Nimble Neurons

I go to the gym every day. Previously, I went for a long run. The bones do weary. So now it is the gym. It is also warmer.

I started to exercise in the early 80s, wasn’t sleeping well, too much work. Running was said to improve sleep. At first, I could barely run around the block. Eventually, I ran for miles, in the rain and snow. It was hard sometimes to get out the door. But I always felt better when I did. Who does not want to feel better? For a while it became a bit of an addiction, a positive one, I told myself.

I also accomplished something. Maybe that was it. But I was also fitter, sleeker, in a better mood. It was the beginning of the great running boom, the days of Billy Rogers and Frank Shorter and much talk about the benefits of aerobics.

Later Alberto Salazar became of the great marathon runners. I admired his remarkable ability to ignore pain. When he visited Portland, he used to run up in the hills where I lived then. What a beautiful run as it curved around the crest of the hill! I can still recall every rut in the road, every change of temperature, every easy and tough grade. One day he was out running when I was. I saw him in the distance. I ran faster and faster. Eventually, I reached him. And passed him! We were going in opposite directions.

When I began running, I wasn’t trying to live longer, loose weight, improve my cardiovascular function, avoid the dread disease of old age, or increase my brain volume. Since then each of these effects has been well documented.

Gretchen Reynolds reviews some of this research in a recent article in the Times. She calls exercise “the relationship.” She begins with a study of four groups of mice that were placed in distinct living situations:

1. An enriched environment with toys, abundant food, colorful visual stimuli
2. The same enriched environment plus a set of running wheels in their cage
3. The standard mouse environment—no extra stimulation or running wheels
4. Running wheels alone in the standard mouse environment

Both before and after they were placed in these environments for “several months,” the mice were given a series of “cognitive tests.” The only groups that improved were the two with access to running wheels; the enriched stimulation by itself had no effect on the test performance. Physical activity also led to “healthier brains.”

Do comparable results occur for human exercisers? Two recent studies confirm the animal findings. Both examined the normal loss of brain tissue as a person ages. In one this loss was significantly less in a group of 55 and older individuals with superior cardiovascular function. The authors attributed this outcome to exercise, although they did not have an independent measure of it.

The second study directly measured activity in a group of 60-79 aged individuals who were randomly assigned to an aerobic training group. This consisted of three 1-hour exercise sessions per week for a 6-month period. The nonaerobic group participated in a series of stretching and “toning” sessions during the same 6-month period.

Brain volume increased significantly for the older adults who participated in the aerobic fitness training sessions but not for those who were in the nonaerobic group. Again, physical activity appeared to benefit your brain, as well as your heart. What is true for the mouse is true for the man.

Exercise seems to be good for our smarts and our neurons. So throw away those crossword and Sudoku puzzles and go for a swim, walk, bike ride, or run. You’ll be healthier, feel better, loose some weight, and power-up your brain.

References
Stanley Colcombe et. al. Aerobic fitness reduces brain tissue loss in aging humans. Journal of Gerontology, 2003, 176-180.

Stanley Colcombe et. al. Aerobic exercise training increases brain volume in aging humans. Journal of Gerontology, 2006, 1166-1170

The Brain Lights Up

Let’s talk about the brain. Not a day goes by when I don’t read about another study demonstrating a relationship between a particular area in the brain and an attitude, feeling, or behavior.

Imagine, for example, you are reading a really enjoyable novel. At the same time a neuroscientist is measuring the activity of various areas of your brain. A certain area lights up, other areas don’t. What exactly do we know when that happens?

Why is there so much talk about this kind of research, especially in the media with the research labs not far behind? In a recent article in the Times, “Your Brain on Fiction,” Anne Murphy Paul wrote,

“Brain scans are revealing what happens in our heads when we read a detailed description, an evocative metaphor or an emotional exchange between characters. Stories, this research is showing, stimulate the brain and even change how we act in life.”

Change how we act in life? Really? That is a powerful claim. Is the activity in that area of the brain changing us? Or is the “detailed description” having that effect? Would our life be similarly changed if another area of the brain lit up when we read the text?

Are we not going well beyond the data in making inferences like this about the role of brain mechanisms and conscious processes, let alone changes in behavior?

I confess that I am not much enamored of the growing body of research in this area. I also admit I do not fully understand all of it. Still I know enough to realize no one has yet demonstrated a causal relationship between activity in a certain brain area and a particular idea, thought, or feeling.

Indeed, we know more than one area of the brain is activated by a specific experience. We also know the process whereby brain activity might generate a particular conscious experience or behavioral change is still a very great mystery.

It is reasonable to believe, as Kenneth Oatley and Raymond Mar have claimed, that those “who frequently read fiction seem to be better able to understand other people, empathize with them and see the world from their perspective.” But is that because empathic individuals enjoy reading more than those who lack this very important characteristic or because reading fiction is the source of their empathy?

We also know that a great many individuals who do not read fiction have a very strong sense of empathy. Again, like any other behavior, attitude or sentiment, we are faced with the almost impossible task of untangling its roots.

In Psychology’s Ghosts, Jerome Kagan reminds us of this fundamental truth. If we discover an area of the brain that “light’s up” each time we read a book that arouses our sympathy for another person(s), the assumption is that this evidence demonstrates a relationship between the two. But what has been demonstrated? Kagan writes,

"An adolescent's feeling of shame because a parent is uneducated, unemployed, and alcoholic cannot be translated into words or phrases that name only the properties of genes, proteins, neurons, neurotransmitters, hormones, receptors, and circuits without losing a substantial amount of meaning.”

And by “meaning” Kagan is referring to the multiple effects of culture, class, prior experience, etc., factors that all too often are discounted by the prevailing belief in the primary importance of brain mechanisms in governing behavior.

Commonplace Book

I turn to my commonplace book. I’d like to do something with it now. That means analyze it--examine its central themes and truths. I am in a quandary.

My commonplace book consists of two volumes, each about 500-600 pages, with an additional set of unbound volumes for the last two years. It is the history of the notable passages I’ve marked and then copied from the books and essays I’ve read every year since 1980. There is an electronic version on my Mac and a printed version that would sink a ship.

It is a gold mine. Every time I turn to it, open a page at random, I am struck by the wisdom of the assembled collection. Here and there, I come across a sentence, a paragraph that suggests something more general.

How can these nuggets remain locked away in the volumes of an unknown, idiosyncratic reader of the late 20th and early 21st century? How to mine this wealth?

At first I think a statistical analysis would be the easiest. I soon realize that isn’t going to capture the meanings of the passages, some obvious but most second or third order concepts. Nor of their beauty.

I go through some pages and start my own analysis. It takes forever, although it is worth it. Perhaps I can find someone to help me, someone who knows a little about me and my reading proclivities. A volunteer appears. She starts, develops an interesting taxonomy, but soon gives up. It is too much for her. I am not surprised.

It is too much for the software. Too much for the volunteer. Will it do me in, as well? I start.

I begin with the pages for 2010. At once I am halted by two passages that hit home:

From the poet William Carlos Williams:
Whether we’re young, or we’re all grown up and just starting out, or we’re getting old, or getting so old there’s not much time left, we’re looking for company, and we’re looking for understanding: someone who reminds us that we’re not alone and someone who wonders out loud about things that happen in this life, the way we do when we’re walking or sitting or driving and thinking things over.

From Paul Auster’s Paris Review Interview:
Time begins slipping away, and simple arithmetic tells you there are more years behind you than ahead of you—many more. Your body starts breaking down, you have aches and pains that weren’t there before, and little by little the people you love begin to die. By the age of fifty, most of us are haunted by ghosts. They live inside us and we spend as much time talking to the dead as to the living. It’s hard for a young person to understand this. It’s not that a twenty year old doesn’t know he’s going to die, but it’s the loss of others that so profoundly affects an older person—and you can’t know what the accumulation of losses is going to do to you until you experience it yourself.

It continues like this, slowly. Occasionally I come across a book I don’t recall. I know I read it; the copied passages are evidence. But I cannot recall a single thing about its story or characters. This happens from time to time, even though my memory is fully operational. I go to find the book on the shelf. Of course, it isn’t there. This happens too often.

I continue and come across the passages from an article I do recall reading. It suggests a game, one for which there is no app. I call the game Counterfactuals.

One way to think about what a work of art does is to imagine the counterfactual—how would my life have been different had I not spent the last three months reading War and Peace? The answers, I think tend to group into three categories: The social experiences I had because of the book; the ideas the book incorporated into my life; and the aesthetic moments that were opened to me because of what I was reading.

I start playing the game with the book I just finished, The Spinoza Problem, by Irvin Yalom. Immediately a counterfactual comes to mind.

But I am distracted by all of this. What to do with these gems remains?

Unequal Societies

This is the 500th blog I’ve written on Marks in the Margin during the past three years. From time to time, I have taken a break and I’m going do so once gain. I hope to resume with a retooled version of the blog. After the last break, I wrote about Occupy Wall Street movement that galvanized me into action. I conclude on a similar theme as I write about the multiple effects of the ever-growing, ever-pernicious effects of economic inequality in this country and elsewhere.

In addition to wide financial disparities, what are the other, equally harmful effects that economic inequality gives rise to? This is the question posed by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in their wide ranging analysis reported in The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better.

I first heard about the book in a talk Wilkinson gave in at a TED presentation and later in Andrew Hacker’s review last month. Although the assumptions built in to The Spirit Level's statistical analysis are complex, the results are straightforward. Wilkinson and Picket rank the quality of life in twenty-three countries, primarily European, but also the US, Israel and Singapore.

By quality of life they mean several indices including education, incarceration, mental and physical health, etc. These measures are then “related” to how income is distributed in each country. Consider some representative findings:

• People in more equal societies live longer and their self-rated health is better.

• People in more equal societies are far less likely to experience mental illness.

• Children do better at school in more equal societies. Measures of child well-being are also better in more equal societies.

• Unequal societies have a higher proportion of incarcerated individuals.

• Measures of obesity, drug abuse, and violence are higher in more unequal societies.

Wilkinson and Picket write, “As income gaps grow, it’s not only the poor who suffer. Unequal societies not only bear “diseases of poverty,” but also “diseases of affluence.” The latter include cancer and cardiovascular disease as well as the afflictions of well-off people who are “anxiety-ridden,” “prone to depression,” and “seek comfort in overeating, obsessive shopping and spending.”

Here is an example of the type of data reported in the book. The horizontal axis of the graph shows the level of economic inequality (The US, UK, and Portugal are the highest; Japan, Sweden, Norway and Finland the lowest). On the vertical axis is a composite measure of social problems. Wilkinson and Pickett conclude there are significantly fewer social problems in more economically equal societies. A similar relationship holds for most of the other measures they report.

However, it is important to remember that the results reported in The Spirit Level do not demonstrate a casual relationship between income distribution and any particular outcome measure. Instead, they describe societal averages in which even in unequal societies, there are individuals who are in good health, do well in school, and have few social problems. We can say that on the average individuals in unequal societies do worse on these measures and on the whole people in more equal societies do better.

Some critics have questioned Wilkinson and Pickett’s statistical model and, at present, there have been few attempts to replicate their findings. However, in one, the authors report that, “the most straightforward measure of health simply has no robust correlation to income equality when comparing industrialized countries using standard OECD [Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development] and UN statistics.”

In spite of these cautionary notes, The Spirit Level does put forward a powerful claim about the wide-ranging, seemingly interrelated consequences of economic inequality, a claim that is especially pertinent now as we enter into yet another political campaign and try to assess the future impact of unexpectedly popular Occupy Wall Street movement.

Fictional Conversations

Looking back into your own past along the landmarks of your life, you will find that great readings occupy a place no less significant than actual happenings. For instance, a long and adventurous journey through strange lands which you undertook in a certain year may in retrospect appear no less memorable than your first exploration of A la recherche du temps perdu, or again you might realise that your encounter with Anna Karenina or with Julien Sorrell proved more momentous than meeting most of your past acquaintances. Pierre Ryckmans

In a recent exchange with a writer whose vision is not what it used to be, I inquired if she had ever considered listening to audiotapes of books. I thought she might object to the practice because they make it almost impossible to add passages to her commonplace book, as she is an avid commonplacer.

She replied that her major objection to an audiobook is that it brings a third voice into the conversation between the reader and the person heard in reading the text. It is as if the conversation we have while reading changes from a duet to a trio. She put it this way, “Reading for me generates a conversation between the author and myself, an exchange between our two minds.”

When I first read her statement, I thought she was referring to the conversation between the person in the story and the reader, not that between the author and the reader. When I am reading Ian McEwan’s Saturday, I converse with Henry Perowne, not McEwan.

When Perowne says, “…statistical probabilities are not the same as truths” or “It’s a commonplace of parenting and modern genetics that parents have little or no influence on the characters of their children,” I tell Henry how much I agree with him, not Ian. This may seem like a small, almost trivial distinction but it isn’t to me when I become as engaged by a novel and its characters as I did while reading Saturday.

Keith Oatley made this point recently in his online magazine OnFiction. He wrote that like a real conversation between individuals, we also come to draw inferences about what the other person is thinking and feeling when we read about a character in a book. “When we need to make inferences we come to understand a character better, and can identify with that character more strongly.”

Do we “talk” to the characters on the page like we do when we have a face-to-face conversation with someone? If not, what distinguishes the two? It is said that individuals who live a solitary life, without much in the way of social relationships are likely to suffer far more personal and health-related problems than more sociable individuals.

But what about those solitary souls who spend their life engaged in “talking” with characters in books? Do they also suffer from the same problems solitary non-readers do? And might these vicarious conversations and the inferences made in this process avoid the purported deleterious effects of living alone?

It is the person on the page, not his or her creator that I talk to, come to know, and often come to regard as a friend. The relationship I have with imaginary individuals is often quite real, especially those who occupy my favorite books as I have previously mentioned here.

“I am convinced that many novel-readers go to a book not merely for the story but for the companionship of the teller of the story—they want a friend with a somewhat greater knowledge of the world than themselves, one who knows the clubs, a good cigar, Tangier and Singapore, who has perhaps dallied with strange women and read odd books, but remains friendly, smiling, tolerant but indignant when the reader would be indignant, always approachable and always without side.” Anthony Burgess

From My 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

As I approach Marks In the Margin's 500th post, I return for a moment to its initial purpose--to make note of passages from my commonplace book. Each year I collect two sets of extracts from the books and essays I read. I call the first Passages. It is quite a collection of ideas, conjectures, ruminations, and simply well written sentences, some clever, others funny, but mostly statements that have set me to thinking

I also keep a much smaller, separate section that I call Briefs. These selections, perhaps quotations is a more accurate way to describe them, consist of much the same kind of material, but they stand alone and are not part of a larger set derived from a book or essay or organized in any particular order.

A fair number of the Briefs I collected last year dealt with the pleasures of reading, and the literary arts in general. Here are some examples:

It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive. James Baldwin

And then you’d take a break at the wonderful coffee bar in the Cortile. (Pretty much all the Vat [Vatican Library] wax ecstatic about the coffee bar.) There’s a social aspect. You are talking with friends, with colleagues, with people you’ve maybe just met, about important things, things of the mind. It’s almost like being in the Platonic Academy. Daniel Mendelshon New Yorker

…a weekday edition of The New York Times contains more information than the average person was likely to come across in a lifetime in seventeenth-century England. From Information Anxiety by Richard Wurman

Follow your interest; follow the writers who energize you, not the ones who exert a sense of obligation on you. The books that do the one or the other will change, as time gone on. The landscape shifts. Don’t adhere to systems unless that feels good. Guy Davenport

It takes two hours to watch Molly Sweeney at the Irish Repertory Theater. But you’ll spend much more time thinking about it afterward. A deeply moving meditation of hope, change and despair, it’s a compelling piece of theater, one in which the ending applause is only the beginning of the plays effects. Ken Jaworowski Times

To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you, and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations—such is a pleasure beyond compare. Yoshida Kenko

But speaking artistically—I like it when, at the end of a story, I can imagine the characters going on to do a number of things, all with an equal level of specificity. For example, at the end of Chekhov’s “Lady with Pet Dog,” I can imagine the couple leaving their respective spouses and staying together and living happily ever after. But I can also (with equal clarity) imagine them leaving their respective spouses—and then starting to fight bitterly. I can also imagine them staying with their respective spouses and loving each other forever, illicitly. Or staying with their spouses and slowly falling out of love with each other. So Chekhov’s accomplishment in that story is that those characters are so there, so real, that they live on beyond the end of the story, in three dimensions, and you feel their possibilities as human possibilities, i.e., unpredictable, with all the wild variations that are possible in an actual human life. So that’s the aspiration, anyway. George Saunders

…creative reading was at last inseparable for him from creative writing. But reading was just the means. The end—the purpose—was writing. Emerson

Behind any artist's urge to create is an egotistical impulse -- a desire to be remembered, to see one's works immortalized. Writers attempt to defy death by achieving eternal life on the page and in the imaginations of readers. Such hopes are ultimately illusory: obviously, a page or a book or a computer file may outlast their creators, but nothing has the stamina to outlast time. Yet few writers are either willing or courageous enough to confront the fact that literary immortality is essentially impossible. From a review of Paul Auster’s Invisible by Vincent Rossmeier

"Beautiful Souls"

Those who write about moral courage invariably wonder if there is anything that individuals who have acted courageously have in common. Their usual method is to undertake a series of case studies and then try to identify a factor(s) that motivated their actions.

So for example, Eyal Press in describing his recent book Beautiful Souls: Saying No, Breaking Ranks and Heading the Voice of Conscience in Dark Times writes:

This is a book about such nonconformists, about the mystery of what impels people to do something risky and transgressive when thrust into a morally compromising situation: stop, say no, resist.

Who among us has not asked ourselves how we would react when placed in a situation that required risking our life when doing so was contrary to the law, group pressure or a strong cultural norm? Whatever prediction is made cannot hope to capture the dilemma that would confront us if we were, in fact, placed such a situation.

None of the individuals Press portrays had given any thought to the matter, to prepare, for example, to act courageously when faced with such a situation.

Paul Gruninger was the police chief of a state in Switzerland along the Austrian border in 1938. It was illegal in Switzerland then to allow Jews fleeing the Nazis to enter the country. In spite of the law and the compliance of other officials, Gruninger put his career at risk to allow Jewish individuals to enter Switzerland. He said,

“Whoever had the opportunity as I had to repeatedly witness the heartbreaking scenes of the people concerned, the screaming and crying of mothers and children, the threats and suicide and attempts to do it, could….ultimately not bear it anymore.”

Aleksander Jevtie was a Serbian soldier at the time of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina who was ordered to pull fellow Serbs out of a line of Croatians about to be beaten or executed. Instead of obeying the order, Jevtie began pulling Croatians from the group by giving them a Serbian name, thereby avoiding whatever fate was in store for them. He said,

“I thought these people needed help the most, from the look in their eyes.”

Avner Wishnitzer was a soldier in the Israel Defense Force who refused to serve in the occupied territories. As many other Jewish Refusenks have said, Wishnitzer felt the policies of his government violated the traditions upon which it was founded, his own moral convictions, and what he viewed as the inhumane treatment of the people he was asked to control.

Leyla Wydler was an investment adviser for the Stanford Group, a large financial organization in Houston, who became suspicious about the securities she was asked to sell. Unlike her other colleagues, she started asking questions, too many as it turned out. In spite of Federal regulations prohibiting corporations from sacking employees before they have a proper hearing, she was soon thereafter fired. Subsequent investigations revealed the entire Stanford financial organization was a vast Ponzi scheme, second only to Madoff’s.

Wydler, a divorced single parent who like many of her clients was Hispanic, realized she could no longer in good conscience sell them ”products” that would lead only to their financial ruin. When Press asked her if she would come forward with her allegations again, she said, “Probably so. Yeah, I would. I would have done it again, because it was the right thing to do.”

If there is anything in common among these four courageous individuals, I sense it might be the empathy they felt for the individuals who sought their help or that they were required to harm, their ability, if you will, to put themselves in the other person’s shoes. I say this with reservations since I do not know of any direct evidence. The sources of such courage still seem to me pretty much a mystery.

While I greatly admired Eyal Press’s study, at the same time, I would have appreciated knowing something about those individuals who did not act so courageously even though they also knew full well the consequences of their failure to disobey or resist or speak their voice? Why didn’t they intervene? A comparable set of four such individuals placed in the same situation might have shed some light on this question.

The London Library

I use the Library almost daily—it’s taken over as my main source of reference and become my main (and now much treasured) place of work. There I can write away in peace—the London Library places me in a convivial atmosphere on, one quietly buzzing with fellow writers. Benedict Allen

When I was in London last summer, I went to visit the London Library. It was something I had wanted to do for years, motivated largely by my dream of establishing a membership library myself one day.

The London Library is said to be the world’s largest independent lending library. It is also one of the most inviting, another way of saying it is a place of extraordinary warmth and beauty.

The library is located on St. James Square, an oasis from the crowded city dotted with shady trees, park benches beside its well-manicured laws, and walkways, all of which are surrounded by elegant townhouses.

The joy of the place is not only the books, however, but also the cast of characters. The dusty fellow next to you might be a proto-Nobel-winning author…and the almost certain knowledge that the person in the next carrel cares deeply about words and ideas, and best of all, has a book to tell you about, in a whisper. Orlando Whitfield

The library collection numbers over one million books plus more than 750 current periodicals and adds over 8,000 new books each year. Members also have remote electronic access to over 1,000 academic journals, as well as a wide collection of literary periodicals, newspapers, and magazines.

The library was founded in Thomas Carlyle in 1841 and its members have included Dickens, Tennyson, Virginia Woolf, Evelyn Waugh, George Bernard Shaw, etc. and T.S. Eliot who served as its President for many years. However, you don’t have to be a literary luminary to belong to the library, as membership is open to anyone for a relatively small annual fee.

I joined the library for myself when I was about eighteen and soon the place became an addiction, an obsession.” Orlando Whitfield

During a period of major cuts in funding public libraries and in some cases the closing of many branch libraries, there is an increasing need for independent private libraries. The extremely wealthy, whose income has risen of late at a dizzying pace are more than capable of establishing these libraries.

Their resources and in many cases excellent libraries can readily serve as their foundation. That was how these libraries originally came into existence. What better way to maintain the culture of reading and scholarship than by assuming a major role is founding these “houses of reading once again?”

On A Perfect Moment

“God has given us this moment of Peace.” Natalia Ginzburg Winter in the Abruzzi

There are times when a feeling of contentment sweeps over me. Time stops, I don’t move for fear the feeling will vanish. I try not to think. The feeling stays that way for a while and then disappears. I try to recapture it and can’t.

Nothing specific ever triggers a perfect moment, it doesn’t last long, and it can’t be predicted or controlled, nor does it occur frequently. In fact, I can’t recall when it last arrived. It is a mystery, not chemically induced, for that is not part of my life, although I suspect there is some subtle change going on somewhere among the neurons. Nothing I can pinpoint with any certainty brings it on. All I know is that it is a perfect moment.

A perfect moment is not the kind of experience that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi refers to as Flow, for I am not engaged in any particular activity or focusing on anything specific. In fact, I may simply be relaxing or sauntering around the neighborhood. It is not the same as an epiphany where you suddenly experience an insight about a problem or the meaning of something.

The first time I heard the term “perfect moment” was in a monologue performed by the late actor Spalding Gray. Apparently he had first used that term in his book, Swimming to Cambodia. He describes a visit to Bangkok where he had his first perfect moment.

“At first glance I just couldn’t imagine Bangkok, a sprawling city of heat and chaos, as being the kind of place where I would find my own “perfect moment.” But I soon discovered that if you’re prepared to accept it for what it is, for all the good, the bad, and the downright ugly, then your efforts will be rewarded. A“perfect moment”…sort of sneaks up on you when you least expect it. A full red coloured moon at dusk rising above corrugated rooftops. Or the sight, and unbelievable sound, of a long tailed boat as it blasts it’s way along the Chao Phraya River with The Temple of Dawn as a backdrop. …All you have to do is get out there whatever your budget. A “perfect moment” is priceless anyway.”

I am especially fond of Alice Munro’s short story The Jack Randa Hotel, her tale of a fractured marriage and runaway husband. I was in Italy the first time I read this story. It was late in the afternoon, the day was warm, and I was on the rooftop terrace of the hotel in Florence where I was staying then. I read her story slowly, very slowly, as I knew this perfect moment would not last long or be repeated soon, if ever, again.

It is said that the right book at the right time can give rise to a lifelong reading habit. I have always wondered if Alexandre Dumas’ Camille was that book for me. I think I was about 14 or 15 when I read the novel. As I recall the situation, the 1937 movie with Greta Garbo as Camille had been reissued and for reasons that completely baffle me now, I decided that I wanted to see it. I am fairly certain my mother suggested I should read the book first and that she had purchased a copy for me.

And so, after breakfast early one weekend morning, I went back to bed to begin reading the novel. Going back to bed after breakfast was not something I ever did. That day was the exception. Reading Camille during the day in bed seemed like such a lark. Everything seemed to fall into place then on what was no doubt a sunny Saturday in Los Angeles, sometime during the early fifties. I returned to the book after lunch and continued reading until I had finished by mid-afternoon, in plenty of time to see the film that evening. It was perhaps my first perfect moment.

Not Now, Voyager

“There is no frigate like a book.” Emily Dickinson

Many of my friends now are packing up and traveling hither and yon in all directions near and far. Some do this almost every other month, to Africa, Hawaii, Europe and just down the I5 to Ashland. I ask, How can they do this, how can they manage to head off once again, so soon after returning from their previous jaunt?

While I had my days of traveling, it was never quite like this and now I am growing weary of the entire enterprise. I have come to feel much like Lynne Sharon Schwartz, who writes in her “anti-travel” polemic, Not Now, Voyager:

“…how much easier it is to let the mind, rather than the body, do the traveling. No tickets or schedules, no borders, no passports. Thought is the one thing that remains free no matter what changes outside the head.”

Schwartz wonders if people really enjoy traveling as much as they claim. And like her, I ask, “What do they truly learn in the new territory?”

Yet, in spite of all the anti-travel remarks in the first chapter of her book, Schwartz spends the remaining eight chapters describing various trips she took to far off lands, while at the end of each account, professing how happy she is to be finally back home. So much for consistency between words and actions.

For me travel was always a search for a place where I finally felt at home. When I was foolishly young, I thought it was Paris and then, when I was a little less young, but equally foolish, I realized it was Florence. I knew I could live there quite contentedly, but in the end, it too was not much more than a dream. They do have their winters in Tuscany after all and my life-long companion did not find the idea the least bit appealing.

Going off here and there, traveling from place to place for a week or so is not how I search for home. And so I return to Florence as often as I can and stay for a month or so each summer, wandering about the city, exploring as much of it as I can, only to fly back to the place I’ve never “connected” with and want only to leave the moment I get off the plane.

I do now feel that learning about a country, a place, the peoples and their culture can be readily conveyed in books and films. Since these experiences can be repeated and lingered over in the comfort of your armchair, whatever learning is sought may, in fact, be equally, if not more, easily acquired.

Jhumpa Lahiri wrote, “For surely it is a magical thing for a handful of words, artfully arranged, to stop time. To conjure a place, a person, a situation, in all its specificity and dimensions. To affect us and alter us, as profoundly as real people and things do.”

There is also no doubt it is carried out at less cost, less hassle, and none of the burdens of arranging tickets, accommodations and “all the rest of it.”

The Courage of Tony Judt

“We need to rediscover how to talk about change: how to imagine very different arrangements for ourselves…” Tony Judt

Over the years I have read many of the essays and reflections Tony Judt wrote for the New York Review of Books. Since I had no background or particular expertise in the issues he discussed, I never felt I could write about them. However, I admired the spirit in which they were written and especially the way he went about reasoning.

He kept asking questions, wanted you to take issue with him, wanted you to help him think through his ideas, to talk and argue with him. How could I not admire him, regardless of whatever view he held, a view that was always provisional anyway?

Tony Judt died last August. Since 2008, he had suffered from Lou Gehrig’s Disease (ALS). He was quadriplegic and on a breathing machine. He couldn’t move, not even to scratch an inch. He couldn’t write and was only able to express his thoughts and feelings by means of a voice amplifier that sputtered out his gradually weakening voice. He wrote: “In effect, ALS constitutes progressive imprisonment without parole.”

And yet, in spite of everything, he continued to “write” essays and four books including his last, Thinking the Twentieth Century, completed with the help of Timothy Snyder who engaged him in a series of conversations. In “Tony Judt: A Final Victory” his wife, Jennifer Homans, describes how he continued to work up until his last day. She writes:

“…ideas were everything. Tony had always cared more about ideas than anything—more than friends; more in some in some ways than himself. He believed—really believed—that they were bigger than he was. He wouldn’t survive, but they would.”

She speaks often of his need to think socially, to make human rather than monetary gain the goals of social policy. “Tony had always been a forthright critic of social injustice; now he had zero tolerance…zero tolerance for political deceptions and intellectual dishonesty.”

With moving sadness she continues, “…he had lost his students, his classrooms, his desk; he couldn’t travel or take a walk. He had lost, in other words, the places that had helped him think through his ideas.”

Similarly, “He wanted desperately to teach them [his two boys shown in the photo with his wife and medical assistant], to love them, to be with them into their adulthood. He had so much to tell them about where he had been, whom he had known, books he had read (and written), and what he had made of it all.”

I write about Judt briefly out profound admiration for his courage, for his stamina, for his struggle, a moment-to-moment struggle to keep going, to keep thinking and talking ideas, all the while growing weaker, paralyzed within his "bubble.”

In the current issue of the New York Review of Books Ian Buruma concludes his tribute: “Judt would have been the last to claim that he had all the answers. But he asked all the right questions. And for that we can only be grateful.”

And at the end of Ill Fares the Land, Judt says it isn’t enough to talk and write about ideas. “But if we think we know what is wrong, we must act upon that knowledge. Philosophers, it was famously observed, have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways, the point is to change it.”

On Bookplates

Do you remember the days when you went to the library, found a book on the shelf, and when you open it up saw a colorful bookplate pasted inside the front cover? The bookplate always had some kind of drawing, perhaps a symbol, image, or flower and then the name of a person.

That was what always drew my attention. Who was this person? What was their interest in this book, this library and perhaps the book fund that was established in their honor? While I didn’t linger long over these questions, I did always notice the bookplate and spent a little time thinking about it.

Cynthia Haven’s recent blog, Bookplate Porn, brought this all back to me. She says she misses “those exquisite bookplates you used to run across when you peeked into the top-notch books in the finest libraries or secondhand bookstores.” Haven is at Stanford University and on her blog she posts a few from the Stanford Libraries.

Here is one I found in their library:

It is describes a book fund established to honor a person I have known for over 50 years. In fact, she is my wife.

I met her in that very same university library when we were both undergraduate students. She said she saw me reading a book with my legs propped up on a table in the main reading room and that I looked like an interesting person. Ever since, she has been super-cautious about judging a person on the basis of first impressions.

Here is a bookplate of another person with the very same last name at the Stanford Library.

As you can see, it is less elaborate, quite simple in design, not unlike the simplicity of the person for whom the bookplate was established. She was a person who was very familiar to me in my youth. In fact, she was my mother.

She gave me a set of my first and only bookplates that I duly pasted inside the cover of all the books of my youth. Whatever happened to that bookplate? Over the weekend I searched in vain for a book that had one, but found to my dismay, that I no longer have any from those days.

My mother was a reader, a serious reader, who spent most of the day reading a book and pondering its meanings. She was a great admirer of the works of D. H. Lawrence, read everything he wrote, a fair amount of what others wrote about him, and eventually became something of a Lawrence scholar.

In time, she developed an exceptional collection on Lawrence. One day I asked her what she was going to do with it. She replied she would will it to the Stanford University Library. It did not take me more than a moment to say, let’s do it now.

And so together with my brother, we established the Shirley P. Katzev Book Fund at the Stanford Library that is largely, but no longer exclusively, devoted to books by or about D. H. Lawrence. The endowment has grown, the collection is now quite extensive, and we are told it is widely used by Lawrence and other literary scholars.

The culture of bookplates, like so many other tangible features of printed books, will soon disappear in the era of electronic books. No doubt, Cynthia Haven and countless others will then come to miss them even more.

Restoration

The following passage occurs early in Olaf Olafsson’s new novel, Restoration.

“I live on a farm in the south of Tuscany. Chianciano, the nearest village, is twelve miles away, the railway station six. Our house stands on a hill with a view of the wide valley….I never want to leave.”

Instantly I am reminded of a passage at the outset of Iris Origo’s The War in Val d’Orca:

“We live on a large farm in southern Tuscany—twelve miles from the station and five from the nearest village. The country is wild and lonely: the climate harsh. Our house stands on a hillside, looking down over a wide and beautiful valley, beyond which rises Monte Amiata, wooded with chestnuts and beeches. Nearer by, on this side of the valley lies slopes of cultivated land: wheat, olives and vines but among them stay still stand some ridges of dust-couloured clay hillocks, the crete senesi—as bare and colourless as elephants’ backs, as mountains of the moon.”

Everything begins to sound very familiar. Like Origo, Alice Orsini in Restoration, was born into a wealthy English family, grew up in Florence, married an Italian, purchased a large farm in southern Tuscany, restored the main villa, San Martino, and outlying farmhouses, built a school, had an affair with a friend of her youth, and struggled to survive as World War II came to her bucolic estate.

What is one to make of these similarities? As I read the novel, they didn’t enter my mind much or intrude on the pleasure I had in reading it. I thought it was not much different than a film version of a novel about historical event or person.

However, after the novel ended, Olafsson writes this postscript: “While Alice Orsini undoubtedly shares similarities with Iris Origo, it is important to stress that the former is a purely fiction construct.” “Purely?” Come now, Olaf.

In countless respects Restoration draws heavily on Origo’s The War in Val d’Orca—its characters, their histories, the restoration of the villa and surrounding farm houses, and more than anything the way San Martino became a refuge for partisans and Allied soldiers during World War II.

The novel is also the story of another woman, Kirstin Jonsdottir, a young painter who lives in Rome. She befriends a Robert Marshall, an expert in art restoration, becomes his apprentice, quickly surpasses his ability and soon thereafter becomes his lover. However, when it becomes clear the married Marshall is not about to leave his wife and that he sells his restored paintings to the Nazis, Kirstin contrives an act of revenge.

Her technical skills enable her to create what appears to be an unknown work of Caravaggio. She tricks Marshall into believing she has restored a badly damaged but unknown work of this highly regarded painter. He sells the work to the Germans who bribe Alice to hide the work in a vault near her villa.

Many years later, the National Gallery in London acquires the fake Caravaggio and Kirstin, who is living in London then, is invited to its opening presentation. As David Levitt suggests in his review, by ending the story this way, Olaffson may be inviting the reader to wonder if originality is required to create a work of art.

Kirstin’s part-creation-part restoration is clearly a work of art and to a certain extent not original. Similarly Restoration is a work of art and yet not by any means original. But as is often asked lately, is anything truly original these days? Perhaps it is more a matter of the degree to which such works deviate from their sources. But then, other than outright plagiarism, does that really matter? It didn’t in my reading of the novel.

On Suffering

“The happy years are the lost, the wasted years; one must wait for suffering before one can work. And then the idea of the preliminary suffering becomes associated with the idea of work and one is afraid of each new literary undertaking because one thinks of the pain one will first have to endure in order to imagine it.” Proust

The problem of suffering in all its forms from the minor, almost trivial, to the severe and tragic continues to unsettle me. The life of the majority of human beings on this planet is difficult and largely harsh. As Ryszard Kapucinski put it, “For me this is the most important thing we are facing.”

I blogged about this topic in connection with Viktor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl argued that without suffering, human life cannot be complete. Everywhere man is confronted with fate, with the chance of achieving something through his own suffering.

He claimed that a person’s character is revealed in their response to the inevitable suffering they experience, citing his experiences in Auschwitz for support. One could make a victory of those experiences, turning life into an inner triumph, or one could ignore the challenge and simply vegetate, as did a majority of the prisoners.

I was reminded of Frankl’s view once again in reading Francine Du Plessix Gray’s short biography of Simone Weil. Gray says Weil believed labor work is the truest road to self-knowledge. The suffering of the working class became the central theme of her life and, as Gray notes, “her strong tendency to cultivate her own.

Elsewhere, Weil wrote: “After my years in the factory…I was, as it were, broken in pieces, body and soul. That contact with affliction killed my youth. Until then…I knew quite well that there was a great deal of affliction in the world, I was obsessed with the idea, but I had not had prolonged and firsthand experience of it. As I worked in the factory…the affliction of others branded my flesh and my soul.”

I am not one who holds to the belief that suffering is essential for creative achievement or that it builds “character.” Neither did Somerset Maugham: “It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering, for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive.”

Must one suffer in order to work, to write beautifully and with wisdom? Are there not countless exceptions? Was the life that Tolstoy lived so grounded in suffering that he never could have written his masterpieces without this experience? The same applies to every artist, writer or composer.

To be sure there are several kinds of suffering: physical pain, psychic suffering, disease and hunger induced suffering. As far as I know, the effects of these various forms of suffering on personality and character development have yet to be investigated empirically.

While theories abound, they are usually based on the experience of a single individual or anecdotal accounts of others. Yet, if a widely applicable theory of the effects of suffering is possible (and I am not sure it is, given the diversity of forms it takes), I doubt this is the way it is going to be derived.

"We stand, as it were, on the shore, and see multitudes of our fellow beings struggling in the water, stretching forth their arms, sinking, drowning, and we are powerless to assist them." Felix Adler

On Living Alone

Providing you’re not in a state of longing, living in solitude can be its own powerful pleasure. Philip Roth

The trend is striking. The numbers speak clearly. According to Eric Klinenberg in his recent article in the Times, more people live alone now than at any previous time in history. In 1950 22% of American adults were single; today, it is almost 50%.

It is the same in some European countries—Sweden, 47%; Norway, 40%. In Germany, Netherlands, Britain and France, the percentage of households with only one occupant ranges from 34% to 39%. In every country cited in the numerous charts and tables in the article, the percent of adults who live alone increases with age.

Consider this graph of the metropolitan areas of this country:

No less striking is the Klinenberg’s claim about the social effects of solo life. It is widely believed that living alone gives rise to social isolation, loneliness and sense of alienation. After interviewing over 300 individuals, Klinenberg concludes that living alone encourages more, not less social interaction.

He cites data that single people are more likely than married couples “to spend time with friends and neighbors, go to restaurants and attend art classes and lectures.” He refers to a paper in the American Sociological Review that “showed that single seniors had the same number of friends and core discussion partners as their married peers and were more likely to socialize with friends and neighbors.”

Rilke wrote: “Embrace your solitude and love it…It is through this aloneness that you will find all your paths.”

Although I have a long and happy marriage, I have lived alone for many periods of my life. In many respects, I find it a congenial and refreshing change. My days are more my own, I can work longer periods and with less distraction than when I’m with my wife. There’s more time for ruminating, trying out new ideas, wasting time in a bookstore or library.

Yes, I go through periods of loneliness but they are short and disappear quickly as the “powerful pleasures” of solitude begin to take hold of me. In her book Fifty Days of Solitude, Doris Grumbach described this feeling:

“At first I found I missed another voice, not so much a voice responsive to my unexpressed thoughts as an independent one speaking its own words….There was a reward for this deprivation. The absence of other voices compelled me to listen more intently to the inner one. I became aware that the interior voice, so often before stifled or stilled entirely by what I thought others wanted to hear, or what I considered to be socially acceptable, grew gratifyingly louder, more insistent. It was not that it spoke great truths or made important observation. No. It simply reminded me that it was present, saying what I had not heard it say in quite this way before….What we yearned for were periods of solitude to renew our worn spirits.”

Like a teeter-totter, we oscillate back and forth between seeking solitude and, when that gives rises to a certain discontent, longing for companionship once again. It is often difficult to find a level center, one where independence and attachment are in balance. Eventually we yearn for solitude and then, in turn, for togetherness--the never-ending swaying of the teeter-totter.

I think I must be really weird to enjoy these periods of solitude so much. I used to wonder how many others would welcome an experience like this, at least how many other men? Now I am aware, how many others, both men and women, have come to prefer living along.

I often recall a passage in Martha Cooley’s The Archivist: “He set out to find…the source of beauty and elegance…something you do by yourself. Not with other people. Other people muddy the waters.”

Anita Brookner

Anitia Brookner died the other day. Brookner was an English art historian and novelist. I think I’ve read almost all of her many novels. As I say in reposting this blog, they are all pretty much the same.

At times they grow tedious, but she wrote well and her themes captured my interest. In 1984 she won the Booker Prize for her novel, Hotel du Lac--a tale of a lonely woman coming to terms with her solitary life during a visit to a hotel by a Swiss lake.

At the Hairdressers was her last novel and the first to be published as an e-book. It is the only one I wrote about on this blog. Her others were written before I started blogging. The following post was written four years ago.


…we are all alone, that no reciprocity is to be sought between people formed by different outlooks, and not only outlooks but different environments, both mental and physical.
Anita Brookner

There are several firsts in Anita Brookner’s latest novel, At the Hairdressers. It is her first e-book; in fact, it is only available as Penguin Short e-book. It is her first novel after a lapse of several years. For a while, she was publishing a new novel each year like clockwork, most of which I read. Now they appear intermittently and since she is almost 84, I don’t imagine there will be many more.

It is also the first Kindle e-book I have read from start to finish. After many tedious criticisms of e-books in general, I have finally mastered the fine art of highlighting passages and then copying them into my commonplace book. As readers of this blog have been reminded all too often, these steps are essential to my way of reading.

At the Hairdressers is like all of Brookner’s previous novels. There is a lonely woman (occasionally a lonely man), usually educated and reasonably well off, emotionally reserved, and finished with their professional life. They long for friendship or perhaps a lover, a happiness that is never fulfilled, without hope or expectation that anything will happen to them other than yet another blank day.

Solitude is the familiar burden for Elizabeth Warner in At the Hairdressers. She lives in a basement flat in London and leaves the house only to go shopping and have her hair done. Her only “friends” are the people she sees on the streets, the market, or the women at her salon. Mostly, what the 80 year-old Elizabeth longs for is youth.

…a brooding and no doubt disagreeable old woman to whom memories of youth come unbidden, and unwelcome, now that youth is out of reach.

Sometimes the young do nothing for one’s dignity.

At the Hairdressers opens on this theme as Elizabeth recounts a dream. In it she recalls the small group of friends she had as a student in college, imagines what course their lives have taken, and how much she would enjoy seeing them again. Of course it was youth that was being celebrated.

When she chances upon one of these friends, she is immediately disappointed by the wide social gap between them and the comparative inadequacy and failures of her own life. She concludes that the dream only brought back feelings that are gone forever now.

Like most of the other books Brookner has written, this short novel is infused with inwardness, continual reflection by the protagonist of their life, their life unlived, and the only life that one can expect now.

I rather hope I shall die at the hairdresser's, for they are bound to know what to do. At least that is what I tell myself.

You have to like this kind of internal dialogue to enjoy Anita Brookner’s novels. And yet it spite of their repetitiveness, self-centeredness and absence of any action, I find it hard to put one down once I start. I may not read it all at once, but I do eventually finish, knowing full well that the next one, if there is to be one, will not be any different.

The Lanyard

The other day I was strolling along a street here in Honolulu I chanced upon a strange looking object on the ground. It looked like this.

After some sleuthing, I determined it is the frond of a Norfolk Pine, Araucaria heterophylla, if you recall your Latin. Apparently the tree originated in Australia and now grows throughout the South Pacific. Here in Honolulu it is widely used as a Christmas tree.

As I looked closely at the frond, I was immediately reminded of a lanyard, the multi-colored plastic strands that we used to weave together at the summer camp I went to each year.

It didn’t take long before I also recalled one my favorite Billy Collins’s poems. No wonder, as it is called The Lanyard.

The Lanyard - Billy Collins
The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.
No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly—
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.
I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.
She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light
and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.
Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the worn truth
that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

The poem is best enjoyed if read it out loud. Try to capture the wistful humor that Collins coveys in this reading.



Note: Marks in the Margin will be on Spring Break for a while. Thank you for reading. Meanwhile, I hope you discover new literary gems and enjoy sunny days.

A Perfect Thing

I am holding a book. It is small, 5 x 7, an easy to hold paperback about 300 pages. The pages are uneven, deckle edged. On the slightly heavier cover page is a drawing of a villa high on a hill in Italy.

The colors are Tuscan—green, bright pinkish sky, earthy brown villa walls, red tile roofs. A vegetable garden, olive trees and tall pines are shown in the valley below.

The sky was turning gray … The outline of the mountain across the valley etched against the dawn, gradually darkening and growing distinct against the awakening sky. Lower down, mist caressed the slopes, catching like tufts of wool on the treetops.

The scene is bucolic, with one exception—warplanes are flying overhead. The tale takes place during the Allied invasion of Italy in World War II.

I am thinking the book I am holding in my hand is a perfect thing. I am reminded of Iris Origo’s The War in Val d’Orca. It may very well be a fictional account of Origo’s experience at her estate, La Foce, in southern Tuscany during the War.

For a bookmark I am using one from a small independent bookstore in a far off land where the culture of reading has a long tradition. The bookstore is a perfect place.

Together with the book I bought there, it is also a perfect moment, a moment that cannot be planned or expected and only arrives unbidden every now and then.

On the Web I read about an exhibition at the University of Amsterdam, The Printed Book: A Visual History. The exhibition is said to trace of the evolution of book design through the last 500 years.

In the Google translation of the exhibition brochure, "the cannon of Western book design is said to be a work of art and the printed book more and more a statement against “the e-book to be.”

In describing the exhibition, Alice Rawsthorn wrote in the Times: “ Some things seem designed to do their jobs perfectly, and the old-fashioned book is one.”

Later she admits there are “some wonderful e-books” too and they have their well-known advantages. Still, she holds fast to the belief that “…there is still something very special about an adroitly designed printed book.” I am of the school, call us “old school,” if you must, that couldn’t agree more.

Not long ago, Kathryn Hughes wrote in the Guardian that 2011 was a year of beautiful books. She notes that Julian Barnes, in his Booker Prize acceptance speech, singled out the book designer of his prize winning novel The Sense of Ending. He called her the “best book designer in town” and had turned his prize-winning novel into “a beautiful object.”

Other commentators have recently made particular note of book cover designs, a topic that rarely receives much attention. You the Designer recently posted the covers of 86 beautiful book covers. And the Millions compared the design of US and UK covers of the same book. Here is one of a book I greatly admired last year with the US version shown first.

What is it about the design of a book that appeals to so many readers? According to Hughes, Barnes suggested that the design of printed books matters so much right now is “because of the challenge of e-readers, which tend to make all novels look alike.”

For me it is more a matter of art, the sheer beauty of a book’s cover and the way a book is bound and how it feels. I walk into any small bookshop and am immediately struck by the varied colors and shapes of the books on the tables and shelves.

Oddly this effect is strongest when I walk into an Italian bookstore. I pick up one of the books, may recognize the title if it’s translated from English, open the cover and begin reading. More truthfully, try to begin reading it. All I can think of is how much I wish I knew how to read Italian literature--the sheer beauty of those unknown words.

The Street Sweeper

…to produce a written account of the destruction of European Jewry down to the last detail and to bury it in the hope that it would survive…This was what kept them going—the need to tell what would otherwise have been unimaginable. Elliot Perlman

I usually find a character or situation that mirrors to some degree my life in the novels that mean most to me. That is one of the reasons I found Elliot Perlman’s latest novel, The Street Sweeper, such an engrossing work of fiction.

I can only touch on one or two of the several themes coursing in and out of this novel—the nature of history, memory, and racism in America, the Holocaust, friendship, and the importance of communication. And chance. Chance is what brings the two main characters together and is the source of each of these themes.

A chance encounter between two individuals is not a totally random event. Rather it is the intersection of their separate, fully determined paths that is fortuitous. Had the chance encounter not occurred, their lives would have taken entirely different paths. And Lamont Williams and Adam Zignelik would have never met on the pages of The Street Sweeper.

Lamont Williams is an African-American ex-con, having been imprisoned for a robbery he never committed but in which by chance he became involved. Lamont has a probationary “Building Services” job at a New York Hospital and while making his rounds one day fortuitously befriends, Henryk Mandelbrot, a Holocaust survivor. It is Henryk who tells Lamont everything he experienced while he was in Auschwitz. He wants him to remember all of it.

“Tell everyone what happened here. Tell everyone what happened here.” This sentence is repeated over and over again throughout this sprawling narrative.

Adam Zignelik is a Jewish about-to-be ex-history professor at Columbia as a result of his meager publication record. As he is searching for a new direction to his career, he learns about a professor in Illinois, Henry Border, who interviewed Holocaust survivors in displaced person camps and, like Mandelbrot, conveyed detailed accounts of the horrors they experienced.

This discovery takes Adam on a series of weekend commutes to Chicago where he begins listening to the recordings made by Border. Meanwhile, Lamont begins listening to Mandelbort’s accounts of his unbearable Sonderkommando “job” in Auschwitz.

“I had no choice if I was to keep living. None of us had a choice. It was live in this hell, a world like no human being had every known before, or not live at all.”

And later Lamont asks Mandelbrot: “You wanted to survive to get the story out.” He replies: “Yes, for what other reasons was there to live.”

After Mandelbrot has unfolded his tale of survival to Lamont, one that is perhaps the most painful “fictional” account of Auschwitz I have ever read, and Adam has grasped the equally unbearable tales revealed in Border’s recordings, their paths ultimately intersect.

This occurs as a result of Adam’s role in the overturning of an injustice done to Lamont while working at the hospital. In this way, the novel weaves together the parallel situations of blacks in America and the Jews throughout Europe during the Holocaust.

The first sentence of The Street Sweeper is: “Memory is a willful dog. It won’t be summoned or dismissed but it cannot survive without you. It can sustain you or feed on you. It visits when it is hungry, not when you are. It has a schedule all its own that you can never know.”

The theme is repeated on the last pages of the novel: “What is memory? It is the storage, the retention and the recall of the constituents, gross and nuanced of information. How is it called upon? A certain protein in the brain, an enzyme, acts upon one neuron after another in rapid sequence as if to light them up…each neuron holds some pixel, some datum and if even one is lost, the sequence is interrupted. Then you have started to forget.”

Perlman does not want us to forget these events, they need to be passed on from one generation to another in all the ways this is possible.

The last sentence of this thoroughly absorbing novel, one that I have only been able to mention of a fraction of, is: “Tell everyone what happened here.”

Leonardo Live

Last weekend, I flew to London to see the once-in-a-lifetime National Gallery’s Leonardo da Vinci exhibition. I was invited by the irrepressible Tim Marlow and the charming Mariella Frostrup, both well known to British art critics. I found it impossible to refuse their extraordinary invitation.

They escorted me around the gallery, spoke eloquently and enthusiastically about each of the Leonardo paintings and introduced me to several knowledgeable art historians who in one way or another participated in the creation of this exhibition.

As a novice in the world of art appreciation, I was blown over by all that I learned--the history of each painting, Leonardo’s life in Florence and Milan, his patrons and students, and the difficult business of restoring his works, as well as authenticating them.

The truth must be told. I did not fly to London last weekend. I do not know Marlow or Frostrup. And it has been over 30 years since I last stepped foot in the National Gallery.

But I did attend and indeed relish going to the theater to view a live video broadcast of the Leonardo da Vinci exhibition that has been presented as a one-time only showing in cinemas across the United Kingdom and in several cities in this country.

However, everything I said about the on-screen presentation is true. For me, sitting quietly in the theater, being informed by these learned scholars and listening to the breezy English television hosts, Marlow and Frostrup, describe in detail each painting was a student’s delight.

I imagine anyone with knowledge of Leonardo’s paintings might have plenty of reasons to discourse on the weaknesses of the presentation. That was definitely true of Roberta Smith’s critique in the Times.

She notes that “Leonardo Live” was perhaps the first instance of the digital format applied to an art exhibition. However, “Thankful as I am to have an inkling of what the Leonardo show was like, I can’t say that it is entirely a promising debut.”

Smith finds fault with the notion that viewing a painting on film “is as good as, if not better than seeing it in the flesh, even in the context of a crowded exhibition, is bizarre.” Her claim must be taken seriously. Yet, for me the experience was far more revealing than it would have been in person. I might note the background music, keyed to each painting, didn’t hurt either.

I was also far more engaged in the works than I usually am at museum exhibition. The commentaries of the hosts and various scholars were largely responsible, as were the detailed close-ups and background historical scenes made possible by the video presentation. I was able to see the gradual evolution of the restored paintings explained by the hosts and the experts they were interviewing.

I suspect that variations on how one experiences such a presentation are largely a function of their prior knowledge of art history. Since my background in this area is practically nil, I found the movie much more immediate and enlightening than I surely would have had by viewing the paintings in-person.

Here is a short preview of the exhibition.