A dissatisfied life

"Norwegians don't enjoy, they endure."  So replied a woman of Norwegian background when I asked her if she had enjoyed the experience she was describing to me.

George F. Kennan was Scots-Irish in ancestry, but he married a Norwegian, spent holidays in Norway, and might as well have been Norwegian.  As told by his biographer, John Lewis Gaddis, Kennan merely endured his 101 years of diplomatic service, historical scholarship, world travel, consultations with presidents and secretaries of state, reputation as perhaps the foremost American expert on Soviet affairs, and fame as the originator of America's post-war policy of Soviet "containment."  Besides his professional activities, he was an amateur poet, a sailor, a man who thought deeply about religion, a devotee of Russian literature, and a hands-on Pennsylvania farmer.  He lived a life that causes most of us to gasp with admiration.

But his life, from childhood to death, was troubled with feelings of guilt, inferiority, self-consciousness, and rejection.  He served America nobly, but didn't really like Americans.  Although he called himself a Christian, he doubted almost everything (and was perhaps unique among Christians in believing deeply in Christ, but not being so sure about the existence of God the Father).  And he had no hopes for the future -- not his own future, not America's, and not that of mankind. 

He was not a happy man, and his life might have been unendurable except for the continuous support of his Norwegian wife, Annelise, to whom he was married for 73 years -- despite occasional strayings on his part.

Some books one swallows happily in one sitting.  Gaddis's biography,¹ at 698 pages, is not one of them.  I began reading it last November, shortly after writing my blog post based on book reviews of the biography, and I finished it today.  It was a wine made for sipping, not chugging.

Gaddis is a distinguished Yale professor, but he had close ties with the first President Bush, and has had kind words to say about the foreign policy of the Reagan administration -- a president whom Kennan himself loathed.  Much of the latter part of the biography attempts to show that President Reagan effectively put Keenan's views on "containment" into practice, thus giving both Reagan and Kennan credit for the ultimate dissolution of the Soviet Union.

It is Kennan's half-century influence, and often unfortunate lack of influence, on American foreign policy that will attract many readers.  But some will also be attracted by the tragedy of a great but flawed human being, a public figure of great reputation who nonetheless never felt that he'd received the respect from either the government or the public that he deserved.  Gaddis's portrait, if we assume its accuracy, shows a thinker who perhaps thought too much, an analyst whose analyses were too often affected by his emotions, and a diplomat with a deep understanding of nations and peoples who often failed to understand both the legitimate concerns and the selfish egos of individuals.

He was, as he concluded near the end of his life, a teacher, but not a politician.

When asked unexpectedly to sum up and connect the various careers of George Kennan, he laced them all under the heading of teacher: on understanding Russia; on shaping a strategy for dealing with that country; on the danger that in pursuing that strategy too aggressively, the United States could endanger itself; on what the past suggested about societies that had done just this; on how to study history; on how to write; on how to live.

George F. Kennan's life was, perhaps from his point of view, tragic.  But his life serves as a model to others who follow -- a model of one man's making the maximum use of his talents, of achieving power and influence without losing his humility and sense of proportion, of maintaining his curiosity and love of learning throughout a long and active life.  And also, perhaps, a cautionary story of a man's asking too much of himself, of driving himself daily to the point that he cannot sit back and simply enjoy his accomplishments, his family, and the world about him.
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¹John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life (Penguin Press 2011).

Lifting up our hearts

O Lord,
How manifold are thy works!
In wisdom hast
Thou made them all;
The earth is full of thy riches.
--Psalm 104:24
On my last morning at the Grand Canyon, after my previous day's exhausting but triumphant hike down to the Colorado, I wandered along the rim in the (finally!) warm sunshine, enjoying the views of the canyon.  As anyone who has been there knows, the views are breathtaking, the mind's response transcendent.  At "Lookout Studio," a little stone building with an interesting history, perched on the rim of the canyon, I looked down and saw a plaque with the excerpt from Psalm 104, displayed as quoted above.

My first thought was "Exactly!"  The beauty of the view, the vast distances involved, and the incomprehensible time spans evidenced -- endless eons, almost as impossible for the mind to grasp as the size of the national debt -- create an emotional surge that lifts you above the daily routines of our lives in 2012 -- at least if you're alone and silent, as was I, and not trying to keep track of three wild and noisy children.  But my second thought, being a lawyer, was "Hmmm.  Does the ACLU know that a psalm is being displayed in a national park?"

As it turns out, the ACLU does know.  The organization complained in 2003, the plaque (together with two others located elsewhere along the rim) was removed for a few days, but then replaced by order of the Park Service's deputy director, pending further legal and policy review.

That review seems to be still pending.

Legally, from a purely analytical point of view, I suppose the plaque should be taken down, although the Supreme Court precedents aren't totally clear.  Unlike religious symbols approved in other parks, these plaques have no particular historical value -- they were installed only in the 1960's.  But, from a common sense point of view, I feel otherwise.  The plaque enhances the experience of the visitor to the park, just as would a verse from Shakespeare, without putting the government's stamp of approval on any particular religious belief, or even on religious belief in general.

The psalms are literary expressions, as well as religious writings.  An atheist, secure in his atheism, would surely read the quoted excerpt as an ancient writer's heroic attempt to express  awe in the face of an ineffably magnificent  "Creation" -- even if the atheist personally felt that the Creation was not, in fact, literally "created."  I suspect, therefore, that he would have very much the same emotional response to the psalm as would a Christian or a Jew.  Or a Muslim or a Hindu, for that matter.  Very much the same response as I found myself experiencing.

Even Soviet officials, firmly atheist by doctrine, often resorted to religious imagery to express strong depth of feeling.  Some of our greatest poetry is religious in subject matter.  And the Bible itself contains poetic imagery that is unforgettable and that is part of the bedrock -- religious content aside -- of our civilization.

It's not a life or death matter, certainly.  The plaque can be removed, and the Grand Canyon will still be there to astound and stupefy.  But we shouldn't be so rigid and doctrinaire that we insist on  purifying our responses to nature of any language from our literary heritage that helps us to express those feelings -- often difficult to articulate -- that overtake us as we confront suggestions of infinity and eternity.

4/20

I don't do drugs. I even think twice before swallowing an occasional Aleve. 

I do drink occasionally. But frankly, if I knew that I'd never have another beer -- or gin and tonic -- for the rest of my life, the effect on the totality of my happiness would be virtually nil.

On the other hand, I'm somewhat appalled that our country had to endure Prohibition for over a decade. I'm just enough of a libertarian to object to limitations on anyone's personal freedoms without a showing of some reasonable justification in terms of the public welfare.

I do think that such a justification can be shown for prohibiting use of a significant number of "recreational" drugs, just as we permit purchase of many non-narcotic drugs only by prescription. But marijuana? Certainly, studies have shown that long-term usage can result in impaired memory and cognitive abilities. But regular drinking results not only in similar problems, but also in a significant number of organic disabilities. Tobacco smoking causes well-known damage to the body -- including cancer, lung ailments, and cardiovascular disease -- and a shortening of one's life.

No one suggests that smokers and drinkers shouldn't be able to choose their own poison. And yet, the federal government and some states seemed obsessed with aggressive enforcement of often Draconian anti-marijuana laws. Surely the fact that Senators and corporate executives choose to smoke and drink, while pot is associated with young people and -- to those still living in the past -- "hippies," has no association with these differing attitudes?

What's the difference between a person driving while drunk and one driving while stoned?
The drunk runs through red lights.
The guy who's stoned stops at the stop sign and waits for it to turn green.

Old joke, but one that makes a valid point as to the relative threats to the public safety posed by the two substances.

Criminalization of pot is low on my list of problems threatening America, but I suppose irrational government regulation and misuse of police resources in general are valid concerns. I'm not particularly happy about encouraging increased use of recreational drugs -- anymore than I'd be happy about encouraging increased smoking and drinking -- but all such behaviors seem more the proper subject of education and discussions with one's physician, rather than cause for imposition of prison sentences (or even fines).

Let's free up the police to worry about more important matters, and free up the kids to find more critical issues about which to demonstrate.

All I have to do is dream, dream, dream

A dream is a wish your heart makes.--W. Disney

Sometimes dreams are enjoyable. Sometimes they're scary. Most often, for me at least, they're just sort of exhausting. But most of all, they're random.

But not anymore. Just buy the proper app for your iPhone and you can program your dreams, just as you program your music on your iPod. So a CNN article reports.

The app, called Sigmund and costing a mere 99 cents, lets you choose from a list of key words that your iPhone will then whisper into your ear, over and over, during the times of the night when Sigmund calculates you'll be most likely to experience REM sleep.

Young people who have used the app report that it works well, but sometimes more subtly than expected. A Harvard student entered "running" and "mountains," and had a satisfying dream about running in the Sierras. But a Yale Law School student remarks:

... one night, I entered the words: "black cat." I did not dream about a black cat. I had a very vivid dream of walking around Paris in the evening with a girlfriend. But, at a decisive moment in the dream, a black cat appears and watches us silently.

Once awake, he enjoys reconstructing his dreams and discovering what his mind did with the whispered cues.

"Fascinating," as the Yalie notes. But perhaps a bit creepy, I wonder?

Mr. Huxley had the idea, if not the technology, figured out back in 1931.

"Alpha children wear grey They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfuly glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able …"

Of course, these quiet whispers in sleeping children's ears, described in Brave New World, were used by government to create proper attitudes -- not by the sleeper himself to shape his own entertainment. But how big a gap, really, is there between the two uses? Why not an FTC regulation requiring the app to insert a few patriotic murmurs? And why not add a few subliminal commercial announcements as well, a word from the sponsor before your nightly dream program commences?

The article does not explain how the app came to be named "Sigmund," but I suppose that can be left as an exercise for the reader. Pleasant dreams.

And then climb back up!

To cut to the chase: Yes, I successfully made it down to the river. And, more importantly, I returned to the Rim. As the Park signs proclaim: "Down is Optional. Up is Mandatory."

Whether I was even going to get started on my hike was touch and go for a while, however. I woke up Saturday morning, looked out the window, and saw a pine forest white with snow. A winter wonderland! Oh no. Just what I needed. A Winter Wonderland! About three inches of snow had fallen during the night, and it continued snowing all day Saturday. Snowing, and gusting with high winds. Only a few brave souls struggled along the rim trail, trying to view some signs of the canyon through the opaque white-out.

It snowed some more Saturday night, but tapering off, and the weather forecast for Sunday looked promising. Therefore, I put on four layers of clothes, filled my daypack with water bottles and candy bars, and began my descent.

For the first half mile or so, the Bright Angel trail was slushy, but the temperatures were warm enough that it wasn't particularly slippery. From that point until about the 1.5 mile Resthouse, the trail just got wetter and muddier, with snow only along the sides. And after that, conditions just kept getting better and better, and layers of clothes just kept coming off.

By the time I reached the cottonwood tree oasis of Indian Gardens -- 3,000 feet below the rim -- I was down to my t-shirt and enjoying my rest break in warm sun. One nice thing about really crummy weather up on the Rim? Lots of solitude on the trails. Coming down to Indian Gardens, I probably saw more Park staff doing trail repair than I saw fellow hikers.

Below Indian Gardens, I was hiking in new (for me) territory. The Tonto plateau, and all the layers of rock above, are sedimentary and easily erodable -- by water, wind, and gravity. Below, the river cuts a narrow V-shaped channel through much denser and harder, pre-Cambrian, metamorphic schist -- rock that is much older than the sedimentary layers that lie atop it. The views are no longer expansive. The walls about you are dark-hued. They close in about you as you descend farther and farther. You never see the river until:

Wow, there it is right in front of you!

I spent about a half hour poking about the river shore. A number of rafters had pulled in for a rest stop a few yards up river, and a couple of their group were paddling around in kayaks, being careful not to get far from shore. The water was fairly calm in this area, but to my left, downstream, the river quickly fell into a stretch of rapids. The Colorado is an attractive river, at the point I encountered it, and narrower than I expected.

I really wanted to follow the river about two miles farther upstream to the Campground (which is where the 9.3-mile figure came from in my earlier post) and the Phantom Ranch (which would make an ideal overnight spot, if one only had the reservations, which need to be made far in advance). But I'd left the Rim a bit later than I'd hoped to, and I was afraid of not making it back before nightfall.

And so -- there was nothing to be done but turn around and begin climbing back. Up.

I won't bore you with the aches and pains of my 7.5 mile ascent. Let's just say that it's probably just as well that I hadn't irritated my body further by forcing it to handle that additional four-mile round trip to Phantom Ranch. As it was, I arrived back at the Rim at 5 p.m. And weary.

I wasn't embarrassed to take the shuttle back to my lodge, rather than walk another 1.5 miles.

We make jokes about the ineptness of government. But three cheers for the National Park Service. They have done an excellent job of managing a park that caters to both the casual tourists who dread getting out of their cars and walking a quarter mile to see the Canyon, and the hardy mountain men who descend into the canyon and don't emerge for a week or so. I'm impressed especially by the signage along the rim trail, easily viewed by all Park visitors, that gives a really decent and understandable explanation of the geological history of the Grand Canyon and -- as a result -- a sense of the awesome lengths of time that nature took to create the spectacle now on view.

In terms of time, human existence certainly is only a tiny exclamation point at the end of a very long novel. Looking about me, I felt the extraordinary fortune that allowed me to exist as part of that tiny morsel of punctuation.
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Photos, from top (click to enlarge):

1. Rafts putting in where trail first hits the Colorado
2. Snow on Saturday the day before the hike
3. Bright Angel Trail, leaving Indian Gardens before descent into Inner Canyon
4. Tourists relaxing up at the Village on the rim

For 20 more photos of the hike, click here.

Down, down, down

To segue from yesterday's blog posting, April in Seattle is not necessarily a "cruel" month, but it is a confusing one. The flowers are out, the leaves are budding, the air is perfumed. It can be beautiful. But the fragrant perfume is borne through the soft air by the soft moisture in the air -- the chilly high humidity, the dripping trees, the drizzle.

It's an enjoyable month, for those of us who are used to wetness, and a nice contrast with, say, February. But the heart sometimes cries out for something both warmer and drier.

Hence, my decision back in mid-January to reserve three April nights at the Yavapai Lodge (more a government-operated motel than a "lodge"), on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. I've been to the canyon three times in the past, always in April, and each time encountered wonderful hiking weather -- sun, dryness, and temperatures that were warm but not too warm for comfortable hiking.

And so -- I'm flying down on Friday, enjoying the canyon over the weekend, and returning on Monday. I've hiked at least three-fourths of the way (by elevation) down into the canyon -- as far as the Tonto Plateau -- a couple of times. This time, I decided to get up early on Sunday, pack plenty of water, and hike all the way down to the river -- and, of course, back up again. The Park Service strongly recommends not doing the round trip in one day, but their advice is clearly intended for the usual summer visitors, innocents choosing to hike down during months when the temperature can easily reach 120 degrees by the time one reaches the river.

Imagine my surprise -- my unpleasant surprise -- when I noted about a week ago that the weatherman was forecasting two days of rain and much lower than average temperatures for this coming Saturday and Sunday. You may recall my foreboding about the rain in Scotland last summer. This appeared to be a bit of a repeat.

Fortunately, the most recent weather prediction has shown a slight improvement. Rain still on Saturday, but "mostly sunny" on Sunday, the date of my anticipated long hike. The temperatures will still be chilly -- a high of 48 and a low of 23 on Sunday -- but I much prefer hiking in unusually cold weather than in unusually hot.

So, I'll arrive at the Park Friday evening, and play it by ear. It is 9.3 miles down the Bright Angel Trail from the South Rim to the Colorado River (and, of course, another 9.3 miles back up -- a return on tired legs that's mandatory and not negotiable!). The change in elevation is 4,380 feet, which is certainly manageable, based on my past experiences.

I'm a cautious sort, and not given to taking wild chances. I'll be monitoring my physical condition all the way down. I will definitely turn around before reaching the river if I feel that I'm overextending myself, but -- so long as the weather is decent -- this should be a day's hike that I'll complete successfully.

Stay tuned for post-hike comments.

Casting about

As I sit at my computer, I find myself nearing the end of the tenth day of the month. Yes, indeed, April is one-third over, and, until this moment, I've written only blog entry for the month.

And it's curious. Looking over statistics for the past three years, I note that I've written an average of only 4.67 posts during each April, compared with an overall average of 7.75 posts per month for those three years as a whole. To you, my occasional readers, these statistics may be of little interest -- you may, in fact, be already preparing to click over to your favorite gardening blog -- but I pore over these figures with the same puzzled fascination that a young baseball fan lavishes on ERA's and batting statistics.

I scratch my head, but can't think of any unusual feature about the month of April that would account for my low authorial productivity. I've already used up, in earlier posts, my only two literary insights into the mysteries of the month: "April is the cruelest month" and

Whan that aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of march hath perced to the roote, etc. etc. etc.

Granted, these are highly satisfying quotations and, I'm convinced, quite meaningful when taken in proper context. But this hardly seems the context.

I suppose I might appeal to the schoolboy's excuse of spring fever. Or to the schoolboy's joke: "I just got finished with a march of 31 days." (Yuk, yuk.) Or I might consider the fact that each year in March I do celebrate in print the anniversary of my blog: perhaps April finds me exhausted after the excesses of those revels, the sheer Dionysian abandon with which I indulge myself?

I don't know. I just don't know. But I do know that I'll somehow manage more than the (now) two posts that I've been able to accomplish to date.

Meanwhile, there's one more popular allusion to April, perhaps less literary than those by Eliot and Chaucer, but nevertheless containing some allegorical truth: "April showers bring May flowers." Let's pretend that while the soil of my brain lies relatively fallow throughout April, seeds are being planted that will spring to life in works of great art by next month.

"Yes, isn't it pretty to think so," as one of my fellow writers once wrote.

I "heart" you

As with many of you, my driver's license is imprinted with a small red heart -- an announcement to whomever it might someday concern that I'm a registered organ donor. The decision to become a donor felt like a no-brainer: neither my scientific nor my religious beliefs suggest that I will in any way cherish my organs once I'm dead. Why not let someone else enjoy them?

Now comes the devil, whispering in my ear: "But how do you know you'll be dead?"

The devil, in this case, is Dick Teresi, who has just published a volume entitled -- chillingly -- The Undead.¹ I haven't read Teresi's book, but am relying entirely on its review by Elizabeth Royte in last Sunday's New York Times.

Teresi points out that no uniformly accepted criteria for death exist. I guess I've always realized that, and have been willing to take my chances. But Teresi also suggests that doctors confronting patients who appear near death are willing to relax their usual standards for determining death in order to preserve the viability and usefulness of the organs they are about to transplant. They no longer wait for the heart to stop beating and the lungs to stop breathing. Instead, they rely on a test for brain death. Not a test for certain termination of consciousness (controlled by the cortex), but death of the brain stem which controls basic physical functions of the body.

Furthermore, in order to determine "brain-death," doctors give "two rounds of tests with a Q-tip, a flashlight, ice water, a rubber hammer and the removal of the ventilator," Ms. Royte points out. Or, as author Teresi himself puts it, doctors are being allowed "to declare a person dead in less time than it takes to get a decent eye exam."

If you don't let the docs know otherwise during those two rounds of tests, the knives descend.

This unsettling information reminds me of Kazuo Ishiguro's novel, Never Let Me Go, a riveting tale of a future (or alternative) England in which human clones are produced and raised for the sole purpose of supplying an aging world with harvestable organs. These clones, the novel postulates, are unable to reproduce, and are therefore deemed animals without human souls -- even though they look, talk and act like everyone else. Once past adolescence the clones are required to check in -- like kids of an earlier era reporting for the draft -- for a staggered series of "donations" of organs. The first donation is rarely fatal, but few survive a third. When it becomes apparent that death is near, all remaining useful organs are immediately harvested, even when the patient still appears fully conscious.

I enjoyed the Ishiguro novel immensely, and was appropriately chilled by the ultimate fate of the clones -- young folks whom we had learned to love during the course of the story -- but I didn't really see any connection between their fate and my own long-contemplated, and completely voluntary, organ donation.

But now I do.

As Ms. Royte points out in her review, Teresi's book is a little one sided. It doesn't make sufficiently clear that in the overwhelming majority of cases, brain death does in fact indicate an irreversible condition, unaccompanied (at least, so far as anyone knows) by consciousness or sensation of pain, a condition that can result in a long period of vegetative deterioration before total organ failure results. And the book fails to give weight to the great need for fresh, undeteriorated organs for the use of otherwise healthy patients, organs that would make the difference between these patients' own imminent death and many future years of vigorous life.

(I'm tempted to add, "patients like Dick Cheney." But I'll refrain.)

Weighing these risks and benefits, I have no temptation whatsoever to revoke my organ donor status. But I can't help contemplating a creepy image of myself lying on an operating table, unable to whisper "I'm alive," as the scalpels are being readied.
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¹And subtitled, revealingly, Organ Harvesting, the Ice-Water Test, Beating Heart Cadavers -- How Medicine is Blurring the Line Between Life and Death.

Penniless

Back in September 2008, I posted a short essay calling for abandonment of the United States one cent coin -- or the "penny," as we colloquially call it, in imitation of our British forebears. I felt my logic was impeccable, and that my irritation at having to deal with those little red buggers had to have been well nigh universal.

And yet, our own government continues to mint pennies at a loss of 0.6 cents per coin. But our neighbors to the north have seen the light. Canada announced yesterday that it will stop minting the Canadian penny this year because, as everyone knows, they're a damned nuisance -- as well as an unnecessary cost to the government.

When I was a kid, the British were still minting both a penny and a half penny, and had only recently stopped minting the farthing (one-fourth of a penny). And this was back before decimal currency, when there were 240 pence to a pound sterling.

The British, since decimalization, have abandoned the old half penny, the old "tuppence" and "thruppence" (2d and 3d) pieces and the sixpence (6d). The shilling coin (12d) became the 5 pence in the new decimal currency. The new half penny (200 to a pound sterling) hasn't been minted since 1984, leaving the "new" one penny and two pence coins as the smallest circulating coins. But the British penny is worth 1.6 American or Canadian cents, which makes it difficult to argue that the Brits stand together with us in support of a coin as worthless as our own penny.

Some worry that abandonment of the penny would cause the price of everything to be rounded up to the nearest nickel. Not really. Prices per item could still be expressed in cents. Or less, in fact: Gasoline, for example, is routinely priced to the nearest tenth of a cent per gallon. Only payment in cash for a total purchase -- your week's grocery shopping, for example -- would be rounded up. If you were writing a check or using a credit card, you could still be billed $29.97 rather than thirty bucks for your bag of groceries.

As the AP story reports, Canadians are joining New Zealand, Australia, the Netherlands, Norway, Finland, Sweden and other countries in dropping coins of equivalent value to the American cent. Although the Euro one cent coin is still being minted, it's being increasingly shunned by businesses in a number of northern European countries. And the Euro cent is worth about 1.3 American cents. Even in China, the smallest coin in general circulation is the Jiao, worth about 1.6 American cents, although the Fen (0.16 American cents) is still accepted as legal tender.

But as Americans, we are exceptional. We will scorn the metric system, execute criminals, cling to dollar bills now worth a dime in 1950s' value -- and cheerfully churn out tons of worthless, irritating, and costly pennies. Why? What d'you mean "why"? Just because! You some kind of Commie or something?

The Dark is Rising

Having amazed myself last month by reading the Hunger Games trilogy -- and I'm holding off seeing the movie that opened Friday night until the teenagers have drifted out of the theaters and on to some new excitement -- I then moved on to another level of young people's fantasy -- Susan Cooper's series of books, The Dark is Rising. I finished the fifth and final book, Silver on the Tree, yesterday.

Like all such fantasy/adventure stories, I'm left feeling dizzy, neither in the "real world," nor in the fantasy world from which I've just departed. It's an enchanted state, leaving me excited, regretful, and with a certain tearful blurriness in my eyes. Just as I felt many years ago when I completed the last page of The Lord of the Rings.

You yourselves -- my readers -- probably either read the The Dark is Rising when young, or have long since found that kind of reading to be not quite your cup of tea: I don't intend to describe the intricate plot of the series in any detail here. I'll just remind you that it is a very English story about contemporary English (and Welsh) children; about one boy (Will Stanton) who discovers on his eleventh birthday that he is not quite like the rest of his family, but is rather one of "the Old Ones"; about Arthurian legends; about the illusory nature of Time; about an age-old Manichean conflict between forces known as "the Light" and "the Dark," forces that contend -- unlike forces in those religions that tend toward Manicheism -- subject to rules set by a greater force, neutral and implacable, called "the Ancient Magic."

The second book, itself called The Dark is Rising, written in 1973,¹ stands out from the other four as the best and purest presentation of the magic world that hides behind our own perceptions. The first book, Over Sea, Under Stone, written earlier in 1965, is a much milder story, more a traditional English children's adventure story, gently flavored with hints of magic. The later books -- Greenwitch (1974), The Grey King (1975), and Silver on the Tree (1977) -- chronicle the growing power of the Light, as the various protagonists (Will himself, the mysterious and avuncular Merryman (who turns out to be Merlin), Will's slightly older friend Bran (son of King Arthur, but brought to our time as an baby and reared in Wales), and Will's three young friends from Buckinghamshire) successfully complete their assigned quests, leading to the final triumph over the Dark in the final volume.

During the course of the five books, we -- and more importantly, young readers -- learn about the great disasters in British history, disasters that are described not as random evemts, but horrors that have occurred during periods when the Dark was ascendent. The Saxons and the Danes might well have invaded England in the normal course of events, even apart from the Dark. But without the Dark, the invaders would not have killed and destroyed on such a devastating scale, killing and destroying for the sheer enjoyment of death and destruction. (Will sees the Dark working in a small way even in his own neighborhood, when he comes upon local bullies aimlessly tormenting a small, dark "Paki" child.) Each wave of invaders eventually settled down and became "British," but only after the Light had once more for a time gained the upper hand, thrusting the Dark back into the hills, back into temporary withdrawal -- licking its wounds and preparing for the next assault.

Cooper is a beautiful and compelling writer. Peculiar to these books -- compared with, say, the less profound Harry Potter books -- is the author's loving and detailed descriptions of natural and human environments in the parts of Britain -- Buckinghamshire, Cornwall and Wales -- in which the action occurs. Cooper has the knowledge and sensitivities of a gardener, a botonist, a zoologist, an architect, an oceanographer, an historian. No butterfly passes unnamed and undescribed; no architectural style goes unremarked. Her research seems meticulous, as she describes in loving detail the actual towns, mountains and coastlines in Cornwall and Wales where the story takes place. Her characters make free use of the Welsh language where appropriate.

In a sense, the story is profoundly conservative -- not only because of the conflict between absolute good and absolute evil that it portrays, but in its implicit lament over the steady despoiling of the British countryside -- throughout the centuries ever since the days of King Arthur, as well as, in an accelerated fashion, the changes in our own day. Every casual tourist encountered elicits scorn and distaste from her child protagonists; every new dwelling for big city vacationers incurs their contempt.

"Cars, cars," said Will. "D'you know there's even something on the Machynlleth road called a chatel? A chatel! Presumably a cross between a motel and -- " He broke off, staring at the road ahead.

And the books' tale seems conservative also through the underlying, deeply-felt lesson that it teaches, a lesson that Edmund Burke would have well understood, that the history of a people must be viewed as an organic whole, that a nation consists not just of today's citizens, but of those in its past and its future as well. The travel by Cooper's heroes back and forth in time -- from the time of Arthur, the Saxon invasions, the pillaging by the Danes, the nineteenth century, and back to the present -- isn't time travel merely for the sake of excitement, as in some science fiction novels. It is the author's device to show how Britain's past lives on through its present, and how its present population has debts, and consequent obligations, to those who guided Britain through its past.

(Whenever one of Will's young friends asks about some paradox that seems to result from travel through time, an Old One replies that his question is just the sort of thing that a human would ask! The passage of time, we are reminded, is a human illusion; all events throughout time are occurring (in a sense) simultaneously. Got it?)

And in these ways, the story line stakes out a philosophically conservative position in the same way that many of us -- despite perhaps our liberal political views -- often feel conservative. Cooper's story teaches and encourages values -- historical, architectural, environmental, moral -- that should be of use to young Britons today. Or to young Americans, for that matter, insofar as we still derive our values -- even if not, for most of us, our blood -- from our country's British heritage.

In the end, on a day in the late 20th century, when the final book was written, the Light wins its battle. With the help of Will, Bran, and the English youngsters, the Light totally and with finality vanquishes the Dark. Cooper seems to treat this final battle -- a pagan Armageddon -- as the breaking of mankind's bonds to supernatural forces, an ending of mankind's susceptibility to unseen forces of evil ... or of good. But it does not free mankind from the darkness found in the hearts of each of us. From now on, the children are told, it is up to each human being, and to humanity collectively, to fight for what is good. They will have no supernatural Dark to blame for the evils they encounter, and no powers of Light to save them from their own mistakes.

"For remember," he said, "that it is altogether your world now. ... We have delivered you from evil, but the evil that is inside men is at the last a matter for men to control. ... For Drake is no longer in his hammock, children, nor is Arthur somewhere sleeping, and you may not lie idly expecting the second coming of anybody now, because the world is yours and it is up to you. ... Now especially since man has the strength to destroy the world, it is the responsibility of man to keep it alive, in all its beauty and marvellous joy."

"We'll try," Simon said. "We'll try our best."

Merriman [Merlin] gave him a quick startling grin. "Nobody can promise more than that," he said.

And with that final admonition, in a farewell reminiscent of the final scenes in Tolkien's The Return of the King, the Old Ones -- the great powers of the Light -- sail off, away from Earth and out of Time. Only one Old One remains, the now 12-year-old boy, Will Stanton -- the last and youngest of "the Old Ones" -- who will remain with his family and with the young friends he has made during his quests and battles. A young boy, but also an Old One and immortal, his life on Earth will continue as a "watchman" for the Light until the proper time arrives for him, too, to depart and join his fellows of the Light.

When the Dark comes rising, six shall turn it back;
Three from the circle, three from the track;
Wood, bronze, iron; water, fire, stone;
Five will return, and one go alone.

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¹Filmed as a highly unsuccessful movie with poor reviews in 2007, and released in the United States under the title The Seeker.

Quinquennial

Five years ago today, I nervously entered my first post on my newly adopted template for "Confused Ideas from the Northwest Corner." In that post, I noted that I'd spent a lot of time planning out and arranging the format, but that, having completed those details, wasn't really sure what I was now supposed to talk about.

Five years and 497 posts later, I have to admit that I'm amazed to have persisted so uncharacteristically, surprised that I'm still coming back here regularly and sharing my writings.

As I've noted on earlier anniversaries, my mix of subject matter has varied slightly over the years. During the first two years, many of my posts were aimed at politics, especially the Obama-Clinton battle for the Democratic nomination, the vehemence of my thundering pronouncements aided and abetted by comments and criticisms from another novice blogster, a very bright high school writer named Zachary (now a politically disaffected -- but academically very successful -- senior engineering student at the University of Colorado). With time, I gradually increased the percentage of posts devoted to book and movie reviews, comments on scientific items I came across in the press, and discussions of my personal enthusiasms for long hikes in foreign places and for making fumbling attempts at playing the piano.

What most my posts have in common is more a desire to organize and understand my own thoughts than to communicate those same thoughts to you, my hapless readers -- but, of course, both desires at all times co-exist.

So the guy on the haystack still sits there, five years later, and still ponders the fascinating and bewildering world in which he lives. I fully expect to find myself still pondering and still writing away when Year Six comes around. Thanks for sticking with me.

Floating high o'er vales and hills

Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books;
Or surely you'll grow double:
Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks;
Why all this toil and trouble?

The sun above the mountain's head,
A freshening lustre mellow
Through all the long green fields has spread,
His first sweet evening yellow.
--Wordsworth

Oh, William! How very true. One does grow weary of books and documents. Or, should I say, of internet and Kindle? But to wander in green fields -- during March around Seattle -- is to risk drowning in rain or, as grandma would have put it, catching your blessed death of cold.

But if I can't gambol over the hills and fields right now, I can at least plan for the future, looking forward to different climes and different months. After two consecutive years of hiking in Britain, I'll be returning in July for a third.

This time around, my 14-year-old niece Maya and I are planning a weeklong hike in Wordsworth's own Lake District in northwest England. We will be hiking seventy miles from the town of Ulverston in the south, near the Irish Sea, to Carlisle on the Scottish border, walking through the very heart of the Lake District. Although the total distance hiked will be shorter than on either my Hadrian's Wall or West Highland Way walks, the elevation gain will be significantly higher, ascending about 2,300 feet in one day alone.

The path leads through several small towns, tucked into valleys and lying beside lakes, and climbs at times over what are called the "high fells" -- which essentially means the higher mountainous areas.

Although, at Wordsworth's advice, I'll be escaping books, somehow my enjoyment of these hikes is enhanced by the magic of words. Fells, for example, and crags, moors, bracken, tarns, pikes and lanes -- words that were all used in a guide's brief description of the route. And proper names: Coniston Water, Village of Elterwater, Langdale Pikes, Cat Bells, Derwentwater, and Skiddaw Forest. We speak the same language and can encounter the same words in America, of course. But not in such concentrated effusion, a tangle of Saxon and Celtic that casts a glow of mystic antiquity over the entire region.

The hike ends in the border city of Carlisle, a pleasant town through which I passed near the end of my Hadrian's Wall hike, so I'll be ending up on familiar terrain. We'll also spend a couple of days sightseeing in London before the hike begins, letting our bodies catch up with the eight hour time difference.

Our hike is still four months away, but the anticipation allows me to brush aside thought of the Seattle drizzle, and to inhabit, mentally, for at least a few minutes at a time, a more exciting and fascinating world.

Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.

Keep your pinches to yourself

It's St. Patrick's Day. What's the Celtic equivalent for "Bah, humbug!"?

I'm not Irish. Well, there may be some Irish DNA traces in my cells. But, if so, those traces are miniscule, and probably of the scorned Scots-Irish variety. Certainly the only brogue I've ever affected was a clunky type of shoe I sometimes wore as a kid. I've never seen a four leafed clover. The only clovers I'm familiar with had three leaves and purple flowers that were attractive enough, but unfortunately all a-buzz with bumble bees.

Irish or not, St. Patrick's Day was a big deal as a kid. Not because anyone knew who St. Patrick was, but because if you didn't sport some wearing apparel colored green, everyone had implicit permission to pinch you. Of course, my fellow school inmates pinched me on other days as well; they just didn't shout "St. Patrick's Day!" while doing so.

St. Patrick, contrary to the belief of some non-Irish Americans, wasn't a leprechaun. Nor did he sport a green cap, or smoke from a long-stemmed pipe. He was a missionary, and not really very jolly. He wasn't what we today think of as Irish. He may have been born in what is now -- oh, the shame! -- the English county of Cumbria. He may even have been an amalgam of two totally different people, a guy named Palladius and Patrick proper, but that's still something for historians to sort out.

He probably lived between about 340 and 440, with his active work taking place in the latter fourth century. Those weren't carefree and frolicsome times in Ireland, or anywhere else. Patrick, so far as we know, wasn't given to pinching his peers for failing to wear green. The Irish have their little ways, however, and they weren't all that keen on being converted and baptized by this weird guy from England (although England wasn't yet England). He was seen as the fulfillment of an obscure Druid prophesy:

Across the sea will come Adze-head, crazed in the head,
his cloak with hole for the head, his stick bent in the head.
He will chant impieties from a table in the front of his house;
all his people will answer: "so be it, so be it."

Nevertheless, he did baptize "thousands," according to his own written account. And he did become the patron saint of Ireland, an honor given perhaps in shamefaced recompense for his somewhat frigid reception by the early Irish.

St. Patrick wasn't particularly meek and mild. When a local Irish "king" (leader of a small band of Celtic ruffians) sold some of St. Patrick's converts into slavery, St. Patrick hurled an excommunication at him and denounced the king's followers as "fellow citizens of the devils" and "associates of the Scots." The Irish could accept with some equanimity a relationship with the devil, but equating them with the heathen Scots ... well, faith and begorrah, that hurts!

Apart from St. Patrick's religious accomplishments, he is best known to a secular posterity as the saint who drove the snakes out of Ireland. And, true enough, there are no snakes in Ireland. (Except maybe in a zoo, or in such hypothetical roadside attractions as "Only 37 More Miles, See Amazing Snake Pit, Children Free When With Adults."

But sorry, Mike, Sean and Paddy. Neutral scientists claim that all the snakes were banished from Ireland not by St. Patrick, but by the ice packs of the last glacial period, some ten thousand years ago. Ireland has since kept elite, insular, non-serpentine company with such lands as New Zealand, Iceland, Greenland and Antarctica -- none of which was ever proselytized or even dreamed of by good St. Pat. Another pious legend exploded.

So if some of you want to run around today, pinching people in honor of a dour fourth century missionary who was ridiculed by the same Irish who now claim him as their patron saint, a man who is remembered today primarily as the guy who drove non-existent snakes off the Emerald Isle -- fine, be my guest. But those schoolyard pinches can damn well hurt, and don't any of you pinchers think I've forgotten who you are.

Intriguing Iran

Iran is surprising, as this blog has repeatedly suggested. Those who think of the country as a vast desert, inhabited by backward "Arabs," inhabit a dream world. And it's a bad dream. Yes, Iranian society is ruled by a repressive government, but the Iranian people -- many, many of them -- are too well educated and creative to simply submit to authority like a nation of toads.

To recapitulate two events of just the past few weeks: (1) The Iranian film A Separation took the Oscar for best foreign film -- an award that both delighted and worried the reigning mullahs. And (2) even more surprisingly, last month the Iranian Book News Agency (IBNA) issued a routine press release announcing that a Persian language edition of David Sedaris's best seller, Me Talk Pretty One Day, was about to be published in Iran. The release notes that the second half of the book tells of Sedaris's move to Normandy, together with his partner Hugh. The release continues:

Much of Sedaris's humor is autobiographical and self-deprecating, and often concerns his family life, his middle class upbringing in the suburbs of Raleigh, North Carolina, Greek heritage, various jobs, education, drug use, and his life in France, and most recently in London and the South Downs.

Maybe not exactly the sort of entertainment you'd expect a fundamentalist Islamic regime to offer its people? But in Iran you just never know.

It's been nearly a year now since my own much scribbled-about trip to Iran. My own first surprise, after a late night arrival in Tehran, occurred the next morning as I stepped outside. There, looming before me, was a rugged range of snowy mountains. Intellectually, I was fully aware that the Elburz Mountains separated Tehran from the Caspian Sea, and that northern Tehran itself was built up into the foothills of that mountain range. Still, seeing all that dazzling snow as I stepped out of the hotel was something of a jolt, a sight that seemed incongruous, in my own mind, with my preconceptions of the Middle East.

All these various strands of surprise by, and pleasure with, Iran and its people came together for me this afternoon as I received the April issue of The Atlantic. In a short article,¹ climber Gregory Crouch describes his experiences while on a serious climbing expedition last spring in the Elburz (he transliterates the range's name as "Alborz").

No, he didn't "accidentally" hike across the border from Iraq. In another of those Iranian surprises, the expedition was a joint venture between the American Alpine Club and the Alpine Club of Iran, with men and women from both nations participating. Making an ascent of Alam Kuh, the second highest peak in Iran, Crouch and two American partners, one male and female, climbed together with an Iranian married couple, the woman being one of Iran's best female rock climbers. Other members of the party, both American and Iranian, made the climb by a different route.

The expedition ran into some minor bureaucratic hassles before it got started, but the ultimate message of the article was that climbing is alive and well in Iran, where it is unusually popular among the better educated segments of the population, and that climbers from all nations form a like-minded community regardless of political differences among their respective governments. For me, the article also reaffirmed my conviction that Iran is a complex nation, and that even its Islamic rulers permit -- surprisingly; sporadically, perhaps; and unpredictably -- many more freedoms than we here in the West may suspect.

Excellent Iranian movies, a strong Iranian climbing community, American-Iranian exchanges -- and a healthy appreciation by Iranians of the bittersweet humor of David Sedaris. Yes. I do realize that Germans and Americans were toasting their mutual friendship and cultural kinship right up until 1939. It didn't prevent World War II.

Still, as I noted on Facebook, Iran isn't the sort of country I'd care to carpet bomb, thank you.

-------------------------------------------

Photo from The Atlantic. Caption: "Two climbers, one Iranian and one American, prepare to strike out from base camp on an ascent in the Alborz Mountains."

¹Gregory Crouch, "The Peaks of Persia," The Atlantic (Apr. 2012).

Ides of March

"Beware the Ides of March"
--Julius Caesar, Act I, scene 2

Julius had other plans, of course, and ignored the warning -- leading to his assassination on the floor of the Senate. Death under the knives of 23 Senators -- a fate not unfamiliar to national leaders in our own time, even if nowadays the knifing is more metaphorical.

But, as every schoolboy knows, Caesar's demise occurred on the "Ides of March." What is this "Ides" business, you might (but didn't) ask? Every schoolboy knows the answer to that as well, but -- as a perusal of my recent essays suggests -- I've really been hard up for blog topics recently, and today the Ides of March seems to present an appropriately topical topic.

Now you -- and our hypothetical schoolboy (why never a schoolgirl?) -- may simply assume that the 15th of any month, for some mystic reason cherished by the ancients, was arbitrarily called the Ides. Just as we, in our day, have picked a mid-winter date for retail sales promotions and have called it, pulling a name out of a hat, "President's Day." But you -- and our schoolboy (school child?) -- wouldn't be quite correct.

Ides is our English corruption of the Latin word idus, a small but interesting word that may or may not be, ultimately, of Etruscan origin. ("Etruscans" = a clever, artistic and commercially proficient people who were flattened early on by their dour, brutish, but determined Roman neighbors, who (adding insult to injury) insisted on calling the Etruscans "Tyrrheni." A warning we should ponder, a warning against taking dour and brutish neighbors (I'm thinking of Canadians) for granted.) But I digress. (Or I excessively parenthesize.) The word Ides is probably derived from, or otherwise related etymologically to, the Latin word iduare, meaning "to divide."

The Ides thus was approximately the date that divided the month in half. For months with 31 days, like March, it occurred on the 15th. For other months, it occurred on the 13th. The original idea seemed to be that the Ides would mark the full moon of each month, but since Roman months were uniformly lengthier than the lunar month, I can't quite see how this would have worked.

The Romans had similar appellational inspirations for the 1st and 9th days of their months, calling them, respectively, the Kalends and the Nones. The Kalends, according to those who spend their lives thinking about such matters, probably was originally intended to mark the new moon of each month, and the Nones, the (waxing) half moon.

Once the Romans had thought up names for special moon days in the first half of the month, they seem to have lost interest. After the Ides of each month, a gray sea of dates known only by numbers stretched on placidly to the 31st (or 30th).

For those dates not lucky enough to have classy names like the Kalends or Nones or Ides, the Romans simply counted the days until the next named benchmark. Perhaps because the Arabs hadn't yet invented the zero, they called the benchmark itself the first day; therefore, for example, two days before the Ides (as we would call it) would be (to the Roman way of thinking) the third day before the Ides. Once past the Ides of each month, the Romans were stranded in a confusing realm where the month to which the formal date referred didn't correspond to the actual month as lived on the ground. E.g. ("exempli gratia", another curious Roman invention), March 20 would be the thirteenth day before the Kalends of April, or XIII Kal. Apr., even though the Romans were fully aware that they still had many days to suffer through yet another dreary March.

Today, March 14, would be the second day (yes, second, remember? Keep up!) before the Ides of March. II Id. Mart., one would think. But the day immediately prior to a benchmark date was instead called the Pridie (think about it, ok? -- pre + die, day before).

Therefore -- today is Prid. Id. Mart. (Mart., since they called March, Martius).

So, all I've been trying to get to, folks, is a simple greeting:

Happy Prid. Id. Mart.!!

And please, tomorrow, do beware the Ides of March.

(Which a generation or so ago was the deadline for filing federal income tax returns, which, while less painful than an assassination, still lent the expression a certain poignancy.)