One more rock

Boy standing atop a cairn
on the summit of
Ben Nevis, Scotland 

Something's magical about the Last Day of the Year.  I know, it's just another day.  If we still used the ancient Roman calendar, 2019 would have begun on March 1, and we would be still trudging along for another couple of months until it came to an end.

But, here we are, locked into to our Gregorian calendar.  December 31.  Today, we wind things up.  Money earned after today gets taxed in 2021, not 2020.  We ring out the old, and ring in the new -- hoping despite all experience to the contrary that the new year will be better.

And so it is with this, my blog.  This post is the final addition to my 2019 sum of posts.  Google's magic counters flip back to zero after midnight, and start counting for 2020.

I can't speak for quality, but not a bad year for quantity.  As of Saturday, I had published 111 posts during 2019, a new record.  One post more than the 110 I published in 2010.  Today's post is unnecessary when it comes to setting records.  It's overkill.

Back before surveying was less precise than it is now, people argued about whose area had the higher mountain.  For example, Rainier or Whitney?  Climbers even built cairns, piles of rocks, at the summit to boost their mountain's claims.  "Look, my mountain's now higher than yours!"

Similarly, I shamefacedly confess that in 2010, I published a recipe for a Tom & Jerry on December 31, just to add some heft to that year's total number of posts.  No such phony padding is necessary this year.  I've already set a new record, fair and square.

But why not raise the bar a bit?  Make beating the 2019 record a bigger challenge?  Why not just pile one more rock on the top of Whitney's cairn, even after surveys have proved that it's beat Rainier by a hundred feet? One more post to increase the quantity of this year's posts, even at the expense of decreasing their average quality?

Hence this lame post.  Post No. 112 for 2019.

Happy New Year!

A Wizard of Earthsea

My imagination refuses to limit all the elements that make an adventure story and make it exciting -- danger, risk, challenge, courage -- to battlefields. ...To be the man he can be, Ged has to find out who and what his real enemy is.  He has to find out what it means to be himself.  That requires not a war but a search and a discovery.
--Ursula K. Le Guin

If the title of this post attracted you, you probably have already read all six books of Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea series.  I haven't.  Until a month ago, I had never heard of the books or of their author, despite enjoying both fantasy and science fiction.  But my nephew thought I'd like them, and, after reading the first book, I agree.

Ms. Le Guin published A Wizard of Earthsea, the first book of the series, in 1968.  As she points out in her 2012 commentary, included in the Kindle edition, the only fantasy material read widely by adults in that year was the Lord of the Rings trilogy.  Her publisher asked her to write a book for teenagers -- a YA novel -- and this was her first attempt to reach that audience.  As I've concluded myself, it's hard to draw a line between YA and adult literature: "Despite what some adults seem to think, teenagers are fully human.  And some of them read as intensely and keenly as if their life depended on it."  It isn't an audience you write down to.  Teenagers are fully capable of reading language as complex as that found in any adult fiction -- which they also may well be reading.

If there is a distinction between serious adult and YA novels, it may that teenage minds are still searching for meaning in life, and are more open to unconventional ways of finding that meaning.

The Earthsea series -- or at least the first volume -- is similar to Lord of the Rings in that it describes in rich detail an alternative society, probably a pre-historic society, that is fully human and exists on Earth.  But on an Earth where the geography is unfamiliar.  LOTR  described what could be construed as a distorted map of Europe, before coast lines had obtained their present shape.  Wizard describes a huge cluster of islands, of all shapes and sizes, running from cold regions in the north to much warmer regions in the south, surrounded by seas that, to anyone's knowledge, go on forever.

Le Guin describes the places and peoples of Earthsea, as the novel progresses, as though the reader is as familiar with that world as he is with New York and California.  Her technique plunges the reader deeply into her world in a highly satisfying manner.  But a map would help visualize the world she describes.  She mentions that she drew her novel's world on a large piece of posterboard before she began writing, or even knowing the plot of, the novel.  Kindle does provide the reader a similar map, but it is so tiny as to be useless.

Earthsea is a world where magic is just one element of daily life, where every small settlement has its sorcerer or witch who has the ability to cast mundane spells protecting homes, improving the fishing, warding off illnesses.  But these minor spells are not to be confused with the harnessing of the great forces of the universe, for which one must know the "real names" of persons and objects, and have the ability to invoke those real names in the Old Speech, an obsolete language like Latin, believed to date back to the creation of the world.

Ged is a boy who lives on an obscure island in Earthsea, a boy brighter and more curious and more energetic than his peers.  (A boy like the typical young reader, I suppose.)  He learns minor spells from the local witch, but as he turns 13, a learned Mage discovers him and, recognizing that Ged has great latent powers within him, takes him on as an apprentice.  The Mage, Ogion the Silent, tries to teach Ged that any use of the greater forms of magic always disturbs the equilibrium of the universe and the soul of the person using it.  One must use it with great care. 

But Ged wants to be famous and powerful.  He finds Ogion's caution and prudence to be stifling, and goes off to the Harvard of his time, to learn the highest arts.

Ged ultimately becomes very powerful, but finds himself confronted by a dark power of equal strength that threatens to destroy him.  He has many adventures, sailing eventually to the ends of earth trying alternatively to either escape or conquer this dark power.  He learns, as he grows into his later teens, that he can never escape ultimate destruction by running from his adversary, but must aggressively pursue it.  Which he does in the company of his best friend from sorcery school.

Quite literally, he finally learns that "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

The novel ends with both a victory and --  equally important -- an increase in self-knowledge.  As Le Guin notes in her discussion of her novel,

The search takes him through mortal danger, loss, and suffering.  The discovery brings him victory, the kind of victory that isn't the end of a battle but the beginning of a life.

In less dramatic forms, it is the victory that every young person needs to achieve to become an adult.

Some YA books are too good for kids.  I probably will continue reading the series.
-------------------------------

(1-4-20) Finished reading the third book of the series today, each book better than the one before. As with Tolkien's The Return of the King, many years ago, finished with tears in my eyes.

Idaho Christmas

 A second consecutive Christmas in Challis, Idaho.  Some highlights:

• After a four-hour drive from Hailey airport, I arrived just as my nephew Jesse was being given his present early -- a small, extremely lively kitten.  Beige in color, or "champagne" as Jesse suggested.  After some discussion, he will retain the name his temporary foster people had given him -- "Leif," after Leif Erikson.  Leif was the star of the holidays, much to the dismay and jealousy of older resident border collie Molly.
• Temperatures dipped to the 10-15 degree (-12 to -9.5 C.) level each night.
• Snow was on the ground everywhere, although the roads were good, when I arrived.  We had a heavy snow on December 24.
• Walks in the deep snow around Kathy and Andy's property.
• On-going project by Jesse and Andy to film life on the Challis property.  This included video scenes of one of their horses dragging downed limbs to the site of a future bonfire.
• Decision to cancel the planned Christmas bonfire, because of inclement weather and temperatures.
• Visit overnight by Santa, rewarding all of us young girls and boys.
• Watching "A Christmas Story," for the nth time.  "I triple dog dare you!"
• Hauling in wood for a continuous fire in their enormous stone fireplace.  Staring at the fire in a trance, a primordial experience originating with the cave men.
• Gazing at the snowy hills surrounding the Challis Creek Valley.
• Discovering that neighbors in some places still arrive unannounced with Christmas cookies and a few minutes of chatting. 

A brief visit, but an enjoyable one, in a far different climate -- weather and social -- than my home in Seattle.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Northwest Boychoir

Last night at St. Mark's Cathedral

The sending of Christmas cards may be moribund, as I suggested in my last post, but not so the singing of Christmas carols.  Last night I attended the annual performance of "A Festival of Lessons and Carols" by the Northwest Boychoir (together with"Vocalpoint! Seattle," an associated choral group of teenaged boys and girls), at St. Mark's Cathedral.

Last night's performance was their seventh of the Christmas season, performed throughout December in various Seattle-area churches.  Their seasonal offering reaches its culmination Monday night -- I'll be in Idaho  -- when they perform downtown in much larger Benaroya Hall, home of the Seattle Symphony.

I've raved before about the singing of the Northwest Boychoir, after seeing them perform the "Trois petites liturgies de la Présence Divine" together with the Seattle Symphony in January 2017.  Their singing is perfect and highly disciplined.  Both they and their instructors should be congratulated.

The Lessons and Carols is based on the Christmas Eve service at King's College, Cambridge.  It began with four carols, followed by the reading of nine lessons from the Old and New Testament.  Each reading was followed by the choir's singing of a carol, followed by the audience/congregation's joining in a singing of a well-known carol.  Some of the boy readers -- although all were obviously Seattle-area residents -- appeared to be attempting an English university accent, which gave the readings -- all from the King James Version of the bible, with all its thee's and thou's -- additional dignity and force (at least to my Anglophile ears).

The two choirs entered the cathedral from the rear.  They paused half way down the aisles, in the hushed and partially darkened cathedral. Breaking the silence, a young, unaccompanied soprano began singing the first verse of "Once in Royal David's City," before being joined by the full chorus for the remaining verses as they filed to the front.  The boy's clear, high-pitched voice rang through the entire cathedral; the experience was mystical and spine-tingling.

The evening's performance, about ninety minutes in length, washed away all my customary "Bah, Humbug" pre-Christmas attitudes, and put me in the right frame of mind for celebrating Christmas three days from now.

Hey, now I don't even care if people stop sending Christmas cards!
------------------------------------

A number of clips from the similar King's College service can be found on YouTube. King's College originated the idea of commencing the service with a soprano solo of "Once in Royal David's City." To my untutored ear, last night's Northwest Boychoir's singing appeared nearly as good as that of the King's College Choir, but of course their chapel -- built between 1446 and 1515 -- adds a bit more glamour than does St. Mark's. Also, the English boys and young men appear more poised physically, and enter the chapel surrounded by typical English pageantry.

Moribund

Eleven years ago, I posted a lament for the dying custom of sending Christmas cards.  I waxed sentimental over my childhood, recalling how, as a kid, I had opened with excitement the huge bundle of cards that arrived each day. And how, fascinated especially by cards from non-relatives, I would try to figure out who these many senders might be, and what part they played in my folks' lives.

But the custom was already dying by 2008.  I didn't note in my blog how many I was sending that year, but I had been gradually whittling the number down over the previous couple of decades.  Not in a spirit of retaliation, but simply as a recognition that customs change, and that it might be embarrassing to receive my card if you hadn't planned to send one to me.  But I soldiered on:

Maybe in 2008, with email and Facebook so readily available, no one really does care if I send them a card or not. But I send them for myself, at least in part. Christmas just doesn't feel like Christmas until I carry my stack of envelopes down to the corner and drop them in the mailbox.

By last year, I noted that my "stack of envelopes" was down to about twenty, and that, as of today's date one year ago, I had received only seven.  By the time the season was over, late stragglers raised that figure to thirteen.

This year, I sent out 21 cards, about the same as last year.  As of today, with two more mail delivery days before Christmas, I have received three -- one of them from my sister, and one of them an e-card, rather than a tangible card delivered by mail.

I'm sure I'll get a few more by the time I return from Idaho, but the trend is obvious.

"Moribund," i.e., not dead but close to it.  Is it pathetic to continue with a moribund custom?  Where is the dividing line between "pathetic" and "delightfully antiquarian"?

And at what point do we pull the sheet over the moribund patient and snap our fingers to summon the eagerly awaiting mortician?

Merry Digital Christmas!

Walking in the rain.

Rain in Red Square at 4:30 p.m.
University of Washington

Poring over my past posts, I notice that "rain" is a familiar topic.  Complaining about rain.  Lamenting lack of rain.  Oddly awed by how weather changes from sunny to rainy, or vice versa, here in the Northwest Corner.  And a surprising number of references to how rainy it is, or was, or may be in Britain while hiking over there.

But most noteworthy, for today's purposes, was a 2016 post entitled "Drowned Rat."  The plot was simple.  I had decided the weather was good.  I started my daily walk.  Perversely, it poured.  I was drenched.  I wussed out, turned around, and returned home without completing my hike.  I mortified myself.

Today, I can report something more uplifting.  It's been unseasonably dry all season, but today rain was forecast with 100 percent certainty, starting at noon today and continuing through tomorrow.  I looked out the window at about 2 p.m.  Yup, it was steadily raining.  Well, maybe things will ease off, I told myself.  Looked again at 3 p.m.  Still steadily raining.

Based on "Drowned Rat," this is where I would say that hiking today was not feasible; I'd curl up with a good book.   But no!  "Am I or am I not?" I asked myself, quoting a character in André Aciman's memoir.  Am I a Native of the Northwest Corner?  Am I a Man of Great Machismo?  Or am I a sniveling coward who fears a potential fate as a drowned rat?

Sweater on.  Check.  Windbreaker on. Check.  Hiking shoes on.  Check.  Out the door and into the rain.  At 3:30 p.m. in mid-December, it's already dusky in these parts, but I am not deterred.

Seen from your window, rain can look intimidating as it splashes into  puddles.  But once you're outside, wrapped up in rain gear, you hardly even notice it.  I loved the hike.  Walking in the brisk forty-four degree (6.5° C.) outside air was invigorating.  The rain in my face was bracing.  I felt like a kid again, a kid who had to walk to school every day, regardless of whether it was raining, and who not only didn't mind it, but liked it.  All of us did as kids.  Our lockers steamed each morning with drenched coats and jackets.  No one told a teacher, oh, I couldn't come to school yesterday.  It was raining.

Not only the teacher but your fellow students would howl with laughter.  This is the State of Washington.  Rain is what we do up here.

The only obstacle to enjoying a walk in the rain, possibly, are the puddles that gather on our weirdly irregular sidewalks.  You have to look for them and tiptoe around them at times.  As kids, we wore boots over our school oxfords, boots like those you see in drawings of Christopher Robin.  I  don't have those, but I have hiking shoes with thick soles and Gore-Tex tops.  If I don't step into a three-inch deep puddle, my feet stay dry.

I hiked as far as Suzzallo Library on the University campus, where I stopped at the library's branch Starbucks.  Finals were over last week; the campus is still populated but not crowded, and the buildings stay open with reduced hours.  I sat down with my cup of coffee and a muffin, enjoying the unusually calm atmosphere, watching wet tourists drop by and look around.  It was definitely dusk by the time I departed.  The street lights and car headlights reflected on the wet streets and sidewalks.  I realized why so many photographers of city life in Paris and New York love scenes of rainy nights and twilights. 

By the time I looped around the campus and back into Red Square, back once more in front of the library, it was much darker.  I snapped the photo above, and continued home.  I got back to the house just after 5 p.m..  It had been totally dark for maybe a half hour.  The puddles in front of me were now nearly invisible in the dark.  By the time I reached my house, my shoes were soaked from prancing through them.

But who cares?  I'm a Wild Man of the Northwest.  None of my DNA comes from the Wicked Witch of the West.  Unlike her, I'm not soluble in rain water.

I strip off my windbreaker and drenched baseball cap.  I put on dry jeans.  Dry shoes.  I pour myself another cup of coffee.  I feel happy.  Virtuous and happy.

Édith Piaf

For Proust's Marcel, just the taste of madeleine brought back his youth.  For me, less intensely and literately, spotting the name "Edith Piaf" on the first page of "Goings on About Town" in this week's New Yorker did the same.

My first two years of college.  The coffee shop of the old student union -- before the modern food court came into being -- was a smoky room in the basement.  Crowded, noisy, with wall murals of post-war kids riding around in jalopies -- they seemed incredibly anachronistic, although painted only about a decade earlier -- and music.  Recorded music, the popular tunes of the day.

I hung out there between classes, studying for the next class or maybe -- it was next to the post office -- reading my mail.  I would add "and drinking espresso," which now would seem a natural activity  Except no one drank espresso then. And I hadn't yet learned to tolerate even Folger's.  I wonder what I did drink in that smoky den?  If anything.

The music was just background noise, like any jukebox in a restaurant.  Until the day I heard a woman with a nasal, smoky, tired voice singing in French.  French!  In an American eatery!  I had no idea what she was singing, but the song moved along in waves, rhythmically, with frequent repetition at the end of a phrase of the word "Milord."  And, of course, that was the name of the song:  "Milord."  One of the biggest hits of Édith Piaf's career.

A song by a prostitute who invites an upper class English boy or young man (she calls him Milord) to sit at her table, tells him he's beautiful, learns his heart is broken, tries to cheer him up, and finally succeeds.  The French meant nothing to me, but the music -- and Piaf's voice -- cheered me as well.

The next year or so, my roommate bought an LP of her songs, and a few years later I bought my own, which I have here in front of me as I type .

"Milord" was a popular song, but the Piaf song that sticks most in my mind -- that best expresses my reaction to her work in general -- was a song (also to be heard in the student union) not of cheer but of quiet resignation -- "Je ne regrette rien" (No, I regret nothing).

Non, rien de rien

Non, je ne regrette rien

Ni le bien qu'on m'a fait

Ni le mai tout ca m'est bien égal.

No, nothing of nothing

No, I don't feel sorry about nothing

Not the good things people have done to me,

Not the bad things, it's all the same to me.

C'est payé, balayé, oublié

Je me fous do passé

Avec mes souvenirs

j'ai allumé le feu.

It's paid for, removed, forgotten

I'm happy of the past

With my memories

I lit up the fire.

Doesn't sound like a song for young people?  Not exactly Bob Dylan lyrics?  Well, if you thought that you'd be wrong.  For young people around 1959 and 1960, life -- although not excluding the usual joys of youth -- had underpinnings that were somewhat morose and resigned.  In one sense, we were a generation of introverts. We were the silent generation.  And as Joan Didion wrote, years later:

We were silent because the exhilaration of social action seemed to many of us just one more way of escaping the personal, of masking for a while that dread of the meaningless which was man's fate.

But if Piaf's songs conveyed -- in their melodies and in the timbre of her voice, as much as in their lyrics -- a certain world-weariness, and if they did not provide the anthems of a youth movement that rock music did a few years later, they nevertheless gave us a sense of maturity, of adulthood, of appreciation for the sadness of life itself.

Believing ourselves jaded adults -- perhaps avoiding mass movements, imagining ourselves smoking French cigarettes and drinking absinthe in a tiny French café, discussing existentialism -- provided us the same satisfaction as imagining themselves social revolutionaries provided our younger siblings a few years later.

We would survive outside history, in a kind of idée fixe referred to always, during the years I spent at Berkeley, as "some little town with a decent beach."

Joan Didion again, of course.

Édith Piaf knew nothing of a little town with a decent beach.  She grew up in poverty, and lived what was probably a somewhat sad and lonely life, despite her many fans, dying at the age of 47, in 1963.  But she enriched, in some small way, my life and that of others in my generation. 

And now I think I'll replay her album.  If you aren't familiar with her music, pull up one of her songs on YouTube.

Sequels

If you search my blog for "sequel," you'll find a number of posts offering my opinion.  I'm against them.

I'm not referring to the books that were intended as a series to begin with -- Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, Pullman's His Dark Materials, Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu.  Nor am I referring to books written years later as a sequel to or reinterpretation of a novel written by a different author -- though I have my doubts about those, as well -- like Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea.  No, what I really have in mind are the frequent instances where an author writes a wildly popular novel, so popular that many of its readers demand to know "what happened next," and his publisher -- I'm speculating -- tells him "Don't be a fool, give them what they want -- there's gold in them thar hills.

Which is exactly what I expected of a sequel to André Aciman's novel Call Me By Your Name, reviewed in this blog in July 2009.  Reader reviews on Amazon and in Goodreads howled their disapproval of the downbeat ending to the novel, or, even if they appreciated Aciman's craftsmanship, begged for a sequel with a "happy ending."  We see the same phenomenon with other novels, whether their endings are happy or tragic.  If the protagonists are appealing, many readers treat them as real people, as though the author knows what happened to them next, and is obligated to tell us.

In a well-written novel, the author knows the story he wants to tell, and tells it.  If the ending doesn't satisfy the reader, it's not because of oversight on the author's part.  The story conceived by the author demands that "unsatisfying" ending.  And Call Me By Your Name is a very good novel by an excellent author.  Readers have obviously wanted Oliver and teenaged Elio to get together again.  But Aciman's Proustian story was told from the point of view of a middle-aged man recalling memories from twenty years after the fact of his first love, a summer romance that ended with that summer.

It was over, and twenty years later both Oliver and Elio knew it was over.

So when I saw a review of Find Me, Aciman's sequel, in today's New York Times, my heart sank.  But having read the review, I have hope.  Apparently, Oliver and Elio don't even appear in the novel during the first half; the story is told from the point of view of Elio's father, now divorced from Elio's mother and caught up in a love affair of his own.  (This is odd, because in the final, farewell scene of the earlier book, where the two say goodbye once more, twenty years after "that summer," and five years after the events in Find Me, the mother still lives on, somewhat dementedly, at the family home, and a portion of the father's ashes are buried on the premises.)

Do the "boys" say farewell once again in Find Me?  The reviewer doesn't give away the ending, but notes that the focus of the book is on "the come down," the "second act" of a love affair.  Cleverly, the reviewer notes:

"We're not going to feed off the past, are we?" Oliver asks toward the end of the novel, and this question can almost be read as Aciman's meta-commentary on the existence of "Find Me" itself.

Near the end of the earlier book, Elio mused to himself that Oliver:

was and would forever remain, long after every forked road in life had done its work, my brother, my friend, my father, my son, my husband, my lover, myself.  In the weeks we'd been thrown together that summer, our lives had scarcely touched, but we had crossed to the other bank, where time stops and heaven reaches down to earth and gives us that ration of what is from birth divinely ours.  We looked the other way.  We spoke about everything but.  But we've always known, and not saying anything now confirmed it all the more.  We had found the stars, you and I.  And this is given only once.

No wonder so many wanted a sequel.  But he had already told us in this musing, fifteen years after their summer together, (and in the same year as Find Me apparently takes place), that this had been "given only once."

And, as the reviewer tells us,

we are given a book that explores what can happen when your life gets away from you, when you realized just how much time you've wasted.  It may not make for the stuff of glistening cinema, but it strikes an affectingly melancholy chord.

So maybe Aciman once more knew what he was doing; maybe he resisted the urge to sell out! And yet, if Find Me only shows the disillusionment that comes with age and the passage of time, shows how one can't be seventeen forever, shows the future sadness already strongly suggested in Call Me By Your Name -- why bother? I'm happy if the new book remains true to the original novel, that it doesn't in effect trash it, but do we need it?

But I'm not being fair; I haven't read it. The book isn't high on my "to read" list, but I'm sure I will read it.  Because I've read almost everything Aciman has published -- his essays repeatedly, his memoir Out of Egypt several times, and, so far as I recall, all of his novels except Eight White Nights, which I began once, but in which I got bogged down.  (Maybe I'll even tackle that again one of these days!)

A Pilgrimage to Eternity

Timothy Egan writes a column for the New York Times, which I avidly read, and is the author of eight award-winning books I haven't read, including The Worst Hard Time.  He is a Seattle resident and native, one of seven siblings, a graduate of Gonzaga Prep in Spokane and the University of Washington. 

I've always enjoyed Egan's columns, because he discusses politics without simply repeating the same old sound bites.  His columns -- although liberal in slant and, certainly, opposed to the Trump presidency -- have a balanced, thoughtful approach that I like to think represents the Seattle approach to life.

Hiking the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route across the north of Spain has become an item on a bucket list for many adventurers.  Egan, instead, as a youthful 62-year-old, chose to hike an older but less well known route, the Via Francigena, from Canterbury to Rome.  The route crosses the English Channel, passes across northern France into Switzerland, crosses the Alps over the Saint Bernard Pass, descends into Italy's Val d'Aosta and into the Po Valley, crosses the Apennines almost to the Ligurian coast, and then south through Tuscany and Umbria to Rome. 

Why would a guy in his sixties do this?  I suppose, for one thing, Egan and his family have done a lot of hiking in the Pacific Northwest; they enjoy walking.

We introduced our kids to the wild at an early age, bribing them with Skittles to get up the trail, promising to protect them from every horsefly and mosquito in the Cascade range. Lucky for us, and them, it took.

And his book is a travelogue of his walking, through European towns and villages, some famous, some known only to pilgrims following his route.  More seriously, Egan -- raised in a Catholic family but himself a lapsed but curious Catholic -- wanted to experience this route followed by centuries of religious pilgrims to Rome, hoping to find a reason to stop straddling the line between atheism and belief.

I'm no longer comfortable in the squishy middle; it's too easy.  I've come to believe that an agnostic, as the Catholic comedian Stephen Colbert put it, "is just an atheist without balls."

Less sublimely, he wanted to detach himself from the digital world.

Easy access to a world of tempting crap has clearly not been good for me.  My attention span has shrunk.  Sustained, deep reading and thinking are more difficult.  I'm punch-drunk from the unrelenting present, the news alerts and flashes, all the chaos without context.

Egan is strongly affected by the fact that a sister-in-law is dying of cancer.  He is also strongly affected by the fact that the best friend of one of his brothers committed suicide as an adult as the result of having been sexually molested at the age of 12 by their young, popular parish priest, a priest who had run into serious problems for years before being sent to their parish.  Egan himself was traumatized by a priest's furious response, funny only in retrospect, to his eleven-year-old confession that he had trampled on the priest's prize flower bed.

As he walks from one religious site to another, reflecting on horrors of the past, from the cruelty of the Crusades to the Nazi Holocaust to the painful events he's seen in his own family, he asks himself the question that every believer from St. Augustine to the woman next door confronts -- where was God when all this happened?

As he walks the Via Francigena, Egan gradually sheds his exclusively rational approach to religion -- a rationality that is limited by our own human experiences and, in itself, can neither prove nor disprove the existence of a transcendent God.  Belief comes from living life, he concludes, not from sitting in a library thinking.  He recalls St. Francis's admonition to his Order:  "Preach the Gospel at all times.  When necessary, use words."

Egan encounters stories and shrines and memorials of famous miracles in the past, and politely rolls his eyes.  Until, near the end of his trek, he witnesses, alone in a shrine, an event that he himself believes to be a miracle.  It's not an event that he uses to convince his reader.  He could not even convince his wife who, at the time, was hiking with him.  The "miracle" is presented as something that persuaded him to believe something that he had always suspected, but doubted -- that there is something going on in reality beyond science.  Then he reminds us of St. Augustine's observation:  "Miracles are not contrary to nature, but only contrary to what we know about nature."

Pope Francis is something of a hero in Egan's eyes, a pope who understands Christianity in ways that his more medieval predecessors did not.  President Trump is not a hero.  In one funny scene, a grouchy abbott at a Benedictine refuge where he seeks lodging grills him about his background.  Finally, the abbott asks:

"How are things in America?"
"Troubled."
"Why is that?"
"Trump."
"What's wrong with him?"
"Everything."
"I'll show you to your room."

Egan has no theological training, although he has done reading on his own.  He discusses St. Augustine at length throughout the book, and attempts to wrestle with St. Anselm's "ontological argument" for the existence of God -- with more insight than I could bring to it. 

Not a theologian, Egan is merely a very bright, very human, and very "good" man, a man walking the some 1,100 miles of the pilgrimage (assisted at times by trains, offered rides, and a rental car) while thinking about his life and his place in the Universe. 

We learn not only about his religious contemplations, but also about his blisters and torn ligaments.  We learn about making a wrong turn and adding miles to a day's hike.  We learn about having to climb a final hill at the end of the day, when you're at the end of your rope, to reach your hostel. 

We also learn about his family -- and about Egan's life as a family member -- as first his son, then his daughter, and then his wife join him for various short stages of his odyssey.   After several days of hiking with his son, Egan is movingly depressed and bereft when his son has to leave as planned.  Hiking alone for weeks on end sounds more fun in advance than it proves in reality.

As his pilgrimage nears its end -- yes, he makes it to Rome -- Egan decides he has made some progress.  He has edged back toward the Church, but not all the way.  He believes there is something we call God out there.  He remains skeptical -- wisely -- of many claimed miracles, despite his own perceived experience with one.  He concludes that he believes in the Resurrection -- too many eyewitnesses had been willing to suffer death rather than deny their observations.

But what cinched it for me was something the young Lutheran minister in Geneva said about the message of Easter from Jesus, something that echoes Jewish sentiment on what happens after death:  "Nothing can keep my love in a grave."

And, therefore, death is not final:  "The Via Francigena has taught me otherwise."

Nothing in his conclusions is offered as an argument, designed to persuade, anymore than he tries to persuade the reader to imitate him by climbing over the Alps.  His approach to faith is highly personal, determined by his own unique experiences and by his own subjective interpretation of those experiences.  But, unless your mind is closed on the subject, his path part way back to his childhood faith is as interesting as his path through the heart of Europe. . 

He concludes by summing up his experience trodding the indistinct parallel pathways that make up the Via Francigega, as well as his path toward God:

There is no way.  The way is made by walking."

Moss, beautiful moss.

Not my roof.

Moss.  Soft green moss.  Known to us all as "non-vascular plants in the land plant division Bryophyta."

Moss should be the state plant of Washington, although the rhododendron is admittedly more flashy.  Most of my lawn, upon close inspection, is moss.  The vertical surfaces of my front steps are coated with moss.  My car sprouts moss -- resistant to car wash scrubbing -- in every area where water is apt to collect.  The trees have moss on their leeward surfaces -- a compass for the canny hiker.  

A local joke is that you can tell a Northwesterner by the moss between his toes.

And, of course, my roof has moss.  Aye, there's the rub.

It's not really noticeable moss, aside from one small area over the entrance.  My moss looks nothing like the illustration above.  Expensive houses in expensive neighborhoods also have moss -- I was checking the situation out today as I walked through Madison Park.  My moss, by comparison with some, is hardly noticeable.

But my insurer noticed it.  Do something about it, they told me, with the self-confidence that comes from knowing more about what's good for you and for your property than you do yourself.  Do something about it before your policy comes up for renewal, they admonished, not so subtly suggesting reprisals.  Look at it, they say, sending me photos they took of my roof.

Good grief!

Yeah, I know.  Moss isn't good for roofs.  Mainly because it can, as it grows deeper and plusher, shove the shingles up, allowing water to seep in and promote rotting -- rotting of the shingles themselves and of the structural elements underneath.  They're telling me for my own good. And theirs.  

I've contacted three roof specialists to give me estimates.  I'm sure it won't be cheap.  Finding a cheap contractor is like finding a cheap physician -- it makes you wonder.

But it's too bad.  Moss looks cool, just as ivy on your chimney looks cool.  Another no-no.  Moss looks soothing, and reminds one of ancient manses in rural England, perched above a babbling beck.  Cozy.  Places with a history.  Like "The Mill on the Moss."

Oh.  It was the Floss?  Oh well, same difference.  

Soon my roof will be mossless.  But in Seattle, nothing stays mossless for long.  

It'll be back.  You can't keep a good Bryophyta down.

Visit to the Burke

In my four years as an undergraduate, not once did I ever set foot within the magnificent university museum that stood in the middle of campus.  Nor in the years since, after many returns to the campus in California as an alumnus, have I ever ventured within its sacred doors.

Even more remarkable, during my interminable years of graduate school and then law school at the University of Washington,  I never visited the Burke Museum, also known as the State Museum of Natural History and Culture, just inside the main entrance to the school.  Nor, during decades living near the university -- and, since my retirement, walking through the campus almost daily -- have I ever made that effort. 

When plans were made to tear down the old building, and construct a larger building nearby, I vowed to visit the Burke before its demise.  Again, I failed.  Down came the old building, and finally, in October, the new larger building -- fronting on Fifteenth Avenue N.E. -- opened to the public.

And today -- at long last -- I visited it.

I was a little disappointed in some ways -- I'm not sure exactly what I expected -- but in other ways also pleasantly surprised.  The building has three floors, with a couple of classrooms in the basement.  As the alternative name suggests, the focus of the museum is strongly on first the geologic and biological history of the Pacific Northwest -- from the time the continents were first taking shape, through the various paleozoic, mesozoic, and cenozoic eras, up until the present day; and secondly on the lives and cultures of the indigenous peoples of the Northwest.

Expect dinosaurs!  Huge skeletons!  And expect Salish and Tlingit peoples' artifacts -- from totem poles to jewelry and clothing.

The museum building is dedicated partly to public display of exhibits, and includes the mandatory coffee shop and gift shop, but a large portion of the building is set aside for actual work and study by students of archeology.  Work areas are scattered throughout the building, separated from public access only by large windows through which the public can watch the meticulous work in which archeologists and students engage.  This is a fascinating approach, although it requires that exhibit areas be somewhat separated from each other.  I suspect that the windows require students to remember that they're "on stage" at all times -- no putting your feet up on the desk and reading the paper.

A large percentage of the public present this morning, while I was there, consisted of school children, bused in for field trips.  The museum has many alcoves where kids can sit on the floor and listen to docents explain what they are about to see.  The kids -- today, at least, mainly in the early grades -- seemed both excited and attentive to the discussions.

There does appear quite a bit of display space available for future exhibits.  I probably will return in about a year to see whether and how the museum displays have enlarged.

Advent

Tomorrow, at least for the more liturgical churches, is the Second Sunday of Advent.  Advent is the traditional four-week period of preparation for the celebration of Christmas. 

As the poet/essayist Jeffrey Essmann writes this week,* the lessons or readings scheduled for Advent possess a certain strangeness, an emphasis on the voice of the prophets of the Old Testament -- prophets who themselves were often strange in many ways.

It is a voice that echoes in the sacred silence at the very heart of us, and Advent is a season of stillness so that we my pick up the resonance of -- and be drawn to God by -- that echo.

By coincidence, while looking through choral music on YouTube a few weeks ago, I hit upon a performance by the massive National Youth Choir of Scotland, singing "The Lord of Sea and Sky" -- a "top-hit" Catholic hymn, dating back only to 1981, that is also sung in many Protestant churches.  It has a catchy tune that sticks in your mind, which probably contributes to its popularity.

Play "The Lord of Sea and Sky"

The song has three verses, each representing a frustrated God who finds himself confronted with a human race that refuses to acknowledge or accept his gifts of love.  "Who will bear my light to them?  Whom shall I send?" God asks. The refrain is the congregation's response:

Here I am, Lord.  Is it I, Lord?
I have heard you calling in the night.
I will go, Lord, if you lead me,
I will hold your people in my heart.

The hymn -- especially the refrain -- is based on the Old Testament story of the boy Samuel, apprenticed to the aging priest Eli. Samuel was awakened three times during the night by a voice calling his name.  Each time he dutifully awoke Eli to ask what he wanted.  After the third visitation, Eli told Samuel that it was God who was calling, and if awakened again, Samuel should reply, "Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth." And that's what he did, at age eleven, and God replied, leading to Samuel's ultimately becoming one of the great prophets of Israel.

A memorable story for me, because when I was about nine, I was awakened by, I believed, someone calling my name.  We had recently learned the story of Samuel in Sunday School, and in the dark I got up on my young knees in bed and spoke some version of "Speak, Lord ..." 

Sadly, there was no reply.

But God speaks his love in silence, as well as by voice, as Essmann points out, because love can be conveyed through experiences other than words.  Essmann recalls his boyhood experiences, going out fishing with his own naturally-taciturn father:

We baited our hooks and pursued our perch in near monastic silence. I might occasionally have a question (Why do loons sound so funny?); ...  But, in general, we were silent -- silent and happy.  I watched my bobber bounce and totter in the morning sun; heard a tiny errant wave lap the side of the boat.  And I adored my father.  Those moments of sitting quietly in the presence of a loving father taught me just about everything I needed to know about prayer, about heaven.  Today, whatever minor ecstasies I may enjoy are redolent of freshwater lake and worms.

Essmann concludes his essay, reminding us that even in the Old Testament, God didn't usually speak to Israel directly, for example out of a burning bush.  He spoke through his prophets, through human beings. Today, each of us is called to be God's prophet and his voice -- to each other and to the world.  Each sharing God's love in his or her own small way, by words or through deeds, no matter how inept or unsuitable we may feel ourselves, just as timid eleven-year-old Samuel himself responded.

"I have heard you calling in the night."

Happy Advent.  And Merry Christmas!
--------------------------------
*America (December 9, 2019). 

Scaling El Cap

Harding, Merry, and Whitmore
Arrival at the top of El Capitan

Wayne Merry, a member of the first team to climb El Capitan in Yosemite, died on October 30 from prostate cancer at the age of 88, according to today's New York Times.

The 1958 climb sticks in my mind because it occurred during my first quarter of college, and because the last few days were heavily reported by our college daily newspaper.  Heavily reported, because this was not a two- or three-day climb, like many of today's climbs of El Cap, but the conclusion of a 45-day marathon over a period of 18 months.

I was well familiar with reading about climbs at the time, but only with the sort of slogs uphill that had characterized the the conquest of Everest five years earlier by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay.  So far as I recall, I'd never heard of rock climbing, where the object is to choose an apparently nonclimbable rock face -- and climb it.

Merry was one of three members in the team -- all from the Bay Area.  The others were George Whitmore and Warren Harding.  Harding died of liver failure in 2002, at the age of 77.  Whitmore, now the lone survivor, lives on in Fresno at the age of 88.

Purists today -- and many back in 1958 -- insisted that climbs be made without hardware that disturbed the natural environment.  Merry and his friends aimed only at making the climb, by whatever means seemed necessary.  This meant pounding pitons into cracks in the rock, or using expansion bolts pounded into the solid rock where pitons could not be used, connecting climbing ropes that were left in place, and returning to the ground at night.  Each day's climb consisted of climbing the ropes already in place, and pounding pitons and placing ropes to the next higher point.

Harding, in a 2002 interview for the Los Angeles Times, recalled that they had used 600 pitons, and that he himself had drilled holes for another 150 expansion bolts.  Rock climbing hardware as known today was not readily available, and for part of the climb they made their own pitons out of the legs from old wood stoves.  In a 2016 interview, Merry noted:

I wouldn't hang a picture from them today, but back then we hung our lives on them.

But winter was coming, and in early November the team decided to "race" to the top, without returning to the ground.  They remained on the face, day and night, for the next nine days, arriving at the top on November 12, 1958.  The excitement and publicity -- at least in our campus newspaper -- almost equaled that given the first landing on the moon.

I've never rock climbed, or been tempted to do so.  I'm not totally risk-averse, but I like to think that my rationality works hand in hand with my inborn acrophobia.  But memories of the first El Capitan climb remind us of a time when the natural world still had many challenges to be conquered, when it offered adventurers a multitude of opportunities for "firsts." 

Many kinds of "adventure" will always exist, of course, not all of which require hanging by a rope thousands of feet above the ground in freezing temperatures.  And young people invent their own adventures where necessity might not seem to require them. Today, free solo climbing, where climbers climb not only with no hardware, like expansion bolts, but without ropes for protection -- is increasingly popular among young people.

In the future, exploration of the planets will provide the human race collectively plenty of opportunities for adventure.  But one person, or a team of three, confronting a sheer rock face, provides the individual with adventure of a direct and personal nature, an adventure unlike the thrill we get watching a rocket leave earth on the screens of our television sets.
----------------------------------
PS -- In the summer of 2018, two California climbers, Alex Honnold and Tommy Caldwell, set a new speed record on the same route up El Capitan: 1 hour, 58 minutes, 7 seconds.

Thanksgiving in Challis

The snow lay thin and apologetic over the world. That wide grey sweep was the lawn, with the straggling trees of the orchard still dark beyond; the white squares were the roofs of the garage, the old barn, the rabbit hutches, the chicken coops. Further back there were only the flat fields of Dawson's farm, dimly white-striped. All the broad sky was grey, full of more snow that refused to fall. There was no colour anywhere.

--Susan Cooper, The Dark is Rising

I'm writing now from my home in Seattle.  Last  Saturday I also was at home in Seattle.  But in between, I spent five days, including Thanksgiving, at my sister's home near Challis, Idaho, about a five hour drive northeast of Boise.

To those of you from elsewhere, Washington and Idaho are both parts of the Pacific Northwest.  But, please believe me, Washington and Idaho -- certainly, Seattle and Challis -- are two different worlds.  Different obviously scenically and topographically, but it's more than that.  Returning from Challis also feels like a return from a different era of American history.

Each morning, I'd be the first person up, holding a cup of coffee as I stared out the windows.  Kathy's house is actually about nine miles west of Challis, literally on the boundary of Challis National Forest and in the shadow of hills that rise above her pasture land.  Those hills loomed directly above us, but in any other direction there were other  hills, if more distant.  Brown hills, at this time of year, after the leaves had fallen and grass had dried.

Brown until the second day or so of my visit, when the hills no longer were brown, but white.  White with snow.  The ranch property remained accessible by road, although the road became covered with snow, but the snow cuts us off, if only psychologically.  We feel very alone.  Just our family members, a roaring fireplace, two dogs, and five horses.  The dogs hang out in the house, begging to be taken for long walks (walks for us, mad dashes for the dogs).  The horses hang out in the fields, the fields covered with snow.  Never complaining, just asking for daily access to fresh hay and for some occasional affectionate company.

I know I romanticize, but I felt transplanted to the prairies of the nineteenth century, where families homesteaded and farmed and lived isolated from each other.  To Little House on the Prairie, maybe, but with TV and better food.

The loneliness isn't scary, but -- to a city boy -- a bit eerie.  The dark comes early in late November, and the dawn comes late.  I stare out the windows into the dark, knowing that not only our horses are out there, but coyotes and deer and elk and beavers and rabbits.  Wolves, I ask my sister?  Bears?  Probably not.  Extremely doubtful.  But nothing is certain.  Not in late November, in the dark, when the hunger of winter falls across the land.

When not chatting or staring into the fire or studying the dark outside the window, I was re-reading Susan Cooper's five-book series, The Dark is Rising, which I discussed in this blog in March 2012.  A fantasy series set deep in the history and landscape and peoples of England and Wales.

The atmosphere of those books no doubt influenced my vague sense of the uncanny as I spent my days and nights in the snows, in the isolated, hilly land west of Challis.

The snow fell softly but persistently as Friday, the day of my return to Seattle, approached.  A drive of 162 miles loomed ahead of me, taking not the shortest but the least hilly return to the airport at Hailey.  The on-line reports from the Idaho Department of Transportation were a bit unnerving, as they continued to warn of a possibly heavy snowfall on the roads I'd be taking.

I left Challis early and -- not to prolong the drama -- arrived at the Hailey airport with plenty of time to spare.  But the drive south down U.S. 93 through falling snow and hanging mist added to my sense that I was passing through enchanted lands.  The highway was virtually deserted -- I drove for miles without seeing another car.  As I left Challis behind, the road became increasingly covered with snow, with more dry snow falling from the sky and blowing across the roadway, across my windshield.  The highway runs, for the most part, straight and flat through a long valley, as it hugs the base of the Lost River Range to the east.

But the Lost River Range seemed lost indeed, obscured by the mist and steadily falling snow.  At times, however, the highway moved close enough to the hills that they became faintly visible, hanging like ghost mountains over the road.  From past drives in summer, I knew that those hills were reasonably high but hardly Alpine in dimensions.  But on Friday, as they revealed themselves through the mist -- mystical, looming, colorless forms of rock and snow -- they suggested old, grainy photographs of the mighty peaks in Alaska.  And then, as the road moved farther west, the hills disappeared back into the mist, only to reappear minutes later as the road once more approached them.

My flight back to Seattle was uneventful.  But as the plane rose above the clouds, I saw a very slim crescent moon hanging outside my window, with Venus shining brightly nearer the horizon.  These two lights stayed just outside my window for the entire first half of the flight, a fitting conclusion to a week that was magical -- magical if only in my own imagination.

And if I'd looked at that moon more closely, I now discover that I would also have seen Saturn shining and almost touching the moon's upper horn.  But that would have been one wonder too many. 

Keep on learning

Like ordination to the priesthood, law school leaves an indelible mark on your soul.  At least, it sure feels that way.

I retired from active law practice years ago.  I haven't argued a case in court for even longer.  And yet, I still consider myself a lawyer.  I can't imagine not being a lawyer.  And I can't imagine myself voluntarily going onto "inactive status" in the bar association -- as many attorneys do, upon retirement. 

And that explains why, year after year, I continue paying dues to the bar association.  Keeping my membership "active."  Keeping my powder dry.  Just in case a legal emergency should occur, one that requires me to leap feet first into the courtroom, filing motions, serving subpoenas, arguing precedents, and generally making a pest out of myself.  Or in case the governor pleads with me to accept a judgeship.

But continued membership in the bar requires more than payment of exorbitant annual dues.  It also requires complying with continuing legal education requirements.  In Washington, every attorney on active status must submit to 45 hours of legal education every three years.  To keep himself up to date.  Just in case those long hours representing his clients don't do the trick sufficiently.

These credits are earned, traditionally, by attending seminars -- what are called CLE ("continuing legal education") seminars -- on any subjects that he or she may find interesting or useful.  In recent years, he can also earn a portion of those credits from his home or the office by watching streamed videos of past seminars on the computer.

Until this year, I've always earned all my credits by actually attending seminars in person.  The legal community is still small enough that you're apt to meet and chat with colleagues you haven't seen for a while, and it's interesting to watch the presenters in person.  This year, however, which is the third year of my reporting cycle, meaning that I must report 45 hours of CLE by the end of next month, I have earned some of my credits online.

Why?  Because it dawned on me only in September that I still needed 16 credits by the end of the year.  A certain panic set in.  I quickly watched a three hour presentation on arbitration before leaving for Thailand in October.  That left 13 credits to go.

Somehow, this seemed like an incredible hurdle.  Just sitting for 13 hours in front of a screen, paying attention to lectures?  Hardly the same as studying for a final exam, or writing a term paper, right?  But there I was.  Apparently, my tolerance for being required to do anything associated with a deadline has practically vanished since I retired.

All this leads up to my good news that since Wednesday I have earned 12.75 of the necessary 13 hours.  And the experience was actually a pleasure.  I'd been worried that it would be far more difficult to pay attention to lectures on a screen than to watch them in person.  Actually,the opposite may be true.  I have fewer distractions at home than I do sitting with a crowd in a seminar room.  And I can take a break whenever I want, for as long as I want.  Thus, I watched the first seminar, "Advanced Trial Practice and Insights," in three separate segments over a two day period.  I watched the second, "Insurance Law Update," in four segments over a three day period. 

The ability to pace one's watching however you wish avoids that sinking feeling by noon during the course of a six or seven hour seminar that you'll never make it through the long afternoon.

I was lucky in one respect.  Both seminars were on subjects still of interest to me, and both were given by excellent speakers with years of practice in the fields they were discussing.  Watching was not drudgery. 

Nevertheless, I'm glad it's over.  Of course, I still have to pick up another 15-minute lecture some time before December 31.  I feel I can live with that. 

Going a-viking

I'm one-fourth Norwegian, by way of my paternal grandfather.  It generally doesn't mean much.  My Norwegian genes merely add a hint of flavoring to my otherwise vanilla British ancestry.

But many of the kids I grew up with were still living their Scandinavian ancestry.  Little Norwegian flags adorned their houses.  Luther League meetings on Wednesday nights were compulsory for the kids.  Girls wore candles in their hair for Lucia celebrations.  Their families may even have eaten lutefisk in the privacy of their homes, but I can't swear to that.  (If so, they didn't brag about it.)

Following law school, I lived for nine years in Ballard, a once independent city of largely Scandinavian residents.  When it was annexed by Seattle in 1907, it was the second largest city in the county.  My living there had nothing to do with its Scandinavian flavor, but that flavor was certainly still discernible.  In recent years, with inward migration from other parts of the country, especially California, Ballard's Scandinavian roots have become somewhat attenuated, perhaps more an historical bragging point than a present day reality. 

Ballard high school, with students of every ethnicity, nevertheless proudly calls its teams the "Vikings."

Despite changing demographics, the neighborhood has been the site of the National Nordic Museum since 1980, a museum that moved into its new permanent building last year.  The museum is a major attraction in Ballard, but one I hadn't visited until today.

It was my friend Pat's suggestion that we meet at the museum this morning, to be followed by lunch.  I'm not sure what I was expecting, but the building is large and very impressive, its strong, clean lines suggestive of Scandinavian design.  The museum is dedicated to the history, culture, and economy of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, and a number of small autonomous islands.  The history of Scandinavia, from its early occupation by the Sami peoples at the end of the last ice age to the present, is carefully explained and illustrated, stage by stage. 

Beginning with the nineteenth century, considerable space is given to immigration from each of the Scandinavian countries to America, especially to the Mid-West, centered around Minnesota, and later to the Pacific Northwest.  On display are fascinating exhibits of household goods and children's toys brought from the Old World, and of farming and other industrial equipment used and developed once in America.  While immigrants to the Mid-West tended to be farmers, those to the Northwest were most likely either loggers or fishermen.

Also on display are some beautiful, full-wall films showing the natural wonders of the Scandinavian countries.  These films both show why Scandinavian immigrants felt at home in the Pacific Northwest, and force us, their viewers, to wonder why we haven't spent more vacation time back in the "home country."

I was raised without any real sense of ethnic background -- it was stripped away somehow before I came along.  But the Nordic Museum illustrates why so many Scandinavian immigrants remain devoted to their ancestral home, why they keep -- as a Scandinavian-American in one of the films mentions -- one foot in America, but the other in Scandinavia. 

I walked out of the museum feeling a small prickling of pride in my apparently recessive one-fourth Norwegian genes, and the way Ballard continues to embody the Scandinavian immigrant exprience.

Pat and I then had curry for lunch at an Indian restaurant a block from the museum.

Armistice Day

Tell the innocent visitor from another world that two people were killed at Sarajevo, and that the best that Europe could do about it was to kill eleven million more.
--A.A. Milne

One hundred one years ago tomorrow -- on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month -- the first World War came to an end.  The armistice had been agreed to six hours earlier, but by its terms, the killing continued until 11 a.m., Paris time.

Maybe there was a logistical necessity for the delay, but the idea of senior statesmen prolonging the fighting until an esthetically pleasing hour -- if that's what indeed happened -- seems a proper symbol for everything that caused and prolonged the war.

As we all know, now, World War I ended a particular form of European civilization, brought about a new barbarism, and paved the way to World War II twenty years later.  It was caused by a then-fashionable nationalism, where nations as entities were viewed as more important than the human beings who lived in those nations.  As Eric Maria Remarque wrote in his novel, All Quiet on the Western Front:

Tjaden reappears. He is still quite excited and again joins the conversation, wondering just how a war gets started.

"Mostly by one country badly offending another," answers Albert with a slight air of superiority.

Then Tjaden pretends to be obtuse. "A country? I don't follow. A mountain in Germany cannot offend a mountain in France. Or a river, or a wood, or a field of wheat." 

... "Then I haven't any business here at all ... I don't feel myself offended."

It all sounds so obvious.  And seemed so even when Remarque published his novel in 1929. And so after World War II, we vowed never to allow nationalism to overcome common sense, to allow national leaders to treat their nations as individuals who could be insulted, whose pride needed defending.  We helped set up NATO to unify by alliance the military forces of Europe, together with Canada and the USA.  And we encouraged the integration of Europe in the European Community.

Now we have a leader who, apparently, hates alliances, except insofar as an alliance is a facade behind which one nation (ours) can control the actions of others.  A man with no personal friends, only sycophants who come and go according to his whim, he finds friendships and alliances among nations incomprehensible.  He appears determined to return the world to 1914, with the United States perhaps standing in for the then dominant British Empire. 

Such a return to 1914 would be to court disaster.  But it won't happen.  The world, especially Europe, is a different place today, and globalization is too far advanced to be reversed by any one nation's president.  

And that president may have only one more year to work his "magic." 

And so, as we remember the end of World War I, let's renew the vows our fathers made in the past:  "Never again."

The History of Living Forever

Conrad lives in a small town in Maine. He is a brilliantly precocious science student who has skipped two grades as he worked his way through the public school system. He lost his mother in an auto accident when he was ten, and his distraught father took to drinking and showed little further interest in him.  Conrad now lives with an aunt. 

The summer he turns 16, he falls desperately in love with -- has an affair with -- Mr. Tampari ("Sammy" to Conrad), a brilliant biochemist who, strangely enough, has ended up teaching chemistry to high school students.

Jake Wolff's novel, The History of Living Forever, is a complex, frustrating, and yet somehow inspiring study of scientific obsession, adolescent and adult loneliness, and human insecurity, peppered with enough biochemical scientific studies (real or fictional) and data to persuade you that you've attended a series of college lectures. 

The first day of class, as Conrad begins his junior year after a summer of romantic intoxication, the school announces that Mr.Tampari has been discovered dead, apparently from a drug overdose.  The death is considered accidental.  But Conrad finds that Sammy has left him a gift -- a box containing all his diaries, one for each year since he was eight years old, and a handwritten book of "recipes," entitled "The Elixir of Life."  Did he in fact commit suicide?

Sammy has also given indications that he wants Conrad to carry on his research, whatever that research may have been.  Conrad is devastated by Sammy's death, and by a suspicion that Conrad's love for his teacher was in fact reciprocated by nothing much beyond mild affection.  Otherwise, how could he have left Sammy behind, alone?

Conrad, now in his 40s, is the narrator, but the real story is Sammy's.  This is no conventional gay love story -- nor, alternatively viewed, a story of a teacher's sexual abuse of a student.  (Conrad concedes that, even 25 or so years later, he still remembers his relationship with Sammy as an intense "romance.")  Their relationship is a plot device that explains a strong bond between two highly intelligent people, both almost fanatically immersed in bio-scientific studies.

Sammy's diaries begin when he was eight years old.  He was painfully brilliant even then.

At school, he is so much smarter than his classmates that he feels the weight of their stupidity on his chest -- even after the bell rings, like waking up from a nightmare to find yourself suffocating, still, under the heart-crushing burden of your fear.

Sammy has no friends.  He is convinced his parents don't love him.  He believes that, somehow, he is "broken."  "Broken," in the sense that he is incapable of feeling love, feeling emotion, feeling joy, feeling sadness, feeling excitement.  He is numb.

But he soldiers on.  He has no real enthusiasms, not even reading.

In bed each night, he cries from 10:00 to 10:15 (he sets the timer on his bedside clock).  It's almost a relief, this crying, though he can't explain from what.

Years later, Sammy concludes that he is and always has been, in some sense, mentally ill.

As a child, his psychiatrist told him that he needed a hobby.  He learned, from a club to which his father belonged, of the ancient quest for an elixir -- not an elixir that necessarily allowed one to live forever, but that served as a panacea for any diseases that the taker might have.  Sammy's single-minded quest for such an elixir provides him the structure, the direction, the focus that his life needed.

The book, in chapters throughout, provides case histories of alchemists, scientists, and deluded amateurs who had hoped to develop such an elixir, case histories that Sammy carefully studied. 

A recurring ingredient in past recipes had been the element mercury.  The "blue mass" that Abraham Lincoln took to fight depression contained such mercury.  At age 13, Sammy reconstructed this "blue mass," and consumed a large dosage himself, writing up his experiment as his first entry in his "recipe book."  The result?  "Almost died," he wrote, laconically. . 

His brush with death did not deter him.  He continued, obsessively, throughout life to find a "recipe" for the elixir that would cure all ills, and that would cure his own self-diagnosed "mental illness."  The novel strikes the reader as a source book on the history of various misguided attempts to develop such a panacea, and a treasury of human biochemistry.  Unfortunately, the book is an untrustworthy biochemistry resource, with carefully documented science combined with ideas and hopes by the ancients, by Sammy, and finally by Conrad that amount to scientific quackery.  As the author firmly warns in his introduction

You will find within its pages a number of recipes, all of which seem to promise great benefits to your health and well-being.  To repeat:  this is a work of fiction.  Every recipe in this book, if ingested, will kill you.  Every single one.

From a scientific point of view, certain substances found in nature have the beneficial ability to remove free radicals from the human body, free radicals that may contribute to the aging and degenerative process.  These substances cannot, in any significant amount, however,  cross the brain-blood barrier.  But mercury can cross that barrier.  Sammy's recipes, in effect, used mercury to drag the drugs with it across the barrier.  But mercury is a poison, and will kill if it remains in the brain for any length of time, and the body quickly attacks its ability to cross the barrier once it's detected in the brain.  This attack by the body is counterproductive, because it leaves the mercury trapped on the brain side of the barrier. 

Thus, many early experiments with mercury, used in sufficient amounts, resulted in death.  In Wolff's novel, Conrad comes eventually to believe that he can overcome this hazard by concluding the experiment with electroshock, such as used in fighting depression, which temporarily reopens the brain-blood barrier, allowing the mercury to escape.

Conrad's apparent understanding -- still at the age of 16 --of the scientific basis for the use of various substances, including mercury, in the course of the many attempts to concoct the "elixir of life" -- and his discovery of the use of electroshock therapy to avoid mercury poisoning -- is a central theme of the novel.  If science bores or confuses you -- and there is much about this book that's confusing -- you may want to read a different book.

Conrad's scientific quest to continue Sammy's research, and to apply it to his own dying, alcoholic father, is complicated by a subplot involving competing interests and individuals who are themselves trying to develop the same "elixir of life" for purposes of commercial exploitation.  I'm not sure that this subplot and its villains, which occupies a major portion of the book's central chapters, adds much to the story.  It certainly adds complexity to what is already a complex narrative.

At the end, the father's life is saved, as Conrad uses the last of the drugs that Sammy had left for him.  Whether it has been saved by Conrad's "elixir of life," or by subsequent more conventional diagnosis and treatment, remains an open question -- maybe a bit of both.

As his father recovers in the hospital, Conrad is re-united with his loving aunt who had grown understandably alarmed at Conrad's many absences from home.   And his father expresses his love for him. 

In the final chapter, Conrad -- now in his 40s -- waits fretfully in a hospital to learn whether cancer surgery on his partner has been successful.  He watches a five-year-old boy who is anxiously waiting with his mother for news of his own.  Each time someone comes into the room the boy tenses up, then sighs with disappointment when the news is for someone else.

[M]y God, it's a beautiful thing -- a five-year-old boy, learning his limits, surprising himself and his mother with his first act of patience.  Watching him, I remember all of those feelings:  the fear, the frustration, the hope for the future.  I remember being young, when there was nothing worse than waiting.

Over the years, Conrad has learned that -- for all their common brilliance -- he was not like Sammy.  He was not broken.  When he was 16, he had volunteered the words "I love you" to Sammy, a declaration that Sammy was unable to return.  After Sammy's death, Conrad continued Sammy's research -- partly because of its intrinsic interest, but primarily out of respect for Sammy's wishes.  At the end, he returns his aunt's love and that of his father.  His temporary estrangement from home had been proof that he was a teenager, not that he was broken.

He loves his partner as an adult, and he shows empathy for a small boy, a tiny bird first spreading his wings. 

Wolff says that it took him ten years to write The History of Living Forever, and I can believe it.  It is well-written, beautifully written at times.  It is intelligent, both with respect to science and with respect to human emotion.  It required a second reading for me to write about it in this blog, and I'm sure it still contains enough puzzles to justify, someday, a third.

Chiang Mai 2019

Protective deity

Returning from Chiang Mai, Thailand, Halloween night, I climbed aboard the light rail from the airport at 9:30 p.m., and was confronted by ghoulish riders of all ages.  If I hadn't just returned from three weeks of viewing "protective deities" in and about Thai wats (temples), I might have been intimidated.  (And actually, many Thais nowadays celebrate Halloween -- minus the trick or treating -- in much the same way as we do.  Or maybe it is just the Western expats, of whom there are many in the Chiang Mai area.)

My sister had rented the same home in the Hang Dong area, southwest of the Old Town, that she had rented last year, and I stayed with her.  The rental contains two separate buildings facing a small, jungle-like courtyard, with Kathy's bedroom and the kitchen and living room in the main building.  It's an attractive residence, at the end of a long driveway, surrounded by pasture and farm land, as well as other residential units.

My visit was uneventful, perhaps, compared with my one-week visit to Italy in August, but it was intended as a family gathering and a time for relaxation and contemplation.  Kathy's rental is in an area networked with small roads -- some only theoretically two-laned -- which are lightly traveled and excellent for bicycling.

We biked to nearby restaurants for meals, we biked to my great niece's school, we biked to Denny's new rental home -- in a gated community that could easily be mistaken for California -- not far beyond the school.  I biked out occasionally for a morning coffee.  Denny has a motor scooter and Jessie, his fiancée,  has a car.  But mostly we relied on our bikes or, for longer trips into the city, on the local, and very inexpensive equivalent of Uber.

For a little variety, Kathy, Clinton and I did spend two nights at a hotel just outside the wall of the Old Town mid-way though my visit, and at a small, ten-room boutique hotel inside the walls the night before I flew home.   And my entire family (insofar as in Thailand) spent a night at a resort in Chiang Dao, about fifty miles north of Chiang Mai.  A beautiful rural area, dominated by the mountain, Doi Chiang Dao.  We did a hike to a wat part way up the mountain, and explored some famous limestone caves -- many Buddhist shrines and precarious limestone footing!

Finally, I should mention that one night, Kathy and I biked to a small outdoor restaurant a mile or so from her house.  The meal was good, but what was most memorable was the Vietnamese pale ale I was served.  The restaurant owner, a Thai graduate of William & Mary who spoke with the assurance of a native American, assured us that the brewery was owned by a friend of his.  The label was "Heart of Darkness," and was accompanied by appropriate graphics.  Their website assures us:

Heart of Darkness is all about duality. Good and evil. Sane and insane. Big, bold, crafted brews that will challenge the way you think about beer. Thirst quenching, session beers that will have you bouncing off the walls. Hop bombs that will give you a kick-to-the-teeth, while still being still balanced and smashable. Whatever your taste, we’ve got it….

Their beers, under the Heart of Darkness label, include Kurtz's Insane IPA, Futile Purpose Cucumber Pilsner, Dream Alone Pale Ale, and Pitiless Folly Pale Ale.

Panyaden School
Secondary school campus

Well, you get the picture.  Take that, LBJ!

This is Denny's third year teaching at the Panyaden School (6th, 7th, and 8th grades this year), and our third autumn visit with him.  I anticipate another, perhaps longer, visit a year from now.