Testing the Waters

Blind Lunch
One day when I was walking around Florence I chanced upon a store-front window, looked in and saw a man and a woman having lunch together. That was all—one table, two chairs, two people eating lunch. By the door was a sign directing the reader to a website where I subsequently read the following message (translated from the Italian):

Sharing a private moment with a stranger, it means giving up the surprise, let go and let himself be invaded. Blind Lunch takes place within a window, the only boundary that separates the public from the private sector, which faces directly onto the street. The space is transformed into a cozy and intimate with a central dining table, a meeting point where two people unknown to each other, eat a meal together.

Fancy that, I thought. Wouldn’t it be amusing, perhaps even interesting, to give it a try? I sent an email (in English) to the indicated address expressing my interest and never heard a word in reply.

Experimenting Society
A note from the Web a while ago: Today Vermont is set to make history by becoming the first state in the nation to offer universal, single-payer healthcare when Gov. Peter Shumlin signs its healthcare reform bill into law. The Vermont plan, called the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, will attempt to stem rising medical care prices and provide universal coverage... Dr. Deb Richter, president of Vermont Health Care for All … moved from Buffalo, New York, to Vermont in 1999 to advocate for a universal, single-payer healthcare system in the state. Gov. Shumlin calls her the “backbone” of the grassroots effort that helped persuade the Democratic-led state legislature to pass the bill this spring.

Here is an example of an experimenting society at its best. First try something new on a small scale. Then evaluate the results. If the outcome is positive, continue with the program. If it isn’t, try something different. This approach is easy to do when applied to limited number of people. Making changes, as well as mistakes is less risky in small groups or organizations. I have found that to be the case whenever I have observed the origin of significant social changes. The smaller the country, state or academic setting, the easier it is to experiment with change and then in light of its effects, decide whether or not to apply it on a larger scale.

Study Thyself
Reading a book isn’t quite as simple as it used to be. Now a reader is given a choice, print version, Kindle, iPad1 or iPad2, Nook, or mobile phone. It is rather like going to the market to get some cereal where you find yourself confronted with one long shelf above another of a countless number of choices. In the Times last week Nick Bilton describes the way he went about deciding how to read a book. He writes,

“This might not sound so extraordinary, but I didn’t just read a book in print, on an e-reader or even a mobile phone. Instead I read a book on dozens of devices….I wanted to answer a question I often hear: which e-reader or tablet is the best for reading books?”

The book he selected was The Alienist by Caleb Carr and he read sections of it on eleven (11) different devices plus “a crumply old print paperback.” The gadgets included the Kindle, the Google Nexus S Android phone, the iPhone, a Samsung Galaxy Tablet, the iPads (1 & 2), the Nook and laptop computer. For each device he describes its desirable and undesirable features.

A single person trying various approaches by themselves (self-experiments) or with one other individual (single subject research) often leads to important discoveries in science. Examples include Herman Ebbinghaus on memory, Freud on the unconscious, and Albert Hoffman on psychedelic drugs. While Bilton was far from doing scientific research he was going about the decision on how best to read a book by doing a little “experiment” on himself.

While he says reading the paperback version of the novel was frustrating because he couldn’t easily look up things as he could on his iPhone, in the end, he concluded to my immense pleasure, “But if money is tight, go for print. My used paperback cost only $4.” Not only that but he could mark it up any old way he liked.

On Facebook

And why had he never had a friend as Jorge O’Kelly had been for Prado--A friend with whom he could have talked about things like loyalty and love, and about death?
Pascal Mercier Night Train to Lisbon

I don’t understand Facebook or Twitter or really texting either. It’s not that I’m opposed to them. Rather, I simply don’t get their appeal. Of course, many explanations have been proposed and I’ve not found anything too objectionable in these accounts. But what I don’t understand is the purpose, the goal, the raison d’etre of communicating this way.

It is said that their goal is connection, to connect with one friends make new ones, find out what’s going on with them. What a strange way to make contact with another person, sometimes hundreds of persons, many of whom you’ve never met or spoken with, or have the slightest idea who they are.

In her essay Generation Why? in the New York Review of Books (November 2010) Zadie Smith also asks,

Why? Why Facebook? Why this format? Why do it like that? Why not do it another way? The striking thing about the real Zuckerberg, in video and in print, is the relative banality of his ideas concerning the “Why” of Facebook. He uses the word “connect” as believers use the word “Jesus,” as if it were sacred in and of itself: “So the idea is really that, um, the site helps everyone connect with people and share information with the people they want to stay connected with….”

Doesn’t anyone wonder about the nature of that connection, its quality, durability, the degree to which it is a genuine connection? Currently there are said to be over 750 million active users, half of whom log on to Facebook on any given day. The average user is said to have 130 friends, although a “friend” of mine has over 850 friends, and two members of my family have well over 800. What does it mean to have over 800 friends anyway? Is this some kind of a contest to see how many friends we can accumulate?

How can anyone have that many friends? Why are we not discussing the value of this kind of friendship?

I pose these questions not because I was raised during the letter-writing era, followed by the telephone and now e-mailing or that I’m simply an old grouch. I find some of these new communication techniques and the Internet itself a bit of a miracle.

Do Facebook members think much about the quality their connections? As far as I can tell the exchanges that occur on its website seem silly, rather superficial and scarcely the stuff of what we mean, or used to mean, by a friendship.

“Yes.” “Haha, that’s very funny.” “What a beautiful couple.” “Great photos.” “We're hard core: waited 2 hrs for screen door brunch. After a super grueling aerial class this morning I was so hungry! But the summer veggie hash was so worth the wait!” “New Job, new puppy, new car, new desk, new computer, new year since birth--same old guy.” There are an enormous number of Likes and X is now friends with Y and lots of Yeses.

Isn’t this slightly ridiculous?

In response I suppose devoted Facebookers could always quote Charles Lamb who in a letter to Coleridge wrote about his how he felt about his long suffering sister: “’Tis the privilege of friendship to talk nonsense, and to have her nonsense respected.”

Eventually Smith closed her account at Facebook and writes: “The last defense of every Facebook addict is: but it helps me keep in contact with people who are far away! Well, e-mail and Skype do that, too,… If we really wanted to write to these faraway people, or see them, we would. What we actually want to do is the bare minimum, just like any nineteen-year-old college boy who’d rather be doing something else, or nothing.”

Future of Bookmarks

With the ascendancy of the e-book, what will become those odd-little bookmarks that to mark the page we last read in paper books? I don’t know if you feel the same, but I’m very particular about the bookmarks I use. They have to be just the right size. I don’t like small ones like the business cards or bus tickets that some readers use; they tend to fall out of books or get lost somewhere, so they are really quite useless. I don’t much care for paper clips that crease the pages of the books I am reading or those printed on flimsy paper that tear or bend easily.

The bookmarks at the legendary Powell’s Bookstore in Portland, Oregon, used to be like that. I never liked them at all and always recycled them whenever I was given one. But Mr. Powell must have taken my displeasure to heart for a few years ago he stiffened up his bookmarks so that they now remain in the books I buy there, rather than on the stack of papers in my recycling box.

One of my favorite bookmarks was given out by a small, independent bookstore in Portland that I had been going to for almost 40 years. Sadly, the bookstore is no longer in business which isn’t surprising given the likes of Amazon and Barnes & Noble. The store had an almost perfect bookmark, one that remained the same during all the years I went there. They kept doling them out from an inventory that must have numbered in the millions and I still have enough for a lifetime of reading.

Every now and then I read a book that is a treasure. Some of these are reference books, like the dictionary or encyclopedia. Others are books of paintings or photographs. These books clearly require one of the cherished bookmarks that I’ve collected over the years in my travels. These usually turn out to be made of thin leather with a calligraphed message or distinctive symbol printed on the front side. Or the book might already include one those colorful ribbon strips that sometimes accompany those really fine and important books, as well as all my red Michelin guides of hotels and restaurants in Italy and France.

These narrow cloth or silk ribbons that are bound into the book at the top of the spine are said to be the eighteenth and nineteenth century precursors of the modern bookmark. It is a mystery why they aren’t included in every book. Wonder of wonders, the Paris Review now includes a bookmark with each issue. Such a simple idea--promote the periodical, aid those who take their time reading the material, point the way to the publisher’s website where the reader can search the archive, listen to poems, and by golly also subscribe. Then again, maybe it is not such a good idea, since if it is widely adopted it will likely be the end of bookmark craftsman, as well as the pleasure of collecting distinctive bookmarks.

I keep my most valued bookmarks in a very special box upon my desk. The box is about the size of an egg carton, opens with a hinged lid, and has always sat upon my desk ever since I received it. It has more than enough room to house all my favorite bookmarks. The lid is appropriately calligraphed with passages about writing: “Writing is nothing more than a guided dream (Jorge Luis Borges). If there’s a book you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it (Toni Morrison). True ease in writing comes from art not chance (Proust).”

Bookmarks have not escaped the wonders of the electronic age either. A 21st century reader can now purchase a digital bookmark with a built-in dictionary, the ever-popular Selco Bookmark Dictionary II. It is said to hold 130,000 words with “definitions thoroughly revised and updated.” They can be had at Amazon for a little over $35. Whoever heard of paying for a bookmark?

The "keypad" of this gadget is no thicker than your ordinary bookmark. However, it is attached at the top to a modest-size LCD screen that not only displays the meaning of words, but also the date and time of day for readers who can’t live without this information. As if that is not enough, it also incorporates a calculator, for readers trying to solve Fermant’s Last Theorem. I have been rendered speechless by the thing. The screen sits up upon the top of the keypad, like Humpty-Dumpty on his wall. I have a feeling it won’t be long before my jazzy new Selco Bookmark Dictionary II will experience a similar fate.

If you prefer to make your own, see this clever suggestion. And for readers ready to upgrade to a four-star deluxe bookmark, I can report that Tiffany’s new bamboo leaf/scarab bookmark in sterling silver is available at the time of this writing. I saw it advertised in the Times a while ago and was duly informed it is designed for bookmark lovers who want to add a touch of glamour to their favorite coffee table book. Each one is carefully embossed with bamboo stalks and a tiny copper and gold beetle. At $120, it would make a perfect gift for all your bookish friends. You don’t live near a Tiffany store? No problem: just go to their online store to order this gem. Better do so before they run out; I am sure the supply is limited.

Briefs

My reading notebook, otherwise known as my commonplace book, consists of two sections now—Briefs and Passages. Passages are the notable thoughts and ideas I collect from the books and periodicals I read. Briefs are provocative comments, a word or phrase, a quotation from a random collection of almost anything I read—a newspaper, blog, journal, essay, etc. The Briefs for each year are usually just a few pages while the Passages can be anywhere from 50 to 60 pages. To give you an idea of the kinds of things I collect in the Briefs, here are those I saved last year.


I never know what I think about something until I read what I’ve written on it. William Faulkner

I have so much to say about the importance of memory…the role of memory in love. One way in which we love people is by remembering them, maybe even after they’ve forgotten things about themselves. I find the idea of bearing witness very beautiful. The idea that to love someone is to bear witness to his or her life comes up a lot in the book [Man Walks Into a Room]. I find the idea of bearing witness very beautiful. Nicole Krauss

But great books force people to engage in the human conversation. They teach empathy and they teach compassion. They remind us of all the words there are beyond whatever. In a large sense, this is what Man Walks into a Room is about. It's about a man who becomes disengaged, and who—after a lot of loneliness and pain—relearns the difficult beauty of engagement. If I could reduce what matters to me most right now to a single word, it would be simply that: engagement. Nicole Krauss

“… you go to a great school not so much for knowledge as for arts and habits; for the habit of attention, for the art of expression, for the art of assuming at a moment's notice a new intellectual position, for the art of entering quickly into another person's thoughts, for the habit of submitting to censure and refutation, for the art of indicating assent or dissent in graduated terms, for the habit of regarding minute points of accuracy, for the art of working out what is possible in a given time, for taste, for discrimination, for mental courage, and for mental soberness. Above all, you go to a great school for self-knowledge.” William Cory

Miracles can happen in the writing process. More often than in life, unfortunately. David Grossman

…that we have these ideals which are extraordinarily powerful, and extraordinarily high and our inability to execute them is tragic…. Osker Eustis

The world’s most urgent environmental need, he has come to believe, is not for some miraculous seeming scientific breakthrough but for a vast, unprecedented transformation of human behavior. David Owen

I have one opinion—one should evaluate things—which is strongly held. I’m never unhappy with the results. I haven’t yet seen a result I didn’t like. Esther Duflo

Sometimes I think that creativity is a matter of seeing, or stumbling over, unobvious similarities between things—like composing a fresh metaphor but on a more complex scale….The writer’s real world and the writer’s fictional world are compared, and these comparisons turned into text. David Mitchell

“The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.” Writing instructs and that doesn’t necessarily make it dictatorial, elitist, self-righteous or school-marmish. A good writer writes with authority. He has something to give us – pleasure, insight, information – something he convinces us is worth having. He may do so by arguing, explaining, seducing or amusing. An exchange takes place: He convinces us to listen and we give our attentiveness, which is respectful but neither naïve nor credulous. If he tries too hard – if he tailgates like an overheated driver – the contract is broken and we close the book. If we are writers and don't uphold our end of the bargain, we're soon out of readers. Patrick Kurp

It is tempting to think of public resistance to particularly egregious Supreme Court decisions. Suppose, for example, that there had been a popular uprising against Bush v. Gore in 2000—that the recount of votes in Florida had gone forward despite the Court’s decision and that Al Gore had won and become president. The United States would not have invaded Iraq. Lax financial regulation would not have brought us close to an economic meltdown. John Roberts and Samuel Alito would not be on the Supreme Court. The fantasy has its appeal. But the price would have been high: the loss of fealty to the one institution that holds this vast, disparate country together: law….”The Democrats as well as the Republicans followed the decision. They did so peacefully.” It was, he said, “the most remarkable…feature of the case.” Anthony Lewis

Varieties of Hunger

In an interview about her novel The Cookbook Collector, Allegra Goodman was asked why she chose the title. She replied:

This is a book about hunger and about acquisition; it’s a book about people deciding how to live. The cookbook motif raises interesting questions: Is it better to follow a formula or recipe as you live your life? Or improvise as you go along?

By “hunger” I think Goodman is also referring to a strong desire, a longing both for ideas and love, for success and riches.

How sad he thought, that desire found new objects but did not abate, that when it came to longing there was no end.

Emily, the older of two contrasting sisters and CEO of Veritech, a software firm in Silicon Valley, longs for Jonathan, the founder of ISIS, a software firm in Cambridge.

He needed Emily to believe in him so that he could believe in himself.

Jess(amine, Emily’s younger sister, a graduate student in philosophy at Berkeley longs for wisdom, literature and eventually George, a Microsoft millionaire, bookstore owner and rare book collector.

…he was constantly disappointed. Dissatisfied. He was always looking for the next thing. He had the mind of a researcher, restlessly turning corners, seeking out new questions.

Both sisters “hunger” for the truth about their mother who died when they were very young.

Information wasn’t always such a gift; it was also a loss, the end of possibility.

Meanwhile, George yearns for Jess.

…he never stopped desiring the one he couldn’t find…The one he couldn’t find became the one he couldn’t have.

Orion, the software programmer for ISIS, yearns for Sorel, an independent soul, who also works at ISIS.

…he grew more solitary, even as he hungered for companionship.

In a word, every person depicted in this intellectual rich novel hungers after one thing or another—fulfillment, knowledge, achievement and love.

I prefer the chase; I like pursuit better than so-called fulfillment. Everybody does.

Is all of this longing worth the chase? Goodman concludes with this question:

What profit is it to own so many things, to stroll in gardens and enjoy previous jewels, to each such food and drink such wine? In the end, what good is it to collect such riches? Every wall will crumble. The beautiful will wither and decay.

Aesthetic Experience

“I hardly think there can be a place in the world where life is more delicious for its own simple sake.” Nathaniel Hawthorne

I am often asked why I keep returning to Florence. In her novel The Cookbook Collector Allegra Goodman answers for me.

"You forget that some aesthetic experiences satisfy…There is such a thing as excellence, and I do know it when I see it, and when I find it I am fulfilled. I want to keep on hunting endlessly. If I’m restless, that’s not because I want to be or because I can’t help it. I am not chronically dissatisfied; I’ve been disappointed. There’s a difference. When I discover something beautiful and right and rare, I’m happy. I’m content."

That is precisely the way I feel about Florence. For me there can never be another place like it. I am content there. Totally. That’s the way it has always been. I feel no need for anything more and am forever grateful for having found it and been given the chance to be there so often.

Some people want to travel, they want to go up the Amazon, explore the Great Barrier Reef, see the cheery blossoms in Japan. I am not one of them. When you find perfection and beauty, when you find a place that feels like home, your querencia, isn’t that sufficient?

Why do we call something beautiful? Why do we say Florence is a beautiful place? What is it that we mean when we say something is beautiful?

David Hume wrote: “Beauty is not a quality in things themselves. It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.”

Hume has got it just right, as usual. And in The Maytrees Annie Dillard writes:

“In her last years Lou puzzled over beauty…She never knew what to make of it. Certainly nothing in Darwin, in chemical evolution, in optics or psychology or even cognitive anthropology gave it a show."

And so I continue to “puzzle over” beauty until I return to Florence where it is on “show” everywhere.

The Cookbook Collector

I’ve finally found a book I can read. It has been a long slog to get to The Cookbook Collector by Allegra Goodman. What is it about this book makes it one I can read?

There are the people—they are intelligent, amusing, thoughtful, different, lovable, confused, conflicted and I’m drawn to them. I recognize them.

There is the situation—a bookstore in Berkeley, a software company in Cambridge, a software company in Palo Alto, all very interesting, at varying times, a part of my life.

There are the issues, the questions—to marry or not, to reveal or keep silent, to buy or to sell, the ambiguities of life and work, all well known to me now.

It is all there, written beautifully, it is smart, clever, serious and wise all combined in by a master of literary creation. Goodman has done her research, she knows what she is writing about, and there is much that is worth collecting.

Holiday

Marks in the Margin will join most Europeans and be on a holiday break (vacanze estive) for the rest of the summer. I hope you enjoy your summer and have a chance to read a good book or two.

Car-Free Florence

Three days ago on the streets outside the apartment I am renting in Florence there were no longer any cars whizzing by. Indeed, barriers manned by the Carabinieri were set in place that prohibited cars, taxis, trucks, buses, scooters, and motorcycles from entering the area. It was strangely weird and so very quiet and it remains so. Something seems missing, as if everyone has fled the city.

At first I thought it was temporary to block off the traffic during Festiva, Florence’s celebration of its patron saint. Eventually it became clear that was part of Florence’s rapidly expanding plan to increase the number of pedestrian friendly or car-free zones.

People were milling about, amiably chatting with one another on what otherwise would have been an area packed with noisy vehicles moving slowly, bumper to bumper between the many cars parked along each side of the street as those of us who were walking sought a safe place on the narrow sidewalks that are common throughout this city.

In a recent issue of the New Yorker Nicholas Leman writes about several new books that discuss the shifting trends in living in cities or suburbs. Edward Glaeser’s Triumph of the City, interested me most. According to Glaeser the key factor that makes a city successful is proximity, the way it brings people into contact, “enabling them to interact in rich, unexpected, productive ways.”

“In a big city, people can choose peers who share their interests, just as Monet and Cezanne found each other in nineteenth century Paris, or Belushi and Aykroyd found each other in twentieth-century Chicago.”

Florence is also one of the cities that epitomize Glaeser’s view of proximity. Its effects are precisely what I see happening on the streets outside my apartment now. When I’m here I often think of the extraordinarily creative period of the Renaissance in Florence. Leonardo, Michelangelo, Gaileo, Brunneleschi, Machiavelli, the Medicis--all working together, sometimes across the street from one another or down the block at bit.

Elsewhere I have written about Hillel Schocken and Malcolm Gladwell’s views of the experience of living in large metropolitan areas. Gladwell cites the work of Jane Jacobs:

“The miracle of Hudson Street, according to Jacobs, was created by the particular configuration of the streets and buildings of the neighborhood. Jacobs argued that when a neighborhood is oriented toward the street, when sidewalks are used for socializing and play and commerce, the users of that street are transformed by the resulting stimulation: they form relationships and casual contacts they would never have otherwise. Sparely populated suburbs may look appealing, she said, but without an active sidewalk life, without the frequent serendipitous interactions of many different people, "there is no public acquaintanceship, no foundation of public trust, no cross-connections with the necessary people."

When I first read that many years ago I was naturally struck by the lively public socializing that I have always observed in the neighborhoods here Florence. I doubt that the rarity of such encounters in America is because Italians are more outgoing than we are.

Rather I think it has more to do with almost haphazard way their cities have evolved over the centuries and the resulting relationship of the buildings to the street. The frequent socializing of the Italians occurs because their cities naturally invite fortuitous meetings between individuals as they stroll along the sidewalks or visit the piazza in their neighborhood.

“Now in Florence, when the air is red with the summer sunset and the campaniles begin to sound vespers and the day's work is done, everyone collects in the piazzas. The steps of Santa Maria del Fiore swarm with men of every rank and every class; artisans, merchants, teachers, arts, doctors, technicians, poets, scholars. A thousand minds, a thousand arguments; a lively intermingling of questions, problems, news of the latest happening, jokes; an inexhaustible play of language and thought, a vibrant curiosity;…all these spring into being, and then are spent. And this is the pleasure of the Florentine public.” Richard Goodwin

And Schocken, in his book, Intimate Anonymity, defines a city as: "a fixed place where people can form relations with others at various levels of intimacy, while remaining entirely anonymous." He concludes by noting: "The future of urbanism lies in the understanding that the city is a human event, not a sculpture." I am sure this is one of the secrets in the design of all good cities and the neighborhoods within them. It is surely one of the secrets of Florence.

Note: For a continuing discussion and superb photos of car-free cities throughout the world, including the most famous one in Italy, see the journal Car-Free Cities.

What is Social Psychology?

For years I taught and did research in experimental social psychology. In my day, the field emphasized the situational determinants of behavior, perhaps best exemplified by the studies of Stanley Milgram on obedience and disobedience to authority and Philip Zimbardo on behavior within simulated prisons.

There has been a marked change in the field since than, one that focuses less on the situation and more on the way a person views it. An example: It isn’t so much what you say, but what is heard.

I continue to believe the field is important as long as one is ever mindful of the extraordinary variability of behavior and the limits this places on its theories. How widely does the generalization apply--under all conditions and if not, which ones? Does it hold for me and how does this vary over the course of my lifetime?

Timothy Wilson, the author of Strangers to Ourselves, (“the most influential book I’ve ever read,” Malcolm Gladwell) and one of the most highly regarded social psychologists, recently gave an overview of the discipline on the Edge. As Wilson sees it, there are six very general ideas that guide the field today.

• It is not the objective environment that influences people but how they interpret it and the story they construct to account for why they acted the way they did.

• Recognizing the importance of unconscious processes on thought and behavior after a long period in which the field had ignored it.

• Individuals are often unaware of the true causes of their behavior. When they try to explain why they did what they did, they usually fall back on ad hoc theories or make one up.

• Individuals are poor predictors of how they will respond to future events. We usually overestimate the degree to which they will make us feel better or worse.

• One of the most effective ways to change dysfunctional behavior is to “edit” the stories individuals use to explain their behavior or “redirect” them in a more adaptive direction.

By way of illustration Wilson describes an intervention with students who were having a difficult time during their first year in college. The grades of students whose stories focused on their own failings improved “dramatically” when it was suggested their problems were normal for first year students, that it was the academic situation, rather than their own abilities that was responsible for their poor grades.

• Experimental tests of programs that address social problems can be fruitfully applied in determining if they work. Wilson cites two examples of an often-observed outcome of programs designed to reduce anti-social behavior.

When D.A.R.E., an anti-drug program that kids went through when they were in school, was tested with appropriate control groups, the findings revealed it not only didn’t work but it actually increased alcohol and smoking. Similarly a Scared Straight program designed to scare at-risk kids from a life of crime, increased the likelihood they would commit them.

In all such examples the results are formulated on the basis of a large sample of individuals. With evidence of this sort, one must ask is the effect a strong or weak one? What percent of the sample conforms to the general trend and is there any way to account for these differences? How confident can one be that any particular individual in the sample acted in accordance with the main outcome?

For me, the difficulties in answering these questions, difficulties that are inherent in the statistical methods used to analyze the results, are at the core of my disenchantment with social psychology and why it I am no longer very active in the field.

Fragments from Florence

It is the city itself—the city understood as a self; as a whole, a miraculously developed design. It is the city as what Italians call an insieme, an all-of-it-together. R.W.B. Lewis

Every June 24th Florence puts on a colorful celebration for its patron saint San Giovanni Battista. During the day, there are parades, concerts, a rowing competition along the Arno, much good cheer, and in the evening a fireworks show launched from the Piazza Michelangelo, a hillside square with a panoramic view of the city below.

The finals in a sport that is a combination of ruby, wrestling, and soccer also takes place in the afternoon at another square. It is said to be a rather bloody battle that has been cancelled in the past because of the violence among its spectators. While the match is scheduled this year, I have no desire to join the throng in attendance at this gladiator-like event.

The ease of walking everywhere is one of the delights of being in Florence. I walk to the market, to the bookstores, to the magazine stand and the trattorias that I go back to each year. This is what a city should be like, a place where everything is close by, it is not difficult to get by without a car, and as you saunter about the city, you are presented with one surprise after another.

Tomorrow the celebration continues with an event known as White Night in Nottarno in the Oltrarno (the other side of the Arno) when the shops, restaurants, and bars stay open well past midnight. Every piazza in the area will hold concerts and live performances. There will be street art demonstrations, late night dinners, jazz, Latino and rock concerts. Clearly there is far too much to do. What a place this is!

And yet at times I am taken aback when I read about the wartime experience of people who were living in Florence then. Now the streets are crowded, the people are smiling and there is gaiety everywhere. Then the streets were empty with threats of bombing and that knock on the door. The Jews were in hiding if they had not already been rounded up, everyone was hungry and had much to fear, there were worries about what the retreating Germans would do to their city and only hopes that the Allies would arrive soon.

“A grim long winter lies before us, at the end of which none of us can tell whether our homes will still be standing, or our children safe; and we must meet it with what we can muster of patience, courage, and hope” Iris Origo

The Parco Delle Cascine is an enormous park on the western edge of Florence that stretches along the Arno for miles. Over the years I have gone there often, first as a runner, then as a walker, and now as a picnicker. I marvel at how few people are usually there. Perhaps it is because the park is so vast and so heavily treed that the people are simply hidden in between the bushes and shrubs and down the long pathways that traverse the park from one end to the other.

The Number 7 bus takes travels up into the hills above city to the little town of Fiesole that was first a Roman and later Etruscan village and where I have dinner one night. On the bus trip back I sit down next to three young women who immediately try to engage me in conversation. I see at once that they are a little tipsy. So we have a lively conversation although they do not speak English and I do not speak Polish, their native language, or Italian which is what they are speaking or trying to speak to me.

Still we have a jolly time for a while, until another women approaches us and says with a note of exasperation that she can’t stand listening to us any longer. So she begins translating what everyone is saying, although I thought we were doing just fine before she comes to our “rescue.”

The three Polish women are heading for a pizza restaurant a little below Fiesole and they invite me to join them there. I had just eaten enough lasagna for all four of us, so regrettably I decline. Who knows what might have happened on that lovely evening up in the hills above the city of Florence had I accepted their invitation. In retrospect, I am glad that I had eaten a substantial dinner.

Journey to a Tuscan Villa

I’d like to invite you on a tour of an Italian retreat for writers, Santa Maddalena, located in the heart of Tuscany about a half-hour from Florence. It was the home of the writer Gregor Von Rezzori and his wife. When he died, she established the Santa Maddalena Foundation that offers visiting fellowships to four writers each year, as well supporting the Writers Festival described in my last two posts.

You don’t have to fly all night to Italy for this tour that will also include visits with some of well-known writers who have worked there. To see the beauty of this place, hear what it means to these writers, and be introduced to Rezzori’s wife, Baronessa Beatrice Monti della Corte von Rezzori, you need only watch two engaging videos included without additional charge on this no-cost, no-frills journey. How can you resist?

The Santa Maddalena utopia has been described this way: The land, located above a wooded ravine, has been transformed into a series of garden rooms….And an olive grove and pathway that link the house to the tower where many of the writers stay. Flower covered walls and groves of oak and chestnut trees mark the way to this former signal tower from the 15th century. Below, hidden by a screen of bamboo and trees is the pool and terrace.…There also is a vegetable garden with sun-ripen tomatoes in typical Italian style.

Recent fellows have included, Colm Tolbin, Michael Cunningham, Gary Shteyngart, and Zadie Smith (twice). Bruce Chatwin wrote of his visit: “The Tower is the place where I have always worked, clear headedly and well, in winter and in summer, by day or night - And the places you work well are the places you love most.”

Jens Christian Grondahl, a Danish writer, said, “Places reflect the people who have lived in them, and Santa Maddalena resonates and shimmers with the echoes and reflections of lives spent loving beautiful things."

The tour begins here:

And continues here:

Buon Viaggio

Why Write?

Zadie Smith was the featured speaker (Lectio Magistralis) at the Writers Festival (Festival degli Scrittori) I attended in Florence the other day. It was an odd presentation as we were given a pamphlet of her talk upon arriving that I was halfway through as she began reading it, word-by-word.

Meanwhile, the Italian version of her remarks was simultaneously shown on the screen behind the podium. I had expected at least a bit of spontaneity from Zadie Smith during this important lecture. There was none.

The title of her talk was Why Write? (Perche Scrivere?) and what I found most striking about it was the emphasis she placed on social factors in answering the question. She set the background by describing the bleak situation that confronts writers today, arguing that it is almost ridiculous to write a novel any more

There are few readers and it takes years to write one, let alone finding a publisher. If that hurdle is passed, you struggle to preserve its copyright, suffer through all the criticism it receives and the abusive remarks of bloggers. At the same time she suggests this has always been true for the writers of any era.

…Keats suffered the barbs of a few critics but never had to contend with half the internet calling him an asshole; Emily Bronte struggled to find an audience, but she wasn’t competing with a global audiovisual entertainment industry, cinema, television, online gaming, iPods, iPads, and tricked-out phones loaded with a lifetime’s worth of two-minute distractions.

Do writers consider all this misery as they put pen to pad of paper or pound away at the keyboard? I had imagined they rarely did, that they wrote because it was second nature to them or with only themselves in mind.

Why write then? If the act is so attendant with misery? Pope’s answer will be familiar to writers of all times and all ages. Because he couldn’t help it, any more than he could help his hump or his height.

But then she returns to the social factors in considering the question. She says that Pope also wrote to secure the approval of his peers and the opinions of his fellow writers. More so than the opinion of readers, and certainly more so than that of critics, whom he denigrates in the traditional way…

She cites Gregor von Rezzori to illustrate way writers are ever mindful of their readers. “It [the value of writing] has created a reality—and people are touched by it. I have this feeling. Do you? I saw this thing. Can I make you see it? I had this thought. Can you understand it? I am in this elation to death. Are you? I am wondering whether writing is possible. Are you?”

(Rezzori was an Austrian writer who married an Italian woman and together they settled in Tuscany. To honor Rezzori after he died, she established a foundation that supports a retreat for writers at their Tuscan villa, four of whom are offered resident fellowships each year (in 2009 Smith was one of them). As part of Florence Writers Festival, the foundation presents the Gregor von Rezzori Prize for the best work of foreign fiction translated in Italian.)

Smith continued that we write for other reasons too—because we are concerned with the “beauty in words and their right arrangement,” to engage in a dialogue with the wider world, “to counter that overwhelming sense of one’s own pointless,” and finally to see if we can, “that we do still have abilities, ideas and means of communication that are our own…”

But her emphasis on the social context of the writing enterprise did surprise me. It is not an answer I would have given to the question Why Write? and I wonder how many real writers would attach such weight to it. Do Philip Roth or Ian McEwan think for a moment about their readers? Did Virginia Woolf or Jane Austen?

Writers will always write, regardless of the views or number of their readers--like Zadie Smith who still writes, even though she has her critics and must experience all the modern distractions she mentioned that compete with her best efforts.

However, Smith has not published a novel in six years. Her last book was a set of literary essays and recently she has become the monthly book reviewer for Harper’s Magazine. Has she given up on “the act that is so attendant with misery”?

Writing to Connect

I wanted to describe the world, because to live in an undescribed world was too lonely. Nicole Krauss

When I write something, I’m not really writing for anyone but myself. I’m not trying to impress, persuade, or communicate with someone. Rather I’m writing to see if I can and can do it reasonably well. At least that is what I thought until I read an essay by Jhumpa Lahiri which was soon thereafter reinforced in a lecture I heard Zadie Smith deliver.

In her essay New Yorker (June 13th-20th) essay Lahari says when she began to write it was to connect with another person. “When I began to make friends, writing was the vehicle. So that in the beginning, writing, like reading, was less a solitary pursuit than an attempt to connect with others. I did not write alone but with another student in my class at school.”

This statement brought me to a halt. I had just written about the preoccupation young people have today connecting via the various digital technologies available to them. I was worried that they no longer knew how to be alone and spend time with themselves. Lahiri’s statement implies that perhaps writers in all their solitude are simply doing the same thing—trying in their way to connect with other people.

This seemed to me a bit of an insight. Perhaps I’m not writing for myself, at least not exclusively. Rather I may be writing just as much for my readers, however few there are, in the manner I can connect with them best. And how much different is that than connecting with someone online or on your cellphone?

It has been said that we search for company in literature. Is that any different than searching for company online? Imagine a person who reads all day in the company of their fictional friends. Is this person doing anything different than a young kid texting all day or sending messages to their e-mail buddies?

Of course, these questions are difficult to answer. But Lahiri’s simple statement in her essay did bring them into focus.

In How to Read and Why Harold Bloom comments that the search for friendship is one of the reasons we read. “Because you can know, intimately only a very few people, and perhaps you never know them at all. After reading The Magic Mountain you know Hans Castorp thoroughly, and he is greatly worth knowing.”

Of course, we read for other reasons too and we surely write for an equal number of reasons. But perhaps one of them is the search for friendship. I may error in thinking that we might be motivated to write in order to communicate with our peers, our friends, and other largely anonymous readers. Perhaps this expands the notion of “connecting” too broadly so that it covers too much of what we do, thereby rendering it untestable.

I have written a fair amount on writing and until recently did not view as a social activity. But I’ve been led to reconsider that view in light of the stream of questions Lahiri’s essay led me to and, by a strange co-incidence, a lecture I heard Zadie Smith give the other day in Florence. To be continued.

Virtual Identity

We live in an age when private life is being destroyed.
Milan Kundera

Have you ever wanted to live in a monastery, a secular one where contemplation, rather than prayer is the order of the day? I think you have to be a peace with solitude in order to ever consider that kind of life. Of course, you don’t have to move into a remote monastery to live like that. It is enough to live alone and try your best to bracket the ordinary distractions that seem to have overtaken contemporary life.

Yesterday I went to an exhibition in Florence that was a multi-media reflection on the theme of Virtual Identity. It dealt with the emerging way we define our self, both personally and collectively in the new digital culture, where we are constantly available and interacting with smart phones, social networks, computers, etc. “In today’s communication society, one seems to exist only if traceable online and in the constant flow of information”

The exhibition echoed a theme that many have written about, concerned not so much with the nature of the “communication society” but rather it’s cost, what is lost, what we are not doing as a result of our constant need to connect. And what is lost is the experience of solitude, of being alone, and having time for reflection and mind wandering, if you will.

When asked by an interviewer “Do you need a lot of solitude to write?” James Salter replied: “Complete solitude. Although I’ve made notes for things and even written synopses sitting in trains or on park benches, for the complete composition of things I need absolute solitude, preferably an empty house.” I believe almost every writer would reply similarly.

Recently I read A Time to Keep Silence by Patrick Leigh Fermor. Fermor was a British author, scholar and soldier and a highly regarded travel writer. He died last week and was eulogized with much admiration. In A Time to Keep Silence he describes his life in a French monastery and how he responded at various stages to monastic silence and isolation.

“If my first days in the Abbey had been a period of depression, the unwinding process, after I had left, was ten times worse. The Abbey was at first a graveyard: the outer world seemed afterwards, by contrast, an inferno of noise and vulgarity.”

He reports that after a painful period of adjustment he found that it was not long before he achieved a degree of peace and clarity of spirit that he had never known before.

He writes about the “staggering difference between life in the abbey and the world outside.” Indeed, I suspect most people today view monastic life as alien to their values and seem almost joyless. And I think this true for most forms of solitude that are often depicted as a lonely, boring type of existence.

In an essay, “One Hundred Fears of Solitude” published in Granta last year, Hal Crowther notes that the various digital communication techniques have destroyed the experience of silence, of autonomy, of privacy.

When his class was over one day“Two hundred students all pulled out their cellphones, called someone and said, “Where are you?” People want to connect.”

And later Crowther cites what a woman with a master’s degree told a reporter: “I lost my cellphone once. “I felt like my world had just ended. I had a breakdown on campus.”

In Exit Ghost Philip Roth writes, What had happened in these ten years for there suddenly to be so much to say—so much so pressing that it couldn’t wait to be said? Everywhere I walked, somebody was approaching me talking on a phone and someone was behind me talking on a phone. Inside the cars, the drivers were on the phone…For me it made the streets appear comic and the people ridiculous. And yet it seemed like a real tragedy, too. To eradicate the experience of separation must inevitable have a dramatic effect.

At dinner one night a few years ago at an outdoor café in Fiesole, a town in the hills above Florence, I observed a couple sitting silently together at their table. (Since then, I’ve seen this scene repeated over and over again.) Each one was holding their cell phone. I never saw them speaking to one another. Instead, they spent the entire time talking to someone on their phone. And when they were done speaking, they continued to fiddle with their gadget. I suspected they were searching for their e-mail messages or poking around the Web. I thought they were a couple on the verge of a meltdown.

E-Reader Update

I finally succumbed the other day and bought an e-reader—the iPad 2. It is my fourth (previously 1 Kindle and 2 iPads, each returned) attempt to come to terms with one of these gadgets.

The catalyst this time was the end of the $5 fee the New Yorker’s publisher was charging print subscribers to read the app version of the magazine. Subscribers are now able to download each issue of the magazine without any additional cost.

And since I was about to set foot in Italy once again, where the magazine is hard to find and if you do, it will always be two or three weeks old, probably older than the one you read before leaving. Now I can read it over here the morning it appears on the newsstands in New York. Since the new New Yorker has become much more politically and internationally focused than its former literary, cultural self, the articles don’t seem as dated as they might be when read weeks later.

To date I have enjoyed reading the magazine’s app. But I have not enjoyed being unable to highlight, copy, or save a passage of the text. I have tried and tried again to do this and have been uniformly unsuccessful. There is nothing on the Web that indicates it is possible. In response to my inquiry, the magazine sent the following reply:

Dear Subscriber:
At this time, highlighting and copying/ pasting is not a features in the app.
Sincerely,
Sherry

How disappointing! I am scarcely consoled by Sherry’s optimistic phrase, “At this time.” Maybe if enough readers voice their concern, as I have, the magazine will come around on this matter too.

Henceforth, when I read an issue on the iPad, I’ll have to have my laptop or a notepad on hand in order to copy anything and make occasional notes, both of which are part and parcel of the way I read the print edition or anything for that matter. And since the pages are not numbered, it is quite time consuming to try to find a passage sometime after finishing a piece.

I am currently getting used to the gadget. There are some books I will try to read and test what it is like to view films. There are several cinema apps (free) that look promising. And I’m embarrassed to admit that I have been playing a game, Words with Friends, with my wife. It’s a variation of Scrabble that she is a whiz at and when I manage to beat her, I am hoping that will be the end of my iPad game-playing-days. It is one heck of a time-waster.

In short, I see the iPad’s current limitations and some of its advantages for someone who primarily likes to read and watch films. Anything on the screen is bright and clear, like the quality of any Apple product, and to me that is a real advantage over the dull screen of the Kindle. There are an overwhelming number of tempting apps and those I prefer don’t cost a Euro.

This is a sort of status report. I’m not using the thing much. It remains to be seen whether I’ll ever get used to it or simply pass it on to someone else.

Banking in Italy

This is a door to an Italian bank, like the one I went to yesterday. Doors like this must be passed through to enter banks throughout this country. It isn’t the way you enter a US Bank, but here in Italy you just can’t walk into a bank at your pleasure.

Once you master the system in Italy, and it does take a bit of figuring out, you enter one door at a time, one person at a time, no more. First you have to press the enter (Entrata) button and if you don’t look like a threat to society, however they look these days and however that is determined, the door slides open and you walk into a small, narrow double-door chamber. So that’s the first door

You are now in an inner corridor, about the size of a small closet. Somehow you are inspected, although again you never know how, and if you pass muster, another door slides open and there you are, inside the bank. Eureka! You have made it. As you wipe the sweat off your brow, you finally can proceed to the counter.

I should note the procedure is reversed when you leave the bank. So you see it isn’t easy to transact your business at the bank or rob one for that matter.

In spite of these strict entry and exist requirements, much like getting in and out of an Ivy League college these days, banks are still robbed in Italy. According to a 2007 report in the Guardian, over 3000 bank robberies occurred in Italy the previous year, slightly more than half of those in all of Europe. And you know how many countries there are in Europe, don’t you?

You think you have a safe job working at an Italian bank? Wrong. According to the Guardian once again “bank clerks now face a one in 10 chance of being held up every year.”

“One Ferrara bank clerk, Stefano Bellettati, told La Repubblica that after being robbed nine times in 11 years, one heist stood out. "Four robbers with wigs and masks came in speaking English, French and Spanish among themselves to avoid identification and fled on bicycles."

One might wonder how they ever made it through those high-security, double-door entry closets. Perhaps they don’t have such systems outside of the major metropolitan areas. I am in the dark about this, although I suspect there are bank branches in neighborhoods outside the city center and small towns that may not have such tight security systems. I don’t doubt they cost a fair amount to procure and install.

I suppose this shouldn’t be surprising: People will find a way to do what they want regardless of how hard it is or the potential risk to them. Even trying to transact your business at your friendly Italian bank.

Sojourn in Tuscany

Marks in the Margin is going on Summer break as I’m off to Italy for a while. Postings, if any will be intermittent. In the meantime, you are welcome to browse the archives.

Vi auguro buona lettura molto durante l'estate.

Certified Copy

What is the difference between an original work of art and a copy? Can one put the same value on them? If not, why not? Does the distinction even matter? These are the questions initially raised in the movie Certified Copy and, on one interpretation the central theme of the film.

The film was written and directed by the Iranian Abbas Kiarostami. A woman, Juliette Binoche attends a lecture on copies of original works by an art historian, William Shimell. At the end of his presentation she goes to the podium to ask him a question, they converse for a while, and then she invites him to visit a nearby village in Tuscany with her.

Who could ask for more—an interesting question, two handsome actors, wandering through a Tuscan village? As they drive through the countryside, they continue to talk. The talk seems strange. It isn’t the sort of conversation you have with a stranger. You wonder if they might actually know one another after all, as she begins to flirt with him and then argue a bit. The owner of the café assumes they are married.

What is going on? What does Kiarostami mean by all this lofty discussion and incongruous talk?

You begin to interpret their conversation differently. You return to the original question. Are they re-enacting their marriage, creating a copy of the real thing? Is there a difference between the two?

You think perhaps they are married after all; perhaps they no longer live together. What fun to catch on or to think you catch on. You have that “I get it” feeling. Do you have to have a marriage like this to get it? Or is it obvious to everyone? It wasn’t to every moviegoer I spoke to about the film. And some of the reviewers were equally puzzled too.

Roger Ebert who I always count on for insight about the cinema confesses he isn’t sure what was going on. He writes, “Perhaps Kiarostami’s intention is to demonstrate how the reality is whatever the artist chooses, and that he can transfer from original art to copy in midstream. Or perhaps that’s not possible. Perhaps I have no idea what he’s demonstrating.”

And he concludes: “Is a skillful copy of the Mona Lisa less valuable than the original painting? What if the original had been lost? Would we treasure a copy? Such questions are raised by Certified Copy and not answered. Is raising them the point? Does Kiarostami know the answer? Does he care? At least we are engaged, and he does it well. Is that enough?….This is the best I can do with Certified Copy. Perhaps it was wrong of me to try.”

Come on, Roger--the re-enactment of their marriage is indistinguishable from their actual marriage. She wants to go somewhere; he doesn’t. She wants to have a meal; he isn’t hungry. She stops to have a conversation with some villagers; he walks on. Was their marriage any different? She wants him back; he is content in their separation. The roles they are playing in the story are duplicates of how they had always acted. The pas de deux of their marriage is their marriage.

As far as I’m concerned this is cinema at its best. It is also fiction at its best—an amusing story against a background of provocative questions, peopled by brainy individuals, wandering about the villages and countryside of Tuscany.

Just Being There

Each June, as the winter continues for what seems forever, I make plans to visit Italy. In the beginning, it was the single event that kept me going through the winter. Now I wonder if it will be the last time. It is also a chance to recharge the muse after finishing a project and I begin floundering around for the next one.

I do not speak Italian and have little appreciation of its artistic treasures. I have no business or research to undertake. It is enough to simply be there. It is also a stroke of good fortune that I can fly away to Florence, where I spend most of my days simply wandering from place to place, listening to the people, astonished by their energy and the beauty that surrounds them. Then there is the warmth, the warmth each day, all day and throughout the night.

It is reassuring to walk into a place to find the same individuals you recall from previous years--the strong and beautiful woman at the laundry; the quiet one at the kiosk, who retrieves the morning papers for me; those who serve me coffee or tea at the bars. There is something comforting about the people who are familiar in this far off place.

As part of warming up for this month long retreat, I’ve been reading Alastair Reid’s Whereabouts: Notes on Being a Foreigner.

Reid was a poet, staff writer at the New Yorker for several years and translator of many works of South American poets. Among other places, he lived in a remote Spanish village during part of each year. Here he took up residence among the villagers who had kept the modern world at bay.

Communication in the village depended on word of mouth and, as Reid writes in Notes from a Spanish Village “are at the mercy of memory. In the store, Dona Anna tells me that Don Anselmo wishes to see me, though she cannot remember when she got the message.”

There are two, no doubt more, ways to travel—to observe a place and to live among its people. I prefer the later. Upon returning to the unnamed village each year, Reid said he “looked forward keenly to picking up the long, unfinished conversations, the view from the inside.”

From his very first visit to Spain he realized it was going to matter a great deal to him and become a part of his life. “I found it recognizable at once, in the way that something one has been looking for subconsciously is recognizable.”

He bought a small home on a hill above the village, shopped in its few stores, helped the neighbors when needed, and lived a simple life, a life that was possible then in such a village where the climate was warm and where the people took pride in being self-sufficient. He had no car indeed, there were few cars in the village, although the bus did trek up the hill a couple of times a day.

He returned each year, in part, to confirm the village, even though as he says, it doesn’t care. But he wonders if “perhaps we come back to confirm ourselves?”

“From my first visit on, simply being in Spain has always occasioned in me a kind of joy, a physical tingle, which comes from a whole crop of elements: its light, its landscape, its language, and most of all its human rhythm, a manner of being that graces the place. It comes, however not from any such abstract awareness but from intense particularities: bare village café’s loud with argument and dominoes, or else sleepy and empty except for flies; sudden memorable conversations with strangers; the way Spaniards have of imposing human time, so that meals and meetings last as long as they need to.”

As I approach my return to Florence, I share many of Reid’s sentiments. It is warm there, the light is sparkling, as are its people, and while I am a foreigner who doesn’t speak the language, I do not feel like one. There are even times when I am recognized on the street or in a café and that, of course, always surprises and delights me both.

As he prepares to leave once again, always a difficult experience, Reid comments, “…the urgencies I have created for myself elsewhere seem trivial by now, and the timelessness I have grown into is something too rich to leave cursorily.”

Yes, always.

Particularities of Individuals

I continue to read experiments from the various branches of psychology. And they continue to mystify me. Who do they apply to? What is one to make of these generalizations derived from incomprehensible statistical analyses? When examined closely, the differences between conditions or individuals are due to multiple factors and relatively small, albeit statistically significant. What kind of game is this statistical analysis anyway?

When I find myself pondering these questions, I often turn to the work or Robert Coles. Coles is one of those rare individuals who combine a deep appreciation and knowledge of literature with his work as a physician, social researcher, and child psychiatrist. A recipient of one of the first MacArthur genius awards, he is the author of over eighty books and is Professor of Psychiatry and Medical Humanities at the Harvard Medical School.

For years Coles has taught a legendary course on the relationships between literature and the practice of medicine. He attributes his life-long interest in this topic to the work of the poet and doctor William Carlos Williams who became a close friend while he was a medical resident. In an interview Coles said, “I became so impressed with the dual life he lived as a physician and as a writer/social observer of sorts that I thought maybe I’d give it a try myself.”

In Times of Surrender Coles writes about his friendship with Williams and how it led him to realize the inherent affinity between medicine and literature—their common interest in the concreteness of particular human experience. Williams had written

“The abstract, categorical mind can be wonderful…But we‘ve got to keep a close check on all that....The doctor treating a patient out there on the front line falls back on himself…and he has to come to terms with not only a disease but a particular person: this patient, not patienthood, not lungs, in general, or kidneys or hearts in general, but one guy, one gal, one kid who has some trouble and is handling it in a way that may be different than anyone else’s way!”

And in his own work, Coles has emphasized he uniqueness of each individual; that variation is ever-present in the work he does. He put it this way, “I’m constantly impressed with mystery, and maybe even feel that there are certain things that cannot be understood or clarified through generalizations, that resolve themselves into matter of individuality, and again, are part of the mystery of the world that one celebrates as a writer, rather than tries to solve and undo as a social scientist.”

This is why he and other physicians have turned to literature and to writing about the lives of particular individuals, whether in a work of fiction as in Chekhov, Walker Percy and recently Rivka Galachen or non-fiction, as exemplified in the recent articles and books of Jerome Groopman and Autul Gawande, both of whom I have written about in this blog.

Doctors often write well because they never loose sight of specific patients and the way they express their illness. In his essays, Groopman has reminded us how our current medical beliefs are subject to qualification and often refutation. This is often the case with comparative research studies (clinical trials), whose findings may be relevant to some patients but not to others. These studies usually fail to pinpoint those to whom it applies and those to whom it doesn’t.

In reading literature we get to know a person as an individual, not an example of a personality dimension or character type. Quite often we get to know them better than the so-called real people we know or read about in research reports. In Reading Chekhov, Janet Malcolm wrote, “We never see people in life as clearly as we see the people in novels, stories, and plays; there is a veil between ourselves and even our closest intimates, blurring us to each other.”

And we don’t have to worry if their lives follow a common pattern or theoretical prediction. Their life is its own truth--unique and non-replicable.

When Prophecy Fails

How do you react when a prediction you have made is not confirmed? Do you discount the evidence, look instead for supporting data, or revise your belief while you seek further support?

The recent Doomsday predictions of Harold Camping and his followers reminded me of the classic study of these questions, When Prophecy Fails, by Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken and Stanley Schachter. Their work, published in 1956, examined what happened after the world didn’t end in a great flood according to the prediction of a cult of believers.

The cult developed following the purported message a housewife, Dorothy Martin, claimed to have received that the world would end in a great flood on December 21, 1954. Acting on this message, a sizeable number of believers quit their jobs, left college and in some cases their spouses and gave away their possessions to prepare for their departure on a flying saucer which would come to rescue them.

It was an elaborate Doomsday prediction and equally elaborate plan to escape it. What happened to the members of the cult when the world didn’t end on that Winter Solstice in 1954? Did they reject their belief or did they strengthen their commitment to it?

Virtually all of them failed to acknowledge the fallacy of their prediction or the message from another planet. Instead, Dorothy Martin claimed she had received another message that the “God of Earth” has spared the planet and the end of the world had been called off because her followers had “spread so much light.” As a result, members of the cult swung into action and tried more vigorously to spread its message by recruiting new followers.

Reaffirmation of belief in the face of contradictory information has been labeled confirmation bias, although Festinger and his colleagues viewed it within the framework of their theory of cognitive dissonance. On this account, it is unsettling to have one’s belief disconfirmed especially when it is firmly held and concrete actions have been taken that are consistent with it.

Individuals can take a variety of steps to reduce their dissonance—look elsewhere for supporting evidence, seek social support for their beliefs, strengthen their attitudes toward the basic idea, or discount the negative evidence. Recruiting others to join their cause was the most vigorous action the group took as they developed a campaign to spread its message to as wide a population as possible.

How did the believers of the recent Doomsday prediction react when confronted with their mistaken belief? Did they give it up or begin a vigorous recruiting campaign as the followers of Dorothy Martin did? Or did they attempt to justify their belief by claiming it was a further test of God to persevere in their faith?

It is really too early to know much about how these believers will respond in the long run. Most were naturally disappointed. However, apparently a few have admitted their error. Some had given away or sold their possessions, while others had drained their savings accounts.

Meanwhile, Harold Camping, the group’s leader, has been relatively silent. And the group has not been subject to the intensive, “participant observation” study that Festinger and his colleagues had carried out.

But if their dissonance theory is correct, one can anticipate a strengthening of commitment to their prediction in some form and increasing efforts to recruit others to their group. If none of this occurs, it will be just as interesting to see how proponents of dissonance theory respond to the disconfirming evidence.

Rendezvous in Rome

They met in Rome through a mutual friend. They were both in their sixties now, Adam, a musician, was there while his daughter was taking a master violin class, Miranda, an epidemiologist for a conference and solo vacation. They had been former lovers, first loves who were certain to be married until their relationship was shattered when Adam betrayed Miranda. Later we learn Miranda acted similarly.

“We thought that we would be each others one true love. We believed in that idea: the one true love. Now it is impossible that we should believe that, living as we have lived, having loved each other.”

This is the tale of Mary Gordon’s The Love of Our Youth. Do you ever wonder about a long lost love(s)? What are they doing now, where do they live, are they married and tolerably content? Do they wonder about you? It is unlikely you will have the type of encounter Adam and Miranda do or, if by chance you do, that it will be in such a historic place.

Adam and Miranda make the most of their time in Rome as they agree to meet each day to walk for a while in a different place. More often than not it is along the tree-lined paths of the Villa Borghese gardens, to a church or monument of the sort that can be found on practically every corner of Rome. Occasionally they linger over a meal in a café.

Adam had lived in Rome, he had family there and he wanted to show Miranda the places that meant most to him. As they stroll along, they slowly reveal themselves to one another and the persons they have become in the nearly a half-century since they last saw one another. “Are we fated to always be the people we were? Always making the same mistakes?”

Their lives, its rhythms, had grown radically apart. The things that had absorbed them once, no longer did. Yet they still play the question-asking game. “She enjoys this kind of play with him. It was who they were, people who played in this way. She doesn’t have people now who play in this way with her.”

Yes, they ask about each others life, families, and the work they do. But they explore more the real difference between them—the central concern of their lives. Adam is devoted to music; Miranda to political engagement and social change as expressed in her medical research in “undeveloped” countries. Their dialogue on these two lives pervades the novel.

“…she hears him playing a Bach partita, one of the preludes of Debussy, and she realizes that she had moved herself away from his music, thinking it irrelevant to the suffering of the world Now and newly she sees it as essential, an alternative to chaos, a sign of the goodness that is the counterpoint of the dread conditions she is living in.”

In reading Gordon’s novel I became the observer, following behind them as they recount their past, their uncertainties, and the way they are still bound to each other.

They circle around this truth, although Miranda does her best to deny it. The sharpness of her protest when Adam expresses “regret for the life we didn’t have together” awakens a regret sometimes felt at the passing of old loves, old selves, old hopes.

“It is time to go she says. They walk out to the road. Stand here, Adam, just stand here. It will be easier for me to remember if I can remember other things. You against this pale sky, the red, or is it purple of these leaves. And the silly palms, and the yellow of the plane trees. And the building, and the heads of all those poets, or whoever they are that made someone think they deserved to be remembered. By the likes of us."

A Writing Life

Recently a friend sent me an essay she wrote about the importance writing has meant to her throughout her life. It is a profound and moving testament. The essay, Reflections on the Writing Life, was an address she delivered on the 72nd anniversary of Kristallnacht and dedicated to Hannah Senesh, a Hungarian Jew, who was murdered by the Nazi’s in 1944 at the age of 23. She begins by quoting Senesh:

“I feel I could not possibly live without writing, even if only for myself, in my diary….A thought that is not put on paper is as if it had never been born. I can only truly grasp a thought when I’ve expressed it in writing.”

I often feel that way. It is one of the reasons I write these posts. I have an idea and I start trying to put it to words and I find the idea isn’t really much of an idea after all. Had I not tried to write about it, it might have lingered in my mind as some kind of a gem. Writing clarifies. Writing corrects. Writing discovers.

In her essay my friend compares writing to music. She hears a rhythm of words in her ear that “chime in my head as I write them down.” I know that feeling. I hear a sentence or a phrase that almost demands to be written.

Sometimes it is only a word and I type it and the rest of the paragraph and every now and then a page will follow almost automatically. It is quick and when I’m done, little in the way of editing seems to be required. That is unlike the usual case when each word or so requires a herculean effort.

Similarly, my friend says: “I listen for harmonies, point-counterpoint, cadences and fluency in the word-music I want to make as I weave word –patterns on the page.”

She reviews the course of her writing life, beginning as a child when she wrote poems, impressions, and the letters to the members of her family. “Letters are our charms against the ache of absence and separation, and the fear of loss.”

Although I have never met her or spoken to her, I have had the good fortune, perhaps even the richest of fortunes, to be one of her correspondents.

She wrote in her journal as if it was another person. It became “my listener, my confidant—a second person, a “you,” my old companero.”

Later in life she turned to academic writing as she pursued her career in sociology while at the same time writing short stories and then sometime later a trilogy of novels. In writing she discovered that one has an inner life and in reading and re-reading our writings, “we come to know ourselves more deeply.”

To write and then put it in the hands of a reader in the various ways there are to do that now is to make it permanent. In her essay, my friend expresses this much better. “To read another’s writing is to keep its light in the world.” If a book or letter is never read, it is as if it is hidden away in a box until it discarded and eventually turns to dust.

You will appreciate the spirit of her essay and why I wanted to write about it by reading its conclusion:

“Let us, People of the Book, go on reading and writing, let us continue the conversation between the generations, let us be keepers of the flame, let us keep their lights in this world as we go on kindling our own beside them.”

The essay was written by Audrey Borenstein, co-founder of the Life Writing Connection (with Olivia Dresher), author of One Journal’s Life: A Meditation on Journal-Keeping, Redeeming the Sin, and other works of short fiction, poetry, and criticism, including The Kingdom Where Nobody Dies, and Evanesce.

Spring Break

Marks in the Margin will be on Spring Break for an indefinite period. Thank you for reading and responding. You are welcome to write to me at rkatzev@teleport.com. And please feel free to browse the list of Topics archived on each page of the blog.