Aaron Swartz

“I do not know you in person. I am just a year older than you. We have something common which unities—THE INTENET. We belong here. This is our world where boundaries are torn apart. I cried. Literally cried reading about you.” Shri Vignesh

I had never heard of Aaron Swartz until the day after he committed suicide. And yet like so many others, close friends to distant unknowns, I was deeply affected by his death early last year. Ever since, I’ve been trying to understand why.

I know the sudden death of any young person saddens me, particularly a person as talented and articulate as Aaron. Swartz was 26 years old and well-known among computer programmers as a software genius. At the age of 14, he participated in the development of RSS software. The following year he wrote the code for Lawrence Lessig’s Creative Commons, a Web site advocating alternatives to current copyright laws. At nineteen he started Reddit, a user generated news Web site.

Aaron cared deeply about the injustice of current copyright laws and in 2008 he and a few others wrote the “Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto.”

Two years ago he downloaded over a million articles from the JSTOR, the academic database of professional journals. A single copy of a JSTOR article usually costs around $30-$35. Not long after, he was indicted on several felony counts; if convicted he stood to spend a fair number of years in prison.

Most of what I learned about Aaron stems from Larissa MacFarquhar’s New Yorker profile (3/11/13), Requiem for a Dream. She describes him reverently, says he was sometimes depressed, suffered from ulcerated colitis, dropped out of Stanford and later MIT and, in general, couldn’t finish projects. She wrote:

“He didn’t like people who did things that were just silly, that seem to have no purpose….he never internalized any notions about what he was supposed to be doing or not doing as a young person.”

Swartz became a political activist of several causes, but abandoned each one each one out of frustration with their limited, effectiveness. He tried living in San Francisco to work at Wired’s office, hated it because it was too loud, and the people were “shallow.”

Everyone was shocked when they learned of his death. The eulogies poured in all over the Web. His friend put up a Web site, Remember Aaron Swartz that included a video stream of his memorial service. Aaron represented many things to many people. I am among them and feel quite personally the loss of someone exceedingly important.

Here is how his friend, distinguished attorney and colleague Lawrence Lessig felt:

“I don’t want to be here. It’s like he jumps off a bridge and he pulls me over with him. I can’t go back. I don’t know what I can do. Nothing ever has come close to this, in its effect. I am never lost. I’ve never been so lost. I don’t know what to do.”

Solo Faces

Last year wasn’t a terrific year of reading for me. Like everything else, some years are better than others. Nevertheless, James Wood, the book critic for the New Yorker said he had a good one, starting off with the works of Elena Ferrante, an author I had read and liked, but that was several years ago. He mentioned Jamie Quatro’s book of short stories, unfamiliar to me.

And then Wood waxes eloquently about Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers. His review in the magazine led me to buy the book. I’ve tried reading it three times now, getting a little further but never staying with it very long. Yes, she writes a brilliant sentence once in a while, but that by itself doesn’t make a great novel. Besides the story is about people who really don’t speak my language. However, I will not give up so easily

I made a list of the 30 or so books I managed to finish last year and really only one stood out, James Salter’s Solo Faces. Although it was written in 1979, I read it for the first time last year, 34 years after it was published.

A great mountain is serious. It demands everything of a climber, absolutely all. It must be difficult and also beautiful, it must lie in the memory like the image of an unforgettable year. It must be unsoiled…The mountain magnifies. The smallest event is irreversible…

His name is Vernon Rand, he’s a mountain climber, obsessed by it, the only thing that matters in his life. After a series of aimless jobs in California, he leaves one day for Chamonix in the French Alps, where he begins climbing the perilous mountains there.

Salter’s description of his climbs are exciting, tense, you can’t put the book down. Rand’s climbs are dangerous, risky, each one more dangerous and riskier than the one before. Sometimes he climbs alone, sometimes with friend, sometimes with anyone who will go up with him.

The Dru, Pointe Lachene, the North Face of the Triolet, the names of the steep, icy, mountains he climbed. There was an accident on the Dru, the West Face, far up, the climbers were still alive. No one could reach them, the helicopters were useless, one rescuer was killed. Rand takes a crack at it. He reaches them, brings them down safely.

“When he woke he was famous. His face poured off the presses of France. It was repeated on every kiosk, in the pages of magazines, his interview read on the buses by working girls on their way home. Suddenly, in to small rooms and houses the ordinary streets, he brought a glimpse of something unspoiled. For two hundred years France had held the idea of the noble savage, simple, true. Unexpectedly he had appeared. His image cleansed the air like rain. He was the envoy of a breed one had forgotten, generous, unafraid, with a saintly smile and the vascular system of a marathon runner.”

He travels around, meets and discards one woman after another, thinks they are all the same anyway. Bored, restless, he decides to climb the Walker—alone. It did not take him long before he realizes he wasn’t going to be able to do it. “The will was draining from him. He had the resignation of one condemned. He knew the outcome, he no longer cared, he merely wanted it to end.”

He says that once you’ve lost your courage, nothing else matters. He knows his days of mountain climbing are over, his world had come apart. “It’s finished. Once it’s over, it’s over.”

Mavis Gallant

“Literature is no more and nothing less than a matter of life and death.”

For years I was an avid reader of Mavis Gallant’s "Letters from Paris" that appeared in the New Yorker. They were my introduction to Europe and to the city that for a while became my first and final destination each time I went there. So too were the stories she wrote for the New Yorker—116 in all.

Earlier this week Gallant died at the age of 91 in her apartment in Paris. She had lived there most of her life, after leaving Canada as a relatively young woman. She had no children, was not married and none of her work that I have read betrays any longing for the country or city (Montreal) of her birth.

Throughout the years Gallant lived in Europe she kept a daily journal. They are her accounts of the many changes in Europeans and their cultures after World War 2. The war ended in 1945. My first trip to Europe was nine years later. Rubble was still on the streets of London and almost every city in Germany I visited. People had scarcely any money and in Madrid, where Gallant lived for a while, Franco was still in power.

A friend of Gallant’s, Frances Kierman, is currently editing the vast, mostly handwritten entries for what will be the first of several volumes of her daily journal entries. During her last years, when she had been quite ill, she continued to work with Kierman in recalling the details of some of the incidents she wrote about.

Jhumpa Lahiri recently met Gallant to conduct an interview for Granta magazine. After their meeting, Lahiri wrote, "I had never met a writer who has inspired me so greatly, and towards whom I felt such enormous debt." Lahiri has recently moved with her family from the United States to Rome. Born in London to immigrant parents from West Bengali, raised in Rhode Island, she knows well the effects of such a background. In remembering Gallant, she commented: “the great act of bravery to leave Canada to live in Paris alone and to survive solely by means of her writing is such an extraordinary thing to have done. She was completely on her own.”

In her Paris Review interview Gallant said: “I believed that if I was to call myself a writer, I should live on writing. If I could not live on it, even simply, I should destroy every scrap, every trace, every notebook and live some other way.”

In her remembrance of Gallant, Deborah Treisman, the fiction editor of the New Yorker, also cited a passage from this interview: “Writing is like a love affair: the beginning is the best part.” Well maybe, but I can think of many exceptions.

Several excerpts from her journals were recently published in the New Yorker. They are drawn from four months 1952 when she was struggling to survive as a writer in Madrid.

I live on bread wine, and mortadella. Europe for me is governed by the price of mortadella.

When I think of my life before I came here, it is like someone else’s life, something I am being told. I can’t write anyone. At the moment I haven’t the postage, but even if I had, what to say?

Sunshine and little to eat (potatoes and potatoes). To the Prado, that small container overflowing with good things. Back to Goya. I go back and back and still he is haunting and terrifying.

No one is as real to me as people in the novel. It grows like a living thing. When I realize they do not exist except in my mind I have a feeling of sadness, looking around for them, as if the half-empty café were a place I had once come to with friends who had all moved away.

Today from the balcony I see a blind man tapping his way long the buildings across the street. He reaches a street crossing; everyone watches, silent, and lets him walk full on into the side of a building. When he has recovered (for a moment he was like a butterfly beating its wings in a box) the spectators just walk away.

Today I have no money and no food.


Note: Portions of this expanded post appeared earlier on Marks in the Margin.

Amour

Death teaches us that everything can stop in a moment. When everything ends, all that remains is love.
Cardinal Bertone

When I went to see "Amour" I knew what it was about. I had read the reviews, knew that some claimed it was not a film I should see or that I would like, let alone stay to the end. But I had to see it and when it was finally over, I’m glad I did.

It is a film everyone should see, grim as it is, for it is likely you will experience the events it depicts. We don’t talk about them, we do everything to avoid that, but when it arrives it will hit you savagely. And there isn’t anything you can do about it now or then.

Over sixty years ago the two main characters in the film, Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant were young film stars.



As the film opens, firemen break into a Parisian apartment, begin searching for the source of the foul smell, and discover the body of an old woman in bed. We learn that the woman is Anne (Riva) who along with her husband Georges (Trintignant), now both in their 80s, are musicians.

We switch to a concert hall where eventually we discover them sitting together among the vast audience. They are listening to a performance by a pianist that Anne once taught and to whom he later tells that whatever success he has achieved is due to her.

Like them, their apartment, once quite elegant, appears to be wearing out, yet filled with books, photos, a grand piano, and mementos of their long life together. They are having breakfast, as they do each day. Suddenly Anne begins to stare into the distance, fixed on something. Georges tries to talk to her, she doesn’t reply, he shakes her, asks her what’s the matter, without a reply.



We learn that Anne has had a minor stroke, apparently the result of a blocked carotid artery. An operation must be performed. It is unsuccessful and her condition worsens. She returns to the apartment in a wheel chair, unable to get about on her own, although she is still quite coherent.

She grows weaker, and needs to be helped with the basics, shown in all their reality—eating, cleaning, excreting. George vows to care for her. But eventually it becomes too much. He hires an aid, then another, none stay for long and once again George becomes her only caretaker.

The tenderness George conveys to Anne throughout their long and difficult ordeal is an act of the purest love. It is the other half of this grim movie.

In The Coming of Age Simone de Beauvoir writes, “When we look at the image of our own future provided by the old we do not believe it: an absurd inner voice whispers that that will never happen to us—when that happens it will no longer be ourselves that it happens to.” Beauvoir wrote that sentence over 40 years ago. How prescient she was.

Our future is longer than it was then. The so-called marvels of medicine will keep you alive almost forever now. But as she said, you will no longer be the you that you are now. "Amour" makes it clear what you will become and the way it will affect those who love you.

Almost everyone who sees "Amour" has two reactions. It is difficult to watch and once you’ve seen it, you can’t get it out of your mind. The film delivers an important message, a personal message to everyone in this increasingly medicalized world. The experience you live through in watching the film will in time occur to you. The only unknown is when.

It is for that reason that it is such an important film to see, in spite of its excruciating depiction of old age. You have to ask yourself if you want to do anything about it, rather than let it unexpectedly descend on you. When it does, it will be too late. Who can predict when it is time to act?

A Break

After blogging for over five years, it is time to take an extended break. I’m not sure when I’ll return. In the meantime, thank you for reading and for responding.

Blogging continues to be an unusual experience for me, sometimes surprising, sometimes illuminating. I hope you’ve learned a little something along the way; I certainly have.

Unbroken

“If I knew I had to go through these experiences again, I’d kill myself.” Louis Zamperini

In Unbroken, Laura Hillenbrand unfolds the astonishing life of Louis Zamperini. You may not believe what I say about her account, but I have not distorted or imagined anything. Still my summary is nothing like the experiences Zamperini endured.

Louis Zamperni was a rambunctious kid who grew up in Torrance, California, where he broke into homes, robbed merchants, and had a great knack at getting into trouble. But he was never jailed, was usually successful, and must have learned then that he could do just about anything.

It was his older brother who finally found a way to channel his energy by means of long distance running, a mile and beyond. Apparently Zamperini took to the sport at once, he had a long stride, and a tremendous kick at the end of a race.

He qualified for the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, finished 8th in the 5,000 meter race and caught the eye of Hitler who came up to congratulate him after his record-breaking time in the last lap. Hillenbrand suggests he did not do better because he overate to the extreme on the long ship ride over the Atlantic and was terribly out of shape by the time he arrived in Berlin.

When the war broke out, he enlisted in the Air Force and was stationed in Hawaii. In May of 1943, the B-24 that he was flying went down on a search mission over the Pacific. Eight of his crew were killed, he and 2 others survived, one of whom eventually died on the raft they were drifting in.

They floated over 2,000 miles for 47 days. That’s 47 long days and nights without much in the way of food or water. They managed to survive by catching rainwater and an occasional fish they were able to snatch from the sea. This itself was an unbelievable ordeal. But there is more.

The raft eventually drifted on to one of the Marshall Islands held by the Japanese, to the dismay of the two survivors. They were captured, subjected to the most brutal treatment imaginable, especially Zamperini who was well known to the camp commander through his running feats.

He endured over two years of daily, intense assaults, starvation, slave labor, dysentery, beriberi, respiratory diseases, and physical injuries delivered by a succession of sadistic guards.

According to Hillenbrand, “…of the 34,648 Americans held by Japan, 12,935—more than 37 percent—died. By comparison, only 1 percent of Americans held by the Nazis and Italians died.”

Not surprisingly, after the Japanese surrendered and Zamperini was discharged from the Air Force, nothing was ever the same. He tried running again, but the injuries he sustained in the camps made it clear that was impossible. He had nightmares, terrible flashbacks, anxieties, and bouts of alcoholism.

He married, was separated from his wife several times, and finally, at her instigation, attended a crusade led by Billy Graham. Hillenbrand ends her account with an upbeat tale of his new career as a born again Christian and inspirational speaker.

I simply cannot comprehend how Louis Zamperini survived the ordeals he experienced during World War II, first the month and a half on the raft floating in the Pacific and then the years of torture in the Japanese prisoner of war camps.

Hillenbrand attributes his endurance to those early years in Torrance. Zamperini is currently 93 and lives in Hollywood. He has received numerous awards, honorary degrees, and made television appearances in this country, Europe, and Japan.

As she brings her account to a close, Hillenbrand writes: “When he thought of his history, what resonated with him now was not all that he had suffered but the divine love that he believed had intervened to save him. He was not the worthless, broken, forsaken man that the Bird [the most brutal of the guards] had striven to make of him. In a single, silent moment, his rage, his fear, his humiliation and helplessness, had fallen away."

Shouting Won't Help

“We hear as we breathe—effortlessly—until we can’t” Katherine Bouton

In her memoir, Shouting Won’t Help, Katherine Bouton writes that forty eight million Americans have some degree of hearing loss. You don’t have to be entirely deaf to have trouble hearing, especially in crowded, noisy situations.

Hearing speech is usually the most difficult problem for those with hearing loss. Bouton claims one in five people, across all age groups, has trouble understanding speech and many cannot hear certain sounds at all.

Hearing difficulties are known to outnumber vision problems by a sizable percentage. And the problem is exacerbated by the fact that hearing aids don’t work as well as glasses. In fact, by amplifying certain sounds, they sometimes make hearing worse.

Helen Keller considered her deafness to be a much more serious limitation than blindness. “…it means the loss of the most vital stimulus—the sound of the voice that brings language, sets thoughts astir and keeps us in the intellectual company of man.”

Bouton first became aware of her problem when she was only thirty while working as the editor for the Times Book Review and then later, at other departments at the Times. She couldn’t catch everything being said at the group meetings she attended and even in speaking one-on-one with a person in her office. She heard voices, was aware who was speaking, but didn’t hear the words they were saying.

As she got older, she heard less and less, “I had trouble at teacher’s conferences. One of the kids or my husband would fill me in. I missed most of what was said in school assemblies. I never heard a single graduation speech. There were times when my hearing loss was wrenching. I missed confidences, murmured fears, muttered anger. I never heard the backseat chatter and gossip between my children and their friends.”

Eventually she became bilaterally deaf, all the while hesitant to begin wearing hearing aids. They are expensive, for some unattractive, easy to misplace, and sometimes not particularly helpful. Eventually she began using them, but they didn’t improve her hearing a great deal.

To my delight she said email is the” best thing that’s ever happened” to those who have trouble hearing. She has received emails using voice-activated software that she might otherwise not have been able to hear on the phone.

She finally accepted a cochlear implant, in fact two of them, and they came with their own limitations, like trouble transmitting music very well. She took a lip reading course, studied body language, met with researchers, and then other audiologists. But she never did recover her hearing.

“Despite my sophisticated devices, I still can’t hear well enough to follow a conversation except under optimum circumstances—one-on-one, facing each other, in a quiet place. I hear speech, but I often don’t understand it.”

Hearing loss affects friendships, family and professional lives. If you know anyone who has trouble hearing, you might want to tell them about Katherine Bouton’s book. It might help them to recognize a hearing problem that they have been denying or simply unaware of.

Happy Birthday Philip Roth

Last week Philip Roth celebrated his 80th birthday. A party was held, there was much writing about Roth and he spoke, quite memorably apparently, at the gala party held in his honor.

Here are some of my favorite links about Roth and the celebration.

Adam Gopnik suggests the occasion “doubles as a bon voyage party for the American writer’s occupation itself.”

At the Times Charles McGrath and Tammy La Gorce write about Roth’s hometown, Newark, and the events held during the week long celebration.

David Remnick describes the events surrounding the week-long even, the several speakers at the party and says that Roth’s talk was “the most astonishing literary performance I’ve ever witnessed.”

The literary critic James Wood calls Roth his “literary hero.”

Here is a preview of the forthcoming PBS American Masters video Philip Roth: Unmasked

Watch Philip Roth: Unmasked on PBS. See more from American Masters.

The End of Your Life Bookclub

In 1970 Mary Ann Schwalbe learned she had a fatal form of pancreatic cancer with only a few months left to live. She carried on her life for more two active years, as if nothing much had changed, years of chemotherapy and fully engaged on projects that often meant traveling abroad.

She was a person of remarkable courage, a life long reader, and an advocate of refugees in Asia and Africa. Her son, Will Schwalbe’s The End of Your Life Book Club, describes her final years, the books they read together, often while she was undergoing long hours of chemo, and the organizations she either founded or supported.

“That’s one of the things books do. They help us talk. But they also give us something we all can talk about when we don’t want to talk about ourselves.”

He recounts her early work as a casting agent, then director of admissions at both Radcliffe and Harvard and, after moving to New York, her role in directing the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children that took her to Afghanistan, Liberia and Sudan. And in her final months she devoted all her dwindling energy to raising money for a traveling library in Kabul.

“It’s been eighteen months of chemo: of mouth sores, swollen feet, nausea, headaches, weight loss, lack of energy, diarrhea, constipation, cramps, and fevers, and hours in doctors’ offices, emergency rooms, and hospitals. And it’s been thousands of dollars of her own money and tens of thousands of dollars of Medicare.”

Through it all they kept reading and discussing the issues the books raised—Marjorie Morning Star, The Lizard Cage, Suite Francaise, The Last Lecture, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, etc.

“The Elegance of the Hedgehog is, in many ways, a book about books (and films): what they can teach us, and how they can open up worlds. But it’s really, like most great books, about people—and the connections they make, how they save one another and themselves.”

As the book club draws to a close, Schwalbe writes, “Mom taught me not to look away from the worst but to believe that we can all do better. She never wavered in her conviction that books are the most powerful tool in the human arsenal, that reading all kinds of books, in whatever format you choose—electronic (even though it wasn’t for her) or print, or audio—is the grandest entertainment, and also is how you take part in the human conversation.”

Their times together and the books they discussed forged a new relationship between them. It was not unlike the relationship I had with my mother in her final years. While she wasn’t seriously ill, we also formed a book group of two then. Every Sunday we’d talk on the phone about the books we had been reading and what they meant to each of us.

The End of Your Life Book Club is written with heartache and affection. “Even though nearly two years have passed since her death, I’m occasionally struck by the desire to call Mom and tell her something—usually about a book I’m reading that I know she’d love.”

Like Someone in Love

In Abbas Kiarostami’s latest film, Like Someone in Love, much of what happens, and it isn’t a great deal, is seen through mirrors and glass. The film opens with a long scene in a Tokyo bar where we often view a character through a faded reflection in a door window.

The scene shifts to a taxi where a young college student, Akiko, is being driven to an aging scholar who is her client. She is a call girl trying to earn money to pay for her college education. At least, that is what we are told.

We view her through the car window, the small rear window inside the car, and then the one outside on the door. She is sitting quietly and then tearfully in the back seat listening to the voice mail messages from her grandmother who has come to Tokyo to see her. She tells Akiko that she will be waiting for her next to a statue outside the train station.

The taxi circles the station once, but a small truck blocks the view from the rear-door window. She asks the driver to circle again. This time we glimpse her grandmother, or what we assume to be her grandmother, again through the rear-door window

Akiko arrives at the book-lined apartment of the elderly scholar who says his name is Takashi. She begins looking over the photos, covered in glass frames, of Takashi’s family. They talk for a short while. It is the only time in the film that Akiko becomes the least bit animated.

She claims to be tired and I imagine she has had many sleepless nights arguing with her boyfriend, who claims she is his fiancé. She says she isn’t hungry, doesn’t care for the shrimp soup Takashi has prepared for their meal, and repairs to the bedroom. She throws off her clothes and gets into bed. The ensuing conversation between Takashi and Akiko is viewed through a clouded mirror.

The next day he drives her to school. Once again there is a long scene in a car. After she is dropped off, we view an argument between Akiko and her so so-called boyfriend, Noriaki, from the car.

Akiko breaks away, heads into the building, whereupon the jealous Noriaki comes down to the car to confront Takashi. He is invited into the car and the two begin a friendly conversation, as Takashi lets the young man think he is Akiko’s grandfather.

There is another long drive as Takashi drives Noriaki to work, followed by another, when Takashi returns to rescue Akiko who has fought again with Noriaki. They return to his apartment and the film abruptly ends with yet another scene in which a glass object plays a critical role.

It was only later that I began to understand what Kiarostami is suggesting or might be suggesting, by viewing these individuals and presumably their inner life, from the reflections in the various glass objects that appear so often in the film.

We stand before ourselves in mirrors, we glimpse others through the mirrors they choose to reflect. But rarely do we see beyond the appearances. I am reminded of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave in The Republic.

Socrates describes a group of prisoners in a cave who can only observe the shadows cast by the objects passing by outside. Socrates means to suggest that the shadows do not constitute reality, but that is all we are able to glimpse, never the “true form of reality” itself.

There is much deception and evasiveness in Like Someone in Love. Nothing is what we are told or what we are able to see. It is the same theme depicted in Kiarostami’s previous film, Certified Copy, which also spends a fair amount of time in a car, this time driving around Tuscany.

We’re all standing at the windows of our selves and others, glimpsing what we can, and only speculating about the rest, a highly risky endeavor that often ends disagreeably and with considerable misunderstanding.

Small Courtesies

Every once in a while I send an email to one of my children or grandchildren. I rarely get a reply. Sometimes it is in response to a question they ask me. I try to answer it in an email and I wait in vain for a thank you.

On special occasions, we send a gift. With increasing frequency, we never receive a thank you note, email, phone call, or text message

I am disappointed when this happens. I ask myself is this reasonable? I am bothered by it. Is there anything more unsettling than being ignored, especially by someone you love?

Now I learn that I am out of fashion, that current email etiquette does not require a thank you or acknowledgement.

In the Times Nick Bilton writes, “Of course, some people might think me the rude one for not appreciating life’s little courtesies. But many social norms just don’t make sense to people drowning in digital communication.” I utter a profanity.

If I was speaking in person to someone and they didn’t reply to a question I asked or a remark in our ongoing conversation, it would feel rather strange, to say the least. Yet the rudeness of such silence would be unmistakable.

I am sure I’d get a reply if we were texting each other or speaking on the phone. But not necessarily in an email.

Bilton quotes Baratunde Thurston, a co-founder of something called a “comedic creative company.” “It’s almost too easy to not think before we express ourselves because expression is so cheap, yet it often costs the receiver more.” Again, I utter a profanity.

I know I am older than these people and that I come from a tradition that both expects and appreciates a thank you note, regardless of how it is delivered. I do not understand or welcome the new era of digital silence.

I see people on the street, in restaurants, and elevators staring at the screen on their cell phone, usually hitting the keys with their thumbs. Sometimes, their thumbs are moving as fast as the speed of light. It almost seems that this gadget has become attached to their body.

A teacher describes a short seminar she will be teaching. She plans to give the students a few pre-assignments: one is to take a walk, observe what they see around them, but without taking their cell phones. To that I say, “fantastic.”

What an experience that will be, the trauma of a few minutes of solitude without that part of their body, as if they were leaving one of their feet at home before heading out for a walk.

The teacher says, “I am very sure—that asking them to spend half an hour without a cell phone is like asking them to take their clothes off. No cell phones, no cup of coffee—just take a solitary walk.”

I think this teacher deserves the Teacher of the Year award. And I wonder how the students will get by. Will they begin suffering from a new form of traumatic stress disorder? Or need to repair to their psychiatrist before the half hour walk ends?

However, I doubt this exercise will teach them the lost art of saying thank you when they receive a gift or a thoughtful email. I have no idea what it will take to do that?

Friday Night Video

Book or Tablet?

Visit https://vimeo.com/61275290

 

An MRI

It begins with flashing lights. Always on the left side of my field of vision. I can’t read. I can’t see clearly. I rub close my eyes. If I can get to the Tylenol, I take a couple. And if possible, I lie down. The lights flash across my forehead, so to speak, from left to right. In a half hour they are gone. And I can see again. Afterwards, I have a headache, sometimes mild, sometimes a little stronger.

The episodes were increasing, from maybe once or twice at most a year, to a recent series of four of them. One night I had such a pain in my head, I woke up, turned over and then it went away. Lately I have a low-grade headache that comes and goes during the day, never strong enough to require Tylenol, however.

What is going on? I go to the doctor to find out. He tells me we better have a look. I go to the MRI lab. I read about the procedure. “Our unique Philips Gemini GXL PET/CT system has both PET and multi-slice CT components….” “…multi-slice…?” Good grief, did I bargain for this?

What is PET? I read on. “PET (Positron Emission Tomography) is a powerful diagnostic tool…” I’m sure. What is CT? “CT stands for Computed Tomography.”  I am convinced. “CT is non-invasive, painless and relatively fast.” I remain hopeful.

I am laid out flat, inserted into a cylinder and then the music begins—bam, bam, bam; boom, boom, boom, drilling and more drilling, beep, beep, beep, drum rolls, squeaks, rat-ta-tat tats—again and again in progressive waves for forty five minutes.

Before it begins I am asked if I want to watch TV. Sure I say. So there I lay watching CNN and they are blasting my head with this Schoenberg. How am I expected to hear Wolf Blitzer when they are pounding my head with Arnold Schoenberg?

I am told it is over. They hand me a CD of the results. I say, what is this for? So you can see the images. What will I be able to make of them? Well, you can take it to another physician one day if you need to. I know that is something I am going to have to do for the rest of my life anyway.

I go to the doctor. The report has arrived. There is no evidence of any “cerebellopontine angle lesion, although “mastoid disease is present and possible medial temporal lobe atrophy.” There is also a “mild vertebrobasilar dolichoectasia with slight chronic indentation of the ventral margin of the pons in the right paramedian location by the basilar artery.”

I am thrilled by the news, although can’t make heads or tails of it. It is suggested that I take some Tylenol. No more flashing lights, no more headaches. The wonders of placebos.

Henri Cole's Paris Diary

I’ve been reading Henri Cole’s “Street of the Iron Po(e)t” installments on the New Yorker Website. To date there have been five and I imagine they will form the basis of his Paris Diary, whenever he completes it.

When I began reading them, I had no idea who Henri Cole was. I’ve subsequently learned he is a poet, one time executive director of the American Society of Poets who has held many teaching positions, published several collections of poetry, and received a good many awards and honors.

In his first installment he explains that his little apartment is Paris is located on the Street of the Iron Pot (rue Pot de Fer) which he renamed the Street of the Iron Poet—the title of his daily experiences in the city.

The matters he treats range from ordinary chores of going out and about, the parks he visits and the literary luminaries he spends time with.

“I had to clean [his apartment] for many days before I felt comfortable, but now it is home.” “Today I received a flu shot.” “Today I visited the cenotaph to Baudelaire.”

He visits the bookstores of his Latin Quarter neighborhood, the bars and the cinemas that he says have the feel of a village. His words read like prose poems and he intersperses them with photographs he took along the way. He writes about his parents, his mother a first generation French woman whose parents emigrated from Armenia. She met his father in Marseille, who was an American soldier. He includes a photo of the family of three.

He recalls a poem, “Quai d’Orleans” by Elizabeth Bishop, that is set on the Seine, quotes the poem, and includes a photograph, (or is it a painting?) of the bridge. Another day he encounters fifteen horses marching down the avenue.

“I heard the horses’ hooves striking the pavement long before they were visible, and when they stopped at an intersection, those of us on the sidewalk, and in cars and on motorcycles, couldn’t help but pause and admire them, smiling as the wind played with their brushed tails.”

One night he has dinner with a friend who is the biographer of Picasso and Giacometti. The next day he meets with his translator. He visits the Jardin des Plantes and I recall an afternoon I spent there not long ago.

“Walking along the Seine today, I found a monument to Thomas Jefferson, who first sailed to Paris in 1784, to negotiate with European powers. Later, taking a carriage drawn by horses, he traveled south, to Aix-en-Provence, as a private citizen without servants, because he believed that when one travelled alone one reflected more.”

What a pleasure it is to read Cole’s account of his activities from one day to the next. He writes beautifully and gives me a chance to recall those times I too have lived in the same neighborhood of Paris, walked down those same streets, and strolled about the same parks.

I wait for the next installment. Perhaps you’d also like to read those he has published so far? Visit this page for first five.

Proof

“…you don't need to have had known or reported concussions to develop this brain disease. [chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE)]. It really shows us that those multiple, repetitive sub-concussive blows to the head that are experienced by so many athletes in many different sports can bring on the beginnings of this disease."
Dr Robert Stern

A while ago, Malcolm Gladwell gave a public lecture at the University of Pennsylvania on the subject of “proof.” He asked: What do we need to know about the harmfulness of college and professional football before we take action? That may range from complete banning of the game to somehow taking steps to reduce the likelihood of injury, especially to the brain.

Gladwell began by discussing the very lengthy time it took for society to do something about the seriousness of black-lung disease among miners. Then he moved on to the matter of recent deaths that have occurred among football players

Not surprisingly what counts as proof for Gladwell are examples of players who have died as a result of brain injuries incurred during their playing days. It doesn’t take more than a very small number, perhaps only one, for Gladwell to “prove” the harmfulness of the game.

And then, in the light of that evidence, to take action, not waiting for more evidence, more deaths and if so how many. Rather doing something now to insure it will not happen again.

He pointed to the hazards of this hard-hitting game by citing several examples of players who had committed suicide and where autopsies of their brain discovered a condition known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).

They included Junior Seau who had played in the NFL for 20 years, Dave Duerson, Terry Long and Andre Waters who shot themselves to death, and the linebacker Jovan Belcher who killed his girl friend and then himself.

According to Liz Neporent, “Of the 34 former NFL players who have died and donated their brains to research, the percentage of them who have pathologically confirmed CTE is staggering – over 90 percent, a 2009 University of Michigan report found.”

And before an audience of Penn students, Gladwell brought up the case of 21-year-old Penn college football player Owen Thomas who committed suicide and whose autopsy indicated he had mild stages of the same type of brain damage seen in athletics who have played much longer.

These occurred in spite of continuing improvements in the design of helmets and modifications in the rules of the game to reduce these risks. But players today are bigger, stronger and faster than they used to be.

Gladwell confined his remarks to football. But what about all those other rough and tumble sports—hockey, rugby, wrestling and boxing, where the likelihood of major brain injury is just as likely?

In his lecture he argued forcefully for the complete elimination of the “brutal” game of football. “Brutal” because of the cumulative effects of blows to the head that almost all football players experience.

He argued that football has no place in colleges or university settings where something called an education is supposed to be occurring. (At Reed College, where I taught for many years, there was no football team. But “Ultimate Frisbee” was wildly popular.) In Gladwell’s view, the enormous financial benefit to the institution from all those well-healed alumni is no justification for continuing to maintain a football team.

Gladwell is a cool and effective speaker. If you’re interested in this subject have a look:

Weekend Reading

You could say that the book club became our life, but it would be more accurate to say that our life became a book club.
Will Schwalbe

Over the weekend I began reading Will Schwalbe’s The End of Your Life Book Club. Schwalbe and his mother, who had advanced pancreatic cancer, that is almost always fatal, discuss the books they are reading. They exchange books, sometimes read together and share their hopes and concerns by means of literature. In a way they have created a book group for two, a group that I’ve been hoping to join for years.

Early on in the book Schwalbe recalls a poem by Auden called “Musee des Beaux Arts.”

Musee des Beaux Arts
About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Schwalbe says Auden wrote the poem in December 1938, just after Kristallnacht. Brueghel’s painting depicts Icarus falling into the sea while everyone else carries on with their daily affairs without the slightest concern for the drowning Icarus.

Kristallnacht was a series of attacks against Jews throughout Nazi Germany and portions of Austria on the night of November 9, 1938. It is estimated 91 Jews were killed, thousands were arrested and Jewish homes, stores, buildings, synagogues and schools were attacked. Some were completely destroyed, others were partially burned, and windows were shattered in all of them. German authorities, police officers, and citizens in the communities where the attacks took place did nothing to stop the destruction or come to the aid of the Jewish citizens.

Some years later (1960) William Carlos Williams also wrote a poem in response to Brueghel’s “Landscape With The Fall of Icarus.” Quite different in structure and with greater concision, it also recognizes the world’s indifference to the tragedy of Icarus.

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring
a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry
of the year was
awake tingling
with itself
sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax
unsignificantly
off the coast
there was
a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning

Stephane Hessel

“TO CREATE IS TO RESIST.
TO RESIST IS TO CREATE”

Stephane Hessel died early this week. He was 95. I admired him greatly. Yet it was only two years ago that I first heard of him. This was true for most of the readers of his 2010 impassioned pamphlet Indignez Vous, later published in English as Time for Outrage. I wrote about Hessel soon after I read the book.

In an instant he captured a feeling, a belief that I had been harboring for years: Beliefs are not enough unless they are translated into action. Hessel wrote:

“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.”

Hessel clearly believed that historical progress is made by successive challenges to injustices and that each individual is responsible for contributing to this task. The great challenges he feels most outraged against are the immense gap between the very poor and the very rich, “which never ceases to expand,” the gradual eroding of human rights and “the state of the planet.”

He felt passionately that “The worst possible outlook is indifference that says, “I can’t do anything about it: I’ll jut get by.” And throughout it seems that he is primarily addressing the young. “To the young, I say: look around you, you will find things that make you justifiably angry—the treatment of immigrants, illegal aliens and Roma. You will see concrete situations that provoke you to act as a real citizen. Seek and you shall find!”

In a talk to students at Columbia 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 again 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.

Hessel was of German Jewish ancestry and with his family moved to France in 1924. While serving in the French army in 1940, he was captured, sent to a POW camp, eventually escaped and joined de Gaulle’s band of Free French resistants.

The Gestapo captured him while serving in one of the resistance networks, sent him the Buchenwald and Dora concentration camps. He escaped from both. After the war he was a key figure in drafting the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

His short manifesto became a rallying cry to the Occupy Wall Street movement that has all but been forgotten about now. But surely this is just as much a time for outrage and active resistance as it was two years ago.

Hessel’s death reminds me, perhaps reminds everyone of the truths he so clearly enunciated.

Car Sharing

I’d rather have a cleaner environment, but I can’t imagine me without my car.
Steph Willen

Many years ago I read a newspaper article about something called car sharing. It described a group in Switzerland whose members joined together to share the use of a few cars. I thought the notion made perfect sense. Not everyone needs to own their own car; how much better it would be, to say nothing of the cost savings, to have convenient access to a car only when you needed one.

At the time I was doing research on environmental issues, so I filed the article in one I called Transportation. Several years later as I was preparing a lecture on transportation solutions to the then energy crisis, I came across the article again. I began to think further about the idea and started talking about it with some colleagues.

Not long after, we formed a small group to plan a car sharing organization in Portland, Oregon. After many discussions and meetings with local officials, we obtained some start-up funds to initiate what turned out to be the first car sharing organization in this country. That was 1988. A few years later, a group (Flexcar) in Seattle began operating and within a few months Zipcar was formed in the greater Boston area.

Car Sharing Portland was never profitable and in time the owner sold it to Flexcar. A few years later, Zipcar purchased Flexcar and became the largest car sharing group in this country with branches in Canada and England. As the popularity of car sharing grew, the major car rental agencies that rent cars by the day, not hourly as in car sharing, became interested. And a few weeks ago Avis purchased Zipcar to add an hourly rental service at some of its locations.

This is how an innovation that begins on a local level, in a limited way, can expand and eventually be gobbled up by a large, world-wide organization. In a way, I am pleased to see this development, although the eventual benefit to individuals remains uncertain.

It is possible that Avis, as well as other rental car agencies that have added hourly rentals to their service may find it unprofitable and bring it to an end. Or they will raise the hourly rental rate to a point that it will be unaffordable for most users. That would leave the car sharing concept to those groups, who have remained independent and those recent variations--Car2Go, RelayRides, and one-way car sharing systems—that operate largely in this country and Europe.

In the beginning, many of us thought that car sharing would enable a person to drive less, reduce the number of cars they had and, in the long term, lead to less traffic congestion. To date, over twenty years after the start of car sharing in this country, these questions remain unanswered. At least much of the evidence is equivocal, although there is some reason to believe that it does reduce the number of cars a family has when they own more than one.

As car sharing grows and the number of users expands significantly, perhaps we’ll get a better reading on these questions. But for now, many of the environmental benefits of this transportation concept have yet to be realized.

As Scott La Vine wrote in a recent comment on the Avis-Zipcar merger, “Reductions in emissions, traffic levels and parking needs are possible – but planners will need to bear in mind these are not the only goals worth achieving, and that impacts are likely to change over time. It will take many years to fully understand the impa

Six Footnotes

Commentaries on issues that I’ve previously discussed on Marks in the Margin often appear on the Web. Here are a half dozen that might interest you.

Relationship between gun ownership and party affiliation: On his blog, 538, Nate Silver, author of The Signal and the Noise, presents evidence on the political party affiliation of households that do and do not possess a gun.

How to shorten waiting times: A clever way to shorten the perceived time spent in waiting for the bus or any similar transportation service.

On Letter Writing: Sometimes a letter writing correspondence has a profound effect on an individual. Daniel Mendelsohn describes the way it did for him.

Cognitive biases: It is good to be reminded of the several potential errors and biases that cloud our thinking. George Dvorsky has compiled a brief description of the twelve most common ones.

Civilizing effects of literature: Teju Cole reaffirms the importance of fiction and what can happen when we don’t.

What book changed your life? Hilary Mantel writes that one of Oliver Sacks’ book changed her life, as probably did for many others, as well.

Betrayal

Without love there can be no betrayal—love of a country, a brother, a wife, a platoon mate, a family. Granta #122

Harold Pinter’s play Betrayal depicts the course of an affair. But it does so with a twist. The play begins at the end of the affair and moves backwards, scene by scene, to the point where it began, as the lovers become younger and desire becomes more erotically charged.

In this way, Pinter poses an important question: If you knew the outcome of your act of betrayal, would you still make it? In the recent issue of “Granta” (#122), 12 writers approach this question from different perspectives. They include:

Janine Di Giovanni in “Seven Days in Syria,” in which she describes how the government is betraying its people. In “Abington Square” Andre Aciman lingers long and mournfully about his cafe encounters with a cryptic, flirting woman. Jennifer Vanderbes’ story, “A Brief History of Fire,” depicts the several affairs of a woman who lived deep in the forest at a fire lookout station.

Granta, also asked the contributors to to briefly define the word “betrayal” and its implications. The most common understanding of the term refers to a liaison outside of a marriage or close relationship. But the term has a much broader application, as illustrated in the issue and the author’s definitions.

Mohsin Hamid views betrayal very generally as pain and also as education. A person you love shows you life isn’t the way you expected it to be. Yet he says, “Sometimes it is a blessing.”

Karen Russell points out that the powerful effects of an act of betrayal are often just as much a surprise to the traitor as to the victim. Several of the writers look back on their personal experiences in giving meaning to the term. The war correspondent Janie di Giovanni describes some of the people who let her down during the war in Iraq. One of the worst was an man she had befriended, who she later found out was an informant for Saddam Hussein.

John Burnside writes, “Banks, politicians, the legal system, corporations, broadcasters, advertisers, the police, any government-supported watchdog or ‘standard agency’ and even NGOs—the list of traitors seems endless…”

Finally I think Samantha Harvey offers up the most widespread understanding of the term. “We think of betrayal as the point at which one, who is loved and respected, fails the other, who loves and respects. I wonder if it is really only the point at which we realize that we have been asking for something that the other could never give? In other words, that we see we have been believing in false gods.”

There are also those far less serious acts of betrayals that occur in the world of sports and widely reported in the press: Lance Armstrong confessing he doped in his Tour de France races, baseball players admitting they took steroids during their playing days.

And what about all those Boston Red Sox players who betrayed their devoted followers by signing with other teams after their 2004 World Series victory—Johnny Damon and Manny Ramirez, etc? And then there are all the treacherous acts of the Red Sox management who consistently trade away of their legendary stars, often to their “arch-enemy” the Yankees beginning as early as Babe Ruth. That single trade led only to the Curse of the Bambino that for 86 years, from 1918 to 2004, prevented the Red Sox from winning the World Series.

From the green playing field of Fenway Park to the bedrooms of Tribeca, all the way to the alleyways of Damascus, the world of betrayal is immense.

Midnight Disaster

Late one night well before the turn of the century, I lost a book. It wasn’t just an ordinary book, one you can easily replace at the bookstore or find at the library. Instead, it was a book I had written. It was the only copy I had.

I recall a well-known tale. Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley, lost a suitcase she was bringing him while he was on assignment for the Toronto Star in Switzerland. The suitcase was full of Hemingway’s writing that he wanted to show Lincoln Steffens.

She had also packed all the carbon copies. Apparently the suitcase was lost at the train station while Hadley left it unattended when she went to get a bottle of water. When she came back, the suitcase was gone.

The book I lost was a bit different, as it was written on a computer. As a faculty member of the college where Steve Jobs had attended for a few years, I was a beneficiary of one of the early Macintosh computers. At that time we were also using Apple’s word processor known as MacWrite.

I had not learned the fine art of backing up computer files, had not printed a single copy, and in a single idiotic mistake, the complete version of the book was gone. I couldn’t find it and became a bit frantic. The night wore on, the ravings became more frequent and I was growing desperate. And for the life of me, I had no idea what mistake I had made.

Off in a distant room, my wife eventually heard me. In her distinctive way of ambling about, she wandered in and probably asked me in her sweet and soft way, “What in heaven’s name is going on?”

I explained the situation as coherently as I could, all the while pounding my fists on the floor. She sat down at my desk, fiddled around a bit, the book reappeared on the screen, and she ambled back to bed without a single word.

That was the night I learned some of us have it and the rest of us don’t.

Apparently long before the birth of Steve Jobs, there have been others whose work has been lost, not necessarily by any dumb computer mistake, but by the nature of writing then and the stupidity of those entrusted with the disposition of the writer’s work.

It is said that roughly two-thirds of Aristotle’s work has never been recovered, while only a small fragment remains of Jane Austen’s novel, Sanditon. The man entrusted to publish Byron’s memoirs burned them and the same was true of a novel and many of the journals Sylvia Plath had written.

One Art by Elizabeth Bishop
The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster,

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

- Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like a disaster.

Memory Distortions

“Don’t ask who’s influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he’s digested, and I’ve been reading all my life.” Giorgos Seferis

Do you every doubt the reliability of your memories? Did that experience really happen to you or did you dream it? Or was it something someone told you? Or an event you read about it a book? In a beautiful and comprehensive essay on memorial errors in the latest New York Review of Books, Oliver Sacks describes four general limitations on the accuracy of memories.

Unreliable memories are those we think we recall correctly but in fact never happened to us. In one of his books Sacks described how upset he was by two bombings near his home in London during World War II. While the area was in fact bombed, his brother reminded him he wasn’t in London then. Perhaps he read about it somewhere or someone told him about it and over time these cumulative reminders led him to believe he actually experienced it.

Constructive memories are those we make up from, say a photograph or story someone told us. We think our memory is real and we convince ourselves it is every time we repeat it or recall it. But in fact, the recollection is fictional, constructed out of other events or situations that did take place, but were never those you experienced.

Sacks illustrates this error with a tale Ronald Reagan often told about a wartime experience that never took place. Rather it was drawn from a scene in a 1944 film. Sacks says, “Reagan had apparently retained the facts, but forgotten their source.”

False memories are erroneous recollections that are the subject of much research in psychology and relevant to many legal cases where eyewitness testimony is called into question. Reports of childhood abuse and other traumatic events are often said to be pseudo-events.

Unconscious plagiarism is the most interesting of the four types of erroneous memories that Sacks describes. Variously called autoplagiarism, cryptomnesia, or unintentional plagiarism, occurs when a phrase, sentence or entire passage is experienced as an original idea. In fact, it is derived from an existing source, say one you read a long time ago or heard someone say or sing. Sacks gives several examples:

George Harrison was found guilty of plagiarizing a song by another composer for his own song, “My Sweet Lord.”

Helen Keller was accused of plagiarizing “The Frost Fairies” by Margaret Canby in her own story “The Frost King” that she wrote when she was twelve.

The play, Molly Sweeney, by Brian Friel, contains entire phrases and sentences from Sacks own case history of a woman who was born blind. Her sight was much later restored after an operation, but she found her new visual world so confusing that she ends up returning to her original condition of blindness. When Sacks called this to the attention of Friel, he acknowledged that he had read the piece and subsequently agreed to add a note of his debt to Sacks for Molly Sweeney’s source.

Sacks suggests “literary borrowing” (“revisionist narrative”) was a common practice in the 17th Century, citing Coleridge, Shakespeare and the German philosopher Friedrich Schelling.

Now I wonder how much of what I write is an unconscious revision of something another person wrote or that I recall correctly? I remember an experience that I had as a young boy. Was X actually there with me, or do I imagine she was? Did I actually say that, or have I made it up? In the end, there’s no way to be sure. You can live with false memories and they can affect you profoundly, even though they never happened.

A Story of Rage

 
Walter Benjamin had wanted to write a book woven entirely out of quotations.
Jonathan Rosen

One afternoon, right after lunch, my husband announced that he wanted to leave me. He did it while were clearing the table; the children were quarreling as usual in the next room, the dog was dreaming, growling beside the radiator.

I was too good he said.

He wanted me at all costs to see him as he said he was: a good for nothing, incapable of true feelings, mediocre, adrift even in his profession.

He also had the manners of a gentleman who cultivates his melancholy soul while the old world collapses around him.

“I don’t give a shit about prissiness. You wounded me, you are destroying me, and I’m supposed to speak like a good, well-brought-up wife? Fuck you! What words am I supposed to use for what you’ve done to me, for what you’re doing to me? What words should I use for what you’re doing with that woman! Let’s talk about it! Do you lick her cunt? Do you stick it in her ass? Do you do all the things you never did with me? Tell me! Because I see you! With these eyes I see everything you do together, I see it a hundred thousand times, I see it night and day, eyes open and eyes closed!”

I began to change. In the course of a month I lost the habit of putting on makeup carefully, I went from using a refined language, attentive to the feelings of others, to a sarcastic way of expressing myself, punctuated by coarse laughter. Slowly, in spite of my resistance, I also gave in to obscenity.

[I] watched TV. But there was no program that could make me forget myself.

Once he fucked me, now he fucks someone else, what claim do I have? Time passes, one goes, another arrives.

But in the end he had shown himself to be a contemptible man, incapable of keeping faith with the commitments he had made. We don’t know anything about people, even those with whom we share everything.

He desired the past, the girlhood that I had already given him and that he now felt nostalgia for.

I spent the night and the following days in reflection. [One day I noticed the solitary man who lives downstairs out in the garden.]

So I stood silently watching him from the fifth floor, thin but broad in the shoulders, his hair gray and thick. I felt an increasing hostility toward him that became more tenacious the more unreasonable I felt it to be. What were his secrets of a man alone, a male obsession with sex, perhaps, the late-life cult of the cock. Certainly he, too, saw no farther than his ever-weaker squirt of sperm, was content only when he could verify that he could still get it up, like the dying leaves of a dried-up plant that’s given water. Rough with the women’s bodies he happened to encounter, hurried, dirty, certainly his only objective was to score points, as in a rifle range, to sink into a red pussy as into a fixed thought surrounded by concentric circles. Better if the patch of hair is young and shiny, ah the virtue of a firm ass. So he thought, such were the thoughts I attributed to him, I was shaken by vivid electric shocks of rage.

---

The preceding very short story was drawn from the passages I had saved and two that I found on the Web in Elena Ferrante’s novel Days of Abandonment. It isn’t a book, of course, as Walter Benjamin imagined, but it does make some degree of sense. Rather it’s more like a cento, a poem constructed from the poems that others have written.

It was for me nothing more than an exercise to see if I could do it. It is also one of the virtues of saving memorable passages from the books you read in a commonplace book. I read Ferrante’s novel seven years ago and had no trouble remembering it, unlike most of the books I’ve read that long ago. It is not a book anyone who has read ever forgets

It is also representative of all of the books Ferrante writes, as James Wood illustrates in his essay in discussing her fiction. He begins by noting she “is one of Italy’s best-known least-known contemporary writers.”

As if in reply, Ferrante comments in Fragments, a short Kindle book, on her reading and writing: “I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.” And further on, “Who really cares about the person who wrote it? What’s essential is the finished work.”

A Possible Life

Sebastian Faulks’ A Possible Life consists of five separate stories. The publisher calls it a novel. So does Faulks on the grounds that “it’s a novel basically because I say so.” He compares it with a piece of music. When you hear a symphony, you don’t think of it as four separate movements, each of which differs from the others. Rather you think of it as a single piece of music.

Faulks begins with the story of Geoffrey, a modest student and excellent athletic. He becomes a teacher, then a British agent in Occupied France. He is captured and sent to a concentration camp. He survives, “But some subtle rearrangement of particles had taken place within him.”

Billy is the subject of the next tale, an orphan sent to a Victorian workhouse where he also struggles to survive. In time, he makes a good life for himself, but his wife dies at an early age. “Once he thought he could win, but life had beaten him, like it beats everyone.”

Jeanne is an illiterate French peasant in 1822 France, who cares for two young children and the farm in which they live. She doesn’t know the point of trying to understand anything and makes no judgment on what she has seen in her life. “Death made her an orphan; life had made her poor; and she had made herself go through each day with no regard or trust for others.”

Anya King is a singer/songwriter in the 20th century. Her life is told in the reminiscences of Freddy, a musician who became her manager and one-time lover. She tells him “It’s life honey. It’s a bummer from start to finish. A total fuckup. Then you die.”

Freddy concludes his narrative, “I was almost sixty years old, but I didn’t understand anything. It all in the end seemed to have been a matter of the purest chance.”

Elena is the subject of the longest story in A Possible Life, set in near future (2029) in Italy. As a child she was a loner, a shy outsider who found other children “irritating.” As an adult she becomes a distinguished neuroscientist and, together with her colleague, discovers an important synaptic process that has significant implications for the nature of the self and consciousness.

She also develops a close bond with Bruno, another orphan, who was able to invent stories and people that “made her ache from laughing.” She felt her thoughts were never validated until she told them to him. But their relationship was difficult as they were separated by distance and in the end Bruno turns away from their mutual love for one another.

“Knowing one was comprised of recycled matter only and that selfhood was a delusion did not take away the aching of the heart.” Elena concludes that after a lifetime of her scientific research she understood nothing at all.

What can a reader conclude from these five tales? Is there something binding them together that justifies calling A Possible Life a novel? That when it’s all over, we know little or nothing? That life is all a matter of chance? That why bother to understand anything when nothing remains of our life?

Faulks is often asked what is the unifying theme of the stories? He doesn’t know what to say, as if to imply if he had one, it wouldn’t be necessary to write the book. Yet he answers,

“But I suppose it’s to do with individuality and to what extent our idea of ourselves as being a unique “self” is really valuable, or whether it’s actually, as neuroscience believes a complete delusion—what they call a “necessary fiction.”

On Deciding

Whoever has the choice has the torment.
Adam Gopnik writes about some advice given to him by a former professor, Albert Bregman, at McGill University who he much respected. In trying to decide whether to major in psychology or art history, Bregman “squinted and lowered his head.”

“Is this a hard choice for you?” he demanded. Yes! I cried. “Oh, he said, springing back up cheerfully. “In that case, it doesn’t matter. If it’s a hard decision, then there’s always lots to be said on both sides, so either choice is likely to be good in its way. Hard choices are always unimportant.”

The advice immediately raised a red flag for me. Is that a sound decision making strategy?

To begin, it really didn’t help Gopnik to decide, did it? He had to choose one at the expense of the other, even though he liked them both. Gopnik is still left in a quandary. Which of the two?

More importantly, Bregman’s strategy focuses on the positive outcomes of each discipline. Is that what really counts? Or do the potential disadvantages, the negative outcomes of each field, matter more?

In the end, that is going to be what really counts once you begin the pursuit of either one. Sure you might enjoy the study of art history. But what about all those hours in a dark lecture hall looking at those slides the professor is displaying on the screen? What about all those periods in history where the work of the artists leaves you cold? How long is this guy going to take to get to the Impressionists?

Let us say, you opt for psychology, you are impressed with what you’ve read about it and from what your friends tell you about its potential. So you start your study, hoping to get a better understanding of human behavior, including your own.

What you find is that the work of psychologists today is so varied that to meet the requirements you’ll end up taking a course in psychophysics, one in conditioning theory studying animals, sometimes rats at other times pigeons, and along the way you’ll be asked to take a course in neuro-anatomy.

What happen to behavior, who among those members of the department are studying what people do? Perhaps it is social psychology, the study of social interaction? What you’ll find today is that most social psychologists are currently studying social cognition or the neuroscience of interaction. Where happened to the behavior in social behavior?

In short, it isn’t the positive features of the field that are going to matter, say the smart group of students and professors, the absence of course exams, and the pleasure of small group discussions. What is going to matter are all the things that grate on you.

Perhaps a better decision strategy is to try to predict all the positive features of the field, as well as the negative ones. Try to rate them, say, from 1 to 10 with 10 the most positive or most negative. Add up the pluses and the minuses and see what the results are.

The field of study with the least negative total is probably the field for you. Of course, any estimates of this sort are inevitably going to be imperfect. But there’s no alternative but to accept that. Simply focusing on your estimate of the desirable features of any field is going to ignore those that aren’t. And in the end, those will weigh more heavily.

It’s the pains that outweigh the pleasures. You try to shake them off, but they don’t go away.