It's "a-waitin' for me"

Twenty- six miles across the sea
Santa Catalina is a-waitin' for me
Santa Catalina, the island of romance, romance, romance, romance

Twenty- six miles, so near yet far
I'd swim with just some water-wings and my guitar
I could leave the wings but I'll need the guitar for romance, romance ...

Santa Catalina!  Actually, it's only 22 miles, across the Gulf of Catalina from Long Beach, but even so -- considering the temperature of the water and the presence of sharks -- water wings wouldn't be my preferred method of transportation.  And romance?  Well, that's more up to you -- don't rely on  the island.

My brother had a landmark birthday this past week, and some twenty of us, his friends and relatives, descended on the island to help him observe and celebrate the occasion.  Rather than water wings -- or a "leaky old boat," as the Four Preps suggest elsewhere in their lyrics -- we took the Catalina Express, a speedy and comfortable one-hour cruise -- from Long Beach.  All of us, that is, except for one eccentric couple, who insisted on arriving by helicopter.

Journeying back and forth between Catalina and the mainland has been a tradition, of course, ever since the heyday of the Gabrielino/Tongva tribe called the "Pimugnans," back in 7000 B.C. or so.  We know much about these lotus-eaters from our careful study of their middens.  "It is estimated that there are over 2,000 middens on Catalina Island, only half of which have been discovered," as Wikipedia puts it -- a sentence whose meaning I find conceptually elusive, but never mind.

But today's Catalina -- the Catalina we went to experience -- dates back to Bill Wrigley, of Doublemint gum fame, who, beginning in 1919, poured millions into the island's infrastructure.  He also brought his pet team, the hapless Cubs, from Chicago to Catalina each year until 1951 for spring training.  The causal relationship between the island's idyllic charms and the Cubbies' impressive lack of baseball success has not yet been firmly established.

We loved it.  So far as I can tell from my own experience, it's the closest approximation to a Mediterranean resort city you can find anywhere this side of the Atlantic.  There's a restaurant in Avalon (the principal town on the island) called the Portofino, which suggests that others have sensed the same resemblance. 

Few automobiles are permitted on Catalina.  We made frequent trips between Avalon and our accommodations in Hamilton Cove -- about 1.3 miles to the north -- by noisy golf carts which seemed to be powered by lawnmower motors.  Pretty weird, but a lot of fun.  The same distance was also quite walkable, along a scenic, winding road through eucalyptus trees, and could be walked almost as fast as it could be driven by golf-cart.

For recreation, we ate, we drank, we sat in the sun, we watched seals and sharks and sailing ships (and at night, the lights of Long Beach and Newport) from our balconies, we walked, we people-watched along the pedestrian-oriented, harbor streets of Avalon.  Some of us entrusted our lives to zip lines.  Some attended  a silent film festival, an event that prompted many Southern Californians (are we surprised?) to arrive by ferry and wander the streets dressed in styles redolent of the 1920s.  Very F. Scott Fitzgeraldish, right?  And all of us enjoyed getting back together and analyzing the major family events of the past few years.

I had proposed a group assault on Mt. Orizaba, the highest mountain on the island at 2,097 feet.  My suggestion was politely but firmly disregarded.

It was a great four days.  We've all heard of Santa Catalina.  But it takes a visit to remind ourselves that a little bit of old Europe -- somewhat tamed, somewhat homogenized, but still, there for the asking -- exists just 26 miles, or 22 miles, or whatever, off the coast of Los Angeles County.  Just "forty kilometers in a leaky old boat," as the song goes.

I'll be returning for another visit. 

Go directly to jail

Seven-year-old Christopher and his school friend were suspended last Friday from their school in Virginia.  They were caught in a form of illicit play -- pointing their pencils at each other and "making machine gun and 'bang bang' noises."  The school stated that the school's zero tolerance policy against weapons or "anything that resembles a weapon" mandated a two-day suspension.

A few months ago, six-year-old Rodney was suspended from his school in Maryland.  He had pointed his finger at a friend and said, "Pow!"  His "permanent record" says that he threatened a classmate with gun violence.  He was suspended for one day.

I'm strongly in favor of gun control.  I'm appalled by positions taken by the NRA.  As I've stated on numerous occasions, if I were re-writing the Constitution, it would contain no Second Amendment -- or, if not eliminated entirely, the Second Amendment would be drastically watered-down.

I have even on occasions, out of humorous frustration, proposed plans for carving a gun-lovers' reservation out of the Old West, where those so inclined, together with their guns, could go and settle their daily disputes however they chose without being troubled with laws or police --  in exchange for strict gun control in the rest of the United States.

I also, however, believe in common sense.  Common sense justifies banning weapons on school campuses.  It justifies confiscation of toy guns and other weapons, just as it has historically justified confiscation of other distracting merchandise -- marbles, jacks, squirt guns, and their modern equivalents such as cell phones.

Common sense would prohibit kids from having pretend shoot-outs in the classroom while the teacher was attempting to teach.  It does not, however, justify banning kids' fantasy play on the playground that involves pointing pencils -- or fingers! -- at each other, and exclaiming "Bang, bang, you're dead!"

And even if such kids' games were to be banned, common sense certainly would not justify school suspensions for such forms of play.

A little sense of proportion, folks. Please.

It's axiomatic

I found high school geometry unsatisfying.  I liked mathematics in general, and my grades in geometry were fine.  But the subject was somewhat irritating for a number of reasons, one of which was the concept of "axioms" and "postulates."

"Axiom" is generally given two definitions.  The first, and more traditional, according to Wikipedia: "an axiom is a premise so evident as to be accepted as true without controversy."  To me, nothing was without controversy. The second, which is that used in modern logic: "an axiom is simply a premise or starting point for reasoning."  (A "postulate" in traditional geometry was an "axiom" applicable by its terms expressly to geometry; I'll use the two terms interchangeably.)

I don't know how geometry is taught today.  But we were given Euclid's axioms, and from those axioms were taught to prove a large number of theorems.  The axioms and the theorems focused, of course, on the properties of geometrical figures.  A typical axiom, Euclid's first, was "It is possible to draw a straight line from any point to any other point."  The axioms were supplemented by a list of "common notions" used in development of proofs: e.g., "Things that are equal to the same thing are equal to each other."

The proof of theorems -- while not as congenial to me as, say, manipulating trigonometric functions -- was interesting and satisfying.  But if we were going to work so hard to prove theorems that seemed intuitively obvious anyway, why were we exempted from providing proofs for the axioms (and "common notions")?   I asked my teacher that question, and he (who spent most of his time as "boys' counselor") replied -- rather impatiently -- that we accepted them because they were "obvious." The "traditional" -- and, to me, irritating -- definition.

I would have been happier if I had been taught and had understood the second definition.  Geometry had its origins in the efforts of early mathematicians to describe real shapes in the real world -- and has its uses even now in so doing (it's always nice to know that A=πr²).  But what we are really doing when we study geometry formally is playing a game with arbitrary rules, not working scientifically from empirical data.  We are proposing that certain concepts be accepted as "true" -- the axioms -- and discovering what we can prove from those concepts using only logic.  It's like chess.  We don't ask why it should be so that a bishop can move only diagonally; we instead see what we can accomplish given that arbitrary limitation. 

We can -- and mathematicians do -- propose different axioms (ones less intuitively related to the world as we perceive it), and see where those axioms logically lead.

I've been lead to these rambling thoughts by a book review in Sunday's New York Times.  The book -- Time Reborn, by Lee Smodin -- apparently is too complex to lend itself to an intelligible one-page review, even a review written by a highly regarded physicist and writer .  (At least, I found myself unable to understand the general argument of the book from reading the review.)  But the review does present some of the author's more interesting conclusions. 

Smodin is a physicist, and his book discusses cosmological questions such as "what is time" and "where did the universe come from."  He has concluded, apparently, that black holes beget new universes, and through "natural selection" of such universes we have finally arrived at our own universe -- a universe that possesses the peculiarity that the constants upon which its physical laws depend are precisely that narrow set of constants that life required in order to have developed and to continue in existence.  With "time" in his title, it's clear that Smodin believes that this discussion is somehow related to what we mean by "time," and its passage -- and the review touches on this relationship without really conveying Smodin's argument.

The review ends with the following summary, which brings me back to my discussion of geometry:

Putting aside the sensational ideas proposed in "Time Reborn," it is a triumph of modern physics that we are even asking such questions as what determined the initial conditions of the universe.  In previous centuries, these conditions were either accepted as given or attributed to the handiwork of the gods.  A triumph, and also possibly a defeat.  For if we must appeal to the existence of other universes -- unknown and unknowable -- to explain our universe, then science has progressed into a cul-de-sac with no scientific escape.

In a sense, the reviewer shares my frustration with geometry as a kid -- if our universe sprang forth from a black hole in another universe, like Athena from the forehead of Zeus, we have reached a starting point beyond which we can probe no further.  To ask whether the Big Bang was "really" generated by that black hole, or by a Word from the Voice of God, or by some Child from a Superior Race's having turned on his celestial Gameboy, is scientifically meaningless.  Information as to what  happened before the Big Bang is scientifically unrecoverable.  Empirical data take us back no further than the Big Bang itself -- not only the data we have now, but also any data conceptually obtainable in the future.

Rather than despairingly view the Big Bang as a dead end, a scientific "cul-de-sac," we should consider it as a cosmological axiom of the "game" that is our universe.  We accept the Big Bang -- that the universe began as an infinitesimal point of infinite density -- as our starting point, just as we accept Euclid's axioms -- for example, that one can always draw a straight line between any two points -- as the starting point in geometry.  We can't prove scientifically -- and will never prove in the future -- why the Big Bang exploded or whence burst all that energy out of an infinitesimal point, any more than we can prove logically Euclid's first axiom.  All we can do is speculate, as has Smodin, apparently -- with no empirical support. 

Admittedly, speculation is fun.  But it's not science; it's science fiction. In so speculating, we're like chess pieces trying to understand why bishops, unlike rooks, can move only diagonally.

Going home

My high school

"You can't go home again."
--Thomas Wolfe (book title)

But you can.  And yesterday, I did.

Not really, of course.  Not in the sense Wolfe intended.  But one can indeed go back physically to his home town, look at it once more -- with pleasure or dismay at the changes -- and remember all the good times.  (There undoubtedly were bad times, too, but they have a wonderful way of fading quickly with time.)

My sister called me from my home town -- a smallish to medium sized burg in the southwestern part of the state -- and told me she was there for an in-law's funeral.  She wanted to wander around, and wondered if I wanted to join her.  I did.  And so, I did.

Yesterday (like today and tomorrow) was unbelievably -- and unseasonably -- warm and sunny.   I put in a quick hour of piano practice, dug out my sunglasses from last summer's backpack, and jumped in the car.  Two hours later, I pulled into the parking lot of a venerable hotel that was built at the same time the city was founded.

We spent the afternoon walking through the neighborhoods in which we had grown up, as well as exploring the high school grounds.  These destinations were within the "inner city" -- that part of town that's remained unchanged, essentially, since the aftermath of World War II.  Then we drove around some of the more outlying areas -- areas that were farmland and industrial areas when we were kids.  The industries are still there -- but mostly shut down, abandoned, or operating at a fraction of capacity.  The farmlands -- like exurban farmlands everywhere -- have become a messy hodgepodge of strip malls, Walmarts, service stations, and fast food outlets -- interspersed with fairly new residential areas. 

The population has nearly doubled since I was in high school -- all of the increase ending up in the sprawl outside the old city limits.

My high school was as beautiful as ever, although I've read that its measures of academic performance have fallen precipitously.  The school has gone downhill to the point where local residents now refer to it as the city's "ghetto" high school -- not for its appearance or location, which, as I say, remain spectacularly beautiful.  But for the academic quality and level of ambition of its students, resulting, at least in part, from local unemployment.  The unemployment is structural, not cyclical -- timber, paper and aluminum industries with their high-paying union jobs are gone, probably forever -- and has brought with it concomitant increases in  social maladjustment, feelings of futility and worthlessness, petty criminal activity, and drug use. These are problems common to many of the school's students -- and probably to their parents, as well. 

So, visiting the high school was a pleasure, but my knowledge of its present difficulties was saddening.

Our old neighborhoods were even nicer than I remember.  The trees have grown larger; the lawns are better tended.  These residential areas, dating from the 1920s and 30s, always seemed superior to tract neighborhoods in other cities, each house having been built by a different builder and architect in differing styles.  Such diverse neighborhoods are now increasingly uncommon, in any city, and it was a pleasure to walk past block after block, appreciating houses that had been well-designed originally and well-maintained over the years.

Revisiting my home town, and enjoying the visit, is like visiting mountains and forests in today's world.  You have to view it selectively, as though framing a photo.  For example, going on a wilderness hike, you can often take a beautiful photo of a forest, but only if you frame the shot to avoid the powerlines in the background, the freeway to the left, and the massive clearcut to the right. 

Similarly, while the old residential areas were a pleasure to visit, I had to ignore the pathetic sights of the once thriving downtown -- a once-traditional "Main Street" that is now a trashy collection of pawn shops, thrift shops, bail bond emporiums, fast food restaurants, and deserted buildings.  I had to ignore certain large vacant spaces in other parts of town -- places where old buildings, undistinguished architecturally, no doubt, but impressive as local landmarks, had been torn down and replaced by not much of anything.  I had to ignore the fact that the school district is currently deciding whether to shut down certain formerly prestigious schools as too expensive to maintain with the district's declining enrollments.

All in all, it was fun to make yet another return to the old home town.  And so, yes, I did go home again.  But, I also appreciate exactly what Thomas Wolfe had in mind.  Just as I can't go back to being a teenager, I can't go back to my home town as it was and as it felt while I was growing up -- an optimistic, self-confident community cheerfully climbing up a rising curve of prosperity.

Southwest Washington has long since passed over its own hump of prosperity.  The curve now seems headed in the other direction.

Pancakes at midnight

Facebook offers its users various opportunities.  One is an occasional look at the lives of folks you'd know otherwise only as pleasant faces.  Such as -- in my case -- college students.

I've been following a good-natured debate on a college student's Facebook page, a debate contemplating the pros and cons of going out for pancakes at midnight.   I myself have no particular feelings, one way or the other, about starchy food shortly before bedtime.  But the debate brings back bittersweet feelings of nostalgia.  Regret for experiences no longer practical -- or, if pursued, probably even enjoyable -- once you're much past college age.

At my university, going out for midnight pancakes wasn't something one did every night -- our dorms and other living groups were at the center of a campus that was geographically very large.  Going off-campus was a bit of a production; someone in the group needed a car.  But we did it occasionally, especially during the nights before exams or before term paper due dates.  Going off-campus relieved stress, relieved late adolescent hunger pangs, and recharged us mentally for another couple of hours work before bed.

My nostalgia is less for the pancakes -- although for that, too -- and more for our enthusiasm (at midnight) to charge out of the dorm and do something different.  And for our ability to come back, and still be reasonably productive, after 1 a.m.

Once the halcyon years of university pass -- and I stretched those years out, god knows, as long as humanly possible -- we submit ourselves to the unpleasantly different biorhythms of the gainfully employed.  (We do, at least, unless we live in the puzzling world of Seinfeld and friends.)

Once I finally left school behind, my work day began at 8 a.m.; I rarely had classes that began that early at the university.  And rather than jump out of bed, pull on a days-old t-shirt, and storm off to class, professional employment required me to fix my own breakfast, take a shower, put on a suit, drive to work, park, and walk to my office.  This all took time.  And I, at least, also needed to first prepare my brain for all those tasks by downing a couple of cups of coffee while forcing my eyes to focus on the morning paper. 

In other words, I had to get up between five and six o'clock each morning.  I usually was in bed by 10 p.m.  No midnight dashes to a restaurant with a bunch of buddies.  No ultimate bedtime of 2 a.m. or later.

This, I learned, is the life of an adult.  It has its compensations, certainly, compensations beyond simply a paycheck.  But it demands sacrifices as well.  And among those sacrifices is the spontaneity of suddenly exclaiming, "Hey, why don't we go grab some pancakes?" (or a hamburger, perhaps, for the pancake-averse).  Also among those sacrifices -- and maybe this is what actually hurts so much -- is of a life surrounded by others, folks subject to the same stresses as myself, who were only too happy to drop whatever they were doing for an hour and head out for a bit of food.

I miss the easy, late night esprit de corps.  And, to be honest, I also miss the late night, youthful energy -- in myself and, especially, in others.

Now, if I were an irrational romantic, I'd find myself staying up until midnight tonight, and then driving out to Denny's or IHOP for pancakes with raspberry syrup.  But I'm a realist.  I know it wouldn't work.  It wouldn't be the same.  It wouldn't even be close.  As Heraclitus (see, I did learn something in college!) once said, as he no doubt chewed thoughtfully on a blueberry pancake, you can't step in the same river twice.

More's the pity.    

Travel through a mirror

Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping
Than you can understand.
--W. B. Yeats

A famous mountain climber, now a recluse living on the family estate -- living, in fact, in an enormous, decaying home, a one-time abbey, surrounded by a deep frozen forest, lying at the bottom of a canyon carved by waters rushing off of Dartmoor.  His obsessions: the death of his wife in an auto accident, and an ancient mirror -- highly-polished obsidian -- updated with modern high-voltage attachments -- a device that permits travel through time.  The obsessions are related.

And the other characters! A scar-faced man from the age of Dickens who claims he was robbed, that he is the mirror's rightful owner and wants it back. A woman from a dark and bleak future, who comes seeking to change the course of time. Jake, an angry student expelled from his exclusive Swiss prep school, who comes to the abbey in search of his missing father -- his father having been the recluse's best friend; Jake suspects murder. Gideon -- a boy apparently Jake's age, but actually born five hundred years earlier -- a human by birth, but raised and kept immortal by the fairy-lore of the Shee.  The Shee themselves, the amoral and self-centered beings who haunt the forest surrounding the abbey.  The abbey's butler, Piers, who just happens to be a genie.

The English have a knack for writing a certain type of fantasy novel.  Tolkien, of course.  And Susan Cooper, more recently, author of The Dark is Rising series.  In a somewhat different way, even Philip Pullman, and the His Dark Materials trilogy.  And now, Catherine Fisher has published the first book of her new trilogy, Obsidian Mirror.

What these fantasy writers have in common -- Pullman to a lesser extent -- is a deep feeling for the history and mythology of England, together with the ability to tell an absorbing good tale of adventure.  I read the New York Times's review of Fisher's new "young adult" book a couple of weeks ago, and was able to download it this week.  I read it virtually overnight. 

Obsidian Mirror is the first fantasy book I've read since Revelation Space, a couple of months ago.  Nothing could be more different.  Alastair Reynold's imaginative series takes place in a distant future among peoples whose problems are not ours and whose memories of our own lives in the early twenty-first century are as faint and cloudy as are our memories of the Middle Ages.   The series' characters live, and have always lived, in deep space.  They are "deracinated" both physically and mentally.

Fisher's novel, by contrast, is cozy, home-centered, and, well, English -- deeply rooted in the folklore and landscapes of Devon.  People drop in and out on their way to and from other eras -- nineteenth century London is vividly depicted in all its filth, poverty and danger -- but the action centers about an ancient Devon country home, an enormous structure closely surrounded by a fairy-infested enchanted forest.  The plot itself is a bit clunky, perhaps -- absorbing enough, but I had the vague sense of having read stories with similar plots in the past.  But Obsidian Mirror is superlative in presenting characters who I cared about and wanted to know better, and even more superlative in painting a sense of place, scenes both beautiful and frightening.

All the characters, including the trilogy's (presumptive) hero, Jake -- the novel is narrated from multiple points of view --  are self-centered and selfish.  Each wants the mirror for his own aims, and is willing to deceive and trick the others to get it.  For the most part, however, none is able to avoid occasional flare-ups of empathy for the others, thereby softening and humanizing each of them in our eyes.  The fact that the novel's point of view changes several times a chapter prevents us from becoming too attached to -- or from cheering on behalf of -- any one of the characters too exclusively. 

Fisher has a marked ability to depict vividly strange and/or beautiful settings.  I mentioned her descriptions of nineteenth century London.  The haunted forest surrounding the abbey -- and the elusive Shee who live and rule within -- also come alive through her descriptive language.

Jake turned.  A tiny shimmer caught his eye.  He stared at it; saw a patch of glossy leaf, a lichened tree trunk.

And it became them.

He breathed in, felt Gideon's warning grip.

They were almost people.

Where they had come from he couldn't tell; they were so much a part of the shadow and the foliage.  Tall and pale, male and female, it was as if they had always been there, and just some adjustment of the light had revealed them to him.  Their faces were narrow and beautiful, their hair silvery-fair.
...
"Who are they?" he whispered.

Gideon was silent.  Then he put his lips to Jake's ear.  "Don't be fooled.  They look like angels, but they're demons.  They're the Shee.

In Obsidion Mirror, there are no "angels," either human or fairy.  Everyone is out for himself.  Everyone is a mixture of selfishness and kindness with the selfishness usually prevailing.  But Gideon -- immortal by adoption and enchantment, the boy the Shee had five centuries earlier lured away from his family home as a toddler, the human who knows the ways of the fairy world, the boy who craves the sort of warmth and friendship that are foreign to the superficial, pleasure-loving Shee who have adopted him -- is perhaps the saddest and most sympathetic of all the characters.

The book ends after much action, many discoveries, many revelations -- but nothing yet resolved.  Gideon returns to the icy forest, his hopes of finding a trustworthy human he could befriend apparently dashed.

"Enjoy it, Jake.  Enjoy it while you can.  The food, the warmth, the people.  Do everything, taste everything.  Enjoy your life because outside is only the cold and the dark."
...
"I won't let you go," Jake said, angry. But even as he said it, Gideon wasn't there; the frail green velvet faded from between his fingers, and he held only air.

I'm definitely hooked. I'm waiting for Book Two!
-------------------------------------
(1-1-15) I've provided a brief review of Book Two, The Slanted Worlds, on Goodreads. Book Three, The Door in the Moon, will be published on March 24, 2015. (2-29-16) This turned out to be a quartet, rather than a trilogy. I commented on the final volume, The Speed of Darkness, on February 17, 2016.

Daily magic

I'm reading a book about time travel, magical mirrors, a mysterious mansion, and fairy peoples.¹  I may or may not post an essay reviewing it one of these days, but that's not my point.  My point is that I'm reading it on my Kindle. 

So I finished a chapter, pressed a button, saw a tiny green light appear, and watched the screen dissolve into an abstract pattern.  Then the thought hit me over the head.  Thirty years ago, holding such a small device in my hand would have caused my heart to pound.  I myself would have been flirting with the occult.

When I was growing up, I was surrounded by modern technology that also seemed wondrous.  As an illustration of the word "magic" found in my dictionary puts it:  "A hundred years ago television would have seemed to be magic."  

But when I was a kid, the "magic" was magic only at first glance.  Television, automobiles, telephones, radio, airplanes -- all seemed wondrous, all seemed magical.  But only to the incurious.  If you wanted to learn about them, each modern wonder could be explained to a teenager of average intelligence. 

As I began writing this essay, I recalled a book from my early teens, a book from which I remember reading a chapter each night in bed, the way some people read the Bible:  The Modern Wonder Book of Knowledge, subtitled "The thrilling stories of twentieth-century industry, science, nature, transportation, communication, and other marvels of the world."   And -- lo and behold -- I discovered that not only do I still own the book, but was able to locate it hiding in one of my more obscure bookcases.  Copyright 1949, affordable in hard cover for $4.95 ($48.41 in today's dollars), thank you.

The book has clear text, written in high school level English, with diagrams, charts and photographs.  The book is not a technical manual.  You won't be able to build a telephone after reading the chapter on telephones.  But you are given a good, practical understanding of how a telephone works (with an excellent photograph of a long row of intent, seated women: "long-distance operators at a modern switchboard").  A telephone wasn't magic; it was an example of modern science.
 
An automobile was every bit as wondrous to me as the telephone, but a large number of boys in my high school could dismantle a car's engine, clean the parts, replace defective parts, and rebuild the engine so that it was better than new. Now an auto engine is one big computer.

But what do I know about a Kindle?  What does a high school kid, the kind of kid who used to take auto shop, know?  What does anyone know, outside the engineers and technical workers who actually design and assemble the product.  The Kindle's a small, thin rectangle.  It obviously contains a rechargeable battery.  It has some sort of memory device -- is it similar to a computer hard drive?  An integrated circuit board?  It downloads books from "the cloud" (well, from Amazon, actually), charges my Visa card for them, and stores several thousand of them inside its slim, elegant frame.  I can return books to "the cloud" for additional storage if I wish.  By touching the screen, I can thumb my way through books, page by page or chapter by chapter.  I can "highlight" passages for future reference.  I can obtain instant dictionary definitions of words I don't understand.

I haven't a clue how it works.  Not a clue!  If anything went wrong -- the way a kid's Ford might have gone wrong in the 1950's -- I couldn't begin to fix it.  I couldn't even open it up to look at its gizzards.  Nor could anyone else in town.  If you went into Radio Shack and told them your Kindle needed repairs -- or a tune-up -- they'd think you were insane.

My point, then, is that a Kindle -- which serves only as one example of a vast number of products we rely on daily -- might as well be "magic":

the art of producing a desired effect or result through the use of incantation or various other techniques that presumably assure human control of supernatural agencies or the forces of nature.

The Kindle does not strictly fit the dictionary definition of magic only because I trust the assurance of its manufacturer that its operation rests on well accepted laws of nature -- not incantations -- that they have cannily bent to achieve the "desired effects" of this small and wondrous device.

I've owned my Kindle for a couple of years, now.  It still amazes me, but no more so than I'm amazed by an iPhone, a digital camera, my PC, or most of the other so-called necessities of my daily life.  I know they're all based on natural phenomena, insofar as we've all gotten used now to considering quantum mechanics a "natural phenomenon."

But, let's face it.  They're really magic.
----------------------------
¹Catherine Fisher, Obsidian Mirror (Dial Books 2013).

Lavender

It's spring, and my neighborhood is full of flowers.  I breathe in the smell with a smile as I walk or run down the sidewalk.  Once in a while, rounding a corner, I suddenly catch a faint scent of daphne.

Daphne.  The slightest whiff, and I'm thrown back to the age of 13, possibly 12.  We had moved to a new house.  In the basement was a storage room we called the "fruit room," with a screened vent to the outside.  Outside the vent was a bush of daphne, whose scent filled the basement.  The new house, the novel sweet scent of daphne, the age of 13.  All mixed up in my mind.

I'm 13, it's spring, and my brother's practicing the piano, against his will. He's playing "To a Wild Rose," a tune that ever since has been attached to the smell of daphne.  My brother and I have just met the other kids in the neighborhood.  Some we would know for years; others moved away shortly after we arrived.  But my memory of those first few kids we met is engulfed in the scent of daphne.  About the same time, my mother suggested a book she'd just read, a memoir written by the mother of gifted 13-year-old twins.  Their clever and imaginative  lives fascinated me.  I wouldn't know where to find that book, now.  I have no idea of its title.  But my memory of that book -- or the memory of my reactions to reading it -- also is bathed in daphne.

Scent and memory are powerfully linked. 

[T]he olfactory nerve is located very close to the amygdala, the area of the brain that is connected to the experience of emotion as well as emotional memory. In addition, the olfactory nerve is very close to the hippocampus, which is associated with memory.  

So says an on-line source of unknown authority.

Proust knew all about it.  In his Á la Recherche du Temps Perdu, his protagonist famously experiences vivid flashbacks to childhood from the taste (scent) of a madeleine cake.  Not surprisingly, André Aciman, a well-known author, and a specialist in the works of Proust, has had similar experiences, experiences he describes in his essay "Lavender."

"Lavender" is the opening essay in his collection Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere.  Aciman's madeleine cake is the smell of his father's lavender shaving lotion, remembered from childhood.  As he grew up, he discovered that lavender shaving lotions and colognes, like good whiskeys,  come in many subtle variations.  He searched for the lavender that best exemplified his own personality, the "ur-lavender," as he calls it.

You're right.  He sounds a bit obsessive.  But then so was Proust.

His contemplation of lavender, like all good obsessions, segues eventually into thoughts of love.  And of loves.  And of death.

And even of chemistry.  Aciman arranges scents mentally by analogy with the chemical elements.

As in Mendeleyev's periodic table, one could sort these scents in rows and categories: by herbs, flowers, fruits, spices, woods.  Or by places.  By people.  By loves.  By the hotels where this or that soap managed to cast an unforgettable scent over this or that great city.  By the films or foods or clothes or concerts we've loved.  By perfumes women wore.  Or even by years, so that I could mark the bottles as my grandmother would when she labeled each jar of marmalade with her neat octogenerian's cursive, noting on each the fruit and the year of its make. 

During lonely years teaching college courses, he expanded his fascination of scents to those of tea -- hanging out at a small Harvard Square café, sampling "each tea, from Darjeeling to Formosa oolong to Lapsang souchong and gunpowder green."

I liked the idea of tea more than the flavors themselves, the way I liked the idea of tobacco more than of smoking, of people more than friendship, of home more than my apartment on Craigie Street.

He finally discovered a lavender perfume, a very expensive lavender, that exceeded his every expectation of lavender, a perfume that evoked "the women in furs who smoked Balkans aboard a yacht while watching the Hellespont drift in the distance."  A scent that reminded him of past experiences and present hopes for his future, all tangled together in what I suppose was the amygdala of his brain.  A tempered joy, bitter regret, and a muddling of past, present and future bring him to ponder:

Perhaps fragrance is the ultimate mask, the mask between me and the world, between me and me, the other me, the shadow I trail and get hints of but cannot know, sensing all along that talk of another me is itself the most insidious mask of all.  But then perhaps fragrance is nothing more than a metaphor for the "no" I brought to everything I saw when I could so easily have said "yes" -- to myself, to my father, to life -- perhaps because I never loved any of the things of the world well enough and hoped to hide this fact from myself by thinking I could do better by looking elsewhere, or because I loved and wanted each fragrance and couldn't determine which to settle for, and therefore stored the very best till a second life rolled in.

Aciman is a fine writer. He combines, painfully, an appreciation of the potential for joy in one's life and a tragic fear of having somehow missed the boat.  Or, rather, perhaps, a sense of there being too many boats, each with a fascinating destination, and the ability to book passage on only one.

I really have no interest in being 13 again, but I love the scent of daphne, because -- like a home movie -- it evokes my past so strongly.  Not just my past experiences, but my emotional reaction as an adolescent to those past experiences.  Why those emotions seem so important and worth recapturing isn't clear to me, but Aciman understands my puzzlement, a perplexity

within each one of us that nothing, not even love or friendship, can unburden, the life we think of each day, and the life not lived, and the life half lived, and the life we wish we'd learn to live while we still have time, and the life we want to rewrite if  only we could, and the life we know remains unwritten and may never be written at all, and the life we hope others may live far better than we have....

Well written, as always, and well felt.  I 've read one of his novels and his memoir (Out of Egypt), and am now reading his essays.  I enjoy his writing.

Boston

As terrorist outrages go, nowadays, it wasn't all that impressive.  Three people dead, one a child; about 140 injured to varying degrees, some losing limbs.  Compared with the airplane attacks of nine-eleven, the carnage was slight.

As always, it is the motivation that intrigues and puzzles.  I'm assuming, without knowing, that it was a terrorist attack.  At least two bombs were detonated, coordinated to go off at roughly the same time.  Sufficient evidence of technical sophistication apparently exists to suggest that more than one person was responsible.  The attack may still turn out to be another act by a crazy adolescent, or by some guy driven insane after having been fired from his job, but at present that seems less likely.

Let's assume it was a terrorist act by some organization.  What was the motive?  Traditionally, terrorist acts against non-military targets are attributed to one or more of three motives.  The first is the desire to call the attention of an uninterested world to injustices that need to be righted.  Second is an attempt to force a governing authority to realize that it has more to lose than to gain by continuing its present policies; terrorism to win national independence is one example.  And third is the tactical plan of terrorists to elicit a violent and disproportionate response from the government that will gain the terrorists sympathy and new adherents.

None of these motivations make sense unless the terrorists make public their group's identity, or at least the nature of the cause that their actions were designed to favor.  But no one has claimed "credit" for today's attack.  I suspect no one will.

These three motives are "rational" motives: they are designed to help win a battle. I can also think of two "non-traditional," "irrational" motivations, somewhat related to each other, for engaging in terrorist activities against innocent civilians.  Attacks based on these motives have probably always occurred throughout history, but in recent decades they have become increasingly common and threatening. 

One is a sense, possessed by some cultural groups including Arabs, of "collective responsibility."  When a member of a neighboring tribe hurts a member of my own tribe, I hold the entire tribe responsible.  Either the other tribe comes up with acceptable economic compensation for my injury, or I seek primitive compensation -- an eye for an eye -- against one or more members of the other tribe.  When the "tribes" are modern nations, and the perceived injury seems unlimited in its scope and humiliation -- beyond the power of money or cattle to compensate -- it seems only fair to seek unlimited retribution against that nation's citizens.

The other possible motive, less based on cultural beliefs, is simple revenge.  Revenge may be the most obvious motive for terrorism in today's world, the most difficult to deter rationally, and the most frightening.  When a people -- like certain factions of the Arab world, for example, but certainly not limited to them -- feel that they have suffered for decades or more at the hands of the West, that their suffering has included humiliation and disrespect for their own culture and religion, that attempts to improve their lot by either negotiation or intimidation seem fruitless, their response may be to seek revenge.

After suffering for years from a sense of cultural humiliation,  I no longer hope to change the oppressor's policies.  I'm no longer interested in "converting" him.   I'm no longer interested in extorting concessions from him.  I realize that my military and technological weakness relative to him will continue indefinitely, and that nothing I can do will improve my lot.  The only arrow left in my quiver is revenge.  I can make some of his citizens miserable -- his children killed, his friends' bodies dismembered, lives ruined, the relative happiness of people totally uninterested in politics or international relations destroyed in a couple of seconds.

My misery and humiliation will remain, but my chill will be slightly warmed by having spread a bit of misery to my enemy's people as well.  That the people suffering the misery are not those directly responsible for my own is no more a deterrent than is "collateral damage" to innocent bystanders a deterrent to the West's own military efforts.  The terrorists simply realize that their own misery enjoys company.

The acts of revenge may be enjoyed even by those who only stand by and cheer.  Thus we have Mohammad al-Chalabi, a Jordanian Muslim extremist, commenting on today's attack in Boston:

Let the Americans feel the pain we endured by their armies occupying Iraq and Afghanistan and killing our people there.

As modern technology makes the vast differences between haves and have-nots become readily apparent to the have-nots, and as American foreign policy increasingly is viewed as hostile to and contemptuous of the beliefs and aspirations of various religious and cultural groups, and as fast and easy transportation makes national borders increasingly porous, we will find it increasingly difficult to defuse and prevent such attacks of terrorists within our nation.

Lights out!

After watching it sprinkle off and on all afternoon, my spirits were momentarily lifted by what we in the Northwest Corner like to call a "sun break."  I dashed out of the house and onto the wet sidewalks for an enjoyable four-mile run.  But as I rounded the turn into the home stretch, I was startled by a flash of lightning (unusual around these parts), followed by a crash of thunder.  Several more rumbles seemed to chase me down the street before I reached the safety of home.

The donner und blitzen continued for maybe a half hour once I arrived home.  After an ominous pause, the heavens then opened and we were deluged by hail, hail that piled up on the streets, the sidewalks and the lawns as though it were snow blizzarding in January.  And then, to punctuate Mother Nature's displeasure at only-she-knows-what, at promptly 6 p.m., the lights went out.

I was on the computer when the screen went black, the room darkened, the radio fell silent, and the furnace stopped running.  My reaction was first surprise, then annoyance, and then -- I sensed it gradually creeping up on me -- a shiver of existential dread.

No heat.  No light, once darkness fell upon us, aside from my one workable flashlight.  No cooking.  No entertainment.  And, most awesome realization of all, no internet, no Facebook -- no connection with the outside world.

The outage lasted only twenty minutes, a trivial inconvenience compared with the days without power the poor souls in the Northeast experienced last fall in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.  But when the power goes, you have no idea how long it will be gone.  My thoughts immediately turned to the harrowing logistics of staying alive for days without all the essentials of life.  Even if the power returned by morning, I realized, I was confronting an unpleasant evening and night.

All because we had no electricity, a luxury that many Americans -- and certainly many inhabitants of other countries -- did not have until after the Great Depression.  Even after electrification was widespread, our grandfathers possessed a collective memory of how one lived without power.   If the power failed, they might grumble, but they probably had some old kerosene lanterns lying around the garage, or certainly plenty of candles in the cupboard.  They built a fire in the fireplace.  If they needed hot food or water, they balanced pots and pans on the hot coals.  They threw blankets around themselves and their kids.  They went to bed when it got dark, and got up when it became dawn.

Today, we lack the childhood memories that would help us survive.  Our roots in a pre-electrical past have been severed.  Contemplating loss of power for more than 24 hours creates in us not merely annoyance, but a rush of panic. 

At 6:20, the power came back on.  The house came to life, glowing and humming and rumbling.  The crisis had passed.  The cats -- who had disappeared into the outdoors at the first rumble of thunder -- eventually returned, dripping wet, and allowed themselves to be fondled and dried.    Die out tympani, fade in violins and woodwinds.  All was well. 

But the anxiety remains.  If we lost power for weeks -- perhaps when a giant earthquake, "The Big One," hits Seattle -- we would have to fend for ourselves without the quiet assistance of our electrical servants, servants we've come to rely upon to the point of utter dependence.  We would find ourselves back in the Little House on the Prairie with none of the experience of living in a log cabin that the pioneers themselves were able to fall back on.

My cats -- despite all my silly fears for their health and psyches -- would do just fine.  They can rely on their instincts.  But without elaborate preparations for such a disaster, preparations that most of us think about but never undertake, I'm afraid our cats would survive with greater aplomb than would their nominal masters.

Blood and gore

Tarantino's movie Django Unchained was shut down on its opening day in China, yesterday.  The reason is not yet clear.  Some blame a brief scene of nudity.  Others blame Tarantino's signature blood and violence.

The New York Times notes that American movies opening in China are usually altered to tone down the violence.  Django Unchained's violence had already been altered, reportedly, "including altering the color of fake blood in violent scenes and limiting how far the blood spattered."

As an official for Sony Pictures commented:

What we call bloodshed and violence is just a means of serving the purpose of the film, and these slight adjustments will not affect the basic quality of the film -- such as turning the blood to a darker color or lowering the height of the splatter of blood.

News reports have focused on the issue of film censorship within China.  Censorship is indeed an issue.  To me, however, the more interesting question is how the quantity and velocity of blood splatter acts in "serving the purpose of the film."

To my memory, I've never seen a Tarantino film, and have no plans to see Django Unchained.  Tarantino is, of course, a serious and respected director.  Django Unchained received a respectable 89 percent on Rotten Tomatoes "Tomatometer."   Dissenting reviews, however, question the increasing repetitiveness of Tarantino's movie formulas.  "Tarantino's incoherent three-hour bloodbath" was the headline attached to a serious, in-depth, on-line review in Salon.

What's the objective of a serious movie, I like to ask myself, and how does each scene help realize that objective?  Violence, like sex, is "gratuitous" if it is unnecessary to the objective of the film.  I'm sure some people see a film primarily in the hope of seeing gratuitous sex and/or violence.  I don't.  Both distract attention from the movie as a serious experience.  And, to me, filmed violence, gratuitous or not, is simply an unpleasant viewing experience.

The Sony spokesman suggests that movies can be (and are) made less offensively bloody and violent for Chinese audiences.  I suggest that producers and directors consider releasing their less offensive versions in American theaters, as well.

A less violent Django Unchained still wouldn't suck me into my local theater, but there have been other films I would have been more inclined to attend if I hadn't realized that I'd have to spend an evening in the equivalent of the Roman Colosseum in order to view them.

Cat and mouse

"I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice."
--Charles Darwin (letter, May 2, 1860)

I woke up last night to the sound of feline scuffling.  After lying awake for some time, I decided I might as well read.  Shortly after I turned on the light and opened my book, one of my cats came prancing into the room with a small mouse in his mouth, the tail hanging off to one side.  The mouse appeared alive, its eyes wide open in somewhat understandable alarm.

The cat, having proved his prowess, trotted back out of the room.  I didn't discovered a small corpse this morning, so he may have let the mouse loose for further recreation at a later time.  There have been unnerving noises of tiny feet scampering about the house the last week or so.  The mouse's days, however, are clearly numbered.

In a letter, from which an excerpt is quoted above, Darwin clarified that he wasn't an atheist.  (He stated in other places that he considered himself an agnostic.)  He simply was baffled at the mysteries of the universe.  Other naturalists have been equally unsettled.  One, whose identity I can't recall, recoiled in horror at watching a predator eat a gazelle in Africa while the animal was still alive and conscious.  Even if God chose to use natural selection as his means for guiding evolution, he wrote, surely natural selection could have been accomplished with far less pain to the creatures being selected against.

I lay awake at 3 o'clock in the morning, thinking initially about life from the perspective of the mouse.  I then considered the incredible amount of horrific pain and suffering that creatures about the world are undergoing at any given moment.  As a species, we shield ourselves from suffering and death to an amazing degree relative to other creatures.  Even death from cancer -- although still accompanied by both physical and mental pain -- has been eased by modern medicine.  Millions of other species are far less lucky.

I've read arguments that other animals do not suffer as man does.  The pain may be great, but it lasts a finite time.  The animal is not aware of time, does not consider that his present suffering will continue for hours or days to come until he dies.  Or animals' nervous systems are not developed to experience pain in the same way humans do.

I certainly agree that a paramecium does not "suffer" as it dies.  Even insects, birds and the simpler mammals may lack both the neurological and the psychological ability to experience pain as we do.  Pain is a tool devised by evolution to teach animals of a certain intelligence to avoid future exposure to life-threatening experiences that they have once survived.  "Once burned, twice shy."

But to deny that the higher mammals -- primates, horses, dogs, cats, even (I would argue) mice -- experience pain in the same way as humans do, or that they suffer from fear (even without consciousness of impending death) while being tortured, suggests either that the person in denial has never spent much time around animals, or that he is blinded by an ideology that requires him to consider all beings except humans as automatons.  In either case, I would feel nervous in having such people as my neighbors.

The existence of suffering, both human and in nature,  has always posed problems to the religious believer.  The suffering of animals does not weaken my own faith, but it once again makes me conscious that the Universe and its Creator are mysterious beyond comprehension, and their nature not susceptible to glib expression in the stilted language of a catechism.   "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saieth the Lord."   (Isaiah 55:8.)

That pretty much sums it up, doesn't it?  And it compels great humility when one is contemplating the overall plan of Creation.  But, even while accepting the world we've been given, we should, as we go about our lives, nevertheless be sensitive to -- and consider ourselves obligated to minimize -- the sufferings of all creatures. Of all "sentient beings," as the Buddhists phrase it.

Even the tiny mouse who comes into your house to get out of the rain. 

Better living through chemistry

I have claimed on a number of occasions, only half jokingly, that had I gone to school in today's environment, the school system would have had me on Ritalin from K to 12.  There's no place in today's school system for the Class Clown, apparently.  Actually, there never was, but back in the day they didn't know what to do about it.  Now they do.

The New York Times reported Sunday that nearly 20 percent of all American high school boys have been diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).   Two thirds of those are being medicated with either Ritalin or Adderall.  We're looking today at an impressively high percentage of our youth who are diagnosed with a pathology requiring prescription drugs.

In a moving essay yesterday, entitled Diagnosis: Human, Ted Gup writes of his son who was diagnosed with ADHD in first grade, began receiving medication, and ended up dead of an alcohol and drug overdose at age 21, while a senior in college.  Gup admits that his boy had problems unrelated to ADHD, but he feels that his lifelong experience with Ritalin and Adderall made his transition into the drug culture all too easy.

But Gup's more interesting point is something different.  Many "normal" kids are now getting their hands on these drugs, because anti-ADHD drugs also provide an easy, pharmaceutical way for a non-ADHD student to focus on his studies and avoid distractions.  Just as an athlete uses steroids to improve physical performance, just as grieving survivors of deceased loved ones are using anti-depressants to restore daily functioning, many of today's most ambitious kids are using Ritalin and Adderall to heighten academic performance.  Any weakness in personality or performance is being diagnosed and medicated out of existence. Seemingly. Gup notes that the psychological profession, in the latest edition of its diagnostic manual, is now about to define some forms of what we consider "normal grief" to be a diagnosable pathology.

I fear that being human is itself fast becoming a condition. It’s as if we are trying to contain grief, and the absolute pain of a loss like mine. We have become increasingly disassociated and estranged from the patterns of life and death, uncomfortable with the messiness of our own humanity, aging and, ultimately, mortality.

I agree.  But I wonder if, in agreeing, I'm not really fighting against "progress," attempting to sweep back the tides of human history.

A few posts back, I discussed the science fiction novel, Revelation Space.   In that novel -- its events set five hundred years in the future -- electronic chips were routinely implanted in people's brains to add funds of specialized knowledge or to permit them to function at higher cognitive levels than would be possible by the unassisted normal brain.  These implants were considered normal, and were routinely used by anyone whose jobs required anything more than the most routine activities.

Is that where we're going?  Are what we are seeing now merely the earliest, most primitive attempts to raise our human capabilities by our use of drugs?  Drugs to perform physically like superhumans?  Drugs to master difficult academic work through superior powers of concentration?  Drugs permitting us to ignore the human emotions resulting from loss and tragedy, and thus continue in an uninterrupted fashion as productive members of society?

Maybe, but Gup warns us that we thereby risk losing those qualities that make us recognizably human, rather than well-oiled machines.  And in so doing, permitting ourselves to go through life living in an illusory world:

Instead of enhancing our coping skills, we undermine them and seek shortcuts where there are none, eroding the resilience upon which each of us, at some point in our lives, must rely. Diagnosing grief as a part of depression runs the very real risk of delegitimizing that which is most human — the bonds of our love and attachment to one another.

The D.S.M. [official psychological diagnostic manual] would do well to recognize that a broken heart is not a medical condition, and that medication is ill-suited to repair some tears. Time does not heal all wounds, closure is a fiction, and so too is the notion that God never asks of us more than we can bear. Enduring the unbearable is sometimes exactly what life asks of us.

Gup's words are moving and philosophical, but they may well fall on deaf ears.  His concerns do not seem to reflect the direction our society is moving.

Running like a leopard

Jack: What are your legs?
Archie: Springs. Steel springs.
Jack: What are they going to do?
Archie:  Hurl me down the track.
Jack:  How fast can you run?
Archie:  As fast as a leopard.
Jack:  How fast are you going to run?
Archie: As fast as a leopard!
Jack:  Then let's see you do it!
--Gallipoli (movie)

Seattle was sunny today, with temperatures in the high fifties.  Flowers and flowering trees were in bloom; spring was upon us.  And it was my birthday.  The signs were all auspicious.  I needed to run.  It's been two or three years since I last did any serious running, after an Achilles tendon strain in 2006 ended many years of regular running.

I had prepared for the arrival of this urge, and for this sort of spring day.  I had ordered new running shoes, which arrived Friday.  Today was the day for the test.

I'm no leopard.  It had been a while, as I say, since I'd run.  But I felt as leopard-like as I had any right to feel. Running fast, but not too fast.  Breathing hard, but not too hard.  Skimming through Interlaken Park, along a curvy lane that's closed to traffic in places, and infrequently trafficked in others.  Feeling feral.

Feral, perhaps, but not really feline.  No, rather than a leopard, I felt more like myself as a skinny pre-teen boy.  I always wore leather shoes to school -- not a school rule, but my mother's rule.  But, come summer vacation, we kids all got Keds.  Or some other brand of "tennis shoes."  We'd get 'em home, put 'em on, and run outside --  dancing across the lawns and sidewalks like wild maniacs.  The tennis shoes were like magic.  I felt I could run like the wind, jump like a gazelle. 

Frankly, I guess I really felt neither wind-like nor gazelle-like today.  Those years following the age of eleven have, in fact, taken something of a toll.  But everything's relative, right?  Compared to how I feel wearing my usual light hiking shoes, I felt light-footed as a ballet dancer. 

I've exhausted my fund of similes.  Let's just say that running in new running shoes is exhilarating.  It brings back those joys of being eleven years old at the very beginning of summer vacation -- joys that, in retrospect, are wasted on an eleven-year-old.

Now, I just have to remind myself every two or three days how good the run will feel once I start running.  If only my memories of today's run are strong enough to trump my usual inertia ...

Updates as events warrant.

Putting it in perspective

Some of us can remember the old pull-down World maps at the front of our classrooms, maps on which half the countries were colored pink.  Those pink lands made up the British Empire.

Empires aren't fashionable these days -- except, perhaps, with neo-cons like Dick Cheney -- but the British Empire has receded far enough into history to exert a nostalgic pull on our affections.  We think of explorers (like Dr. Livingston) opening up new areas in Africa and Asia.  We visualize military officers crisply dressed in red-coated uniforms, pioneer families in Canada and Australia, the invincible British fleet, Indian "durbars" presided over by Viceroys -- and, more generally, the entire Victorian aristocratic backdrop of boys' schools, overstuffed furniture, leather books, long letters home from the colonies, and London itself as the center of civilization.

My mind wanders thusly because I have just finished reading Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain, a new book by Oxford historian John Darwin.   In one readable volume, Dawson tells us all we ever thought we wanted to know about the British Empire -- but it's also made me want to learn even more.

As an American schoolboy, I was taught a specific point of view with respect to what we call the American Revolution.  Indoctrination in a national religion, I suppose.  Even in college, when I took a course analyzing the events leading up to 1776 from a nationally known expert in the field, the facts were studied in far greater detail, but their worldwide context was not notably broadened.  In all my course work, at whatever level, it was assumed that American Independence was a central event in world history. 

Professor Darwin's history is taught from a Briton's point of view.  It is not obviously biased, anymore than my college course was obvously biased.  But from Britain's viewpoint, the battle against the American colonists was merely one aspect of a dangerous period in British history.  After Britain's unexpected territorial gains at the Peace of Paris (1763), ending the Seven Years War with France, Spain, and Austria (which we parochially describe as the "French and Indian War"), she found herself overextended overseas, and faced with potentially dangerous forces on the European continent.  Desperate for money, Britain imposed the notorious Stamp Tax on the American colonies, forcing us to help pay for the British troops that had protected us against the French -- a tax that led to the Declaration of Independence.

While trying to reimpose order in the colonies by blockading its shipping, the British faced a renewed threat from France, Spain, and Holland.  These nations were joined by Russia in 1780, thus including virtually all of Europe in a demand that the British blockade against the colonies not affect neutral shipping. Britain's navy was greatly outnumbered by those of the allied nations, and the British Isles themselves were threatened.

[I]n 1782, [Britain] regained control of the Atlantic.  But for the American war, it was too little too late.  In the critical phase when its Atlantic lifeline was cut, Cornwallis's army, their main American strike-force, was squeezed into surrender at Yorktown [1781].  With no will to go on, the British went to the conference table desperate to break up the coalition against them.  Conceding American independence was the only sure way to end the colonies' alliance with France -- the worst of all worlds -- and preserve their commercial connection with Britain.

My American education never suppressed knowledge of the historical context in which independence occurred.  But we were taught history as perceived by our forebears living in Massachusetts and Virginia, for whom the European balance of power was of merely incidental interest -- not history as it might have been perceived by an interested Martian hovering overhead.  Darwin is no Martian, but his perception as an historian whose fascination lies with the development of the entire British Empire adds the necessary context.  From Britain's point of view, London had bent over backwards trying to placate the American colonists, at least insofar as possible without surrendering whatever advantage was derived from the colonies' status as imperial possessions.

The American war is but a minor theme in Dawson's story, a prelude to the later development of what now usually comes to mind when we hear the term, "British Empire" -- an amazing story of commercial and military success for which Britain's victories at Trafalgar (1805) and Waterloo (1815) were the necessary but not sufficient conditions.  But lessons learned in dealing with the American colonies affected Britain's policies in dealing with future colonies, especially those that Dawson calls "settler societies" -- Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.  And the chapters dealing with India -- the jewel in the Crown -- could be read alone as a fascinating cautionary tale, a mixture of avarice and nobility, cruelty and compassion, recklessness and caution.

How the Empire developed after 1815 -- primarily as a means to protect  British commercial investment and exploitation -- and how a small island parlayed an early industrial revolution, supported by large domestic reserves of coal, into one of the largest and most successful empires, commerical, financial and governmental, the world has ever seen, is the primary story of Dawson's book.  As is the sobering -- to us on this side of the pond -- coda illustrating how Britain fell from world domination within not much more than a generation.

As an American, I like to recall the fable of the blind pygmies trying to understand their first encounter with an elephant.  Our history classes, perhaps, have taught us to inspect carefully the elephant's leg and conclude that an elephant is a form of hairy-barked tree.  Dawson's book shows us the entire beast.