we must assume that all of human history has followed the same rules of physical cause and effect as do the events of geology and physics.  Human activity is thus of the same character as the orbits of asteroids and the erosion of creek beds.

Dr. Cave, a writer and philosopher who received his Ph.D. from Cambridge, devotes most of his Atlantic article to showing how, although we live in a deterministic world, it's better that we ignore that fact.  Or at least that people who are not professional philosophers should ignore it.  People behave better in many contexts, is one unsurprising conclusion, if they believe they are acting with free will. 

But if our lives are pre-determined, aren't we indulging in a free will fallacy by worrying that people will make bad decisions because they don't believe in free will?  It's long been the joke that philosophers don't believe in free will, but spending their lives writing and teaching as though they do. 

Which, of course, is exactly what Dr. Cave recommends -- let's pretend we do have free will. 

Some philosophers, Cave observes, such as Dr. Sam Harris, try to work around this paradox by claiming a distinction between "determinism" and "fatalism." 

When  people hear there is no free will, they wrongly become fatalistic; they think their efforts will make no difference.  But this is a mistake.  People are not moving toward an inevitable destiny; given a different stimulus (like a different idea about free will), they will behave differently and so have different lives.

I'm not a philosopher, and I don't grasp the distinction.  To me, it appears that if every human being's life is pre-determined, their effect on each other is also pre-determined.  From the first instant of the Big Bang, the glory of Athens, the Terror of the French Revolution, the style of Donald Trump's hair-do, and my writing of this blog were completely predictable, given full knowledge of the initial conditions.  To me, "fatalism" just sounds like a more emotion-charged version of the term "determinism."  But, as I say, I am not a philosopher.

Christianity has brooded over the same issue, in theological terms, for two thousand years.  God must have had full knowledge of his entire creation when he created it, including which humans would ultimately be saved and which would be damned.  Therefore, why should we strive earnestly for salvation?  John Calvin had one extreme answer; modern Protestants have a far more optimistic answer (if they even contemplate the issue).

The Catholic Church, steering a middle road, generally holds that predestination is a necessary result of God's infinite knowledge, but that prayer and striving for salvation are duties imposed on us by Christ's teaching.  It's a mystery, we are told.  Don't try to second-guess God, or imagine how his mind works.  Just do your best to follow the teachings of Christ.

Which -- come to think about it -- is essentially what Dr. Cave is suggesting to us in a secular, rather than theological, context.

Scientific research by an early adolescent

At the age of 14, in a bookstore in downtown Chicago, I made a purchase, the repercussions of which have echoed throughout my life.  The book was the memorable story of how our planet has been visited throughout human history by residents of other planets.  And of the personal encounter by the author with a tourist from Venus.

Flying Saucers Have Landed, by Desmond Leslie and George Adamski (1953).   The book, its cover somewhat disheveled with time and use, still sits comfortably in my bookcase, a lasting monument to my youthful inquiring mind.

Now just a minute, you guys.  You're laughing before I've even started telling you about this book. 

This is a scholarly work, which reviews ancient manuscripts that -- until this book was published -- no one had realized were actually descriptions of alien visitations to Earth.  The authors quote (in both Latin and English translation) a resident of a Yorkshire abbey who, in 1290 observed "a large round silver thing like a disk [that] flew slowly" overhead and scared the bejesus (sorry!) out of the monks.  Similar sightings became frequent from the seventeenth century forward.   Flying saucers (to use the vulgar popular term) have been around a long time.

Longer ago than medieval England, certainly.   How about the Hindu epic, the Ramayana? 

"Do thou speedily bring the aerial car for me."  Thereupon arrived the car, adorned all over with gold, having fine upper rooms, banners, jeweled windows, and giving forth a melodious sound, having huge apartments, and excellent seats.

Beholding the car coming by force of will, Rama attained to an excess of astonishment.  And the king (Rama) got in, and the excellent car, at the command of Raghira, rose up into the higher atmosphere.

Clearly, saucers may have been perceived as less sleek and modernistic, and more baroque, or even steampunkish, in those earlier times.  Later chapters discuss learnedly  similar references in the Sanskrit Samarangana Sutradhara, and in Tantric Tibetan works.

These analyses of the ancient texts are indeed scholarly.  They have footnotes.  True, I had difficulty locating the works cited, but what do you expect from a small town library?  I remember trying unsuccessfully to track down an ancient source called Ibid, but I was uncertain whether Ibid was an author or the title of another Hindu text.

But more exciting than this historical research was Adamski's personal account of his encounter with a Venusian at 12:30 p.m. on November 20, 1952, in the California desert.  While driving down the highway, Adamski suddenly felt an overpowering need to drive off onto a side road, because he sensed that someone -- a saucer man -- wanted to meet him.

I cannot tell you why. For those who have an understanding of the subtler workings of mind, no explanation is necessary. For others, an explanation might necessarily be long and difficult.

Well! That pretty much put me in my place, and I worried no more about what conceivable scientific basis might explain mental telepathy.

In any event, Earth and Venus eventually met.  The Venusian was about 5'6", weighed about 135 pounds, and looked pretty much like a Californian except for a high forehead, no beard, and his wearing of pants that looked a bit like ski pants.  Adamski was in a state of shock, I should think, but he nevertheless proves capable of devoting several pages to his observations of the fellow's physical characteristics and clothing.  They chatted.  That is, Adamski spoke in English, and the Venusian replied telepathically, although he picked up a bit of Adamski's English as they went along.

[H]e pointed to the sun; made one orbit, made the second, then touching himself with his left hand, he gestured several times with his right index finger toward the second orbit. 

I took this to mean  that the second planet was his home, so I asked, You mean you came from Venus?"   ... Then he, too, spoke the word "Venus."

For me,  that was the high point.  They then talked about the danger of radiation from nuclear testing.  And deeper subjects.  Luckily, although Venusian bodies die, just like ours, their intelligence goes on evolving out in space somewhere.  They believe in "God," but we earthlings have a pretty naïve understanding of that whole subject.

And don't worry about war with creatures from Venus . 

The presence of this inhabitant of Venus was like the warm embrace of great love and understanding wisdom, and with his departure I felt an absence of this warm embrace.

Of course, if Venusians were going to eat us, they might well choose to make us feel greatly loved in the years leading up to the Great Feed, right?  Like pet sheep or pigs?

I can't tell you more.  A 14-year-old has a limited attention span, and he has much to be concerned about aside from the comings and goings of Venusians.  I went on to other matters.  And later, data from Venus probes describing the climate and temperatures on the surface of the planet -- and indications that the atmospheric pressure on the Venus surface is nearly a hundred times that of Earth's -- made the suavely humanoid features of Adamski's Venusian friend seem vaguely implausible, and caused my mind to wander. 

But who knows?

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

I'm still waiting to hear what really goes on in Area 51. 

Overthinking it

In my 2009 essay discussing John Wray's novel, Lowboy, I made the following observation about the schizophrenic teenage protagonist.

But mostly, the novel is an immersion in the mind of a young man who is precociously bright and likeable and in a sense idealistic, but whose perspective on the world is far different from our own -- a kid who thinks deeply and observes much that we would miss, but who overlooks simple meanings and conclusions that we would find obvious.

My observations about schizophrenia may apply equally to the strange mental patterns displayed by conspiracy theorists.  An article in yesterday's New York Times used Hillary Clinton's promise to release documents about the notorious "Area 51," should she become president, as an opportunity to explore the strange world of conspiracy theorists -- folks who have been trying for centuries to make sense of the world by pointing their fingers at mysterious, shadowy groups of insiders:  the Freemasons, the "Illuminati," Rosicrucians, the Knights Templar, the Cathars and ancient Egyptian religious cults. 

Our American conspiracies tend to be less mystical, perhaps, but -- in addition to the government's contacts with aliens (and I don't mean Mexican immigrants!) in Area 51, we have the FBI's or CIA's involvement in JFK's assassination, the Trilateral Commission (whatever that is), the Fed's nefarious activities, the Global Warming liberal scientist conspiracy, the Obama Kenyan birth cover-up, and a myriad of anti-Catholic conspiracy theories (including, of course, Dan Brown's fictional Da Vinci Code!).

The Times writer points out that conspiracy theorists aren't necessarily mouth breathers.

It takes great mental powers to construct these intricacies, no matter how crazy they are. Conspiracy theorists are not stupid people. Given a different turn in life, some might have made good superstring theorists.

“The higher paranoid scholarship is nothing if not coherent,” Hofstadter wrote in “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” “In fact the paranoid mind is far more coherent than the real world.”

Other scholars have found that adherents of one conspiracy theory are likely to believe in others. They are good — maybe too good — at making connections. Maybe the phenomenon is neurological, with synapses packed so densely that the brain is driven to see way more order than can possibly be there.

That makes sense.  To me, folks who are obsessed by conspiracy theories seem to be folks who have a difficult time with ambiguity, with admitting that life and the world are messy and confusing, that reality isn't (and people certainly aren't) always logical and mathematical.  They sit at their desks, spinning their mental wheels year after year, trying -- as would an astronomical physicist -- to fit every known fact into some all-embracing theory that can account for them all. 

But like the fictional schizophrenic depicted in Lowboy, in weaving their webs of complexities, they overlook simple but aesthetically displeasing solutions, based on the randomness and illogic of human behavior.  Sometimes, folks, "stuff" does just happen.

I find this equivalence between schizophrenic and conspiracy theory behaviors comforting and reassuring.  Those guys are just a bunch of nuts (to be non-PC).  On the other hand, I'm not going to make an all-embracing theory out it, and force all known facts into it. 

As the joke goes, even paranoids sometimes have enemies.

And conspirators sometimes actually do form conspiracies.

I can hardly wait to see those Area 51 documents!

Choosing a rest room

As an undergraduate, visiting Paris for the first time, I had occasion to use a public men's room.  To my great surprise, inside I encountered a woman sitting at a table, keeping a close eye on the urinals.   A small bowl rested on her table, filled with a number of small coins. 

I soon grew used to "using the facilities" under the watchful eye of a woman.  After my second or third visit, my concern was not for her gender but for my ability to stave off her fury by having handy a few centimes to drop in her bowl.  The men using the urinals never sexually attacked her, and she never attacked the men using the urinals (except verbally for ignoring her tip jar).

I've been reminded of my initial surprise and quick familiarity with the presence of a W.C. attendant as I've read of the national uproar over requiring schools to allow transgender students to use the washroom of the gender of their "choice," rather than that of their birth.  Here, in Washington, conservatives have been circulating Initiative 1515, which, it is claimed, would be the most radical anti-transgender statute enacted in America.  The Seattle Times has described the initiative as "an utter embarrassment, an economic disaster and an immoral endorsement of blatant discrimination."

Such laws have been proposed as protection for our youth against the dangers that lurk in their school, university, and private company restrooms.  (We have precious few public restrooms of the sort that I gratefully used in Paris.)   

I have a young female relative who lives in a coeducational dormitory.  Men and women share the same bathrooms.  They brush their teeth side by side, which, as I've mentioned in a different context, amazes guys of my generation who rarely got beyond the lobby of a women's dorm.  No problems occur, even among hormonally-charged college-aged students.  

And really, what problems might occur, especially within schools?  Girls use stalls.  Are boys going to break down the doors to get at them?  Boys don't now venture into a girls' restroom, even though the door is open to them.  Will they nevertheless announce to the school that they are girls in boys' bodies just to gain the permissive access that is already physically available to them?    And then what?

How realistic are we being?

I've been reading a novel -- it takes place in a well-described Boston, which was the draw -- about a prep school student who has been assigned to tutor an 11-year-old boy for a spelling bee.  At their first meeting, the youngster whispers to the teenager, "I'm a girl!" -- a terrifying secret he had been keeping from the entire world, including his parents.  He (she) had never heard of "transgender"; he (she) thought he was unique. 

Eventually, the "boy," by now called by her adopted female name, begins planning medical treatment.  But in the meantime, her friends at school -- male and female -- have made life miserable for her whenever she tries to use either gender's bathroom.

The older student writes in his journal:

What was going through my mind, and what I didn't dare say aloud, was to wonder how the hell this could happen to someone.  How could nature have gotten it so screwed up?  Why should anyone have to go through this just to be who they are? ... 

Once again, I tried imagining myself trapped in a female body and just couldn't get there.  ...  My mind refused to let me go there, even in my imagination.  What must this profound disconnect be like for Kay?

It made me want to throttle anyone who would ridicule her, who would make this horrible, horrible situation even worse.*

Precisely.  Whatever misguided fears the proponents of Initiative 1515 may have for the safety of their sons and daughters, how can they overlook the misery and lack of alternatives such a statute would present for their kids' transgender classmates?  Those kids have loving parents, too, parents who suffer along with their kids.

I'm not so naïve, of course, as to believe this initiative, like similar proposed laws across the country, is entirely about child safety.  It is primarily one more attempt to keep the world from turning, to keep life from changing.  "Stop!  No more change!  Let's go back to the world of 'Leave it to Beaver'."  

Beaver led, in retrospect, a pretty idyllic life.  But we ignore the fact that many of his classmates did not.  We can do better today.
--------------------------------------
*Robin Reardon, Educating Simon (2014).

Home of the Bean and the Cod

Boston Public Library

Until last week, my short list of American cities (1) that I had never been to at all, or had merely passed through briefly, and (2) that I was anxious to explore in depth, had only two remaining candidates.*  Now, after 3½ days in Boston, the list is down to one.

I had visited Boston briefly a couple of times in the past -- once, a day visit, passing through while driving a rental car, and once overnight, while en route to Maine.  But I had never arrived in Boston, as I might arrive in a European city, with maps in hand and a plan of action.  And yet Boston, with its environs, is one of the iconic cities of American history.    

My visit last week, returning on Saturday, was a total success.

My biggest surprise?  How small and walkable the city is -- at least the prime tourist portions of the city.  I bought an all-day pass on the MBTA (neé MTA, as in Charlie on the MTA) each day for three days.  But, if I hadn't been staying in Cambridge, just off the Harvard campus, I could have avoided the subway entirely, other than the ride in from Logan Airport. 

Marlborough Street
Back Bay

I have read non-fiction and fiction, both historic and contemporary, about Beacon Hill, Charlestown, the North End, Copley Square, the  Back Bay, Boston Common, and, of course, downtown Boston.  I had assumed that these areas were separated from each other by non-descript residential or commercial areas, as might be similar famous neighborhoods in London or New York.  I forgot that Boston has almost exactly the same small population as Seattle, and that, like Seattle, its primary attractions are confined to a fairly small area surrounded by water. 

Only a few steps as a pedestrian  separate the Back Bay from Beacon Hill, and only a street separates Beacon Hill from Boston Common (Beacon Hill actually begins to rise within the Common.)   Only a few steps separate  Beacon Hill from the Downtown in one direction and from the West End in the other.  Boston Common itself, with all its historical baggage, looks like the equivalent of Manhattan's Central Park on a map -- but is obviously little more than a large playing field when viewed in person.

And Boston -- aside from the unfortunate John Hancock Tower -- is a far more low-rise city than the city Seattle has become in the past twenty years or so. 

Museum of Fine Arts 

Despite the small distances, however, my phone's pedometer informed me that I had logged 17 miles my first full day in Boston.  There's a lot to see.

The weather was terrible -- cold and raining hard the evening I arrived -- although it improved gradually during my time there.  But so what?  I'm a Seattleite.  I had been hoping for sunny days in May on the Common, but I was just happy that it didn't snow.

I had booked a room for three nights at a small inn two or three blocks from the Harvard campus.  Tiny single room, shared showers and toilets, but a very satisfactory breakfast included.  I was much happier with its atmosphere, and its location, than I would have been staying at a corporate hotel.  (What the heck, I'll give them a free plug -- "Irving House," on Irving Street just off Cambridge Street.)   The fastest route between my inn and the nearest subway stop took me right through Harvard Yard, so my Boston visit picked up a strong Harvard flavor.

Harvard residential halls

Harvard is one of the few universities I've never attended, so I can say without fear of sounding biased that I really like it.  Meaning, I like its architecture and its ambience -- and I've heard rumors that it's not bad academically either.

As I suppose most of us know, its architecture is uniformly -- with a few exceptions -- Georgian or faux Georgian or quasi-Georgian.  At first I saw only the buildings around Harvard Yard, and the campus seemed small.  But further investigations and excursions took me farther away from this central axis, past partly commercial areas, and eventually down to the rather spectacular residential buildings lined up along the Charles River.

Even if the city were ugly, which it decidedly is not, it would be worth visiting for the fact that virtually every block on every street sports informative signs describing the great events of history that occurred on that spot.  The city is a history lesson waiting to be read, just as the Grand Canyon was a geology lesson.

I looked especially for the Great Elm Tree on Boston Common, where public hangings took place for centuries.  Unfortunately, that is one of the few historical landmarks that has not survived.  It passed away in a storm in 1876, and was much lamented by the population.
-----------------------------
*The remaining city, with some reservations, is New Orleans.