Fiat lux

I returned from four days in California this afternoon, and discovered a burned-out light bulb. Not just any light bulb, but the one screwed into that one lamp in the living room that I have hooked up to a timer. Supposedly, various burglars, vandals, squatters, cat nabbers, the criminally insane, the merely idle and curious -- all those apt to end up inside my house in my absence -- will be deterred and driven off by my display of one bright, shining light.

Well, that shining light burned out in my absence, so its deterring glow didn't have much deterrent effect. Nevertheless, I'm happy to report, the house was intact and the cats still alive.

But my point was going to be -- and indeed there was one -- that it was a 150 watt bulb that went kaput, and I don't have any spares. What I do have -- aside from 100 watt bulbs, one of which I'm now using as a temporary substitute -- are some of those new energy saving fluorescent bulbs that we've been urged to buy.

I've tried them in other rooms. I should remark, for those of you who don't know me, that I'm far from being a fussy interior decorator. My worn and uncoordinated furnishings have appalled normal folks of all ages, backgrounds and sectarian beliefs. But I do know the difference between a room that's a relaxing, softly-lit retreat from the world's cares, and one that's lit up like the produce section at Safeway.

As these new bulbs advertise, they offer me the equivalent of 100 watts of incandescent lighting at the cost of only 26 watts of power. And that's great. In a kitchen or basement or attic. But fluorescent lighting is not the equivalent of soft, incandescent lighting, and I prefer not having it in my living room. Not until they develop fluorescent lights that give off the same spectrum as the old, energy-consuming incandescent lamps.

So, I'm relieved to read in today's New York Times that the government has not -- despite what we have all been led to believe -- outlawed incandescent bulbs. The law simply encourages manufacturers to find ways to increase energy efficiency, whatever the technology adopted. And manufacturers are doing so, finding ways to make even incandescent bulbs more efficient.

I'm a Sierra Club member. I'm as worried as you about looming energy shortages as the world develops. I have no interest in Glenn Beck's fulminations against the "nanny state," or his exhortations to hoard incandescent bulbs. In the years to come, conservation needs may force us to adopt many measures that now strike us as outrageous. I will cheerfully submit to them, in pursuit of the common good. But I'm relieved to read that -- at least, for now -- incandescent bulbs will remain on store shelves and shine expensively in our homes.

And I'll drop by the store tomorrow, and buy myself a couple of 150 watt-ers.

Dickens in New York

In ninth grade, my English class was given the task of reading Dickens's novel, Great Expectations. Most of the details of the plot now escape me, but vividly etched in my 15-year-old brain was the character of Miss Havisham.

Pip, the hero of the novel, was first introduced to Miss Havisham when he was around six years of age; she summoned him to be a playmate for her adopted daughter. She was wealthy, she was old, and she was peculiar: She wore an old, yellowed wedding dress. She kept all the windows in her house tightly boarded up. All of the clocks were stopped at 8:40.

As time went on, Miss Havisham eventually showed Pip the room where, long ago, a wedding dinner had been prepared. In the center of the banquet table sat a moldy wedding cake, half eaten by mice and enmeshed in cobwebs on which spiders ran up and down. Miss Havisham explained to Pip that this was the room in which, once she was dead, she would be laid.

The gothic horror of this scene would be enough to fascinate any ninth grader, I'm sure. But when you're a young introvert --harboring secret fears that you yourself are doomed to age into an eccentric old recluse -- well, Dickens's portrayal of Miss Havisham becomes well nigh unforgettable.

I thought of Miss Havisham this week, of course, as I read of the death of Huguette Clark, heir to one of the great American fortunes, a fortune accumulated by her father over his lifetime and originating from his copper holdings in Montana. Miss Clark died this week at 104. Unlike with Miss Havisham, Miss Clark's long-ago fiancé actually showed up for their wedding; he left her nine months later, however, and she found herself divorced at the age of 23. From that time on, she withdrew completely from society and lived with her mother in a Manhattan apartment.

She played with dolls and doll houses. She painted, and she played the harp. For lunches, she dined on crackers and sardines. For entertainment, she loved watching The Flintstones on television. She saw no one. After her mother died in 1963, she continued living alone in the same apartment until the 1980's, when she checked herself into a hospital where others could care for her. And that's where she lived for the last 25 or 30 years of her life.

Besides care providers, she spoke only to her attorney and her accountant. They allegedly fleeced her, not that she would have noticed any losses. Her will has not yet been made public. The main reaction of the public and the press to her death has been to speculate as to who would get her money.

Miss Clark came about as close to living the life of Miss Havisham as anyone could come in today's world. Unlike Miss Havisham, she did have nine months of wedded bliss -- although her former husband later claimed that their marriage was never consummated. Unlike Miss Havisham, who ultimately died of burns suffered when her wedding dress caught fire, Miss Clark died in apparent comfort under the best of medical care.

Miss Clark lacked a Charles Dickens to paint a picture of her presumably sad (although self-chosen) life. But she didn't really need him. Her life really speaks for itself. My 15-year-old self would have been stunned -- and no doubt unsettled -- to learn that a Miss Havisham really existed, a contemporary American woman, living in tragic isolation, surrounded by her money and her dolls.

A Miss Havisham for our times, she was, secluded in the heart of the Big Apple, marking time as the decades passed -- untouched by the bustle, the changes, the excitement, and the life of the great city all about her.

Kiril growing up

Last November, I posted a tribute to Kiril Kulish, one of the original "Billy's" in the Broadway musical "Billy Elliot." It turned out to be my third most popular posting ever, with 150 hits.

Some of you who found it worth reading (and its links worth watching) might be interested in a recent interview of Kiril, a 17-year-old American-born dancer whose parents immigrated from the Ukraine. The interview was produced -- and produced very nicely -- by Russian television.

The YouTube video lasts about ten minutes. The interview itself is interspersed with cuts to scenes in which Kulish reprises some of his dance steps and acrobatics from the musical and attempts as an older teenager (his voice having lost much of its range when it changed) to sing the musical's signature song, which he accompanies with his own piano improvisations. The interview concludes with scenes from the 2009 Tony awards.

Kiril Kulish is now a student at the American Ballet Theatre (ABT) in New York.

Спасибо, Kiril, и удача!

P.S. -- The Russian interviewer himself never appears on camera. He asks quiet questions and keeps the focus on the person being interviewed. If only American television producers would take note!

O Rapturous Day!

But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of the heavens, but my Father alone.
--Matthew 24:36

If you've been paying attention, you realize that at approximately 6 p.m. tonight, Pacific Daylight Time, those chosen by God will disappear from the face of the earth, having been assumed body and soul into heaven. I hope this warning reaches you in time.

Harold Camping is only the latest of the prophets to have predicted the timing of Doomsday. Much of Europe, reportedly, was petrified in the late tenth century, awaiting the dreaded year of A.D. 1000.

Despite attending Sunday School diligently during boyhood and adolescence, as well as having read my Bible avidly as a child, I'd never heard of the "Rapture" until the last decade. You can't find it there in the Bible, unless -- apparently -- you squint, focus on certain key obscurities, apply mathematics, draw inferences, and set angels to dancing on the head of a pin. An odd way for God to set forth his warnings to mankind, one might think. In fact, a major warning I took away from my own religious education was the one given in Matthew: Be vigilant, because the end will come when you least expect it.

My first real intimation that the Rapture was a concept taken seriously by some Christians came from reading the Portofino trilogy by Frank Schaeffer. These novels, both funny and sympathetic, are based on his own childhood in a missionary family. His parents, members of an obscure sect that had at one time splintered off from the Presbyterian church, had dedicated their lives to saving the lost Catholic souls of French-speaking Switzerland. One day, as he recounts in Zermatt, the final book of the trilogy, he awoke to find himself alone in the missionary compound. He instantly panicked, seized by guilty fear that the Saved had been "Raptured," and that he, all unworthy, had been left behind.

It says in the Bible that several amazing things will happen when Jesus zooms back to earth to snatch his elect up into the clouds at the Rapture. The moon will turn to blood. The water will turn to blood too. So I flushed the toilet ... .

After finding assurance in the toilet's clear water that his manifold adolescent sins had not yet caught up with him, he recalled with contrition the time that he had reduced a friend to uncontrollable tears by secretly putting red dye in the boy's toilet while his folks were away.

Schaeffer survived his childhood, and made the radical conversion as an adult from millennial Calvinism to Greek Orthodoxy.

I suspect that when we awake tomorrow, even our most devout friends and neighbors will still be here with us. For most of us, it's sufficient to recall that our personal encounter with eternity won't await an unpredictably timed Second Coming. Each of us is only a heartbeat away -- a burst aneurism, a car swerving across the center line -- from our own personal departure from earth.

The realization that the day and hour of our own personal demise is unknown should suffice. We can leave the timing of the termination of the universe itself to the mind of a Power higher than the angels, higher even than Mr. Camping.

Anthropomorphize much?

I sit at my desk, shuddering, as genocide occurs all about me. Outside. Arboreal genocide.

Yes, once again I've had to hire "experts" to prune back the all too abundant foliage of the Pacific Northwest. Tree limbs have been providing bridges for squirrels and other varmints to traipse across onto my rooftop and -- potentially -- into my attic. The two trees growing in the parking strip have totally blocked my view of the street, and vice versa. A tiny holly bush, once prettily ornamental, has somehow grown -- like Topsy -- into a 25 foot prickly monster that now impinges on my driveway; it's developed roots, moreover, that threaten to dislodge boulders and permit my front lawn to slide down onto the sidewallk.

It had to be done. It should have been done earlier.

Still, I cringe. I grit my teeth as I hear power tools cutting into the living flesh of these beautiful plants. My trees. To some, my landscaping might seem malignant: a cancer gradually surrounding and tightening a chokehold on my house. An organic vise that seeks to squeeze the structure to death, and me within it. But to me, my trees are friendly protectors -- perhaps a bit too rambunctious, like a sheep dog with too much hair, one that bounds about, jumping up on the guests -- but essentially loving and devoted. And I have returned their affection how? By hiring assassins to cut off their limbs. And in the case of the holly tree, to actually "put it to sleep" or -- to call a spade a spade -- brutally execute it.

I listen now to the tearing and slicing of the power tools. Soon will come the chipping, as my friends' bodies and limbs are fed through the chipper, swiftly ground into cellulosic hamburger.

My house will look 100 percent better when the crew leaves. But at what expense? At what loss to my own self-respect -- to my self-image as a kind and moral man? It's such an old story, isn't it? Especially here in the Northwest. Man's inhumanity to tree.

You always hurt the ones you love.

Messing around

I love Wikipedia. I can look up any topic under the sun, and instantly find a readable article. The article will have resulted from a collaborative effort by writers interested in the topic, one that has been peer reviewed and revised, rather than edited by some higher authority. Wikipedia articles are updated within minutes of any new development affecting their contents.

I also own a couple of old standard encyclopedias. They, of course, are not updated on a daily basis. They are not updated ever (except, perhaps, by yearly supplements obtainable by subscription). And this makes them valuable to the reader in a different and unintended way: they portray the era in which they were written, now frozen, as it were, in amber.

I was just thumbing through the "H" volume of the World Book Encyclopedia, 1955 edition. The World Book was one of the better encyclopedias published at that time. Unlike the Encyclopedia Britannica, the oldest and most prestigious of encyclopedias, it was aimed largely at children and high school students, although many of its articles were sufficiently sophisticated to be of some interest to the adult reader as well.

Anyway, I was browsing the article entitled "Hobby," one of those articles clearly designed to appeal to younger readers. It was accompanied by a large number of photographs showing children engaged in common hobbies of the time. Let me list them for you, and then explain why I found these photographs interesting:

• Model railroading
  
• Magic tricks
  
• Archery
  
• Ham radio
  
• Raising livestock
  
• Pets
  
• Skiing
  
• Ice skating
  
• Soap box derbies
  
• Kite flying
  
• Building model airplanes
  
• Rigging a model schooner
  
• Cooking
  
• Wood carving


• Sewing doll dresses


• Making dolls


• Weaving


• "Trapping" wild animals with a mounted camera


• Stamp collecting


• Doll collecting


• Insect/butterfly collecting and mounting


• Collecting bottle caps and using them in building models


• Sea shell collecting


• Chemistry work in a home laboratory


• Microscopes


• Rock collecting


• Music (piano, violin, etc.)


• Fashion design and illustration


• Construction and use of homemade telescopes


• A few more photos showing "unusual" hobbies

Different hobbies obviously appealed to kids of different ages -- bottle cap collecting, perhaps, among some of the younger ones; the scientifically oriented hobbies more among high school students.

I doubt if any of these hobbies sound particularly bizarre to us today. They all still exist within our collective memory. And obviously, kids still ski (or snowboard), and they still take music lessons. But how many kids do you know who would confess to spending any time at all engaged in most of these pursuits? Or would even understand the point? A few, I'm sure. And some adults may still collect stamps or dolls, or build model railway layouts -- interests continued from childhood, or picked up as a nostalgic return to their own childhoods.

But when this edition of World Book came out, these hobbies were part of the common culture of American childhood. What happened?

I suspect that the internet and the computer are primary factors in their demise. Some of the strong urges of children to develop new skills, to learn, to compete among themselves, and to find common interests with which to bond among themselves are now satisfied by computer games, social networks, specialized software programs, and on-line music and videos. The hobbies discussed in World Book arose out of a different milieu. For example, it might well seem strange to most kids today to buy and maintain a layout with model steam trains, trains themselves having been marginalized in our world, and steam engines having disappeared -- but they still build and collaborate in make-believe worlds of their own, using software available to them in an enormous variety of on-line computer games.

Still, reading the encyclopedia article, and looking at the (doubtlessly idealized) photos of kids painstakingly building models, or mounting stamps in a stamp album, makes me feel that something has been lost. Maybe it's kids' ability to take endless pains working on a project important to themselves. Maybe it's the fact that so many of the photos show children alone, happily amusing themselves, rather than participating in a group activity. (Which is a strange reaction for me to have, because too many of today's kids use computer games to isolate themselves from "in real life" friendships.) Maybe it's just the realization that the kids in the photos are doing something slow and unhurried, with maximum focus and concentration. They aren't watching TV and texting friends at the same time they are mounting butterflies.

In reality, I suspect that kids in general may well be happier today than they were in 1955, and certainly as quick mentally. Their ability to multi-task may in fact be pushing our evolution as a species to a new and higher level. Maybe we haven't lost anything at all, except in the same sense that we've "lost" the horse and buggy. I guess I'll just chalk my feelings up to nostalgia.

After all, I'm a guy who's also been inclined to long for the days when knighthood was in flower -- forgetting that the odds strongly suggest that while the knights were being knightly, I would have been an illiterate serf out plowing the field.

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

(5-18-11)After publishing the above post, I learned from (ironically) Wikipedia that the World Book Encyclopedia is still published in annual editions (but under different ownership) in a print format. The encyclopedia was last given a major revamp in form and content in 1988. According, again, to Wikipedia, it is now marketed to students 15 years and older, and "shows particular strength in scientific, technical, and medical subjects." I would not say that these comments applied to the 1955 edition, which is well written but seems to me to have been geared, in part, to students several years younger, as well as those of high school age and older.

By motor car to Oxiana

As many have pointed out to me, a visit to Iran seems like an odd way to amuse yourself. But then, it's always seemed that way.

Since my return home last month, I've finally got around to reading one of the great classics of travel writing, a memoir of travel through Persia (Iran) and Afghanistan in the 1930's: The Road to Oxiana, by the British writer, Robert Byron.

Byron was one of a once-familiar breed of English eccentrics: He had an urge to travel to places largely unvisited by Westerners, he was a self-educated expert in Eastern art and architecture in general, and he was fascinated by very specific types of Muslim art. He had strong views -- he despised those romantic forms of Muslim architecture most popular in the West: those of the Moguls, best represented by the Taj Mahal, and those of the Moors, such as the Alhambra.

He had a keen ear for language, and his book reproduces many unusual and hilarious conversations, ones supposedly recalled verbatim and written out phonetically. For example, using musical abbreviations to show changing voice dynamics, he records comments by the Afghani ambassador to Persia, in which the ambassador discusses his visit to the opera in Rome:

(m)Italian lady she sit beside me. She is (eyes blazing ff) big lady, yah! great? no, fat. (mf) She more fat than Madame Egypt [the Egyptian Ministress] and her breast is (cr) too big. (mf) It fall out of box, so. Much diamonds and gold on it. (pp) I am frightened. I see if it shall be in my face. (f) I suffocate.

The book, written in diary form, tells of the expedition he and a friend -- from their university days at Oxford -- undertook in 1933-34, at the age of 28, from Cyprus, through Palestine and Syria, to Persia and Afghanistan. By the time of his trip, Byron had already become a well-known writer and art critic, famous especially for championing the importance of Byzantine art.

Byron hoped ultimately to reach the Amu Darya river, which separated Afghanistan from the Soviet Union -- a river known as the Oxus during the time of Alexander the Great. Political conditions in Afghanistan barred him from ever catching sight of the river, but he did travel through the region through which it flowed, which he called Oxiana.

But the real objective of the trip was to view Persian architecture in both Persia itself and in Persia's former territory located then (as it is now) in Afghanistan. My own interest in Persian architecture totally pales to insignificance by comparison. My fascination with the book was rather in comparing Byron's observations of Persia in 1933 with what I was able to see for myself last month. Byron visited most of the same cities and major archeological sites that I did.

In 1933, as in 2011, Persia was a difficult land in which to travel. The only serious difficulty now, however, for an American at least, is in obtaining a visa. In 1933, on the other hand, Persia was a huge, thinly populated expanse of land with a rudimentary road system. It was surrounded by other nations equally remote. The few Westerners that Byron encountered were, for the most part, either diplomats or professional archeologists and art historians.

Access from Europe was not by arrival at Tehran Airport, but by dirt roads across the inhospitable expanses of Syria and Iraq. He found Iraq -- in the region of Baghdad -- to be as disagreeable as I'm sure our own military did during the recent war:

[Mesopotamia] is a mud plain .... From this plain rise villages of mud and cities of mud. The rivers flow with liquid mud. The air is composed of mud refined into a gas. The people are mud-coloured; they wear mud-coloured clothes and their national hat is nothing more than a formalized mud-pie.

Once into Iran, everything changed. They entered a land of beauty.

Up and down we sped through the fresh tonic air, to the foot of the mountains; then up and up, to a pass between jagged pine-tufted pinnacles that mixed with the pattern of the stars. ... [W]e dined to the music of streams and crickets, looking out on a garden of moon-washed poplars and munching baskets of sweet grapes.

Persia was not always to be so idyllic; the dirt roads, the lack of bridges that compelled fording of streams, the roads blocked by landslides -- all these obstacles took, at times, their toll on Byron's patience, although not on his sense of humor. But I envied him his opportunity of visiting what is now Iran at a time when it was all new to Western visitors, when simply moving from one town to another could be a challenge, often requiring days of delay, awaiting the right weather or the approval of some minor dignatary.

Iran is still largely unvisited, by Americans at least, but once you're there, you now travel over modern, well-engineered freeways.

Byron visited many of the same sites that I did. He visited the Shrine of the Imam Reza in Mashad, as I did. But while our group timorously followed our guide about the outer precincts of the shrine, our women enshrouded in chadors, Byron dressed himself in what he hoped would look like Persian garb and, walking all alone, penetrated the central portions of the shrine, forbidden to infidels. He looked all about while others prayed, gazing with wonder at the beauty of the building interiors. Eventually, sensing growing suspicion among the faithful, he made a fast departure before a riot could begin. Dangerous and imprudent, perhaps, but the stories he had to tell (and, of course, did)!

He visited Persepolis, as we did. As ruins go, we didn't find it to be overly crowded, but there were still quite a few tourists -- Iranian, Asian, and European -- wandering about reading signs and guide books, and listening to guides. Byron found the site empty and deserted, as it had been for centuries, except for the presence of an archeologist from the University of Chicago who was excavating the site. This American professor claimed all rights to the monumental ruin, and forbade Byron from taking any photographs of "his" Persepolis. (Byron outwitted him in the end, of course.)

Byron also visited Shiraz, and Yazd, and Kerman -- all towns that I also enjoyed visiting -- before eventually moving on to Afghanistan. His descriptions of these towns, again, show us how much has changed: sleepy villages are now towns and small cities that -- while still picturesque and exotic -- have definitely become part of the modern world.

My reaction to Byron's book is similar in some ways, of course, to what it would be to any well written tourist guide to any destination from the 1930's. Fascinating comparisons between places "then" and "now," closer to home, can be made by reading the Guides to the States prepared by writers for the WPA during the Depression. But Persia/Iran has changed so drastically in the same period -- both in appearance and in accessability -- that Byron's book presents an especially dramatic contrast, and arouses feelings of strong nostalgia for a time when the world seemed much larger and more diverse. A time when just getting to Persia required more time, effort, stamina, and logistics than were available to most people.

Now, "Persia" is less than 24 hours away -- once you have that precious visa!

And I'll be in Scotland afore ye

In the spring, a lad's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of -- getting the hell out of the house and doing some hiking!

After my highly successful and entertaining hike across England last summer, following the course of Hadrian's Wall, I plan to follow up in August with a 95-mile Scottish hike along the West Highland Trail. This trail runs from a northern Glasgow suburb in the south, to Fort William in the north. It follows old military tracks, Highlanders' footpaths, and "drovers' roads." (As we all know, a drover's road is a track used in olden times for driving livestock to market. We can picture Glasgow as at one time the Kansas City of Britain, I suppose.)

The trail starts out in the lowlands, ambles along the length of Loch Lomond, rambles through glens and low passes, and ascends into the highlands. It crosses spectacular moorland, climbs the "Devil's Staircase," passes through forest lands, and finally drops down into Fort William -- a "capital" of the Scottish Highlands (second only to Inverness), and located at the base of Ben Nevis.

Ben Nevis is the highest mountain in the British Isles. While the 4,409-foot elevation of its summit may not sound impressive to us Americans, the weather can be wild and unpredictable, taking several climbers' lives every year. I'm staying an extra night in Fort William, in the hopes of completing a successful climb (well, "walk" would be more candid) to the summit.

Once again, I'll be pampering myself while hiking. No tents, no heavy backpack. I'll be staying at B&B's and carrying only a day pack each day, leaving my baggage behind each morning and finding it mysteriously waiting for me each evening at my destination.

The primary hazard, apparently, will be the "midges."

Midges are small, two-winged flying insects, they love Scotland and walkers on the West Highland Way, they can smell your sweat! ... Biting midges fly in swarms (big huge swarms, that follow you around) and usually don't stray too far from their breeding (biting grounds) grounds.
--Walking Scotland (on-line)

I'll be heading off to Scotland with good hiking boots, a good camera -- and several gallons of DEET. I've got some good Scots blood in my veins -- neither miles nor moorland nor multitudes of midges shall stay my sure passage.

Looking back

Once you reach a certain age -- once your own mother is no longer with you, for example -- Mother's Day takes on a peculiarly bittersweet quality.

You're certainly relieved of your annual obligation to buy mom a present or flowers -- a tedious piece of "drudgery" that seems in retrospect so trivial, so petty, as to make you wonder why you ever felt it an obligation rather than a privilege. You're happy for the younger families -- those of relatives and friends -- who still gather with their mothers, by phone if not in person -- to commemorate the day.

For me, the day especially recalls memories of the past. Not the past when I hurriedly ordered flowers by long distance, but a more distant past, back when I'd proudly construct my own greeting cards with crayons and scissors, or a year or so later, when I'd buy some small gift with money from my allowance. Or,once I reached 10 or 11, when I'd put together my own version of a Denny's Grand Slam Breakfast and serve it to my mother in bed -- because I'd seen in the comic strips that that's how the holdiay was done. (I'm sure she would have preferred eating at a table. And I'm a little disturbed that I have no memory whatsoever of cleaning up the mess in the kitchen afterwards.)

I guess what I'm saying is that Mother's Day reminds me -- more so in some ways than do more iconic holidays like Christmas and Thanksgiving -- of a time when life seemed much more stable and unchanging. The big holidays were all different from each other, depending on what presents we received that year, or which distant relatives happened to be present, or at whose house we ate dinner. But Mother's Day was a more intimate holiday, one observed only by our nuclear family for no more than half the day. It changed little from year to year.

Every Mother's Day seemed about the same, and they seemed to come one after another in an endless procession. When you're a kid, at least a kid with a stable home life, you feel that this is the way life is, and always has been. And always will be. Because even by the time you reach high school, you're still a child in many ways. You still find it hard to wrap your mind around the concept that your family's annual cycle of events won't continue indefinitely, although you know rationally that you soon will be leaving for college.

The routine of daily life -- the recurrance each year of Mother's Day -- seemed eternal. And yet, that's just the child's perspective. For the parents -- as you finally realize, once you're well into adulthood -- that period of "normality" was one that had begun just a short time earlier, and one that passed incredibly quickly, leaving them alone together in their empty nest, waiting for the long distance telephone calls that seemed to come all too seldom.

I read a book review¹ in this morning's New York Times, a review of a somewhat old-fashioned novel that spans about 30 years in the life of an Iowa family. The review concludes:

With the decades' fluctuations little more than heavy weather outside the walls of the house, what one is left with is a sense of how provisional it all was anyway, and how fast it all went by.

And I guess it was those words and that book review, together with my memories of childhood prompted by Mother's Day, that provoked today's "bittersweet" blog posting.

My family all felt so stable and permanent at the time. But then we each left home and became an adult. We've seen our parents and other significant relatives pass away. And I'm left with fond memories of what now seems -- compared with childhoods of other folks I've known -- an unusually happy childhood.

But I'm left also with a stunned sense of "how fast it all went by."

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

¹Jonathan Dee, NY Times, reviewing The Year We Left Home by Jean Thompson.

Is he really dead?

I don't consider myself particularly gullible. As an attorney, I've taken zillions of depositions of folks who were highly motivated to fudge the truth. I've listened to testimony that I knew was false, because I had documents in my notebook that proved it. I've generally hoped for the best from people, but have never been particularly surprised when I got the worst.

But to some of you out there -- to many of you, I'm beginning to realize -- I'm pathetically trusting, and live in a fool's paradise. Why? Because:

• I really and truly think Obama was born in Hawaii. And got into Columbia and Harvard on his own merits.
  
• I do believe that our lunar lander actually did land on the moon.
  
• I think it's highly probable that JFK was assassinated by a single disturbed individual.
  
• I'm confident that the Vatican has not spent the past two thousand years keeping a lid on an explosive affair between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, a secret maintained until exposed by the clever novelist Dan Brown.
  
• I don't think that a Jewish cabal is actually running Wall Street and/or the U. S. government.
  
• I don't think that the important events of our time have been directed by the Masonic Order, or that the dollar bill is encoded with their ritual symbols as an revelation of their power.
  
• I don't believe that FDR conspired with Churchill to permit the Japanese to bomb Pearl Harbor, seeking a way to build public support for the war.
  
• I don't believe that the government has systematically concealed proof that we've been contacted by aliens. Or buried photos showing the existence of flying saucers.

Yeah, call me naive. And, furthermore -- I certainly don't believe that (1) bin Osama was not really killed; or (2) bin Osama was captured years ago and saved for death until this politically opportune moment; or (3) bin Osama never existed, at least as an actual leader of al Qaeda.

It's not that conspiracies never exist. It's rather that Occam's Razor mandates that we accept the simplest explanation for all phenomena unless we have good reason to adopt a more complicated explanation. The fact that a sinister explanation can be dreamed up for a political event doesn't mean that it's worth accepting, or even seriously contemplating.

That way lies madness.

People inclined to believe in and argue in favor of conspiracies -- and the same people seem inclined toward numerous conspiracies -- tell us more about their own psychological make up than they do about the make up of reality. As one psychologist has noted, they tend to find the world to be a scarier place than do the rest of us, and they have less tolerance for ambiguity; it's less painful for such people to believe in a conspiracy as a cause of a disaster than simply to accept that bad things often happen randomly. I'd add that these individuals also must be more convinced than experience would seem to justify of the ability of humans to bond together into extremely tight-knit groups, keeping amazing secrets secret, for prolonged periods of time.

So, don't bother to write and tell me I'm a fool and a simpleton. I've already formed my own suspicions about you.

Assassination

Like everyone else, I'm glad that Osama bin Laden is no longer in a position to pursue his blood-thirsty activities around the world.

Terrorism, which always makes the innocent suffer in order to further someone else's goals, nevertheless -- at times --has comprehensible objectives. For example, everyone knew what the Irish Republican Army was after. Bin Laden, on the other hand, may have had specific objectives, but it was his failure to share them clearly with the rest of humanity that made his atrocities so, well, atrocious. Was he motivated simply by personal hatred of America and Americans? By a desire to force America to end its support of Israel? By hatred of secular Muslim governments? By hatred of the modern world?

All of these, perhaps. It was hard to tell. It was difficult to comprehend what we could do -- even if inclined -- to satisfy him.

Even Iran's foreign minister reportedly sounds relieved to hear of bin Laden's death:

We hope that this development will end war, conflict, unrest and the death of innocent people, and help to establish peace and tranquility in the region.

--Washington Post.

Also, as does everyone, I admire the skill and competence of our intelligence community, and the bravery of the special forces personnel who carried out the successful attack.

Having said all that, I'm left profoundly disturbed by the entire incident. We now apparently have no compunction at assassinating our enemies. Although the President told us last night that an effort had been made to capture bin Laden alive, I suspect it wasn't much of an effort, or that there could have been much of an effort within the confines of the compound. Commentators have made it all too obvious that capturing bin Laden alive would have posed extremely difficult political and diplomatic questions. Do we bring him to the U.S. for trial? Or to Guantánamo? No one wanted him. Saudi Arabia, bin Laden's own country, wouldn't accept even bin Laden's corpse, and he had to be buried at sea.

Not only do we now assassinate our enemies, we do so inside the territory of nations with whom we are not at war, and, in this case, one that was putatively a friendly nation. Whatever Pakistan's leaders said to the President after he informed them of the attack, they clearly had not been briefed before the attack -- understandably, since we had no reason to trust security within the Pakistan government. Not only did we land helicopters and armed personnel within Pakistan, we did it far from the Afghan border -- after ten years, this was no "hot pursuit" incursion into Pakistan. In fact, we landed within a few miles of the Pakistan capital itself.

Our mission was skillfully performed; our objective was clear, specific, and reasonable; and every effort was made to eliminate, or at least minimize, collateral injuries and death. But still -- what kind of precedent have we set? How will we react if Russia discovers that one of their criminally convicted oligarchs is hiding in a mansion in Georgetown, and sends in helicopters to grab him? Smile, and congratulate the Russians on their well executed mission?

International law -- and my own mindset -- are directed toward relations between sovereign nations. Apprehending a terrorist mastermind, guilty of murdering American citizens, strikes me as a criminal matter, one to be handled by cooperation between our police and Pakistan's police. It does not fall within the accepted definition of "war." This police approach clearly was not a viable way of handling the situation. But as it is, we are working far outside the framework of international law.

Our immediate concern has to be making the best of our successful mission, and ensuring that other countries, especially Muslim nations, give us their support. But in the long run, we need to work out an international system of law that enables the world to fight terrorism without outraging affected nations by affronts to their own sovereignty. Not just because "law" is a pleasant nicety, but because it governs how nations treat each other, and can expect to be treated, now and in the future.

And we might also want to ask ourselves whether "execution by police" -- an accusation often directed against our own domestic police forces -- should become a modus operandi in the apprehension of international terrorists.