American Resistance Heroine

In the late fall of 1943 Virginia D’Albert-Lake and her husband Phillipe were contacted by a local baker in the town of Nesles, France where they were living at the time. He asked the couple if they would come to his shop to meet some strangers.

Virginia was a young American teacher who met Philippe d’Albert-Lake in 1936 while traveling in France. Philippe was from a family of substantial means with two apartments in Paris and a home in Brittany. They were married in 1937 and moved to a small cottage in Nesles, north of Paris.

The strangers the baker asked them to meet were several downed American pilots that he was hiding until he could arrange their return to England. He asked the young couple if they could help. They agreed to do what they could.

Virginia and Phillipe contacted the French Resistance to organize their return to England via the Comet escape line, a key part of the Resistance that transported downed airman through France, across the Pyrenees, into Spain and eventually back to England where they could resume their missions.

Returning military servicemen to England was a crucial part of the wartime effort since it took considerable time and money to train new airman. It is estimated that 4,000 Allied airmen were successfully returned to England by means of the Comet escape line before the D-Day landings in 1944. It is also believed that at least 12,000 individuals took part in this highly risky wartime activity.

Virginia was one of three American women who participated in the French Resistance and is thought to be the only one who has provided a first-hand account of her experiences in her diary and memoir An American Heroine in the French Resistance.

In this account she makes it clear that she did not join the Resistance out of any deep political conviction, but rather because she “was simply doing the right thing.” No matter her motivation, she “had a share” in helping to ensure the successful escape of approximately 200 downed Allied airman. Much of this work involved providing the aviators shelter and assistance in Paris, moving them to secret hideouts in apartments there, or at a hidden forest encampment south of Paris.

It was on one of these risky journeys south of Paris that the Germans captured her. At the time she was on a scouting expedition ahead of the group of airmen she was escorting to the hideaway. She spent the next eleven months in one German camp after another finally ending up at the “infamous” Ravensbruck concentration camp where she almost died.

In her memoir Virginia describes a premonition she had just before she was captured:

“Something broke inside me. I knew somehow that it was all over. There was no more reason to hope. The sun that only a few moments ago was so bright and warm, now seemed eclipsed by a grey fog….I had no choice but to stand there in the center of the dusty road, grip my [bicycle] handle bars, and wait.”

While she participated in the Resistance barely a year, the tasks she undertook were both dangerous and significant. After the war was over, she received numerous awards from the Allied governments including the United States Metal of Honor, the Order of the British Empire and the Legion of Honneur, France’s highest honor.

I imagine of equal if not more personal importance to her was the gratitude expressed by the many airmen whose life she had saved, as well as those concentration survivors who after the war testified to her “courage” and “generosity.”

Note: I am grateful to Judy Litoff for the background information she provided in the Introduction to An American Heroine in the French Resistance.

Essays on Elsewhere

The Egypt I craved to return to was not the one I knew, or couldn’t wait to flee, but the one where I learned to invent being somewhere else, someone else. Andre Aciman

Andre Aciman wanders around the labyrinth of his mind like a person who can’t find his way out of the Hampton Court maze. He tries one direction, it is blocked, turns around, goes back over the same route only to come to another dead end. Meanwhile, he wishes he was on the path over the next hedge and when he finally reaches it, he yearns to be back on the one he just left.

This is the way his essays are written. You have to enjoy this way of meandering around your synapses to enjoy them. His latest collection, Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere, consists of eighteen partially linked essays about memory, place, exile, and identity.

Aciman says he always begins his mental meanderings by writing about place. “Some do so by writing about love, war, suffering, cruelty, power, God, or country. I write about place, or the memory of place. I write about a city called Alexandria, which I’m supposed to have loved and about other cities that remind me of a vanished world to which I allegedly wish to return. I write about exile, remembrance and the passage of time. I write—so it would seem—to recapture, to preserve and return to the past, though I might just as easily be writing to forget and put that past behind me.”

In Alibis he writes about New York, where he lives, Paris, where he always dreams of being, Rome where he lived for three years with his family after leaving Alexandria which he also writes about, as well as Tuscany, which may be the one place where he doesn’t dream of being elsewhere-- Barcelona, Cambridge, a bookstore someplace or the Tuscany that he dreamed of being in while living in Egypt.

“And this is what I’ve always suspected about Tuscany. It is about many beautiful things—about small towns, magnificent vistas, and fabulous cuisine, art, culture, history—but it is ultimately about the love of books. It is a reader’s paradise. People come here because of books. Tuscany may well be for people who love life in the present—simple, elaborate, whimsical, complicated life in the present—but it is also for people who love the present when it bears the shadow of the past, who love the world provided it’s at a slight angle Bookish people.”

How I wish I had written that for it is precisely the way I feel when I am in Tuscany.

Aciman is Jewish which is to say that his parents were Jewish, the reason they had to flee Egypt. But also like myself, he is and isn’t Jewish. Neither of us wants to be anything but Jewish provided we don’t have to practice it, learn its rituals, or accept its religious tenets. At times he also wonders what it would be like to live in a place where everyone is Jewish but at other times knows it would not be easy.

Aciman cites an exchange or imagined exchange he had with a woman he was hoping to see in Paris, an exchange that is a perfect reflection of the manner in which he thinks or at least writes about the way he thinks or imagines he does. “Since you’re going to Paris, you don’t want to go to Paris. But if you were staying in New York, you’d want to be in Paris. But since you’re not staying, but going, just do me a favor. When you’re in Paris, think of yourself in New York longing for Paris, and everything will be fine.”

All the essays in this collection are written in this manner. Oddly I am one who greatly enjoys reading them, their contradictions, paradoxes, ambiguities, questions, uncertainties, backtrackings, recollections, sometimes true, sometimes false, or partially false, that become true in the writing. I think that is the way my mind works sometimes, but not all the times or the way I might like it to work, since it rarely works that way at all.

"All the Wondering Things and Times We Had"

Hemingway. The almost forgotten writer. The writer who meant everything to me when I first starting reading fiction. The writer who you either cherish or deplore. The writer whose life almost everyone thinks of first instead of what he wrote. James Salter is an exception

In his essay, “The Finest Life You Ever Saw” in the October 13th New York Review of Books, Salter reviews Paul Hendrickson’s recent book, Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961. Part of the book is about Hemingway’s cabin cruiser, Pilar, that he used to fish for marlin off the coast of Cuba and, as some have claimed, hunt down German submarines during World War II. It is also a carefully research personal biography of Hemingway’s life and writing in Havana between 1934 and 1961.

Salter also writes with a sense of reverence about Hemingway's style, the writing that made him great, the one that so many have tried but failed to imitate, only to appear as a parody. Hemingway’s spare writing style is easy to mimic and many have tried. There is even an annual International Imitation Hemingway competition that has been held for over thirty years.

Salter describes Hemingway’s distinctive voice by commenting “…he had his poetic gift and also the intense desire to give to the reader the full and true feeling of what happened, to make the reader feel it had happened to him. He pared things down. He left out all that could be readily understood or taken for granted and the rest he delivered with savage exactness.”

Here’s an example from the start of Hemingway’s short story In Another Country.

“In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more. It was cold in the fall in Milan and the dark came very early. Then the electric lights came on, and it was pleasant along the streets looking in the windows. There was much game hanging outside the shops, and the snow powdered in the fur of the foxes and the wind blew their tails. The deer hung stiff and heavy and empty, and small birds blew in the wind and the wind turned their feathers. It was a cold fall and the wind came down from the mountains.”

Salter writes about the thousands of letters, estimated between six or seven thousand that Hemingway wrote to his many friends, long letters and quotes from a few. I marvel at this number and think of other writers who wrote just as many letters, if not more, in their lifetime.

Voltaire is said to have written about 15,000 letters in his 83-year life, other writers were dedicated letter writers--Bellow, T.S. Eliot, Henry James, etc. I think how few letters are written today, not just by well-known writers but each of us. The loss to historians in the future who want to know about the eminent is incalculable. The loss to those of us who want to review our earlier correspondence is just as great. I speak from personal experience here.

Salter concludes his review with a statement made about Hemingway by the wife of the journalist George Seldes: “Forgive him anything, he writes like an angel.”

Democracy Now

Democracy Now is an independent, daily, ultra-progressive news program that can be viewed on some cable television channels, the Web and on devices that have its app. Its reports and analyses are presented with a refreshingly liberal perspective compared to other media news programs.

If you have time this weekend, I encourage you to listen to its video interview with Stephane Hessel, the author of Indignez-vous that I’ve been writing about. I believe it will be well worth your time, both to hear and see Hessel speak about his convictions and the incredible life he has lived.

A Call to Action

The motivation that underlay the Resistance was outrage. We, the veterans of the Resistance movements and fighting forces of Free France, call on the younger generations to revive and carry forward the tradition of the Resistance and its ideas. We say to you: take over, keep going, get angry! Those in positions of political responsibility, economic power and intellectual authority, in fact our whole society, must not give up or let ourselves be overwhelmed by the current international dictatorship of the financial markets, which is such a threat to peace and democracy....

It is up to us, all of us together, to ensure that our society remains one to be proud of: not this society of undocumented workers and deportations…not the society where our retirement and other gains of social security are being called into question; not this society where the media are in the hands of the rich.

The worst possible outlook is indifference that says, “I can’t do anything about it: I’ll just get by.”

These are the words of Stephane Hessel in his powerful manifesto, Indignez-Vous, that was first published late last year in France as a short, stapled pamphlet. Indignez-Vous is a French term that literally means be indignant. I think of it more as a mandate to express your outrage, especially outrage against injustice.

It can now also be read in various English versions under the title Time for Outrage. Charles Glass, the London publisher of the book, writes that it was “a publishing sensation on its first appearance, and since then has provoked a heated debate about social justice, the power of protest and how to harness our common indignation.” The Guardian reported the essay topped the Christmas best-seller list in France last year.

No wonder: what could be more timely! Stephane Hessell is a remarkable person. He is almost 94, a hero of the French Resistance, captured by the Germans and sent to concentration camps where he was tortured, and was only able to avoid being hanged at the last moment. He finally managed to escape and soon thereafter met up with the advancing American army. After the war, he participated in drafting the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Late last month Hessell spoke to students at Columbia University about his book. The Columbia Spectator reported the book’s message is widely “applicable: Hessel’s book is a call to action.” You didn’t have to look far down the street to realize his message is being clearly heard and above all practiced.

During his talk to the students Hessel urged them to find their own personal outrage and then do something about it. “You will find something, and when you find it you must commit.” It is entirely too easy to do nothing. Hessel argues this is not a time for apathy, rather this is a time for outrage. “Never give up, never be indifferent.”

I write about Hessel because of my own failures to act at various times in my life. It isn’t that I’ve been indifferent. Rather it’s that my beliefs, my convictions even when they were strong, were never followed by actions.

Yes, I made my share of contributions to the organizations I believed in. But that was easy, too easy and I was never really able to break away from the work I thought I needed to do. Individuals, like Hessel, who have more courage, more commitment to their convictions than I do, forcefully remind me that while important, outrage is not enough. It is also necessary to act.

Female Agents

On the night of April 24, 1942 Lise de Baissac was parachuted behind German lines into occupied France near the town of Poiters, south of the Loire. De Baissac was an agent for England’s Special Operations Executive (SOE) established by Churchill to work with the French Resistance. Her mission was to set up a safe house for a group of British trained agents to be sent to France.

She returned to London on August 16, 1943 just before the Germans discovered her “circuit” in Poitiers. Undeterred, she returned to France in April of the following year to work with another SOE group. A leader in the British Special Forces group of World War II wrote that in risking her life every day she played an indispensible role in aiding the guerilla groups of the French Resistance who inflicted heavy losses on the German forces.

Lise de Baissac died in 2004 ago at the age of 98. Her exploits were the inspiration for the film, Female Agents (Les Femmes de l’Ombre) that I saw recently. The film is reported to have won critical praise in France for recognizing the role of women resistance fighters during the War. The film’s director said, he first thought of making the film after reading de Baissac’s obituary in The Times of London.

The plot is complex but in a word four women are parachuted into occupied France in May of 1944 on a mission to protect the details of the forthcoming Allied landing and kill a colonel in a German counter-intelligence unit who is on the verge of learning its location. The Germans have captured an English geologist who had studied the beaches of Normandy and might therefore be forced (i.e., tortured) into revealing the plans.

They join a fifth woman who is already undercover with the Resistance. There are failed night-time shootouts, regroupings, the suicide of the captured brother of the group’s leader, harrowing torture scenes, the capture and subsequent killing of four of the original group of five women, and finally the successful assassination of the German colonel by the woman playing of role of Lise de Bassac, the only surviving member of the original group.

I write about this film out of admiration for these individuals whose convictions meant enough to them to put their lives at risk. In fact, I marvel at such individuals. The fact that they were women is less important to me, although it is clear they never achieved the recognition that men did.

Lise de Baissac was one of the few to be recognized. She was awarded a Legion d’Honneur, the highest decoration in France, and the Croix de Guerre, a French military decoration. In Britain she was honored with a MBE, a member of the Order of the British Empire.

The film ends as the fictional de Baissac lights four candles in a church in remembrance of the four who didn’t survive.

The Art of Simplicity

Here’s to the crazy ones. The rebels. The troublemakers. The ones who see things differently. While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius.
Apple’s 1977 “Think Different” Advertising Campaign.

Steve Jobs went to Reed College where I taught psychology throughout my academic life and was a student while I was there before he dropped out after his first semester. For a while after, he continued to hang around the department, primarily in the heavily electronic physiological lab and audited several of our classes.

And it is true, as he noted in a graduation speech he delivered at Stanford several years ago that he was troubled by the fact that it cost his parents so much to send him there. I doubt, however, that was the only reason he dropped out.

I write about Steve Jobs not only out of respect but also because he and his original team at Apple brought the computer world to me. Throughout his life he remained extremely generous to Reed. After the first computers were produced at Apple, he gave each faculty member one and he continued the practice with each succeeding version of their personal computers.

I never would have learned to use one were it not for the simplicity, for its user friendliness as it is called, of these computers. That feature is characteristic of all Apple products, They are designed to be models of simplicity.

It was simple matter to learn how to use them, something I had previously found impossible with other computer operating systems around then and still do with complicated Windows-based computers. In a way, the early Mac with its graphic interface opened up a new life for me, gave me a better and clearer way to express myself, and eventually with the development of the Web and the Internet expanded the sources of information and the ease of obtaining them regardless of where I am.

You have to remember when this was, otherwise it makes no sense given the electronic world of young people today. It was in 1984, twenty-seven years ago, that the first Macintosh computer was produced. The picture above is what it looked like and something like it sat on my desk at Reed not long after it was manufactured.

I wrote my first book on it, a book on promoting energy conservation, with a word-processor known as MacWrite. Since my handwriting is atrocious, completely unreadable even to me, I never could have written such a heavily documented book without it.

Everyone once it a while I stop to think about the larger implications of the new products that Jobs and his group at Apple have developed—the iPhone, iPod, the iPad. I’m not entirely certain they represent the positive contribution the personal computer does.

Haruki Murakami wrote about life before and after the development of the electronic revolution recently. I was reminded of what he said about this issue in thinking about the death of Steve Jobs and his enormous influence on society.

By setting the story [“Town of Cats,” published in the New Yorker] in 1984, before cell phones and e-mail and the Internet had become common, I made it impossible for my characters to use such tools. This in turn was frustrating for me. I felt their absence slowing down the speed of the novel. When I thought about it, though, not having such devices at the time—both in daily life and in the story—ceased to be an inconvenience. If you wanted to make a phone call, you just found a public telephone; if you had to look something up, you went to the library; if you wanted to contact somebody, you put a stamp on a letter and mailed it. Those were the normal ways to do those things. While writing the novel (and experiencing a kind of time slip), I had a strong feeling of what the intervening twenty-seven years had meant. Sorry to state the obvious, but maybe there’s not much connection between the convenience of people’s surroundings and the degree of happiness they feel

Serialized Commonplace Book

“All educationalists taught that reading was to be carried out pen in hand, ready to note in the margin metaphors, similes, exempla, sententiae, apophthegms, proverbs, or any other transportable units of literary composition. These were then to be copied out into one or more notebooks, divided either alphabetically or by topics, and to be reused in one’s own writing.” Brian Vickers

The Berkeley Daily Planet is a free local newspaper published in Berkeley, California. It began as a daily but now publishes twice a week on Tuesday and Friday.

It has a progressive, liberal outlook (this is Berkeley, after all) and, wonder of wonders, a regular “My Commonplace Book” column written by Dorothy Bryant.

Bryant’s column consists of an excerpt from a printed book, as well as comment explaining why it captured her interest. This is rare in virtually all other commonplace books. Here is her last entry and annotation dated October 4, 2011.



Separation
Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.

—W. S. Merwin, b. 1927

Three lines—one homely, familiar image—the sharp point of a needle piercing my being, dragging the thread of a loved one’s absence, stitching the “color” of this loss through me and into “everything I do.”

Exactly. Using abstract, even vague terms like “absence” and “separation,” Merwin opens us to the widest possible range of loss, great or small, brief or permanent. In sixteen words, clear to any reader, he says more than hundreds of pages can tell about the loneliness, loss, and grief—of brief or long-term physical or psychic distance—or of the ultimate separation: death.

Not that we learn something new, but that we are reminded of something that, at a deeper level, we already know.

And, somehow, we are profoundly, paradoxically, comforted. He has stitched our losses into a color, a texture added to us.

That’s why we need poets.

In a way Bryant’s column is rather like the serialized novels that used to be published in English newspapers during the Victorian era. Then it was the practice of popular novelists including Dickens, Conrad and George Eliot to publish their new works of fiction in installments, usually in very affordable newspapers.

There are a few commonplace books that appear on the Web, if not on a daily, at least a weekly basis. But few are accompanied by commentary as Bryant’s is in her weekly and sometimes bi-weekly column.

Only in Berkeley.

Occupy Wall Street

The Wall Street protests continue and are spreading. It is both gratifying and surprising. Here are some recent developments.

Protests and action meetings are occurring throughout the country in such cities as Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, etc. For a complete list of both national and international support sites see the Occupy Together website.

There is a very active community forum on the protest movements on Facebook.

The media is paying increasing attention. The Times has published a number of articles about the Wall Street Occupiers and has shown video interviews with some of the participants on its website. An older woman said she had been there every day but one, and wanted to help “these kids do what my generation never did.”

Professor Cornell West has spoken to the group, as has Michael Moore. Noam Chomsky sent a strong message of support to the activists.

A food station has been established in the park where the protestors have gathered. Information stations, recycling and media centers, as well as a power generator have been set up. There is even a library at one end of the park with boxes of donated books. The Times reports there are also therapists on location.

The group is now publishing a, free weekly newspaper, The Occupied Wall Street Journal.

Up until recently it has relatively peaceful protest. However, last weekend there was one ugly incident in which an officer pepper sprayed a number of female protesters. The episode is currently under investigation by the police department and Manhattan district attorney.

And during the past weekend 700 demonstrators were arrested as they tried to cross the Brooklyn Bridge on the roadway, blocking traffic, while those who used the walkway were not.

The New York Police Department continues to deploy hundreds of officers on the edge of the park. To date, there is no sign they will attempt to put an end to the protest.

The movement seems to be leaderless, without structure, an end-point and or concrete goal, other than voicing discontent at the varieties of economic injustices in this country.

The development of similar protests throughout the major metropolitan centers of this country is truly remarkable. No doubt it reflects a widespread and perhaps growing support of the movement’s protest against the nation’s economic inequalities.

Day Twelve

I’m back. There’s too much going on now, too much that I’d like to write about.

Hereafter, I’ll write more briefly and broaden the topics a bit.

I’ve been galvanized by Occupy Wall Street. At last we have someone speaking out on economic inequality in this country!

For years we’ve been reading about this issue, the fact that 1% of the population receives 25% of the nation’s income and holds 42% of the nation’s wealth, that these gaps are growing so that now roughly 46,200,000 people in this country live in “poverty,” defined as an annual income of $22,113 for a family of four.

Does it make any sense for one person to earn over $400,000,000 a year in salary or $300,000,000 or slightly less?

Is there any fairness in this? Is it the least bit reasonable? Does whatever rationale is invoked, let alone performance displayed, justify executive compensation of this magnitude, an annual payout, mind you. And this is only their salary, not the taxes they end up paying or the generous options and bonuses that often go with it. What kind of economic justice is this anyway?

Meanwhile, banks repossessed almost 1,000,000 homes last year and the number may be even more this year.

I quote from the website of Occupy Wall Street Now:

Our Mission
On the 17th of September, we want to see 20,000 people to flood into lower Manhattan, set up beds, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months.
Like our brothers and sisters in Egypt, Greece, Spain, and Iceland, we plan to use the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic of mass occupation to restore democracy in America. We also encourage the use of nonviolence to achieve our ends and maximize the safety of all participants.

Who is Occupy Wall Street?
Occupy Wall Street is leaderless resistance movement with people of many colors, genders and political persuasions. The one thing we all have in common is that We Are The 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%.
The original call for this occupation was published by Adbusters in July; since then, many individuals across the country have stepped up to organize this event, such as the people of the NYC General Assembly and US Day of Rage. There'll also be similar occupations in the near future such as October2011 in Freedom Plaza, Washington D.C.


Those who believe that peaceful protests of this nature serve no purpose and accomplish even less might benefit from a closer look at history, especially recent history where far more people put far more at risk in acting upon their beliefs.

Goodbye

After blogging for over three years, it’s time to say goodbye. Thank you for reading and for responding. Marks in the Margin will continue to be live should you want to consult the Archives (Topics). And you can still send me messages and questions at rkatzev@teleport.com. It’s been a great experience for me and I hope once in a while for you too.

The Book Is Dead?

I go to the gym and see people reading. I go to Powell’s Bookstore and the place is jammed with readers. In last week’s New Yorker I learn about the Dickens Universe, a summer camp at the University of California in Santa Cruz where for decades Dickens’s fans, ranging from university professors to realtors, actors, and auto mechanics, young and old, ignorant and scholarly, have been spending a week each summer reading, discussing, and listening to lectures about one of his novels.

Jill Lapore, staff writer for the New Yorker and professor of American History at Harvard attended this camp this summer. She writes:

"There is very little time to sleep at Dickens camp…Reading seminars start at eight-thirty and lectures are delivered in the morning, afternoon, and evening, followed by late-night screens of film adaptations of the week’s novel. There are daily rehearsals of an original farce, written for the occasion. In addition, there are faculty seminars, graduate writing colloquiums, and teaching workshops, not to mention Victorian tea, a Victorian dance, and, presumably, summer romance for graduate students, the less Victorian the better.”

And as if I needed anything more, I read in the Times this Sunday that Ann Patchett reminds me “Americans are still reading books.”

Regardless of who she is, and the fine novels she has written, and the relatively small size of her sample, one cannot entirely discount Patchett's reassuring words as she reports “from the front” on her recent coast to coast book tour to promote her new novel, State of Wonder.

“Night after night after night I showed up in a different bookstore and people were there with their hardbacks. Sure, I signed a couple of iPad covers, Kindle covers. I’ve got no problem with that. But just because some people like their e-readers doesn’t mean we should sweep all the remaining paperbacks in a pile and strike a match. Maybe bookstores are no longer 30,000 square feet, but they are selling books.”

The evidence: " From Porter Square Books outside of Boston and River Run Bookstore in Portsmouth, N.H., to Politics and Prose in Washington and the fabulous Powell’s of Portland. From Birchbark Books in Minneapolis, to my most beloved McLean & Eakin in Petoskey, Mich., the house was packed. Boswell Book Company in Milwaukee, what a bookstore that is! And the Book Stall near Chicago. (I hit them both in a single day.) Book Passage and Kepler’s and Bookshop West Portal, all in the Bay Area, and on down to the legendary Square Books in Oxford, Miss. (which, 20 years before, filled its entire window with my first novel at a time when I could not draw more than three people who were not related to me). The book, I am here to tell you, is not dead, and neither is the bookstore."

So firmly was she persuaded of the future of small, independent, locally owned bookstores, that she and her business partner have started their own. It will be called Parnassus Books and will open in Nashville, their hometown, this October. Its Mission Statement can be found here.

Is there a booklover who has not dreamed of doing something like that?

Knowing & Behaving

In the August 2nd New Republic Adam Kirsch writes about several new books that discuss the experience of “ordinary Germans” during the Holocaust. The problem of the “ordinary German” as Kirsch puts it is to try to explain how “citizens from an advanced society, famous for its culture and education—could be led in the space of a few years to commit a genocide of the Jews.”

Of course, we know that this problem is not confined to citizens of Germany; it is the problem of any human being when asked by an authority under extreme pressure to attack their neighbors. And who among us believes that they would do that?

Can we learn anything from historical events like this? Is knowing about them sufficient to immunize us against strong pressures to commit violence against another human being? This is the age-old question of the effect of knowledge on behavior.

The research on this question is far from cheering. In study after study it has been demonstrated that prior knowledge or anticipating an event has very little effect on how we will behave when put in similar one. Perhaps the most relevant example of the situation Kirsch is talking about is the well-known experiments of Stanley Milgram in which individuals where asked to deliver shock to another human being in the guise of a study on the effects of punishment.

To study the effects of knowing about these studies, another experimenter gave subjects a good deal of written and verbally presented information about Milgram’s experiments. Then the subjects were asked to serve as experimenters themselves in a similar study. Of the 24 informed subjects only 1 resisted the demands of the authority to continue the experiment in spite of the clearly visible distress of the confederates who were ostensibly given shock for errors they made on a learning task. The author writes:

“For these participants, knowing that people are willing to coerce others and cause distress to obtain and scientific understanding and feeling the original Milgram study to be personally distasteful, did not preclude behaving in a manner similar to that obtained in the original Milgram study.”

The increasing public awareness of Milgram's research provides an additional test of this effect. His research has been widely written about in the media, portrayed in television plays and films, and was the subject of at least one popular song. The studies have been discussed in countless public forums and many academic disciplines. Milgram's work is as well known as any program of research in psychology.

If, as a result of this dissemination process, individuals have become more "enlightened" about unreasonable demands of authority, one might expect a diminution in the overall level of obedience in ensuing replications of his work. However, a recent analysis of these replications, which covered a 22-year period, from 1963 to 1983, found no systematic decline in obedience during this time. The overall level of obedience in the most recent studies was just as high (65% of the subjects) as it was in the earlier ones.

What can be done in the face of such evidence? It is difficult to discount it, given the various situations in both the laboratory and under natural conditions in which it has been observed. Frankly, I am not sure there’s much that can be done. In a situation of strong social pressure, even the strongest succumb.

Kirsch concludes: “A society than can only be saved by heroes is not going to be saved: there will always be far more selfish and corrupt people, than good but ineffectual ones...Someone such as Sophie School, the twenty-one year old who distributed anti-Hitler pamphlets in Munich knowing it would lead to her death, deserves everlasting praise … but she knew full well that she was not going to stop Hitler. It took the Allied armies and many millions of death to do that.”


References
Shelton, G. A. (1982). The generalization of understanding to behavior: The role of perspective in enlightenment. Doctoral dissertation, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.

Blass, T (2000). The Milgram paradigm after 35 years: Some things we now know about obedience to authority. In Thomas Blass (Ed) Obedience to Authority: Current Perspectives on the Milgram Paradigm. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Fait Divers

Teju Cole whose recent novel, Open City, I greatly admired, is now at work on a non-fiction account of Lagos, his hometown for seventeen years. He writes, “And what is there to know about a city beyond statistics, beyond population, tallest buildings, GDP, is individual human experience.”

To capture this aspect of city life Cole was drawn to what he refers to as “small news,” the sort of thing your read about in the local newspapers and crime sections, or see on the Internet. He says this type of writing is best described by a French term, fait divers, which he translates as “incidents” or “various things.” Here are two examples he mentions:

“Raol G, of Ivry, an untactful husband, came home unexpectedly and stuck his blade in his wife, who was frolicking in the arms of a friend.”

Another: “A dishwasher from Nancy, Vital Frerotte, who had just come back from Lourdes cured forever of tuberculosis, died Sunday by mistake.”

Both of these fait divers are short, small incidents with large effects, at times ironic in tone, at other times rather humorous on first reading. Cole has begun posting these pieces on his Twitter page. He says that what all his small fates have in common is their “closed circle of the story. It needs neither elaboration nor sequel.”

He also claims you never see anything like them in the New York Times. I disagree. Although not quite as short as those he has selected, the Times routinely publishes short local tales in its daily New York news section and even shorter ones in its Metropolitan Diary column that appears each Monday in the West Coast edition. Here is one from last month:

“I was on my way to the local library near Battery Park City to return a book of short stories, and made several stops on my way … when I realized that somehow in one of the establishments, I had misplaced the book. The librarian informed me that if the book didn’t turn up, it was going to cost me $25. I complained that I wouldn’t mind so much if the stories and the writing hadn’t been so awful. I made a pest of myself with the Duane Reade [pharmacy] manager, who promised to keep an eye out for the book. Two weeks later, there at the drugstore’s service desk was the book. A young woman had returned it several days before and told the manager not to bother reading it, as none of the stories were interesting.”

I have also been collecting incidents or happenings from my daily encounters in whatever city I happen to be in; I call them Urban Tales. Here are a few examples:

The Fish Market
Annie is gone. She had not been there all week. I assumed she was on vacation. But she was not there the following week either. They told me she was working at another store on the other side of town now. I couldn't believe it. We spoke often, called each other by our first name. We exchanged stories. The weather, the bus trip over, where the ahi tuna came from this week. She was my friend. I felt I let her down if I didn't buy something each time I went in. She never told me she was leaving.

Happy Birthday
I like going to Sunday matinees, especially when it is cold and rainy and as dark as it usually is outside around here. As I was going to my seat on such a recent Sunday afternoon, a young woman came down before the audience and asked for everyone's attention. She announced to the puzzled assembly that it was her mother's birthday, indeed, a very special one, and asked it we would all join together to sing happy birthday to her. Without a moment's delay everyone took up her request and sang a lusty Happy Birthday to her mom, Sandy.

Next Door
I used to live high up in the hills above Portland before moving to the neighborhood below. One day, in the market up there, a man approached and greeted me as if we were old friends. I stopped, stared at him for much too long, looking puzzled and uncertain. Eventually I confessed I had no idea who he was. He didn't pause a moment to tell me he was X, my next-door neighbor. We had been neighbors for three years up there in the hills above the city.

I am indebted to Macy Halford on the Book Bench for introducing me to Teju Cole’s Fait Divers.

The Cellist of Sarajevo

At times we scarcely notice significant historical events when they occur. They fail to catch our attention, in one ear out the other as they say. The war in Bosnia and Herzegovia (between April 1992 and December 1994) and the siege of Sarajevo was a case in point for me.

Yes, I was dimly aware of the war, must have read about it in the paper, knew that NATO intervention finally brought the war to an end. But in the midst of all the other news of those days and the work I was doing, the reality of human experience simply flew right by me.

Sometimes a work of fiction can recapture what that was like and in particular what it was like for the people who struggled day after day during those years to stay alive as the shelling and sniper fire continued. Steven Galloway’s The Cellist of Sarajevo accomplished this for me. Instead of focusing on the political and military picture, his novel recounts the experiences of three unconnected individuals.

The fourth character, the cellist of Sarajevo, is based on the real-life musician, Verdran Smailovic, who had been the cellist of the Sarajevo Symphony Orchestra before the war began. Perhaps you remember the day early in the war when a mortar shell killed twenty-two citizens of Sarajevo as they stood in line to buy bread. Smailovic witnessed their deaths and to commemorate each individual he vowed to play (Albinoni’s Adagio) in the square where they died for twenty-two consecutive days.

While this is all we learn about the cellist, Galloway’s novel unfolds the tale of three individuals who at various times come to hear him perform.

“Some days he had an audience. Other days there was so much shelling that no one in their right mind would linger in the street. It didn’t appear to make any difference to him. He always played exactly the same way.”

Arrow is a sniper who is given the task of protecting the cellist. She is far and away the most interesting character in the novel and her skills as a sniper are legendary. Dragan is a man who spends hours traveling to an old brewery to get water for his family and ungrateful neighbor. Kenan is a baker trying to cross a dangerous intersection to get to his job.

But we really learn nothing about the cellist, his motivation, and thoughts as he plays during those twenty-two straight days. Nor do we learn much about what his music brought to the people of Sarajevo? Did it bring them any sense of hope, hope that the war would end, that the city would be rebuilt, and some degree of normalcy would return?

Indeed, with the exception of Arrow, the characters seemed to me almost lifeless. Maybe that’s what war does to many of those who have to live through it. They simply give up on living.

The real drama, the real emotion of The Cellist of Sarajevo comes from Galloway’s depiction of the city, the destruction, the damage and those who didn’t make it across the intersection or were killed during a mortar attack.

It was reported that nearly 10,000 people were killed or unaccounted for, including over 1,500 children during the siege while an additional 56,000 people were wounded; half were children. Electricity was rarely available, food and water were scarce, the only thing that was plentiful was fear and the daily shelling from the hills surrounding the city. In the afterword Galloway says an average of 329 shells hit the city each day, with a one day high of 3,777. Is it any wonder there was an abundance of fear?

“Dragan knows he won’t ever be able to forget what has happened here. If the war ends, if life goes back to some semblance of how it once was, and he survives, he won’t be able to explain how any of it was possible. An explanation implies a logic, but there’s no logic to Sarajevo now.”

A Science of Literature?

I’ve been reading the first issue of the new journal, The Scientific Study of Literature. Is a science of literature possible?

Occasionally we read about a study that claims to be a scientific investigation of literature. For instance there are increasing accounts of the evolutionary origins of stories and story telling, others on what is happening to various areas of the brain as we read a book, and still others that describe computerized research on a large body of textual materials, say an author’s work or a particular historical period.

However, the first issue of the new journal departs from these approaches in emphasizing the experience of reader and the interaction of the reader with the text, rather than the interpretation of texts, the method that currently tends to dominate literary scholarship.

Research on literary processing is carried out in the laboratory with a group of individuals as they read specially designed reading materials. Only rarely are published sections of works of fiction or non-fiction examined, either in the lab or under natural (non-laboratory) conditions.

In discussing the current state of the field Dixon and Bortolussi distinguish between cognitive processing and that focused on emotion and affective reactions. “Personal resonance” is a term that investigators in this area use to contrast a literary text from an expository one. In a representative study it was reported that while both types of text prompted an equal number of recollections, those elicited by a literary text were more personal, evoking scenes in which the reader was involved.

Surely that is one of the reasons for the great appeal of reading works of literature and why individuals become so absorbed in the experience. It reminds us of a similar experience or elicits an association with some personal meaning, sometimes having nothing to do with what is meant in the text.

In his article, “The Individual in the Scientific Study of Literature,” Raymond Gibbs writes: “Yet I am continually struck by an overwhelming sense that reading is so deeply personal, and the content and workings of my mind so individual, that it would be near impossible to describe my literary experiences in any way as something shared with others.”

And then, he poses the central question for this field: How is it possible to use a reader’s unique response to literature as the basis for general scientific principles?

In any study of a group of individuals, a large percentage will vary from the general statistical trend. Gibbs reminds us of the countless ways these individuals differ: gender, age, occupation, education, social status, language, culture, geographic origin, religion, political beliefs, ethnicity, personality, physiological differences, etc. Can a general theory of literary responding be derived when confronted with these differences and the complex ways they interact with one other?

My own view, one expressed occasionally in previous posts, is that other than recognizing this fact, such generalizations are impossible. And that is why I find the entire field rather anomalous and more closely allied with case studies, clinical research, and single subject designs.

Long ago Virginia Woolf said all this much better in her essay, “How Should One Read a Book?” “In the first place, I want to emphasize the not of interrogation at the end of my title. Even if I could answer the question for myself, the answer would apply only to me and not to you. The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions…. After all what laws can be laid down about books?”

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.