Nostalgic India

I had never heard of the novel The Room on the Roof, by Ruskin Bond, until this past week, when I saw it listed as a "want to read" by a Goodreads friend.  In fact, I'd never heard of Ruskin Bond.

But Bond is a fairly well-known Indian writer, now in his 80s, who has written novels, ghost stories, children's fiction, and poetry.  The Room on the Roof was written, based on the author's own journal, in about 1951 when he was seventeen.  In his "Introduction" to my Kindle edition, he makes it clear that much of the novel is autobiographical, and was written at a time, just after graduation from secondary school, when he was living in London and "feeling very homesick for India."

The hero, and first-person narrator, is a sixteen-year-old, Anglo-Indian boy named "Rusty,"  As the novel opens, Rusty lives in the European quarter of Dehra ("Dehra Dun" on most maps), a city located in the low Himalayan foothills about 150 miles north of Delhi.  Dehra has a population of about a half million now, but the story, told in 1951, suggests a town of closer to about 25,000.*  Rusty's parents are deceased, and he lives under the supervision of a tyrannical and snobbish guardian who has made every effort to raise Rusty as a British child, concealing the fact that the boy -- blue eyed and with blond hair -- is half Indian.

Despite being 16, Rusty must seem to us today as closer to 12 or 13 in his thoughts, interests, and occupations.  I thought at first that this seeming retardation was a result of his stern upbringing.  But Rusty's frustration -- and eventual fury -- with his sheltered life (a life where he is friendless and has little to occupy his days) finally causes him to escape from his house and his guardian, and meet other boys his age in the "native" section of Dehra.  These boys, although their lives are much more adventurous and undisciplined than Rusty's, all belong to India's middle class.  They are not the destitute of India, by any means.  And they seem equally childlike by today's standards.

Bond paints an attractive picture of Indian life in and around Dehra (even today, a city of above average income and educational standards), and of the scenery and wildlife in the surrounding jungle.  He also paints a moving picture of adolescent loneliness -- Rusty's loneliness, especially, but also the underlying loneliness of the Indian friends that he meets. 

Friendship is a central theme for Bond, and the intensity of friendship customary among young Indians is shown vividly.  Rusty finds a job tutoring Kishen, a slightly younger boy, in English, employment for which he receives room and board.  Rusty and Kishen form bonds of brotherhood: "He loved Rusty, but without knowing or thinking or saying it, and that is the love of a brother."  Rusty meets another boy his own age, a Sikh, who soon is calling him "my best favourite friend."

Rusty had abandoned the stuffy and repressive world of British post-colonial life, and -- with his new Indian friends -- feels, for the first time ever, truly alive.  He even manages to fall in love with Kishen's beautiful young mother -- an affection that she (married to the much older father) certainly returns and that may or may not -- depending on how one reads the story -- have resulted in an affair.

Then Rusty's entire new world falls apart.  His "best, favourite friend" moves away.  Kishen's mother is killed in an auto accident, and Kishen is taken to another city to live with relatives.  Rusty once more finds himself alone and isolated.  After a long period of despair, he decides to emigrate to Britain, if possible.  But en route to Delhi, he runs into Kishen, who has escaped the clutches of his relatives and is living by his wits (and lack of scruples) in another city.  Kishen talks Rusty into giving up thoughts of emigration, and returning with him to Dehra.  The two "brothers" will make a new attempt at living life in India.  Kishen tries to assure his "brother" that all will be well, as the novel ends:

Kishen laughed.
"One day you'll be great, Rusty.  A writer or an actor or a prime minister or something.  Maybe a poet!  Why not a poet, Rusty?"
Rusty smiled.  He knew he was smiling, because he was smiling at himself.
"Yes," he said, "why not a poet?"
So they began to walk.
Ahead of them lay forest and silence -- and what was left of time.

The Room on the Roof is written in simple, but eloquent language -- eloquent especially considering the age of its author.  Bond at 17 tends to favor short, simple, declarative sentences, but with use of a sophisticated vocabulary.  (In dialogue, especially, he falls back occasionally on Hindi slang or idioms -- only some of which are defined in my Kindle dictionary, but the meaning of which are clear from the context.)

In his "Introduction," the elderly Bond -- looking back fondly on his first published work -- notes that it received generally favorable reviews (including a number of literary prizes), but that one reviewer had complained that he wrote in "babu English."  Meaning, I suppose, simple English as written by a native Indian.  If so, I'm all for use of "babu English," especially in the context of this Indian novel.

The book is also a romanticized recollection of middle class Indian life, by a boy who had all too recently torn himself away from that life and found himself living in a very different, very cold, and very alien land and culture..  I'm not opposed to a little romanticism, at times, either.
----------------------------
*(6-23-16) World Book Encyclopedia in 1955 gave its population as 116,404, but it "feels" much smaller in the story.

Commuting by sea



Seattle from the stern of my water taxi



New York's Mayor Bill de Blasio has electrified commuters by proposing ferry services to help his city's workers make their way around the city's five boroughs.  Initial ferry routes from Brooklyn and Queens would begin service by the end of next year.  The mayor may be dissatisfied with the progress of the Second Avenue subway -- first proposed in 1919, and under sporadic construction since 1972. 

If you can't travel under the streets, he may be thinking, maybe you can head out to sea and travel around them.

New York compares its plans to develop ferry service with commuter ferries already operating in San Francisco and Sydney.  Interestingly enough, the article made no mention of the many routes operated by Washington State Ferries on Puget Sound, which include routes heavily used by commuters to Seattle from Bremerton, Vashon Island, and Bainbridge Island.

New York officials may feel that Washington's ferry system isn't sufficiently similar to that which they contemplate for the Big Apple.  Our ferries are part of the state highway system, and are designed primarily to carry automobile and truck traffic.  Nevertheless, the auto ferries have been carrying increasingly large numbers of pedestrians -- especially on the commuter routes mentioned above.

New York ferries would be exclusively pedestrian. 

But we do have the King County Water Taxi system, which operates exclusively pedestrian ferries. In 2007, King County (Seattle) took over operation of two small pedestrian ferry routes -- between Seattle and West Seattle near Alki Point, and between Seattle and Vashon Island.  They appear to have been operated quite successfully.

All of which leads up to my mentioning that I had my first experience today riding one of those water taxis, an adventure precipitated by my reading earlier today about Mayor de Blasio's big New York plans.  Checking the water taxi website, I was encouraged to discover that the "Orca" card one uses to pay the fare on light rail and buses is also valid on the water taxis.  Therefore, casting hesitation aside, I took light rail downtown to the University Street station, and walked a few blocks to the waterfront. 

The waterfront is badly torn up at present, as rotting wooden piers are being replaced, but a pedestrian walkway leads one safely through the chaos.  I had ascertained that the water taxis departed from Pier 50 -- it was merely a matter of figuring out where Pier 50 might be.  When I reached the ferry terminal -- for Washington State Ferries -- I discovered I was at Pier 52.  I continued south for maybe another quarter mile, and reached my destination -- a rather long pier sticking into the Sound, unmanned but with a vending machine for those needing single tickets.

The ship itself is a catamaran with two passenger decks -- comfortable seats inside, and deck chairs on a small aft deck outside.  The taxis run every half hour during rush hours, and about every hour at other times.  The ride from Seattle to West Seattle ran about 15 minutes going over, and a faster ten minutes coming back.  The views of the Seattle waterfront and skyline were spectacular. 

I had no plans to entertain myself whilst in West Seattle.  I returned immediately to downtown on the same ferry.

The fare, using an Orca card, was $4.50 one way.  Because my light rail and ferry passages were all completed within two hours, under Orca rules regarding transfers the entire expedition cost me just that single $4.50 fare.  Not the most amazing adventure of my life, but certainly one of the most economical.

But I suspect Seattle has little to offer New York by way of its ferry experiences.  These two routes, to West Seattle and  to Vashon Island, as useful as they are for those commuters who depend on them, don't quite compare with the scale of operations being proposed by and for our eastern Big Brother.

Alki Point, near where the water taxi lands in West Seattle, derives its name from the words supposedly spoken by the first Seattle settlers -- "New York alki" -- Chinook jargon meaning "New York, by and by." 

Yes, but not quite yet.

Hot weekend in D.C.

Objectively, of course, the most important event of the past weekend, during my visit to Washington, D.C., was the Orlando killings.  You have no idea how many flags fly in Washington until you see them all at half-mast.  And you merely suspect what a disastrous presidential candidate the GOP has in Donald Trump until you hear his embarrassing "thoughts" on the killings blaring in the background on coffee shop TVs.

But, subjectively, the big event of my weekend was the heat.  The heat bowled me over when I stepped out of National Airport to await my hotel shuttle.  The next day -- Saturday -- it reached 95.  And -- by Seattle standards, at least -- that was a humid 95.  Sunday was slightly better; I think the high was 92.  On both days, I understood (and followed) the southern European custom of going home for a mid-day siesta in the afternoon.

As I predicted, I spent much of the day wandering about the National Gallery of Art --which offers a nice, uncrowded café for lunches -- and the various branches of the Smithsonian.  I spent a lot of time in the National Air and Space Museum and in the National Museum of Natural History.  In both, I tried to time my visits early in the morning, before the arrival of school groups had their full impact.  The kids were fine -- excited and fascinated by the exhibits -- but there were just a lot of them, making it difficult to move from place to place.

The other museums were far more laid back -- especially the National Gallery -- and were comfortable and pleasant to visit at any point during each super-heated day.

But the real fun, for me, came after about 5 or 6 p.m.  The air remained in the 90s, but that temperature was far more tolerable without the sun blazing overhead.  On both Saturday and Sunday, I walked from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial, and then around the Tidal Basin to and on past the Jefferson Memorial.  Those evening walks were incredibly beautiful, and the monuments shone in the setting sun. 

I kept wandering around the Potomac riverside, the various monuments, and the Mall each night until about 10 p.m.; by which time it was dark and the buildings were lit by artificial light -- equally beautiful, but with different shades of light.  At 10 p.m., when I began working my way back to my Metro stop at L'Enfant Square for the ride back to my Alexandria hotel, mobs of tourists still surrounded the monuments, enjoying the evening.

I did a lot of walking, as I had planned (27 miles total on Saturday and Sunday alone), but  -- solely because of the daytime heat -- not as much as I did on my last visit.  No strolls to Georgetown and across the Potomac bridge to Arlington, this time.  But I'm reminded again what a beautiful capital we have, and how impressive is its history. 

As with Boston a few weeks ago, I can only say -- I'll be back.

Took over Washington, so I heard tell

I'll be spending the next four days in Washington, D.C.

Gonna knock some heads together.  Get the Supreme Court numbers back up to nine.  Give Bernie a little straight talk about the difference between the "desirable" and the "possible."  Do a little log jam breaking in the House (I do come from a town of lumberjacks).  Remind Senators that "Senator" and "senile" have the same Latin root, and that all too many Americans have begun to notice.

Ain't gonna be no harangues from the White House portico, with millions of supporters chanting "Sieg Heil" from the Mall during the next four years, not by the time I get through.

Put a smile back on Abe's face.  He doesn't look happy with the party he founded.

Gonna fix up the government and laws as well.  I may even patch up the crack in the Liberty Bell.  (Guess I gotta detour to Philly for that.)

Or, maybe, I'll just look at art and anthropology in the Smithsonian, eat a little ice cream, and do a lot of walking.

Exposure

The ancient Greeks exposed their unwanted babies to the elements. 

In Mary Renault's The Last of the Wine, the narrator -- a young man at the time of the Peloponnesian Wars -- tells of the starvation and desperation experienced by the Athenian people during the Spartan encirclement and blockade of their city.  He makes the heartbreaking decision to expose his baby brother among the rocks at the foot of the Acropolis.

"If the gods had not forbidden it, my brother, I would put you to sleep before I left you, for night comes on; this is an empty place, and the clouds look dark upon the mountains.  But the blood of kindred is not to be washed away, ....  So forgive me, and suffer what must be.  The clouds are heavy; if the gods love you, before morning there will be snow."  It was dark already.  For a long time as I walked away I could hear him crying....

I was reminded of this depressing passage a few minutes ago, walking through my neighborhood.  In the unmowed grass of a neighbor's parking strip, I saw a small microwave unit.  It looked as good as new.

Taped to its top was a sign: "Free."

It seems to be a common custom among my neighbors to dispose of unwanted items this way.  Rather than hold a garage sale, or offer the item on e-Bay, or -- as I do -- add it to the clutter in the basement, they put it outside with a sign that -- however worded -- in effect says "No One Loves Me; Take Me."

Not just microwaves, but bookcases, sofas, chairs, stacks of books -- all free for the asking.  And in nice weather, as we're having this week, I suppose this is an efficient way to find someone to give a good home to an unneeded item.  But this is Seattle.  We have rain, we have dew.  Even our sun, after a time, damages many items.  It hurts to see a perfectly good sofa become wet with rain, and then redolent of mildew.

I tend to anthropomorphize absurdly, I realize.  "The poor lonely microwave," I think.  Like the abandoned Christmas tree in the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale.  Like the abandoned baby in the Renault story, exposed to the elements, for whom we can only hope that the snow and cold reach out and touch him before the wolves do.   I do anthropomorphize, admittedly.  But still -- there must be a better way.

I can almost hear that microwave, crying now in the distance. I hope someone rescues it before the rains come.

Thanks for the memories

"Is lying about one's life precisely what memoirs are all about, a way of giving one's life a shape and a logic, a coherence it wouldn't have except on paper ... ?" 
--André Aciman

I've only known, personally -- to my knowledge -- one guy who ever wrote a memoir -- that "Merry Prankster" childhood buddy I  wrote about a year or so ago.  In writing about his childhood -- the period of his life when I was around to keep an eye on him -- he never lied, as far as I can tell.  (Unless grossly under-reporting the importance I played in his early life is a lie of omission.)

I've always viewed memoirs as a subspecies of history -- the history of one's own life.  I've assumed a memoir relates the truth so far as the author's memory makes possible, aided by whatever written materials and interviews with others are available.  Readers can rely on a memoir, as on a history, to determine what actually happened.  But in an essay, "Rue Delta," in his 2011 collection Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere, André Aciman argues otherwise.

In Aciman's memoir, Out of Egypt, he tells how, when he was 14, his Jewish family was expelled from Egypt, uprooting him from the Alexandria in which he had been born and raised.  He tells how on his last night, he left his family's Passover celebration and walked alone to the Corniche, staring out at the Mediterranean and enjoying one last time the sights and smells of Alexandria.  It's a moving description of the uprooting of a young boy, as it was obviously intended to be.

Aciman notes, however, that knowledgeable readers realized that the chapter in question had been published in a magazine five years earlier.  In that magazine article, he had been accompanied on his walk by his younger brother.  In "Rue Delta," he observes that he himself hated going for walks.

It was my younger brother, by far the more daring and enterprising of us two, who was more likely to have come up with the idea of taking such a walk on our last night in Egypt.  ...  My brother had a bold impish side to him.  People used to say that he loved things, and that he knew how to go after them.  ...  I was never sure I loved anything, much less how to go after it.  I envied him.

Why the change in the memoir?  Aciman tells us that after the magazine article, his brother teased him about his rampant nostalgia, and so Aciman decided his brother had to go.

Removing my brother from the evening walk turned out to be embarrassingly easy -- almost as though getting rid of him had been a lifelong phantasy.

In the published book, Out of Egypt, Aciman admitted in a postscript that he had  "revised" the earlier story to eliminate his brother.

In "Rue Delta," he further admits that his lyrical passage in Out of Egypt, lamenting his departure from Alexandria, actually described his brother's feelings.  Aciman had never liked Alexandria himself.  He felt he had been reared in a second-rate imitation of Europe.  He could hardly wait leave and to move to the real thing.

But wait, there's more.  He then confesses that his motivation for eliminating his brother -- whatever it was -- is actually beside the point.  The very walk itself along the Corniche was totally fictional -- he never walked along the coast road his final night, either alone or with his brother.  But -- he claims -- it was a fiction that expressed a truth.

This, to use Aristotle's word, is how I should have felt had I taken a last, momentous walk that night.

By the time he returned as a tourist to Alexandria, decades later, he "remembered" vividly the original scene he had made up and written, the scene of his brother and himself sitting on a stone wall, looking out at the Mediterranean.  He could picture his brother, wearing shorts and carrying a sweater, as they walked along the shore road together. 

And now?  Now when he tries to remember rue Delta, that part of Alexandria where his family lived, he remembers his much later visit as a tourist, that visit when he recalled the fictional story of the last walk that he and his brother took along the Corniche.  But even that memory is fading.

What I certainly can't remember is the real rue Delta, the rue Delta as I envisioned it before writing Out of Egypt.  That rue Delta is forever lost.

As I mentioned in my last post, Aciman is an expert on the writings of Proust.  I've never read anyone who describes so vividly the tricks memory plays on us, and the tricks we play on our memories. 

Psychologists tell us that every time we remember an event, we "download" it into our conscious minds, savor it, make unintentional changes to it, and "upload" the revised memory again to our long-term memory, erasing the original.  Over a lifetime, those tiny changes add up, leading us at times to be amazed and/or embarrassed by the discrepancy between what we feel we vividly remember and documentary evidence to the contrary.  Aciman embraces these re-workings of memory.  He not only embraces them, but admits that, in his writings, they are sometimes intentional.

Many writers would argue that a memoir is a work of art -- like a novel --rather than a strictly scientific account of factual occurrences.  They will admit that they shuffle facts around a bit, to make the story more coherent, as Aciman describes in his opening quotation above.  But Aciman carries the process one step further -- describing events that represent emotions that he never himself actually felt.  Describing emotions that would merely seem to have been appropriate under the circumstances, emotions that are now -- despite his knowledge of their falsity -- the only ones he can "remember" experiencing.

He's candid, if a bit unnerving.  I think I'll re-read portions of my friend's memoir.

Harvard Square

As I walked across campus this morning, I observed a lot of tense students with frowns on their faces.  This week has been the last week before finals.  I don't think the week has any particular name at the University of Washington, but at my school we called it "Dead Week."  At Harvard, apparently, it's called "Reading Week."

Dead Week is the week during which you try to learn all the things you should have studied earlier while, at the same time, mentally organizing and recalling to mind everything that you actually had studied.  For perhaps ninety percent of the students, it's a time of panic, self-recrimination, insomnia, and unhealthful consumption of caffeine.  We're all a little crazy.

I remember it well.  Decades later, it still occasionally disturbs my dreams.

Now imagine a Dead Week that lasts a year.  That soul-deadening concept provides the background for André Aciman's 2013 novel, Harvard Square. 

The narrator, like Aciman himself, is a French-speaking, Jewish native of Alexandria who -- with his family -- was expelled by the nationalist Egyptian government.  Like Aciman, he is doing his graduate work at Harvard.  Like Aciman, he has failed his "comprehensives" -- an exam that must be passed before one takes his orals for his Ph.D. -- and has only one more chance to get it right.

The novel opens on a hot muggy day in early July 1977.  The narrator's comprehensives, second try, loom ahead in January.  He is trying to read two or three books per day, trying to cover everything he can in his field of seventeenth century European literature.  He is impoverished, teaching courses as a T.A. and tutoring in Italian to keep his rent current and some food on the table.  He feels very foreign, very un-American, very un-Waspish, very un-patrician.  He doubts his ability.  He suspects he neither fits into Harvard's culture, nor is welcomed by its -- in the 1970s, at least -- preppy, upper class faculty and students.

I had the sinking feeling that ... I'd flunk my comprehensives again, and they'd find out what they probably suspected all along: that I was a fraud, that I was never cut out to be a teacher, much less a scholar; that I had been a bad investment from the get-go; that I was the black sheep, the rotten apple, the bad seed; that I'd be known as the imposter who'd hustled his way into Harvard and was let go in the nick of time.

Moreover, troubling his ability to focus on Pascal and Cervantes, he is desperate for women, and he longs for a mythical Mediterranean world, for a lost Alexandria to which he can never return.

Harvard Square is a small square and a district immediately adjacent to the university.  The narrator tells us that in the 1970s, it was a grittier and much less touristy area than it is now.  He begins escaping his tiny apartment and doing his reading in tiny cafés in the area.  It's in the Café Algiers that he meets his soul-mate -- the man they call Kalishnikov, a Tunisian cab driver who spits out French like an automatic rifle, and whose name his friends shorten to "Kalaj."

The two men -- the Harvard graduate student of seventeenth century literature and the Tunisian cab driver who lacks a green card -- hit it off.  Kalaj berates his friend for his passivity, his overthinking every social situation, his inability to live in the present and go with the flow.  They share a love of their Mediterranean homelands, and of their adopted French culture.  Kalaj helps his friend learn to live, to make friends, to enjoy -- however tentatively -- life.  The narrator also learns from Kalaj how to waste precious time.

Aciman, of course, is a Proust scholar.  All his stories and essays deal, in one way or another, with our memories and with with the manner in which those memories shape our lives.  In Harvard Square, both men are deeply drawn by nostalgia for past worlds that never really existed, or never existed as now recalled. 

The novel offers many themes, and can be understood on many levels.  The narrator gradually realizes that he has never allowed himself to open up -- not to the various women he has slept with, not to his few friends.  For whatever reason, he puts up walls, he loses interest, he becomes uncomfortable when a relationship or friendship becomes too demanding.  Kalaj was his opposite:

I was shifty, he was up-front.  I never raised my voice; he was the loudest man on Harvard Square.  I was cramped, cautious, diffident; he was reckless and brutal, a tinder box.  He spoke his mind.  Mine was a vault.  He was in-your-face; I waited till your back was turned.  He stood for nothing, took no prisoners, lambasted everyone.  I tolerated everybody without loving a single one. ... He was new to the States but had managed to speak to almost everyone in Cambridge; I'd been a graduate student for four years at Harvard but went entire days that summer without a soul to turn to.

He eventually realizes that he needs to choose -- the jovial, Mediterranean, live-for-the-minute world of his friend Kalaj, the world he recalls from his Alexandria youth and a world in which he now feels, at times, alive -- or the glittering world Harvard offers him.   Fully understanding what he's doing, he betrays Kalaj as he has betrayed each of his girlfriends -- silently and passively.  He pulls back.  He stops hanging out.  He stops being home when Kalaj comes around.  Kalaj understands all too well; others have treated him the same way.  But Kalaj had come to believe that his shy Harvard friend was different, a true friend. 

Immigration catches up, finally, with Kalaj, and he is deported.  The narrator can't tolerate the emotions that would be involved in bidding Kalaj goodbye.  He avoids Kalaj's attempt to see him one last time, knowing that his behavior is something for which he'll never forgive himself.

"Dead Week" makes us all a little crazy.

He never hears from Kalaj again.  He passes his comprehensives.

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.