Eye of Sauron

"The eye of Sauron."

That is how the New York Times today described the black hole at the heart of the Messier 87 (M87) galaxy in the constellation Virgo.  The black hole, so dense that no light can escape from the region beneath its "event horizon," has a radius of 60,000 light years.  (Our own Milky Way galaxy, by comparison, is "only" 100,000 light years in diameter.)  The black hole has the mass of 6.5 billion of our Suns, all collapsed in on itself from its own gravity.

This photo was taken on April 10, 2017.  It was the first photo of a black hole.

The Times article discusses the fact that the black hole actually has rings around it.  The article, unfortunately, devotes most of its space to background information about the nature of black holes, and to a description of the system of eight radio observatories that together constitute the Event Horizon Telescope that photographed the black hole -- and not so much to the nature of the rings.  In fact, it offers three schematic diagrams of the rings in space-time, without any explanation of what the details of the diagrams represent.

But the article does offer one dramatic description of the source of light in the rings:

When you point a telescope at a black hole, it turns out you don't just see the swirling doughnut of doom formed by matter falling in.  You can also see the whole universe.  Light from an infinite array of distant stars and galaxies can wrap around the black hole like ribbons around a maypole, again and again before coming back to your eye, or your telescope.

The writer later explains that we  not only see light from all over the universe, we are in effect looking further and further back into the history of the universe.

To be fair, the article's writer appears to be primarily interested in showing the importance of the Event Horizon Telescope, a joint international effort by observatories around the world.  I would have liked a clearer explanation of how the black hole is believed to collect light from the entire universe and throw it into orbit about itself, however, and how the light reaches us by eventually escaping the clutches of the black hole. But details such as that may simply not be available at this time. 

A good reason to subscribe to a good scientific journal aimed at laymen -- which I don't -- rather than rely on the popular press. 

But the "eye of Sauron" -- I do like that. 

Land of the South Slavs

Ancient walls of Dubrovnik

The area around Trieste, having been divided into two zones, was occupied by Anglo-American forces after World War II.  In 1954, residents of Zone A, including Trieste itself, voted to join Italy; residents of Zone B, a larger geographical area, voted to join Yugoslavia.  I was 14 at the time, and I remember the plebiscite well.  I viewed it as free Italy vs. Communist Yugoslavia.  Why would anyone choose Yugoslavia, I wondered?

In the 1990s, as Yugoslavia was breaking up, a vicious war took place between Croatia, striving for independence, and Serbia, which hoped to keep Croatia within a Serbian dominated Yugoslav union.  Serbs and Croats were ethnically identical, and spoke the same language.  Why the hatred and hostility between the two former Yugoslav states, hatred that went far beyond that expected in a simple argument about whether two adjacent states should be separate countries or united, I wondered?

Over the years, of course, I developed some vague knowledge about the background of these two hostilities, and others in the area.  But this week I began reading Dame Rebecca West's amazing 1941 book Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, based on a six-week trip the author and her husband took in 1937 around Yugoslavia.  The book helps the reader understand not only the history of, but the emotions causing, the Slavic people's hostilities among themselves and with their neighbors.

The book is epic in size, over a thousand pages, and I've read only the first 25 percent.  The reading is slow because the text is dense with information, and shifts rapidly between travel writing, historical developments dating back as far as Alexander the Great, art analysis, psychological studies of the local people the couple meet and talk to, and detailed descriptions of flowers, plants, trees, seas and rivers, towns, and architecture.  The book is also filled with Dame Rebecca's (I'll call her "West" for short) somewhat eccentric and boldly stated opinions about German and Austrian boorishness and Austrian fecklessness, Venetian and Italian corruption and treachery, Serbo-Croatian male beauty and manliness, Ottoman Turkish cruelty and rapacity -- and her, at times, surprisingly assertive female chauvinism.  And that's just a start. 

West also has strong views, probably well justified, as to why Croats seem more refined and well-educated than the Serbs and other South Slavs.  The Croats were cuddled up as a protected unit of the Austro-Hungarian Empire for centuries, while the Bosnians, Macedonians, and Montenegrins, were part of the Ottoman Empire, and while the Serbs struggled for their own independence, and eventually for the independence of the entire peninsula from the Turks -- at great cost in suffering and poverty.  They achieved independence after a war against the Ottomans in the early years of the nineteenth century.

In general, West finds the Serbo-Croatians to be loud, proud, and often angry.  She likes that about them, and finds it entirely justified by their history.  By 1937, at the time of West's visit, the Serbs were firmly devoted to the Yugoslavian centralized government in Belgrade, as were some Croatians,  Most Croatians wanted independence, even in 1937.  She toured Croatia with friends from both camps, friends who acted stiffly correct in each other's presence.

I visited Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, in 1961, as part of a school group.  We must have had a guided tour, but I primarily recall wandering around the city in the evening with some friends.  It was the most boring city I had ever visited.  I remember our looking in shop windows, and finding surgical supplies on display.  But in 1937, West loved Zagreb, and she devotes three chapters to its charms.  World War II and Tito's Communist state apparently were not kind to the city. 

So far in my reading, West has discussed her visits to Croatia and Dalmatia.  She and her husband have now just left Dubrovnik and are headed for Herzegovina.  Ahead lie sections of her book devoted to Bosnia, Serbia, Macedonia, "Old Serbia," and Montenegro.  I won't attempt to sum up my conclusions until I've finished the entire book -- a goal I've set for myself, something to occupy the long, COVID-19 evenings of isolation.

I leave you with a final item of trivia:   Our English word "argosy" (a large merchant ship, especially with a rich cargo) is derived from "Ragusa," an important city and a key, very prosperous Adriatic port, one long envied by the Turks.  Ragusa was the historic Croatian name for Dubrovnik.  The Dalmatians changed the name to Dubrovnik ("oak grove") after World War I, because (according to West) "Ragusa" sounded too Italian.  Understandable, because the Ragusans had fought the Italians in general, and Venice in particular, off and on ever since 1205, and right up through the time of Mussolini.

Memories are long and don't fade easily in the Balkans.

Keeping connected

Today is only the eleventh day of mandatory "stay at home" regulations in Washington state, and already folks are going stir-crazy.  Compliant, in general, but stir-crazy.

However asocial and reclusive we may think ourselves to be, we don't realize how much each of us craves a certain amount of social contact.  "Stay at home" means that you socialize in person only with those persons already in your household.  For single people, like me, it means you socialize with no one.  (Yes, you can say hi to neighbors you walk past outdoors while walking -- but only from six feet away.)

As I've mentioned in past posts --and should be apparent from much that you read in this blog -- in general, I'm quite happy being solitary for days on end.

How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.
--Virginia Woolf

Ok, we don't all feel that way.  But some of us might.

But even the most solitary, unless our desire for isolation is pathological, have valued ties of friendship and family that they take for granted.  Sociability that may be unconscious, but that is badly missed when it is absent.

As in these days of quarantine and "stay at home."

But technology has provided an imperfect means to stay in touch -- far from perfect, far from ideal, but better than emails, better than phone calls.  Not necessarily better than old fashioned letters, but of a different, more immediate sort.  I refer to audio-visual communications like Skype and Zoom. 

I'd never used Skype, although some members of my family have.  But I understood the concept.  I didn't realize that these tools could also be used -- in fact are in some ways designed to be used -- for teleconferences among groups of individuals, as in business meetings, not just for one-on-one conversations.

I had a "major" birthday yesterday.  I felt doomed to mull over its significance alone.  But my niece introduced me, and others in the family, to teleconferencing on Zoom.  We had a tentative conference on Saturday, just to see how it works, and then a formal birthday conference between me, my brother and his wife, my sister, and my niece yesterday.

I realize I get excited over developments with which most of my readers have been long familiar (cf. my post a couple of years ago about the amazing Starbucks app), but, hey, better late than never.  Zoom posed some problems getting everyone on line, but once there it works great.  The images aren't quite as clear and crisp as in the photo above, but certainly good enough. 

We tended to talk over each other on-line, but then we also tend to talk over each other when we're talking together in person.  It was fun, it was almost like being in the same room, and it was a more immediate experience than talking on a telephone conference call.

And when you've had enough (solitude lover that you are), you don't have to endure long farewells.  You just press the "off" button!

Blinking out

Cherry blossoms in UW's
Upper Quad, in happier days (2018) 

"The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time."

--Sir Edward Grey (August 3, 1914)

I am quite used to living alone, with or without cats.  "Without" for this past year. 

It never bothers me.  I punctuate the week -- not always, but often -- with various lectures, film series, and other distractions.  But most of the hours, I'm happily engaged at home -- reading, going for long walks, emailing, blogging, listening to music, and at times, but not for a while, playing the piano.

All those options are open to me now.  And yet, really for the first time, I feel at loose ends.

Here in Washington state, as in many parts of the country, during the past few weeks we have seen the schools shut down, businesses close, people asked to stay at home unless "necessary" for them to be abroad.  I used to eat out for either breakfast or lunch each day; now sit-down restaurants are closed. I find now that having had one meal outside the house was an important landmark that gave structure to my day.  As one relative writes me, she finds that eating 21 meals a week at home is a deadening experience.

That daily meal out, while reading the paper or a book, was an oddly important event each day.  Similarly, attending church each Sunday gave structure to the week -- it helped remind me which day it was.  Church services have been canceled indefinitely for the first time in my life.  I find myself having to think a moment to recall whether it's Saturday or Sunday.

Running and walking are allowed, as long as you maintain six-foot distances from fellow pedestrians.  Aye, there's the rub.  No one's at school, most people aren't at work.  Like me, many are tired of TV and like to spend time out walking.  Popular walking routes are crowded; even back streets are unexpectedly full of walkers and runners.  We're not allowed to gather in parks.  Beaches are closed because they became too popular.  Yosemite and certain other National Parks have been closed.  Even mountain trails pose the grave threat of human proximity.

In Seattle, this is the time of year when the cherry blossoms bloom on campus, drawing crowds of both locals and tourists.  The University of Washington's Upper Quad is a primary magnet for cherry blossom lovers.  But this year, the magnet was too strong -- the crowds gathering were posing an obvious threat of contagion.  This morning, I discovered yellow tape blocking access -- the University itself had canceled classes weeks ago, of course -- to the entire Upper Quad.

Seeing that yellow tape felt like the final straw.

As in the British Foreign Secretary's time, the lamps seem to be going out all over America.  Unlike Sir Edward, I'm sure they will be re-lit within our lifetime.  But when?  Weeks?  Months?  Longer? 

No one knows.

A Traveller's Life

I first discovered Eric Newby in 2011, when I read his exciting, and often hilarious, climbing adventure, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush.  After ten years as a women's dress buyer for a London fashion house, he telegraphed a diplomat friend in Brazil, "CAN YOU TRAVEL NURISTAN JUNE?"  And leaving the world of London fashion, he set out to climb the allegedly unclimbable, 19,000-foot Mir Samir in Afghanistan.  He had absolutely no climbing experience.   The pair came within 900 feet of succeeding.

Who was this guy, I wondered?

I later read another of his books, The Last Grain Race, in which he describes how, as the recent graduate of a tony London "public" (prep) school, he signed on as an apprentice sailor on a Finnish sailing vessel carrying grain from Australia to Britain.  His first day, while still dressed in street clothes, he was ordered to climb the rigging to the top of the mast.

Again I wondered, who was this guy?

I have a better picture of the lad now, after reading his 1982 collection of reflections, A Traveller's Life.  In 35 chapters, he discusses and reflects on the travels of his active life.  But he explains, in an Introduction, that he broadly defines "travels" to include any experience outside his home -- beginning with his birth, moving along to his boyhood explorations with his mother of Harrod's department store, and his experiences on his own as a school boy.

To anyone looking for a more traditional travel book, these early experiences might seem frustrating.  To me, they are the best part of the book, giving a first-hand picture of life in Britain, from a schoolboy's point of view, in the 1920s and 1930s.

Newby was born, in 1919, and reared in Barnes, a district in west London, bordering the south bank of the Thames.  Immediately to the north, on the other side of the river, is Hammersmith, which in turn is bordered on its north by Kensington.  At the time Newby was a child, Barnes was what he describes as a middle-middle class community.  Hammersmith was a rougher, working class area.  Newby, a day student, had to walk to St. Paul's school in Hammersmith (now relocated to Barnes), a nerve-wracking experience which may have given him a certain ability to confront hardship, as well as to deal with persons of other classes and nationalities.

The first three chapters paint a vivid picture of his Barnes environment at the time of his birth and boyhood, including visits to the Isle of Wight and, beginning when he was five, annual visits by motor car to the beach at Branscombe in South Devon.  He reminds us that until 1931, the speed limit in Britain was twenty miles per hour.  It was in Branscombe that he overheard a family "friend" comment to his aunt, "She didn't ought to 'ave 'ad 'im" -- a comment that seemed to still haunt him decades later.   En route to Branscombe, he recalls visiting Stonehenge, where there was only one human visitor -- and a lot of sheep.  The family''s drive from London  to Branscombe is described in great detail -- a fascinating read if you enjoy observing the changes that the years bring about.

Chapter Seven -- "Journeys Through Darkest Hammersmith" -- is the real start of Newby's adventures as a solo traveler through foreign and dangerous regions.  The daily travel required just to get to school and back, wearing St. Paul's odd school uniform and a mandatory bowler hat, carrying an umbrella in hand, and yet keeping his health and sanity intact was hair-raising.  He describes Hammersmith:

In such streets endless rows of little two-storeyed terrace houses, built of fog-blackened London brick, stood back to back, each with its outside privy, separated by little yards in which the occupiers sometimes kept rabbits or carrier pigeons, or if they were large enough turned into little gardens; the sort of London houses which, if they have survived, have become something their builders and occupiers never dreamed of, desirable residences in streets with names that now have an equally desirable period flavor.

Travel through Hammersmith (now gentrified)

engendered some of the feelings of excitement, danger, and despair that some nineteenth-century travelers experience in darkest, cannibal Africa and in the twentieth century in the central highlands of New Guinea.

Most of us remember similar feelings when confronted with certain neighborhoods (and their scary inhabitants) that were, objectively, far less threatening.

Newby had hopes of attending Oxford, but he failed the mathematics section of his graduation exams (later the O-levels), and his father decided he wasn't clever enough for university, and should go into business.  After eighteen months, he made the fateful decision to apprentice himself on the crew of the S/V Moshula, sailing to Australia.  He was still in many ways a school boy, now thrown in with a tough crew, none of whom spoke more than a few words of English.  He wrote long, brave letters home, each touchingly begun:  "Dear Mummy and Daddy."  But he did well, won the grudging respect of many -- not all -- of his shipmates, and was invited to sign on to the next sailing.  As he writes in the closing words of The Last Grain Race, he took one last look at the vessel, walked away, and never saw her again.

World War II had begun.  He joined the Navy, served as a demolitions expert in the Levant, was captured by the Italians in Sicily, was shifted around from one POW camp to another, transferred to a camp in Germany, and was finally liberated by American troops.  He then married a woman he had met in Italy, and returned to the London fashion industry as a buyer. 

His adventures as a buyer might well be interesting to those involved in the world of retail sales or women's fashion, but those chapters merely made me wonder how he could stand it as long as he did.  Finally, he sent the famous telegram to Rio de Janeiro, and in 1956 headed for Afghanistan.

The final half of the book describes his new career as a travel writer, and especially as a writer for the late lamented American magazine Holiday.  He sums up various trips rather briefly.  Many of these later descriptions seem little more than diary entries.  But it's difficult for a travel writer's life to be boring.  He includes sketches of experiences in India, the Scottish isles, a drive from Amman to Aqaba in Jordan, Kenya, the Orient Express,  Istanbul and the Pera Palace Hotel, a scary visit by him and his wife to Haiti, and a fascinating visit to St.Katharine's monastery on Mt. Sinai. 

He also devotes a couple of chapters to New York, including the "adventure" of walking up Broadway from the Battery to a point north of Columbia University.  Hey, I've done that.  It's not really an adventure, and, from his tone, I think Newby agreed.

He ends the book with a lament for the incursion of motorized tourism into every part of the world, on roads not built for the convenience of the local population.

They were made for tourists in motor cars who never got out of the their vehicles at all.  No one who lived in a remote place and enjoyed doing so was safe from the panoramic road. . By 1973 they had already destroyed the solitude of the high Apennines which I knew and loved so well.

Even worse will be the day, which has not yet come, when the desire to be alone has finally been extinguished from the human heart.

Who of us hasn't uneasily shared that concern?

Tredecennial

The dictionary says that "tredecennial" is a "rare nonce word." Further research reveals that a "nonce word" is a word "created for a single occasion to solve an immediate problem of communication."

Now that we have that cleared up, we can rejoice in today's being the thirteenth anniversary of the founding of Confused Ideas from the Northwest Corner.

Little did I realize on that fateful day in March 2007, when I decided to try my hand dabbling at blog writing, just as an experiment, that thirteen years later I would be looking back on that day with smug satisfaction.  Or that rather than posting maybe an occasional thought now and then, I would have become so obsessive a blogger as to have posted by today's date 1,244 little essays of varying value and interest.

But enough of historical self-congratulation.  How was this past year?

Quantitatively, excellent.  Calendar year 2019 was my most prolific year in all of recorded history, as the Orange One would say -- if he knew the word "prolific."  A record 112 posts, compared with 2018's 110 and 2008's 109.

By far, the most popular post of the year, in term of hits, was September's discussion of Wagner's Tannhäuser Overture.   Other popular topics were an essay on the joys of hiking, a review of the Broadway hit "Dear Evan Hansen," a photo essay of the trip to New York City during which I saw the Broadway hit, and my tribute to the joys of train travel.

Were those my best blog posts?  I'd say not, although we wade deeply into the quagmire of subjectivity.  Rather than so wade, trying to choose my "best," I'll give you a list of nine posts that I personally and subjectively liked better than most.  They tend heavily toward book reviews, or at least discussions of books and authors.  I probably am biased, and  permit my biases to choose posts that deal with subjects I like best.  But I have at least tried to focus more on whether the post is well-written and leaves the reader happy and better educated than before he picked it up.

My nine "best," therefore, in no particular order:

1.  Review of The Bell, by Iris Murdoch.
2.  Review of Venice Observed, by Mary McCarthy.
3.  Review of The Last Grain Race, by Eric Newby.
4.  Discussion of my visit to Challis, Idaho.  "Her Own Private Idaho."
5.  Discussion of my travel to Florence, Italy.  "Florence Then and Now."
6.  Season of Advent.  "Advent."
7.  Discussion of first ascent of El Capitan. "Scaling El Cap."
8.  Magic of childhood imagination.  "Looking Back."
9.  Discussion of an author and her works.  "Ursula K. Le Guin."

There you have it.  I will brook no argument.  And thus we dive into my fourteenth year of writing the Northwest Corner.

Clueless in Seattle

I sat quietly watching the primary election returns this evening (yes, Biden did well), realizing that more of the news was about the COVID-19 virus that's sweeping the world than about the elections.  It didn't make for a restful evening.

I have nothing new to add about a subject that has saturated this week's news reporting.  I'll just remind you that I live in the city that first warned Americans that COVID-19 was not just another problem that those silly Chinese had to put up with.  That the virus was attacking Americans, and killing some of them.  Especially, in the Seattle area, killing the helpless residents of a nursing home.

Even then, it was easy to feel -- even while sneering at Trump for making our feelings explicit -- that the subject was being over-dramatized, that it wasn't something that would affect most of us.  Certainly not those of us who felt in robust good health.

It's gradually dawned on me, however, that older age and underlying health issues are what lawyers would call disjunctive causes of serious problems from the virus, not conjunctive.  In other words, my age alone is sufficient to make me "a person at high risk of severe illness from COVID-19."  And some experts now believe that the mortality rate for persons in my age bracket may be as high as 18 percent.  (As opposed to 1 or 2 percent for the general population.

I wash my hands compulsively.  I avoid people, which as an introvert comes easily.  I get a full night's sleep.  The restaurants are all closed, so I think of new kinds of sandwiches.  I take Vitamin D pills.

Walking about outside seems to be safe, although they'd rather that I stayed in my house.  And so I walk about.  I enjoy the flowers and the views of distant mountains more vividly than in the past.  I like the way the clouds look as they drift across a blue sky.  I smile at kids and their parents.  And dogs and cats. 

I remain optimistic. Not because there's reason for optimism, but because that's how I'm genetically programmed. Optimistic despite the virus's high mortality rate.  And despite the even higher chance that I'll contract the virus, even if it doesn't kill me, sooner or later.  If not today, then next month, or even next year.  Because COVID-19 may wax and wane, but it's not going away, not unless a vaccine is developed.

Six months ago, I was looking forward with excitement to spring and my birthday celebration in Italy. Who could have guessed at that time how much the world would change before spring had arrived?

We're better than that

I got back an hour or so ago from a 90-minute walk to and from -- and a winding route through -- the University of Washington campus.  It certainly wasn't sunny; it was at best drizzling.  I sit here typing with the bottom six inches of my jeans clinging damply to my legs.

But sometimes when the weather's not so great -- cloudy and wet -- but not lousy -- pouring rain -- I enjoy it the most.  I find myself observing my surroundings more closely than I might when the sun is shining blissfully.

Classes have been cancelled at the university since Monday.  The buildings are still open and functioning, however.  The libraries are still checking out books; the on-campus Starbucks outlets are brewing coffee; the dorms appear to have remained open for those students choosing to stay on campus.  Still, one would hardly describe the campus as lively.

But as I ambled along past a dorm, a student walking toward me raised his eyebrows and exchanged grins with me while passing.  And I realized that, ever since the COVID-19 epidemic got its grip on Seattle, casual smiles had become a more frequent occurrence.  Students, adult men and women, old timers out puttering around in their damp yards -- nothing dramatic, just a smile, or a humorous grimace, or a hi or hello, or even a "stay healthy."  Maybe in your part of the country, your part of the world, this behavior is normal.  But it's not all that common, usually, in Scandinavian-rooted Seattle, the home of the dreaded "Seattle Freeze."

I've noticed it before only during big snow storms, when life has slowed down and neighbors stay home from work and walk to the store, actually looking about them as they stomp through the snow, rather than cruise at the speed limit in their SUVs.

I like it.  And it's set me to thinking about  people -- in Seattle and elsewhere.  About how giant organizations like the NBA have canceled their seasons, at enormous cost, to avoid spreading the virus.  And about how people are increasing their donations to those charities that support folks affected by job layoffs and by other collateral effects of the pandemic.  I received an email today from a local professional organization to which I belong -- one representing attorneys who primarily work for insurance companies -- sponsoring a drive for donations to benefit homeless kids in local school districts and children from families affected by epidemic-related business closures, reminding us that "the biggest and most immediate impact [of the pandemic] will be economic; monetary donations will be used to meet this need and prevent families from potentially losing their shelter, heat or electricity due to the economic slowdown."

Our state and local governments have been at the forefront of efforts to contain the epidemic and to prevent spikes in contagion that would overwhelm our local ability to provide health care to seriously ill residents.  The public has widely supported these governmental efforts.

So I thought as I walked in the rain, and as I sit here and type -- people really are pretty decent and willing to be helpful, aren't they, when given a chance?  Especially, I tell myself chauvinistically, here in the Northwest Corner!

As we view the chaos and acrimony and finger-pointing back in Washington, D.C., we realize that -- at this time in our history, at least -- the feds don't really represent all that's best about our people.  How we behave toward each other -- even if by just a smile when passing; how we contribute time and money to charitable efforts; how we govern ourselves, with reasonable efficiency and with compassion, at the state and local levels -- these represent the kind of people we are, far more than does that guy we see on television, the one with the orange face, who so obviously is trying, even as he speaks, to get a grip on the coronavirus, and figure out how to use it best to his own political benefit.

“The government closest to the people serves the people best.” 
--Thomas Jefferson

Of course, this is what the old-time Republican party at one time tried to tell us.  

Ironically.  

Mamba

Alpha on a busy day

It all began with a book, of course.  As did so many events in my childhood.

I was 13.  My mother belonged to the Book-of-the-Month Club, and somehow -- by deliberate choice or, as often happened, by failure to send in a timely rejection -- the book had arrived, and my mother had read it.  The book, whose title I sadly don't recall, was a mother's memoir about the joys and tribulations of raising gifted twin boys.  It focused on the period when her twins were 13.

My mother told me that the book was about boys who seemed a bit like me, and that I might enjoy it.  I read it, and I did.  More than enjoyed it.  I was entranced.  I wanted to be friends with those kids.  No -- I wanted to be them.

The boys' mother wrote that her sons had developed a fantasy kingdom, using miniature toys -- a kingdom with royal ceremonies and matters of state.  What a fool I'd been, wasting my life to date having never thought of doing that!  All my brother and I did was play endless, pedestrian war games with toy soldiers and tanks.  How unimaginative!  How childish!

And thus I began laying the foundations of the great Kingdom of Mamba, with the complete interest, approval, and involvement of my ten-year-old brother.  Some of the earliest events are lost, of course, in the mists of time and legend.  But the first big event was the joint coronation of King Mamb and his queen, whose name I can't recall.  We decorated the top of the card table in our bedroom with colored paper, constructing thrones and carpets, and other royal paraphernalia.  (This was the year of Elizabeth II's coronation, so a scepter and orb were probably involved, as well.  I can't recall for sure, but it would have been just like me.)

Once the coronation hoopla had been completed, King Mamb's kingdom began evolving into a constitutional monarchy.  You have to picture our bedroom, which occupied three-fourths of the upstairs floor of our house, adjoining what we called "the hall," which occupied the rest of the floor including the top of the stairway.  We founded four cities on the bedroom floor as the basis for the kingdom.  My brother wanted cities on the floor, because he wanted territory for his military operations.  I agreed, because I needed boroughs that would be sending delegates to the federal parliament that I was establishing up on the card table, in front of King Mamb seated on his throne.

The largest city was named, appropriately, Alpha.  It was composed primarily of my "Tom Corbett, Space Cadet" set, surrounded by a metallic fence and populated by a motley population of humans and alien beings.  It was clearly the most cosmopolitan of the cities.  And the most technologically advanced.

The second city was called Beta.  It was a small Sparta, a military city populated by a large number of army men and their weapons that my brother and I had accumulated over the years as birthday and Christmas presents.  (To those who know what I'm talking about, the brand name "Dinky Toys" will bring tears of recognition and nostalgia.)

The two smaller cities, Gamma and Delta, were less distinctive in character, and were populated by various odd leftovers from various sets, including a few cowboys and Indians, and metallic "Lincoln Log" pioneers and marksmen.

Based on census data, each city sent a certain number of delegates to the federal parliament.  There were two parties, called, unimaginatively, the Republicans and Democrats.  I was chairman of the Republicans (I was a crusty Tory in my teenage years); my brother, of the Democrats.  The Republicans shared my interest in diplomacy and politics; the Democrats rejoiced in my brother's interest in inter-city warfare.  Elections of city governors and of delegates to parliament were held on regular occasions by a roll of a die.  I think the odds changed to some extent with each city, because Alpha usually remained firmly Republican and Beta, Democratic.

My brother and the Governor of Beta, his alter ego, were constantly stirring up trouble, which I and the forces of Alpha were engaged in putting down with great force, for the greater benefit of mankind -- to make Mamba "safe for democracy" and give Mamba "peace in our time."  (I learned a lot about the importance of how human emotions determined events in international affairs from my participation in this "game."  Game?  No, rather a miniature version of life itself.

Mamba -- and by this time, King Mamb had become a figurehead whose activities were of little practical importance -- had expansionist cravings.  Before long, Colony 1 and then Colony 2 had been established, just inside and just outside the open door between bedroom and hall.  Eventually, Colony 1 was granted "cityhood" as Epsilon, and sent delegates to the Parliament.  Over time, more colonies were established, spreading out of the bedroom throughout the adjoining hall.   Ultimately, colonies grew into cities, Zeta, Eta, and Theta, although by the time Theta was autonomous and sending representatives to parliament the game had reached its decadent stage.  A stage that lasted, actually, for years.

The true beginning of decadence began when we ran out of men, whether human or alien, soldier or cowboy, and had to populate the later colonies with marbles from our great collective trove of marbles.  By this time, the colonies had descended the stairway and were located in portions of the adult living space.  Marbles had one advantage over little soldiers holding bazookas and rifles -- great masses could be rolled across the floor, not unlike the hordes of Genghis Khan -- faceless, brutal, impersonal, notable only for their numbers -- and hot for blood and conquest.

Mamba lasted from the time I was 13 up until maybe my senior year in high school.  (Laugh if you will, but we now have 45-year-old men spending all their spare time playing similar games, with less imagination, on their computers.) 

Obviously, we had adult authorities in the house who, while ordinarily impressively tolerant of their sons' manifold foibles, at times demanded tidiness.  My mother found it wise not to venture upstairs unless absolutely necessary, but once Mamba colonies began invading the downstairs living space, she became somewhat more prickly. 

But Mamba was not a game that had to be laid out on the floor at all times, anymore than computer games require that the computer be turned on 24 hours a day.  It could be picked up, after some nagging, for special occasions -- like the biweekly visit by Olga, the detested cleaning lady -- and spread out again from memory when the urge next struck us.

Mamba never had a closing ceremony.  As our interests expanded, it simply got played less and less often.  I like to think that on some invisible plane of reality, life still goes on among the likable but contentious people of Mamba.  Beta's governor, in league with his villainous commander-in-chief, Captain General Meany, is still plotting against imagined enemies who must be punished for imagined slights and offenses (we all know about people in high office who act like that).  Alpha's governor, wise and world-weary, still goes on, attempting diplomatic solutions to military messes, insisting that Beta struggle for hegemony, if that's what it thinks it wants, in the arena of parliament.

And the masses of the outlying colonies -- anonymous, round, and marble-like in appearance -- still go about their outlandish lives, usually peaceful, but always capable of turning against their betters and storming the older, more established and civilized cities of the Mamba homeland. 

I find those thoughts strangely satisfying.  And I wonder if (and hope) those twins had as much fun with their own little kingdom?

Farewell to Nixon

I occasionally reprint in this blog writings from younger and more interesting periods of my life.  I have not yet seen fit to publish my memoirs of a family trip to California, prepared in partial fulfillment of requirements for the Cub Scout Bear Badge, at the age of 10.  But rest assured, sooner or later...

Meanwhile, I publish today an Epilogue that I wrote as the finale to the last issue of my law school class's law review.  I wrote it on the date that Richard Nixon resigned the presidency and was whisked away by helicopter from the White House lawn.  I wrote it as both a celebration of that event, and a caution.  I'll leave it to today's readers to find analogies with our own public life today, and to decide for themselves its continued validity.

If I were to write it today, I probably would write it somewhat less ornately, considering that its audience was the legal profession and my fellow classmates.  But it is what it is.   The citation is 49 Wash.L.Rev. 1199 (1974)
------------------------
EPILOGUE

Moralizing on the human predicament is a self-indulgence which traditionally accompanies one's retirement.  And so, as retiring editors of Volume 49, we cannot resist offering our reflections on the national malaise of the past year -- fully aware as we are that our exercise will be more satisfying to ourselves than instructive to our readers.

Now that the strange morality play of Watergate has concluded and a new President sits in the White House, what lessons should we -- new lawyers, beginning the practice of our profession -- draw from the drama we have witnessed?  Foremost, perhaps, is that our civilization happily retains a measure of vitality.  It was said of Rome that, even when the state remained militarily potent:¹

The greatest political events passed over the heads of the people like black or golden clouds.  Later it was to watch even the ruin of the Empire and the coming of the barbarians with indifference.  It was a worn-out body whose fibres no longer reacted to any stimulus.

That Americans still are capable of outrage, still avidly debate the issues of the day, demonstrates that the fibers of our civilization remain healthy.  But the shocks which have buffeted us in the decade since President Kennedy's assassination undoubtedly have exerted a dulling impact on our ability to recognize and respond to moral problems.  Rest restores overtaxed faculties; order in society, promoted by general respect for the stabilizing influence of the law, may be therefore of greater relative importance in the immediate future than in less anxious periods of our history.  The denouement of Watergate has itself induced respect for the law; politicians, professors, students, the former silent majority -- all have agreed before television cameras that ours is a government of laws, laws equally applicable to all.

Respect for "law and order" is not an ultimate goal, however, but a means to desired social and individual objectives.  John Locke, our Constitution's spiritual grandfather, himself observed that securing the public good may outweigh the value of a blind obedience to law:²

Many things there are which the law can by no means provide for; and those must necessarily be left to the discretion of him that has executive power in his hands to be ordered by him as the public good and advantage shall require; nay, it is fit that the laws themselves should in some cases give way to the executive power.

Lest we be thought mere apologists for "executive privilege," we recall that our generation itself recently invoked a higher law of God and nature to support civil disobedience toward laws of man believed unjust and oppressive to individual freedoms.  For law is a human invention, reflecting human frailties; ultimately it commands obedience only insofar as it accomplishes goals valued by those asked to obey.

A final lesson to be drawn from recent events, and to be recalled often in our professional lives, is the need for a renewed civility toward each other.  To many of us, those with whom we have disagreed often have seemed evil incarnate.  "I have always tried to do what is best for the nation," President Nixon declared when resigning.  One need be neither maudlin nor blind to Mr. Nixon's faults to concede him that quantum of sincerity -- but few of us have been willing to do so.  An old adage exhorts us to "hate sin, but love the sinner."  In the coming years, in our professional lives as well as in public affairs, it would be well to remember that advice in our dealings with legal, political and philosophical adversaries.  In a dark world posing baffling and complex problems we need to respect and value that tiny spark in each of us, whatever its nature, that keeps us all, friend and foe alike, walking on two legs rather than four.

August 9, 1974

¹   F. Lot, The End of the Ancient World and the Beginnings of the the Middle Ages, 181 (Harper paperback ed. 1961).

²  J. Locke, The Second Treatise of Government § 159 (1690).

COVID-19 capital of America

I went forth toward Moorefields to see (God forbid my presumption) whether I could see any dead Corps going to the grave; but as God would have it, did not.  But, Lord, how everybody's looks and discourse in the street is of death and nothing else, and few people going up and down, that the town is like a place distressed -- and forsaken. 
--Diary of Samuel Pepys (August 30, 1665)

In that week alone, Pepys observed that 6,102 residents of the City of London had died of plague.  Seattle is the epicenter of the COVID-19 coronavirus epidemic in the United States; living in Seattle, it's remarkable to read in the international press that we represent the epidemic in America as Wuhan does for China.

And yet, so far, just fifteen people have died in the entire State of Washington.

But it's interesting to read Pepys's diary, and note the similarities.  Although Pepys makes constant reference to the horrors of the plague, the vast bulk of his diary during the plague years revolves around his career and his social life.  Similarly, my life and the life of almost all Seattle residents is untouched -- directly -- by the virus.  Life goes on.

Which is not to say that our lives are untouched by the effects of the virus.  Pepys observes how few people were out and about in the streets of London.  That is true here, as well.  On Wednesday, I noted on Facebook that Wednesdays usually are the worst days for me to drive home from my favorite breakfast spot near University Village.  I generally return home between 8 and 9 a.m.  The only available route also carries commuter traffic toward the freeway system and thence either downtown or to the techie employers east of Lake Washington.  And it also carries local student traffic to and around the University of Washington.  That drive on Wednesdays generally takes 30 minutes or more.

Wednesday -- this week -- it took me seven minutes.

We are approaching winter quarter finals at the UW.  You expect to see the campus packed with frantic students.  It's been very quiet for the past two weeks, as students have simply stayed home or in their student residences to do their studying, often skipping classes.  Now, it's been announced that no classes or final exams will be held in university buildings until the beginning of next quarter; everything will somehow be done on-line.

The Seattle Public Schools have remained in session, but a number of suburban schools systems have suspended classes -- classes that will have to be made up in June, as though we had been hit by a snowstorm in March.

Organizations have cancelled meetings and parties.  St. Patrick's Day celebrations are being cancelled.  Speculation has begun that the Mariners' opening home game against the Texas Rangers may be cancelled or postponed.  Seattle's mammoth Comic Con gathering has been postponed, as have two other major events at the Convention Center.

All of a sudden, many people -- but no where near a majority -- are wearing face masks.

The question we all are asking -- is this pretty much as bad as it will get?  Or is this just the beginning?  I suspect the latter.  For most of us living in Seattle, it isn't the remote risk of our personally becoming seriously ill or dying that worries us.  It's the total disruption of our lives as we make the necessary adjustments to protect the small percentage of people who are at risk -- and whose identity can be guessed at only statistically.

And yet, we can handle it.  We can work around the disruptions and we can shrug off the risks.  A few days after Samuel Pepys wrote the diary entry quoted above, he made it clear that for him and for his friends, life went on.

Thence with my Lord Brouncker to Captain Cockes, where we mighty merry, and supped; and very late, I by water to Woolwich, in great apprehensions of an Ague.  Here was my Lord Brouncker's lady of pleasure, who I perceive goes everywhere with him, and he I find is obliged to carry her and make all the Courtship to her that can be.

But how long will it last, we ask.  Pepys may have thought the end was in sight in August 1665, but many scholars feel the 1665 plague did not end until the Great Fire of London in September 1666 killed the rats and the plague-bearing fleas that lived on them.

Hopefully, we won't find it necessary to watch Seattle burn.

Biden for President

If this is the best we’ve got - a trifecta of white male septuagenarians - the system is definitely broken. 

Such was the anguished cry of one of my younger relatives last night, before the election results began coming in.  And I sympathize.  It would seem a logical move for the Democrats to choose someone young and charismatic -- representing a new generation of political leadership -- to run against the guy who is not only white, male, and septuagenarian, but seemingly addle-brained as well.

And we had many attractive, likely candidates to choose from:  Beto O'Rourke, Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren.  Good speakers, good ideas, attractive personalities.  

The first problem was that there were too many of them; they split the "moderate" vote, leaving Bernie Sanders as the potential winner of primary after primary, but never with the support of the majority of the Democratic voters.

The second problem was that each of the younger candidates had peculiar characteristics that prevented him or her from obtaining consistently large votes in a number of primaries,, and thus gaining momentum.

They had some good ideas.  Bernie Sanders has some good ideas.  The problem is that in this election, the great majority of voters seem to value great ideas less than usual.  Their overriding concern is saving the Republic from what is viewed as an existential threat -- the potential dictatorship of Donald Trump.

Great ideas invite debate and dispute among party members.  Voters sensed that what was needed was party unity.  Joe Biden has some good ideas, but he soft-pedals them.  His emphasis is on (1) defeating Trump, and (2) returning the country to an atmosphere where positions can be debated without pitting neighbor against neighbor, Democrat against Republican, racial group against racial group.  Where disputes over policy are conducted within a framework of certain traditions of civility and adherence to Constitutional norms.

Biden isn't an exciting candidate.  The Super Tuesday results suggest that the voters in most states don't demand an exciting candidate.  They aren't indifferent to the problems of disadvantaged groups, or to the need to adopt progressive new programs -- if they were indifferent, they would be Republicans, not Democrats.  

But before we debate Bernie's programs, or the specific programs of any other candidate, they know we need to get rid of Trump and we need to return to a certain "normalcy" in our political life.  Biden is bland, but he has good instincts.  His speeches aren't works of art, but they demonstrate a need to cool down the political temperature to the point where we can analyze the advisability of changes, not simply yell as each other.

I've joked on Facebook about how I've supported almost every candidate this year at some point or another.  My state's primary, using mail-in voting, is next Tuesday.  I marked my ballot for Biden and mailed it in on Monday, immediately after learning that both Klobuchar and Buttigieg were withdrawing from the race.

I think he will make a good Democratic nominee -- not a great nominee, but this year "good" will be good enough -- and can beat Trump.  If Sanders does win the nomination, which now seems less likely, I'd certainly support him.  I hope his supporters rally behind Biden if he ends up the ultimate choice of Democratic voters.

Looking back

Several years ago, I wrote an essay in this blog entitled "The Moors of Boyhood," describing how seeing a lonely tree through dense fog as I walked to school allowed me to believe I was walking across the moors of England, through the world of Sherlock Holmes and The Hound of the Baskervilles.

But fog changed all perceptions.  Nothing was visible but the sidewalk on which I walked -- and the mysterious tree.  Sure, maybe I was merely in the home town in which I'd been born and reared.  But I might be in Yorkshire, or on Dartmoor, or creeping across the Scottish highlands.  And for a few moments -- as the shadowy tree became visible and then vanished back into the fog -- I found myself half a world away from my tedious life as a schoolboy in the Northwest Corner.

I was in ninth grade, not a kid.  But I still saw magic in the fog.

I saw magic elsewhere.  At about the same age, I remember walking to the library through a small park in the middle of my town, during spring while the trees were in bloom.  The trees were clearly attractive, and I'm sure I'd noticed them before.  But for the first time, their beauty felt overwhelming, almost making me cry.  The feeling was almost creepy, it was so intense.  Why had I never noticed them before?  

Even certain first-year piano pieces my brother was playing about that time struck me as more enjoyable than they deserved  -- not awesome in the same way as the fog and the flowering trees, but not merely the fumbling attempts of my kid brother, either.

In his essay "Intimacy" in a collection entitled Alibis, André Aciman recalls being obsessed as a boy in his mid-teens by the bookstores in the heart of Rome, and how that obsession eventually spilled over into a love of the city for which he had at first felt indifference.  He felt, however, that it was not so much that he loved the city itself, but that he was using the city to reflect his own inner literary-prompted yearnings -- what he calls a "film.".  As an adult, he reflects

It wasn't Rome itself I was seeing, it was the film, the filter I'd placed on the old city that finally made me love it, the film I went to seek each time I'd go to a bookstore and would come out late in the evening to stroll down my Nevsky Prospekt in search of vague smiles and fellowship in a city I wasn't even sure existed on the sidewalks.  It is the film I can no longer lift off the many books I read back then, the film that reverberates over time and continues to make Rome mine long after I've lost it.  And perhaps it is the film I go in search of each time I'm back in Rome -- not Rome.

He often finds it difficult, as an adult, to recover this "film" when he visits his old haunts -- what he sees now is simply buildings and streets.  Except for those times when the stars align properly, and all of a sudden he is once more an adolescent wandering through magical streets.

For myself, clearly the fog had always been there, the flowers bloomed every spring, and pianos were played everywhere. It was something about me, within me, that invested these common sights and sounds with wonder. Something very similar to Aciman's obsessive reading at that age, reading that permitted him to view the streets of his not-so-glamorous part of the city as reflections of images from the books he had been reading.

The sense of losing whatever "film" we each once used to cover and modify our own sense perceptions is painful.  I recall realizing in my mid-teens that poring over the glories of my stamp collection no longer gave me the same glow of avarice and accomplishment that it had a year or so earlier.  In his memoir Uncle Tungsten, Oliver Sacks describes his childhood obsession with chemistry, and how he unexpectedly lost that obsession when he was about 14.  Looking back, he laments his loss of enthusiasm, and wonders what caused it.

Was it, perhaps, ... that I was growing up, and that "growing up" makes one forget the lyrical, mystical perceptions  of childhood, the glory and the freshness of which Wordsworth wrote, so that they fade into the light of common day?

In his Autobiography, the brilliant mathematician Bertrand Russell recalls the joys of his adolescent enthusiasm with classical poetry and his lyrical appreciation of sunsets and clouds and trees.   Unlike Aciman and Sacks, Russell refuses to worry about the loss of these feelings:  "My interest was of a very sentimental kind, owing to the fact that it was an unconscious sublimation of sex, and an attempt to escape from reality."

So much for that, says the great mathematician dismissively.  Whatever hormonal basis may exist for our emotions, to me it seems a bit reductionist to claim that human existence can be boiled down to a few mathematical equations and chemical fomulas.

Aciman takes his wife and three teenage sons back to Rome, back to visit the street he had lived on as a boy.  Just as he feared, he feels nothing, no nostalgia, no sense of returning to childhood.  The visit was brief, and his boys seem somewhat puzzled about what their dad had hoped to see.  And Aciman realizes that he was now seeing his old neighborhood as it really was -- a lower middle-class, rather dreary outlying neighborhood of Rome. 

As a teenager, on the other hand, he had "radiated" an aura from his own readings in literature, clothing the otherwise bare and impoverished world around him -- a "film" as he calls it, "which is how we become aware of the world, and, ultimately, why we come to love it."  He no longer was projecting the same film, the same connection to the neighborhood; it had therefore lost its attraction and interest.

I may no longer see Dartmoor in a fog bank, or a personal empire in a stamp collection.  But whatever "films" I may have projected over my own old neighborhoods, making them exciting and tolerable, those films still seem to be glowing brightly today.  I can walk through the streets of my home town, and happily imagine myself as still being 10 or 15 or 18 years old, depending on the neighborhood. 

And I'd love to spend a few days reliving some of those early days.