A dissatisfied life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lifting up our hearts

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

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

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

That review seems to be still pending.

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

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

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

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

4/20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All I have to do is dream, dream, dream

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then climb back up!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wow, there it is right in front of you!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For 20 more photos of the hike, click here.

Down, down, down

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stay tuned for post-hike comments.

Casting about

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I "heart" you

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But now I do.

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

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

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