Claire's Knee

Laura and Jérôme 

Well!  I want to own shoreline property on Lake Annecy in the French Alps.  I want to spend long languid days chatting with witty and perceptive friends.  I want a motor boat on which I can buzz around the lake.  I want to be a kid in my 20s or 30s.  I want to walk with someone whose company I like across high mountain pastures.

I might even wish I were French!

I'm not so sure, however, that I'd obsess over the knee of a teenager.

Claire's Knee (1970) is the fourth in this year's SAM film series, exhibiting the films of director Éric Rohmer.  It is the fifth in that director's series he calls his "Six Moral Tales."  It is a beautifully filmed and witty comedy, with, as always, an undercurrent of serious questions.

Jérôme is an urbane diplomat, bearded, perhaps in his upper thirties, who is visiting his former lover and old friend Aurora.  Aurora is renting a house on Lake Annecy.   The owner is an older woman who travels on business, and who has left her two teenage daughters, Claire and Laura, in Aurora's care.  Jérôme is shortly to be married to a woman in far-off Sweden, a woman whose aspect in a photo appears somewhat tense and severe. 

Jérôme and Aurora are completely relaxed together.  The romance is long past, but they display constant affection, hugging, holding hands, leaning together.  Aurora is a writer.  She tells Jérôme that she does not create her characters out of nothing, but based on her observations of the people she knows. 

Laura appears while they talk.  Laura (Béatrice Romand) is one of the most appealing film characters I've seen in recent years.  She appears no more than 12 or 13, but is actually 16, and played by an actor who is 18.  She is gangly, awkward, not shy in the least, funny, tom-boyish, and a young woman with opinions on virtually everything -- opinions she is happy to share with anyone who will listen.  It quickly becomes apparent that she has a crush on Jérôme.  Boys my own age are boring, she tells him.  I've never actually been in love.  I really prefer older men.

She looks at a photo of Jérôme's fiancée.  She doesn't look like someone whom I'd expect you to like, she says.  Jérôme had earlier told Aurora that he and his fiancée had nothing in common, and that they gave each other complete freedom to do whatever they wanted.  Their separate careers would keep them apart much of the time. Therefore, an ideal marriage, he feels.

Jérôme feels uncomfortable, but can't quite stop from preening before Laura's flirtation.  Aurora looks on amused, and tells Jérôme that he should go along with her.  Aurora had already half-written a story in her head about a man very similar to her former lover, and would like to see how this development worked out.

The movie is then filled with idyllic scenes between Jérôme and young Laura, including their wandering the high meadows above the lake, like a scene out of The Sound of Music.  Nothing physical beyond holding hands, however, and long talks with Laura's head on Jérôme's shoulder. 

Laura has a boy friend, Vincent, who looks barely older than she does.  Jérôme chats with Vincent, who assures him that Laura is just a friend.  At times, they seem a bit closer than that, but just barely, just enough to give Jérôme unwanted feelings of jealousy.

Finally, older sister Claire, in her upper teens, arrives with her handsome but bossy boyfriend.  The boyfriend Gilles is just obnoxious enough to disgust Jérôme.  He finds his attention diverted from Laura to the more mature Claire -- focusing at one point on her knee while she is standing on a ladder.  But Claire has Gilles, and Laura -- losing interest in  Jérôme -- has Vincent and her own interests. 

Jérôme finds himself alone and feeling old, while the social activities of a younger generation surround him.

Ultimately, when he and Claire are alone in a rainstorm, he tells her things about Gilles that make her cry.  To "console" her, he strokes her knee.  Nothing more.  The crisis is over, as is the knee fetish.  The girls are leaving the lake -- as is Jérôme who is returning to Sweden and his impending marriage.  He tells Aurora that touching the girl's knee "broke the spell." 

Jérôme had earlier told Aurora that he was attracted only to women who were attracted to him.  He obviously had meant nothing to Claire, in fact he irritated her.  He had enjoyed a month basking in Laura's attentions, however -- a girl who was far too young for him, but who satisfied his need to be loved and admired.  He departs the summer warmth of Lake Annecy for the glacial chill of his impending marriage in Sweden.  (Rohmer was a close friend of Ingmar Bergman, and I wonder if this was a dig at his old friend?)

A bittersweet ending, but actually a warm and sunny movie about people who enjoy each other's company.  And who, unlike characters in many films, are rarely hard on themselves -- or on each other.   

Skeletons and Dining Couches: Eating and Dining in the Roman Empire

Sometimes the most exciting aspect of a lecture is its title.

That's my rather snarky reaction to tonight's lecture, the second in the UW History Department's winter lecture series.

So where, in my own opinion, did things go wrong? 

First, the length of the lecture.  The speaker's announced topic -- as I interpreted it -- was a study of diet, nutrition, and the enjoyment of food in the Roman Empire.  A broad topic.  The lecture, after the usual fulsome introduction of the speaker, lasted fifty minutes.  Those of us who have been attending alumni lectures recall when the lectures lasted a full two hours.  Professor Costigan's lectures, which were presented for a number of years during the 1970s and 80s,  could go as much as 15 or 20 minutes past the two-hour mark, once he got wound up, accompanied by apologies for taking up so much of our time.  Those lectures -- and the lectures of several subsequent lecturers -- were so well-focused and eloquent that we would have gladly stayed for another hour.

Second, and speaking of focus, it was hard to tell exactly where the lecturer was going.  She emphasized that what we know about Roman eating is based on three types of evidence -- studies of skeletons, especially from Pompeii, written texts such as those by Pliny and Seneca, and various art works showing Romans at table (for example, illustration above).  She didn't have enough time to present more than a few items in each category, but the evidence was interesting.  More would have been more in this case, not less.

And third, aggravating the first two problems, was the time she spent trying to put an ideological spin on her research.   I could tell there were going to be problems near the beginning of the lecture when she warned us that the human body is more than just our flesh and blood -- it is also a surface upon which elites write their aspirations and prejudices.  I hope I'm not mis-paraphrasing.  Thus, in our own world today, eating organic food isn't just eating healthily, it's also a way to display your social class and educational background.  It's aspirational.

It's as though you had signed up for a lecture on Wordsworth and the Lake poets, and found yourself listening to a deconstruction of Wordsworth, one that demonstrated how the poet had forced male heteronormative values on his readers, worshipping Mother Nature as a means of asserting Victorian idealization of and thus male societal control over women.

Our lecturer pointed out illustrations on murals and mosaics that showed slaves at a banquet hustling and in motion to serve food and assist the diners, while the dining guests lay quietly on their couches, speaking to each other but avoiding eye contact with the slaves.  Having experienced the same behavior at most good restaurants and banquet halls I've attended, this didn't surprise me.  Yes, there's a gulf between server and those being served, whether the servers are slaves or aspiring actors or writers who are just working as waiters to pay the rent.  I suppose that it's legitimate to do research to establish that this common human behavior was also common among the Romans, but I'm not sure it should be more than mentioned in passing in a fifty minute lecture.

The lecture wasn't terrible.  The lecturer was personable, and the examples shown on the screen were interesting.  I'm just disappointed that we aren't being offered longer lectures with more depth and clearer focus.

May it please the court ...

In a few hours I will stroll over to the UW School of Law and serve as a moot court judge in a competition for first year law students.  I'm always impressed by the poise and skill possessed by students who have been studying law for only a few months. 

The issue tonight will be the ever-popular one of applying the Fourth Amendment's prohibition of "unreasonable" searches and seizures to the specifics of a particular case.  Since I'm a judge of a case under review, albeit mock review, I can say no more.

But it reminds me of my own first year moot court experience.  The mock hearing was the culmination of months of research on a complicated problem, with our briefs probably counting more toward our grade than our oral presentation.  I partnered with another good student, Mark, and we worked well with each other.  The problem was less sexy than "search and seizure" or than criminal law in general.  It was -- and my memory has faded to a large extent -- an application of the Federal Tort Claims Act to certain acts of the government.

I'd tell you more, but I honestly can't recall the hypothetical facts we were litigating.  But the issue boiled down to an application of the Supreme Court's decision in Dalehite v. United States, 346 U.S. 15, 73 S.Ct. 956 (1953).  (I give you the citation in case you're so excited by this post that you need to look it up.)   Dalehite arose out of a disastrous explosion of a ship carrying 2,100 tons of ammonium nitrate fertilizer near Galveston, Texas -- the deadliest industrial explosion in U.S. history.  Victims sued the federal government for negligence, and the trial court found the government liable for a litany of acts and failures to act. 

The Supreme Court reversed the trial court's verdict.  It held that whenever the government acts in the same manner as a private individual or corporation, its sovereign immunity has been waived by the Federal Tort Claims Act.  But when the alleged negligence was in pursuit of governmental policies or interests, so-called "discretionary acts," its immunity had not been waived.  The suit was dismissed in its entirety, because all the alleged negligent acts had been "discretionary acts."

The Dalehite decision was complex, and offered many aspects that had to be investigated; its implications had also been interpreted by later opinions from lower appellate courts.  Dalehite provided Mark and me meat for months of research and writing, before we came to the time for moot court arguments.

At the hearing itself, in the late spring of our first year in law school, I was petrified.  I had never done any public speaking.  On the other hand, my briefing was exhaustive (and no doubt exhausting), really more a law review article (and a good one) than an argumentative brief.  But we made good partners, because Mark was a brilliant speaker, and made up for my appearance during my half of the argument, where I stared at my inquisitors like a deer caught in the headlights.

Moot court teams are scored by the judges not on the merits of their case, but on how they present it -- in our case, both by the briefs and by oral argument.  We won.

But I assured everyone afterward that I would become some sort of probate or tax law attorney.  I would never, never be a trial attorney, where I would have to argue cases to either a judge or a jury, or an appellate attorney, where I'd have to argue to an appellate panel as we had done at our student moot court.

But I did, of course.  And enjoyed it.  Who can predict the future?   
------------------------------

CORRECTION: I learned after I arrived that these were all second and third year students. Excellent job by everyone, as expected.

Ma nuit chez Maud

If there is a God, He is infinitely incomprehensible, since, having neither parts nor limits, He has no affinity to us. We are then incapable of knowing either what He is or if He is....

..."God is, or He is not." But to which side shall we incline? Reason can decide nothing here. There is an infinite chaos which separated us. A game is being played at the extremity of this infinite distance where heads or tails will turn up. What will you wager? According to reason, you can do neither the one thing nor the other; according to reason, you can defend neither of the propositions.

--Pascal

Like many of us, my only knowledge of the philosophy of Blaise Pascal comes from an introductory philosophy course in college, and all of it that I recall is "Pascal's Wager": If God exists, the consequences of believing or not believing are infinite; if he doesn't the adverse consequences of mistakenly believing in him are trivial.  Therefore, as a rational gambler, one would choose to believe.

An interesting proposition for discussion in college bull sessions, but hardly typical conversational material for any American adult today, unless by a Ph.D. in philosophy.

The French are -- or at least were -- different.  In Éric Rohmer's 1969 film, My Night at Maud's, Pascal's philosophical opinions form not only an underlying theme of the movie, but are a subject of recurrent interested conversation by four young adults.  Somehow, someone is always walking to a friend's bookcase and pulling out a copy of Pascal's Pensées for consultation. (Clermont was Pascal's home town, which no doubt kept him in the characters' consciousness.)

Two old friends who haven't seen each other for years meet on the street in Clermont, France.  They have coffee together, and then dinner.  Jean-Louis is a practicing Catholic; Vidal is a Marxist.  Rather than jump at each other's throats, like a Trumpist and a liberal in today's America, they ponder in a long, intelligent conversation, relaxed and at times humorous, how Pascal's philosophy fits or does not fit with their own beliefs. 

Although Pascal was a Catholic, Jean-Louis dislikes his mathematical, "statistical" approach to faith.  Vidal, although a Marxist, finds this mathematical approach congenial, but not sufficiently persuasive.  Both understand and appreciate the other's position, and enjoy discussing their agreements and disagreements.

They find much in common, but essentially reach different conclusions.  To me, what makes the movie fascinating isn't the details of their discussions, but that two young men from opposite ends of the philosophical spectrum would, upon meeting, discuss anything other than their teams' World Cup hopes.  Also fascinating is that the film won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, and here in America was nominated for 1969 Oscars for best Foreign Film and best Original Screenplay.  I do seem to remember that movie audiences were more serious in 1969, and maybe they were.

Vidal tells the rather shy Jean-Louis that he is meeting his girl friend Maud that evening, and invites him to come along.  After some hesitation, he agrees.  Jean-Louis had just noticed a young woman, Françoise, at church, and is still experiencing the exciting conviction that she is the woman he wants to meet and eventually marry.  But he accompanies his friend to Maud's house.

Vidal and Maud had been lovers, but their relationship has evolved into friendship.  Vidal leaves Jean-Louis with Maud for the night -- a snow storm makes driving to Jean-Louis's country house hazardous.  Jean-Louis is uncomfortable, both for reasons of morality and because of his attraction to Françoise.  Maud's seductive behavior makes him only more uncomfortable, although she claims she wants him only for company and as a friend.  He ends up sleeping on her bed, but fully clothed and above the covers.

Rather than sex, they discuss Pascal's approach to the problem of predestination.  Jean-Louis agrees with it, Vidal had not, and Maud -- as a total unbeliever -- feels that the question is meaningless.  What she does recognize is that Jean-Louis considers himself predestined to marry Françoise -- a fellow Catholic -- and to  have no further dalliances with other women.  She is rather cross, but as in many French movies they end their night as friends.

Five years later, Jean-Louis and Françoise, now married and accompanied by their child, run into Maud while visiting the beach.  Maud is still unmarried, and somewhat sad, but they chat for a few moments graciously.  Maud was right -- Jean-Louis would marry the Catholic girl.  Jean-Louis sees himself as right as well-- it had been predestined.

The dialogue is excellent, and the black and white photography of urban Clermont and surrounding countryside -- in mid-winter and in the snow -- was beautiful.  The philosophy was unfamiliar enough at times to be over my head, but that hardly detracted from my enjoyment of the film.  It is understandable, even if a bit surprising, how this film was successful enough in American art houses to justify its subsequent general release. 

Back when films were adult.

Sacrifices

16th century Mexica codex

Every winter quarter, the University of Washington Alumni Association teams up with the History Department to present a series of public history lectures.  I've attended almost all of them since 1976, back when the UW's teaching professor extraordinaire Giovanni Costigan taught ten-lecture series, year after year.

This evening, I attended the first lecture of a series entitled "Life, Death, and the Gods."  Tonight's lecture dealt with the meaning of human sacrifice and blood letting among the Aztecs.

The lecture was interesting, but not entirely satisfying.  The professor, whose name I failed to note, spent half the lecture arguing that the Spanish invaders of the sixteenth century sensationalized the extent of human sacrifice among the Aztecs, and often misrepresented its purpose and meaning in order to conform with Christian teaching.  The exaggerations were for the purpose of justifying the colonization of Mexico, and the misrepresentations were -- I gathered -- largely unintentional, and resulted from the common human need to view unfamiliar practices through the lens of one's own experiences and beliefs.

I felt that none of the above was surprising or new, and could have been stated and, if necessary, supported in much less time.

The second part of the lecture was an interpretation of the meaning of these practices within the context of the Mexicas' (the Aztecs own word for themselves) culture.  This portion of the lecture was supported by quite interesting Spanish texts and by "codices" -- illustrations -- both by pre-Columbian Mexica artists and by Mexica artists working in collaboration with Spaniards after the colonization.  The codices were beautiful, brilliant in color, and not simple to interpret.

The professor explained that Mexica "sacrifices" were not always sacrifices as we understand them, but were attempts to relate to the gods, and to propitiate for transgressions both by individuals and by the entire Mexica nation.  This discussion was interesting, but the lecture ended before the speaker was able to fully explain his thesis -- or at least to make it clear to me.

I note that a number of articles exist on-line regarding the purpose of Mexica sacrifices, one of which may have been an attempt to feed or nourish the gods.  According to a 2018 article in Science Magazine,

 Many of the region's cultures, including the Maya and the Mexica, believed that human sacrifice nourished the gods. Without it, the sun would cease to rise and the world would end. And sacrificial victims earned a special, honored place in the afterlife.

This purpose wasn't discussed in tonight's lecture, although it may have been implied.

All in all, an interesting lecture, but the subject was perhaps too complex and controversial for the speaker to do it justice in the hour of actual lecture time afforded by tonight's lecture.  Next week's topic will deal with practices in the Roman Empire.

La Collectionneuse

La Collectionneuse (1967) was the second in SAM's winter Éric Rohmer film series.  It was the third film of Rohmer's "Six Moral Tales" series, and the first of his movies to be filmed in color.

After last night's viewing, I find it was enjoyable to watch, but impossible for me to review critically.  Let me tell you at least what was interesting and enjoyable, and why you might want to view it.

The film takes place on an isolated stretch of the French Riviera, near St. Tropez.  For budgetary reasons, the movie was filmed almost entirely in natural lighting, which gives every scene a relaxed, languorous, and slightly washed out appearance.

The characters are slightly washed out, as well.  The story is told by Adrien, a man apparently in his late twenties or thirties, who has come to a friend's beach house for a "vacation," declining to accompany his girl friend on her business trip to London.  Adrien doesn't work, although he is an artist who is engaged in discussions with a wealthy American to put on some sort of exhibition.  The details are never clear, nor important.  He has come to the beach with the hopes of doing nothing.  Not just relaxing, but doing nothing -- thinking nothing, deciding nothing, talking about nothing.  Being a hermit.  With a flattened brain wave.

Like the narrator of The Wild Boy, however, (discussed a couple of posts ago), he finds it impossible to be alone.   He shares the house with an even more languid old friend, Daniel, who drapes himself over the furniture, and drapes himself with various odd gowns and caftans.  Despite Adrien's professed desire for solitude, he and Daniel talk incessantly and compulsively -- Adrien with fervor, dedicated to what he considers "moral" concerns, Daniel with languid sarcasm interrupted on occasion by sharply offensive and acutely correct accusations -- not because he really feels strongly about anything at all, but because he enjoys seeing the effect he causes and/or because he wants to get rid of someone.

Their witty conversational exchanges are themselves worth the price of admission.

The two men are joined by another mooching friend of the  house's absent owner -- Haydée, a young woman, probably in her late teens, who at first ignores the older male friends and goes off on overnight dates with a succession of boys her own age.  The two men give her the title of the movie, meaning a female "collector," as in a stamp collector.  She gradually becomes first annoyed and then interested in her housemates, and attempts to make friends.

I've read reviews that view the situation as a potential romantic triangle, with everyone seething with longing for everyone else, but all too laid back and/or civilized and/or strategically-minded to be overt about it.  Maybe.  I see the two men as too laid back to really care much about Haydée, or anything else, one way or the other.  Daniel states that he has grown weary with almost all women, and of course Adrien hopes to be alone.  Both men may merely be competing to see which is the more world-weary, but they both convince me.  As for Haydée, she is less interested in the men as men than as potential friends.

Each man tries to persuade Haydée to sleep with the other, as a way of minimizing her attraction for himself.  Daniel finally succumbs, to his boredom and her disappointment.  But gradually, Adrien begins to realize that he truly likes Haydée, not just as a potential sexual conquest but as a companion.  As someone on whose altar his personal "morality" would permit him to sacrifice his longing for solitude. 

They ultimately drive off for some time alone.  They encounter some of  Haydée's old friends, and stop so she can talk for a minute with them.  Adrien interprets her conversation as abandonment, and drives off without her.  He congratulates himself on his assertiveness and integrity, as he returns to the house.

His self-satisfaction quickly dies.  For the first time since coming to the beach, he experiences the pangs of loneliness, rather than pleasurable solitude.  He regrets his hastiness in deserting Haydée. 

But, luckily, he still has his true girl friend in London.  He picks up the phone to arrange a flight to London.  The screen flashes "The End."

I'm not sure La Collectionneuse is a movie that needs too much thought and interpretation, although it probably deserves more than I can give it.  The French word "moral," in the term "Six Moral Tales," I learn, does not have the same connotation as "moral" in the English sense.  It has to do with what an individual thinks and feels.  How the three principal characters in this film think and feel is something that shifts and morphs from scene to scene, and their spoken lines are unreliable indications.  The film feels very "French," and at times reminds me of the "hell" portrayed in Sartre's No Exit -- but a hell of great physical beauty and luxurious surroundings. 

I suppose, as Sartre wrote, that "hell is other people."  Until, of course, the time when you discover that hell means the absence of other people.

Visiting Lee

Saturday, I leave behind the winter cold, and a rare Seattle snow week.  I'll fly south to Southern California. 

A flight I've made often in the past, but this one has a unique feature:  I'll be spending my time down there with the two individuals on Earth whom I've known the longest.

The first is my brother Philip, whom I've known and tormented since I was three years old, ever since that bleak day in May when he was introduced to me as my "baby brother" upon arrival home from the hospital.

The second is a kid I didn't meet until three years later -- I met him in first grade -- but we were already young adults at the age of six, while Philip was still ... well, as Christopher Robin advised us, "When I was three/I was barely me."  As for my friend Lee and me,

But now I am Six, I'm as clever as clever,
So I think I'll be six now for ever and ever.

And we were as clever as clever.  We may not have remained six, or wanted to, but anyone reading our past decade's email correspondence would be pardoned for thinking that we've come as close to it as possible.

Lee went on to become a chronicler of the late 1960s as one of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, as I've noted in an earlier post, and has published his memoir of life in those days.   As the youthful euphoria of the 1960s faded, along with our youth itself, Lee could well have faded into the foliage himself, living out his remaining days as a drug-addled guru.  It's been done, it's been done.  But, for better or worse, he instead ended up spending years as a popular columnist and reporter for the largest and best Silicon Valley newspaper (and one of the best on the West Coast).

And, not to be outdone, I myself became a ... well, you know.  Something wonderful, I'm sure, although it's a little hard at times to separate my self-image from objective reality.  If such an animal even exists.  Objective reality, I mean -- not myself. 

Once adolescence kicked in with a vengeance, and we found ourselves living a couple thousand miles apart, we let our childhood friendship quietly burn dim.  We lost touch to some degree, although Lee's activities were of such an amazing nature that he never quite disappeared from my consciousness.

And so, when, eleven or so years ago, on the eve of my retirement, Lee sent me a letter (or maybe email) advising me that he and his wife would be visiting our hometown in southwest Washington -- and asking, would I like to get together?  My bashful answer was, well, golly, gee, sure.

And thus began Phase Two of our friendship.  Mostly a literary (loosely construed) friendship, as he lives in Orange County and I'm in Seattle.  I dropped in on him one afternoon, a year or so after our hometown visit, an afternoon after which I was happy to conclude that -- all odds to the contrary -- our minds still worked on somewhat the same level.  We have, over the ten plus years since, written hundreds of emails to each other.   Sometimes on serious subjects; more often, perhaps, building joint fantasies, writing an alternative history of our hometown (it desperately needs one!) that would bewilder and irritate the uninitiated. 

Kind of weird, at our age, but hey!  That was how we related as six-year-olds, ten-year-olds, and fifteen-year-olds.  It worked,. and it works.

I'm looking forward, however, to some face to face conversation with the guy in the next few days.  Lifelong friendships are uncommon enough -- especially when the friends don't live out their lives in the same village (literally and metaphorically) --  to be worth nourishing by whatever means possible.. 

The Wild Boy

Many novels -- certainly many first novels -- are in a sense autobiographical.  They are based on the author's own life.  And when I read Paolo Cognetti's first novel, The Eight Mountains, a story of a young city boy who grew up spending his summers in the Italian Alps, the story was so vivid, the observations so detailed, the grasp of a climber's mind and temperament so true, that I was convinced that Cognetti was a climber turned writer.

As it turns out, The Eight Mountains, published in Italian in 2016, was even more autobiographical than I expected.  Cognetti had written in 2013 a memoir of a half year spent in the same region, near the Val d'Aosta, as his novel's protagonist.  The memoir, The Wild Boy, reveals that Cognetti had grown up in Milan, but, like Pietro in his novel had been taken by his parents to the Alps each year, staying each year in the same cabin.  Like Pietro, he had drifted away from the Alps when he reached his twenties.

At some point, urban life began to seem like prison, and he recalled the mountains as the place where freedom began.  He reads with longing Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild, the non-fictional reconstruction of the life of Chris McCandless, the young man who fled to the wilds of Alaska and died ultimately of starvation.  But he didn't feel the need to flee all the way to Alaska.  He was happy to return to the Alps of his childhood, while admitting that there is no true wilderness in the Alps.  More apt, considering his own plans, was Thoreau's Walden -- the nineteenth century author's account of living alone on a site outside Concord, Massachusetts, where he hoped

to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.,

And so Cognetti rents a cabin far up in the hills, taking his books and notebooks, and settles in with the hope of, by living alone, becoming more observant, more reflective, closer to nature.

Cognetti's childhood love of the mountains hadn't been instantaneous, but earned.  He recalls that alpinism  "had been for me as a child a way of confronting fear, exhaustion, and cold."  It was about being far from home.  And because he, like his creature Pietro, was prone to altitude sickness, it was also about physical pain.  Under the guidance of a skilled and compassionate mountaineering instructor, he gradually overcame these childhood complaints, and had become a strong climber and a youth skilled in mountaineering techniques.

Now, returning to the mountains after many years, he quickly learns that he "wasn't cut out to be a hermit."  He found himself constantly seeking someone to talk to.  When a neighboring cattle herder shows a slight sign of friendliness, Cognetti feels his heart beating, he is so excited.

At one point he feels his experiment has been a failure.

I had learned how to chop wood, to light a fire in a rainstorm, to hoe and plant a vegetable garden, to milk a cow, and to stack bales of hay; but I had not learned how to be alone -- the only true aim ultimately, of any hermit-like retreat.  ...  More than a hut in the woods, solitude resembled a house of mirrors; everywhere I looked I found myself reflected: distorted, grotesque, multiplied an infinite number of times.  I could free myself of everything except him.

Although he concluded that his inability to be alone made his return to the mountains a failure, this period of depression was experienced at a low point mid-way through his half year. 

But his stay in the mountains lives up to many of his hopes.  He becomes a close observer of nature -- the plants, animals, snow, clouds, and weather patterns that he encounters.  He has a sincere and touching tendency to worry about the animals around him -- not only the victims of hunters, but those who suffer and die as part of nature's normal cruelty -- the mouse emerging from snow under which it has hibernated, the small bird alive but dying from unknown causes.  Moreover, he feels the same empathy for non-animate (so far as we know) objects -- the tree downed by lightning, the abandoned hut that is falling into decay.

At times, we feel we can understand Cognetti's desire to withdraw from the world, while still desiring companionship with those he feels are like-minded.  He is too sensitive to tolerate bruisings that most of us take for granted, bruisings not merely of himself but of other people.  Of wildlife.  Of nature.  Of the Earth itself.

At last, even his cabin seems too confining, too civilized.  Too full of books and labor saving devices.  He straps on his pack and goes out into nature -- but soon ends up living at an eight thousand foot altitude with two other men his age who are managing a refuge for hikers and climbers -- visitors who, to their relief, rarely show up.   "The Ephemerals," they call these visitors.

By October, the weather is turning, and his hut is not capable of sheltering him through the winter.  And, like Thoreau a couple of centuries before him, he seems psychologically ready to return to the city and give it another try  He has learned as much about himself, at least for one year, as he could expect.

But we must go, I said to Lucky [his adopted dog].  It was time to go back down.  I already knew all the dreams that I would have that winter.

Did he ever go back?  I don't know.  But in the next three years, he found the time to write and publish The Eight Mountains, a prize-winning book translated into 39 languages, which was largely inspired by the events chronicled in his memoir, The Wild Boy.

Spick and span

Every two weeks, I pay a cleaning woman to clean my house.

It is intuitively clear to me that I must never be in my house while she is here.  She might feel hassled; I might feel awkward.  She charges me for three hours of work, to be done between 7:30 and 10:30 a.m..  I leave the house at 7 a.m., eat breakfast out, amuse myself in various ways, and return at 10:30 a.m.  She has come and gone. 

Does she actually work for three hours?  Or even occupy my house for three hours?   I have clearly made it impossible for me to ever know.  Before my cat died -- my very shy and skittish cat -- I was always surprised to find him asleep on a chair in the living room when I came back at 10:30.  The same cat that streaked upstairs and hid under my bed when anyone knocked on the door.  Peacefully asleep, as though nothing had disturbed him for some time.  But -- I told myself -- maybe, over time, he's just got used to her.  And to her vacuum cleaner.

She must not think me a slob, or raised by wolves.  This fear is paramount in my mind.  Therefore, I spend some time -- not hours, but some time -- cleaning the house before the cleaning woman arrives.  I learned this from my mother.  It never looks better than the hour shortly before she arrives.

What does she do?  Primarily, she drags the vacuum around the carpets, upstairs and down.  I know she does this, because I see the tracks.  I assume the vacuum is operating while she does so.  And she folds the ends of the toilet paper rolls into little triangles, as they do in hotels.

What else?  The mop is usually wet.  The hardwood and tile floors usually aren't, but, to be fair, they dry fast.  So they may well have dried before I arrive.  Especially if she mopped them at 8 a.m.  Before leaving at 9 a.m.

I'm always surprised at what she doesn't do.  I'm not fastidious.  Trust me.  A table can collect dust for weeks without my noticing.  And yet, I do notice that dust collects -- dust is really an understatement -- "dust" wedged into corners of the rooms she mops, where the mop doesn't easily dig it out with one swipe.  White painted stairway banisters get progressively more grimy each week.  Baseboards are never dusted.  Cobwebs -- small ones, but still -- remain in place long after abandoned by a resident spider.

I felt happier when I had a long-haired black cat.  He shed daily.  There was always cat hair on all the carpets.  It had to be cleaned up.  She knew it, and she did it.  (Except for one patch of hair under the coffee table in the living room, a patch that remained black and hairy for months after the cat died.  She finally -- thank God -- vacuumed under the table without my asking.) It was obvious -- comparing the carpets before and after her visit -- that she was doing something that needed doing.

Why don't I say something to her?  Rather than seethe and feel guilty for seething?  I could.  When I was taking weekly piano lessons, I finally pointed out that the white keys were becoming black, and she immediately cleaned them.  But who am I to tell her how to do her job?  She might get angry. Her feelings might be hurt. She might go home and yell at her boy friend, and I have nothing against her boy friend.

You may hate being an employee, having someone boss you around?  Believe me, you have it good.   I find it much more difficult to be an employer.

Hiking in Scotland

We don't stop hiking because we grow old,
We grow old because we stop hiking.
--Finis Mitchell

Although famed mountaineer Finis Mitchell did suffer a stroke at 74 and a serious knee injury at 77, he continued not just hiking, but serious mountain climbing, as long as physically possible.  Death finally claimed him the day before his 94th birthday. 

I'll be engaged in a two week celebration, with family and friends, of an advanced birthday of my own -- inshallah, as our Muslim friends would interject -- in Levanto, Italy, in May.  And, having suffered neither a stroke nor a serious knee injury to slow me down, I'll be back in Europe in mid-June for a nine-day hike in Scotland -- an unguided hike with pre-booked overnight stops at bed and breakfasts.

Not mountaineering, granted, but a hike.

I'll be hiking the West Highland Way -- a 95 mile hike from a north Glasgow suburb north to Fort William.  If this itinerary sounds familiar to long-time readers of this blog, it's because I did the same hike in 2011.  Of all eight hikes I've done in Britain since 2010, this is the one that I have least hesitation to hike again.

I'll be hiking with my old University of Washington friend Jim and his wife Dorothy, a couple who I joined for hikes of the Great Glen Way in northern Scotland in 2018, and the Cornwall coast last May.  The opportunity to hike with them again is one reason for repeating the West Highland Way hike.

The other reason is the beauty and the diversity of that hike.  The trail follows the full 24-mile length of Loch Lomond on the less traveled east side, traverses large, isolated, and "bleak" Rannoch Moor, descends to Kingshouse in Glencoe, climbs the well-named Devil's Staircase, and ends up at Fort William at the foot of Ben Nevis (which all three of us climbed in 2018).

Dorothy herself was born and reared in a small town near Glasgow, and can be depended on to offer history, facts, and enthusiasm about  the areas through which we pass.

I'm looking forward to returning to a favorite hiking route.

Pauline at the Beach

Éric Rohmer (1920-2010) has been called the last of the French "New Wave" directors.  He is known in America especially for his films My Night at Maud's (1969) and Claire's Knee (1970).  According to Wikipedia:

Rohmer's films concentrate on intelligent, articulate protagonists who frequently fail to own up to their desires. The contrast between what they say and what they do fuels much of the drama in his films. Gerard Legrand once said that "he is one of the rare filmmakers who is constantly inviting you to be intelligent, indeed, more intelligent than his (likable) characters."

This general description describes my personal reaction to Pauline at the Beach (1983), shown last night, as the first in a weekly series of nine Rohmer films, at the Seattle Art Museum.

Pauline at the Beach is the third in a series of films that Rohmer called "Comedies and Proverbs."  Those films followed an earlier and more probing series which he called "Six Moral Tales."  Pauline is the first of Rohmer's films that I have ever viewed, to the best of my knowledge.  Therefore, my comments are the reactions of an uneducated but interested viewer.

Marion arrives at a beach, somewhere in Normandy or Brittany, with her 14-year-old cousin Pauline.  Marion is beautiful. maybe about 30 although her age is hard to determine.  She is also giggly, flirty, talkative, inquisitive, and ultimately -- to me -- tiresome.  Pauline is young enough to still seem rather boyish, but surprisingly mature.  She is quiet, curious, non-judgmental, and reserved.  She smiles easily and seems to enjoy her life and being with her older cousin.

Marion meets Henri, a thirtyish extrovert, talkative, suave, experienced, and -- as it turns out -- somewhat tired of most women, but compulsive about going after them.  Just as she's becoming attracted by Henri, an old friend Pierre shows up.  Pierre is younger than Henri; he is idealistic, and believes in treating women as friends as well as romantic partners.  He has been desperately in love with Marion for years.

Marion likes Pierre as a friend, but tells him, essentially, that he is too predictable and boring.  She's not looking a for a friend.  She's not looking for someone like herself  She wants to -- she uses the word repeatedly -- "burn."  

Two men after one woman.  One man -- the one she wants -- is just going through the motions and is looking forward to adventurous travel.  The more admirable man -- the one who bores her -- is consumed with love and jealousy.  

Pauline watches this all, is pleasant to everyone, and says very little.  All three adults seem desperate to learn about Pauline's love life -- she is 14!   Has she never been in love, perhaps with an older man?  Oh yes, she replies, once.  With an older man, but he was too old for her.  He was 12 and she was only 6.  The fascination everyone felt rapidly rising collapses.  She smiles.

Pauline runs into Sylvain, a boy her age or maybe a year older, on the beach.  They talk and swim.  They make a nice-looking couple.  It appears to be the first love for each of them.  He is, like Pauline, quiet and thoughtful.  They are as much friends as lovers.  Meanwhile, each of the two men makes half-hearted plays for Pauline.  (This is France, after all.)  She makes it clear politely that, while some girls like older men, older men have no attraction for her.  But she continues to be friendly.  Everyone is always friendly, and very civilized.  Everyone shakes hands and/or kisses upon meeting and departing.

It's not worth describing in detail, but somehow Sylvain, in order to protect Henri, blunders into a situation where others believe he was having an affair with a girl selling candy along the boardwalk.  Pauline eventually hears both versions of the matter.  She decides that even if Sylvain was innocent of the affair, she couldn't forgive him for not standing up for himself when accused of it.  Marion prefers to believe that it was in fact Sylvain, and not Henri, whom Pierre saw, through a window, in bed with the candy girl.

The two cousins leave their beach vacation early.  Marion still believes in Henri's innocence, but tells Pauline that they can each believe their own version of the truth.  Pauline smiles as they drive off.

The story is mildly entertaining, and the dialogue is often witty.  None of these characters is stupid or gross or unduly selfish.  But all except Pauline (and perhaps Sylvain) are highly self-centered.  This is an unusually "talky" movie.  The sole subject of virtually all their conversations is "love."  What each expects from love, the varieties of love, past unfortunate experiences with love.  These are conversations that American men would shy away from as "girl-talk" -- but Henri and Pierre are as absorbed by the subject, and as verbose in discussing it, as is Marion.

Pauline alone stands apart.  She listens, she smiles, she perhaps rolls her eyes.  She seems somewhat older than the older people she observes.  She makes it clear that, while "love" may be important to her as well, life has other aspects that she is interested in exploring.

The others like her.  But they seem unable to understand her.

Gray days in the Northwest

In that house, once my father had gone, my mother reverted to a version of herself that I had never known before.  In the morning, as soon as she had got out of bed, she would put some kindling in the stove, scrunch up a page of newspaper, and strike a match on the rough surface of the cast iron.  She wasn't bothered by the smoke that would then unfurl into the kitchen, or by the need to wrap ourselves in a blanket until the room warmed up, or by the milk that she would overheat and burn on the scalding hotplate.  For breakfast she would give me toast and jam.  She would wash me under the tap, scrubbing my face, neck, and ears before drying me with a kitchen rag and sending me on my way outdoors: out into the wind and the rain, so that I would finally lose a little of my delicate urban constitution.

--Paolo Cognetti, The Eight Mountains

Seattle today embraces its reputation.  The sky is gray and overcast.  It hasn't rained for perhaps 24 hours, but rain is always threatened.  In fact, rain is forecast within the hour.  The temperature is 43 degrees (6° C.), and hasn't changed by more than a few degrees, night or day, for a number of days.  There is a wind -- not a strong wind but enough of a wind to remind you that it isn't summer.

I love it.  I've been out walking for an hour and a half, and I love it.

If you grew up in California, you'd hate it for obvious reasons.  If you grew up in New England or the Mid-West, you'd miss experiencing a "true" winter, with blizzards and snow perpetually on the ground.  The Cleveland world of A Christmas Story.  But I grew up in the Northwest Corner, and, just as much as the sunny days of summer, days like this were the days of my childhood.

Like the mother in Cognetti's novel, on a day like today my own mother would tell us kids, at some point, to get out of the house and go play outside.  Not merely because she wanted a little peace and quiet -- although that was certainly a consideration -- but because that's what kids should do.  Reading books was great -- my mother was an avid reader -- but we needed to run around on our own with other kids, get cold, fall off our bikes, skin our knees, argue with each other.  It was part of growing up.

When I think of days like this, I think of raw knuckles, red from the cold and wet.  I think of my perpetually runny nose, repeatedly and unconsciously wiped against my bare arm or my sleeve -- whichever was more handy.  I  think of wading in puddles, deeper and deeper, feeling the increased water pressure against the tops of my boots until -- oops! -- I waded one inch too far and the water poured over the top and into my boots, drowning my shoes. 

My mother may have complained, but I can't recall it.  Mistakes like that were the cost of getting me outside.  Maybe even a desired result, at some level of her thinking.

Unlike the mountain cabin in Cognetti's novel, we did have electric appliances, thank you very much.  But we were well familiar with wood stoves -- lighting them using newspapers as kindling, waiting for them to heat up and heat up the entire room, cooking on them.  We had similar stoves in beach cabins and cheap motels we visited.  My grandmother ran a boarding house with an enormous wood stove on which all the cooking was done -- eggs and pancakes cooked in great number directly on the cast iron top.

These memories flooded my mind today as I was out walking in the gray cold.  The vacation cabins.  The coziness of huddling under the covers while my mother or dad got the stove going.  The rain beating against the windows, because beaches in the Northwest may have sun but they also may very well have rain.  Even at home, in my own house, feeling secure in bed as the rain beat against the roof, blew from the southwest against the windows.  Knowing that someone beside myself was looking after me, keeping the elements at bay.

A similar feeling, less intense, years later, in cabins at ski areas, seeing the snow drifting outside the windows.  Wondering if we could make it up to the slopes today, or if today would be a day spent drinking coffee and playing cards and board games, as the snow fell ever deeper.

Or Cornwall. I hiked in Cornwall last May, but I've never been there in the winter. But I've read stories. I can picture the storms brewing at sea, blowing rain and wind in upon the coast. I can see myself walking the shoreline, the damp wind in my face; I can imagine myself camped in a rustic but cozy small house, as the rain beats against the windows. England's weather is similar in many ways to that of the Northwest Corner. In Cornwall, I probably would feel at home.

To parody Hemingway, if you're lucky enough to grow up in the Northwest Corner, wherever you go later, the Northwest stays with you.  A moveable feast.  I lived for a year in Honolulu, a wonderful experience I'd never surrender.  But half way through the year, back in Seattle for a visit, I walked along a downtown street feeling the cold but not frigid wind against my face, smelling the scents off the Sound, and hearing the shrill cries of seagulls -- a bird unknown in Hawaiian skies.  I felt invigorated.  I knew then I'd always love being a tourist in Hawaii, but would never become a permanent resident.

I've walked my daily four miles today.  But I've almost written myself into the mood to walk a few more!

Is Persepolis burning?

In April 2011, I visited Iran.  I posted extensively on my visit, if you're interested.  It was one of the most interesting and rewarding visits to a foreign country I've ever experienced.

We saw the ruins of the Persian palace at Persepolis, burned by Alexander the Great, but still extensive.  We visited the enormous shrine to the Shi'ite imam Reza in Mashad.  We visited the tomb of Cyrus the Great, an emperor praised by the Hebrews in the Old Testament book of Ezra.  We visited the incredibly beautiful city of Isfahan, capital of Persia under the Safavid dynasty in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

These are all presumably targets to be destroyed by President Trump if Iran acts out, according to repeated presidential tweets, following Trump's assassination of one of Iran's generals.  Iran has 24 UNESCO World Heritage Sites.  We haven't been told how many are due for destruction at Mr. Trump's whim -- but he has 52 sites that will be destroyed.  He has them on a list, he has them on a list.

Modern day Iran under the Islamic Republic is only a few decades old.  These sites -- many of them -- were built millennia ago, by pre-Islamic Persians.  They are considered treasures by the entire world, as much as the Louvre in Paris and the pyramids in Egypt.  We would destroy our own cultural heritage by damaging or destroying them -- just as we did by fire bombing Dresden at the end of World War II.

But there's more.  Trump's tweets on Twitter -- his childishly-drafted equivalent of press releases -- suggest we will hit civilian targets.  When I was in Iran, including Tehran, in 2011, I was overwhelmed by the friendliness of the Iranian people.  They knew I was an American, and yet -- despite all reasons to act otherwise -- they were relaxed, laid back, and often very humorously funny.  Especially in the cities, the very large educated middle classes were sympathetic to the West.  They were our hope for Iran's future, as the burning embers of the Islamic revolution died down.

And yet Trump would kill them without hesitation.  News reports indicate that, like nothing else, he has united the country against the United States.  He killed the nuclear limitation treaty with Iran.  He seems intent on ensuring that Iran stays a perpetual enemy of America.

Trump has an emotional need for enemies, for people to bully and to ridicule.  Things haven't been going well for the Chosen One.  He no doubt is upset.  He has no self-control.  He will do what he will do.  Iran is his chosen enemy in the Middle East.

His tweets over this past weekend smell of war crimes.  Destruction of cultural sites is a war crime.  Killing of civilians without military justification is a war crime.  Ordering such acts is a war crime.  Carrying out such orders is a war crime.

Mr. Trump probably feels safe.  He just finished pardoning men convicted of war crimes in the course of military actions.  He has the constitutional power to pardon anyone, to pardon his entire cabinet and all his generals, if that becomes necessary.

I know my blog is read by nearly as many people overseas as it is by Americans.  I apologize if I seem unpatriotic.  But I find it difficult to stand quietly and watch what this man is doing to my country and to our world.  He is ignorant and mentally lazy and highly insecure emotionally.  But, because of all of the above, he is dangerous.