A Room With a View

All we knew was that we helplessly loved the place, and did not pause to ask why. C. Lewis The City of Florence

The apartment I’ve rented this year in Florence is located on the Lungarno Grazie, not far from the historical center of Florence. From its tall windows, I look out at the Arno, the hills across the way, dotted with trees and villas.

Higher up, I see the Piazza Michelangelo with is panoramic view of the entire city of Florence, the Brunelleschi’s Dumo and Giotto’s bell tower.

Even further up the hill is the Basilica of San Minato al Monte at one of the highest points in the city and is among the most beautiful churches in Italy.

On the other side of the Arno, down a few blocks, is a beautiful park, where I take a picnic lunch to each day.

It was always difficult, she said, to come home. She adored Italy. Apart from everything else, it was one of the few places where one’s hopes for the future could be restored. Beautiful, unspoiled fields and hills. Great houses that families had lived in for five hundred years. It was deeply consoling. Also the general sweetness of the people. James Salter All That Is

Two Italian Tales

The ending of Marco Vichi’s, Death in Florence was such a letdown. I was hoping for a happy one. Fifty-six year old Inspector Bordelli did not capture the culprits of the crime he was investigating.

The young boy who had been missing for days was killed. Two of those involved committed suicide. Two others began their own vendetta. His young lover leaves him after an excruciating experience, for which he had not taken steps to prevent. He turns in his badge and Beretta and retires to the countryside. He has failed, failed his lover, himself and colleagues.

The novel takes place in 1966, the year of the massive floods that ruined parts of the city of Florence and its historic treasures. The streets were filled with mud and the litter of the rampaging Arno. The rain never stopped. Food was scare, so was water, there was no electricity, heat or telephone communication.

The city seemed ruined. Bodcelli was ruined. And the pleasure I had in reading the novel left me somewhat ruined too. It will pass for me. But not for Inspector Bordelli. “He didn’t feel like asking himself any more pointless questions. It made no sense. He should let whatever happened happen.” He was alone again.

“…the nobility and greatness that are at times hidden within mental illness.”

Giuseppe Pardo was an Italian Pardo, a leader of Jewish individuals in the community of Pisa. He lived there at the time of Nazi Germany’s occupation of the country during World War II.

Silvano Arieti, now an American psychiatrist, also lived in Pisa then and was a member of the Pardo’s synagogue and a close friend. Arieti describes Pardo’s life in The Parnas, A Scene from the Holocaust.

It’s a short book, primarily focused on Pardo’s great fear of animals, especially dogs whenever he went outside. The origin of his serious phobia is unknown and, while Arieti attempts to give a psychoanalytic interpretation, it isn’t very persuasive.

“I am constantly in a state of expectation that animals will come after me, jump on me, bite me, torture me, or even kill me.”

Arieti makes clear that Pardo was at his best, quite normal, with the group of individuals who gathered in his home. “No trace of his illness remained in him when he was with them. He was no longer the afflicted man, but a much respected person…” This was particularly true of the young people who were part of his group and with whom he engaged in debates both as leader and peer.

What’s important in Arieti’s account is that Pardo refused to leave his home for a safer place as the Nazis retreated from the advancing American troops and began to wreck havoc on the towns in Italy they left. Eventually they discovered Pardo and remaining friends, all of whom were killed during a Nazi raid.

“Am I more afraid of my illness than of the Nazis? Is that all there is in this matter and no more? Had I not been ill, probably I would had left.”

Recycling in Florence

Not so long ago in Florence, you took your trash to big containers somewhere near your home or apartment. If neither of these were nearby, you simply tied the trash bag as tightly as you could and left it outside the door, where the collectors who routinely drove through the neighborhood would pick it up.

There isn’t anything like the big trucks that drive through the major metropolitan areas of this country to collect the trash and now some recyclables. In Florence the streets were never designed for trucks or for cars either.

It depresses me every time I realize what the cities of America were designed for.






However, throughout Florence now you begin to see these nifty recycling/trash collection containers. There are three types--one for organic materials, one for non-recyclables and one for recyclables.

A set of these containers is located just across the Arno from my apartment. A short walk across the Ponte Alle Grazie and I am there.

Florence is said to have the highest rate of recycling of any Italian city.

According to former mayor, now Prime Minister, Matteo Renzi: In Florence the cost of waste disposal is among the lowest in Italy; separate trash collection and separation has reached 47%, which becomes 65% with the new underground containers around the city and a massive 78% with the new San Jacopino ecological stations.

Florence Parking Lot

Do you remember two lines of Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi”?

They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot.

Mitchell says she wrote the song during her first visit to Hawaii.

I took a taxi to the hotel and when I woke up the next morning, I threw back the curtains and saw these beautiful green mountains in the distance. Then, I looked down and there was a parking lot as far as the eye could see, and it broke my heart... this blight on paradise. That's when I sat down and wrote the song.

There is nothing like that, nothing close to that in Florence. Instead, gradually, street-by-street, the Centro is being closed to automobiles. Instead, this is what you are likely to see:

I took the photo as I was walking along the Arno one sunny morning. Off in the distance to the far left, is a section of the Ponte Vecchio, while closer to the left, behind the row of scooters, is the Museo Galileo.

Summertime

I am going to take a summer break from blogging for awhile. I’ll be traveling, so any reports will be intermittent, if that. Meanwhile, I hope to be reading more than usual, including as many of the following books as possible:

Ayelet Waldman Love and Treasure

Thomas Piketty Capital in the Twenty-First Century

Aharon Appelfeld Suddenly, Love: A Novel

Kate Pickett & Richard Wilkinson The Spirit Level

George Packer The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America

Bernard Ingram Unfinished Symphony

Laura Morelli The Gondola Maker

Is it OK to Write?

In an article I first read in "Aeon Magazine" (March 2014) Rhys Southan raises a subject that is hard for me to ignore. He wants to know if writing makes the world a better place. He puts the question more generally: “Is it OK to make art?”

And in the next breath, he answers his question: “If you express your creativity while other people go hungry, you probably don’t make the world a better place.”

How can I possibly answer this question? The obvious answer would leave me up the creek. Down the drain goes the past 20 years of my life.

But really what can I do now at the age I am to improve the world? I taught for many years and I thought I was doing something worthwhile. I did laboratory research all those years whose results I thought might clarify an idea or two and later, field research I thought might in some small measure conserve energy resources.

As I think back on this work, I have to admit none of this research made the world a better place. It is rarely cited in the journals and even it is, it might be read by a half dozen students, at most.

The question, (“Is it OK to make art?”) was posed by Southan as he was about to finish a screenplay he was working on. He decides to travel to a retreat in East Devon with a few other friends who happen to be members of a growing activism movement called Effective Altruism (EA). They tell him its goal is doing as much good as you possible can.

So like Southan, I begin to wonder if anything I’ve written has done any good and by “good” I mean reduce hunger, eradicate disease, improve the world, that sort of thing. Of course it hasn’t. Southan begins to think the same, as he realizes Effective Altruism’s goal threatened to undermine the very purpose of his trip.

“As EAs see it, writing scripts and making movies demands resources that, in the right hands, could have saved lives…From this point of view, the importance of most individual works of art would have to be negligible compared with, say, deworming 1,000 children.”

As I become more and more unsettled in reading this article, I recall something Henry Perowe said about reading great novels in Ian McEwan’s novel, Saturday.

“Henry had read the whole of Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary, two acknowledged masterpieces. At the cost of slowing his mental processes and many hours of his valuable time, he committed himself to the shifting intricacies of these sophisticated fairy stories. What did he grasp, after all? That adultery is understandable but wrong, that nineteenth-century women had a hard time of it, that Moscow and the Russian countryside and provincial France were once just so.”

I wonder what Tolstoy or Flaubert would say when asked if their novels made the world a better place or if literature, in general, benefits humanity in any way. Yes, novels may be a pleasure to write and an equal pleasure to read and once in a while enhance the coffer of authors.

Perhaps a few readers were able to make a major change in their life after reading a novel and some may have no doubt learned something or chanced upon a truth that led to a fruitful line of inquiry. But beyond these few individuals, how might literature make the world a better place, as the Effective Altruists ask?

When I was a young man, I learned about an oath that every Athenian male swore to as they graduated from the Ephetic College that was required to become a full citizen of classical Athens. Among other things, mostly military matters, you pledged, “to transmit this city, not only no less, but far greater and more beautiful than it was transmitted to us.”

I’ve never forgotten that oath, believe it applies widely, and now, in the context of this article, feel that at least in terms of all I’ve written, none of it leaves the city or any other part of the world, any better than I found it.

Once in a while a novel will be written that really does make the world a better place for a wide segment of the population. Upon Sinclair’s The Jungle is the one I recall most vividly. I led to a radical change in the meatpacking industry in this country and subsequently to the Meat Inspection and Food and Drug Regulation Acts.

And Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe is credited with promoting the abolitionist cause and all that ensued from that. Upon meeting Stowe, Lincoln is said to have declared: "So this is the little lady who started this great war." (I also think of Rachel Carson’s The Silent Spring, which isn’t a novel, but none-the-less played an enormous and continuing role in promoting the environmental movement.”)

And while John Steinbeck’s novel, The Grapes of Wrath, may have wrestled with the life of impoverished families in the Great Depression, nothing much changed in the life of the poor as a result of it. I don’t know of any novelists today who are writing about the plight of the poor.

At the end of his article, Southan admits he, along with everyone else, could do more than they currently are. “For now that will have to be my justification. I’m not ready to give up writing. I’m not ready to take up some high-paid job that I’d hate in order to reduce the world’s suffering. Maybe that will change.”

My immediate response is: I doubt it will. I suspect every writer will continue to write, as they always have, regardless of the compelling goals of Effective Altruism. Novelists don’t write books to change the world. Why they do is another matter.

The Other Language

Everything was the same but nothing was the same anymore.

The characters in each of the nine stories of Francesca Marciano’s The Other Language, are displaced or unmoored in one way or another. They are in a different city, country, or time in their life.

Time takes its toll, you are a different person, nothing is the same, you can’t go back. “It’s always a disappointment.”

In “Big Island, Small Island” a woman flies to a tiny island off the coast of Africa to see an old boyfriend. But he is not the boy he once was, has grown a long beard, lives in a hut with a native woman, the rapport they once had is over, as are the daring views he used to express

He is a different person in this new incarnation—that cool aloofness, that lightness of touch he had when I knew him, seems gone.

In “The Presence of Men” a divorced woman moves to a small Italian village where she restores an old building. After several years there she grows restless and returns to Rome. But now she feels out of place, an exile. She couldn’t resume her previous life in Rome, “she couldn’t find her center any more.”

In the title story an Italian teenager and sister travel with their father to a Greek village by the sea. There they meet some young boys from England. The older sister wants to speak to one of them, but knows no English. Many years later she moves to New York, where she starts a new life. But even though she now speaks English fluently, she feels out of place, an outcast in a land where she has no past, no roots.

In “An Indian Soiree” a couple travels to a luxury resort to try to restore their marriage. In a dream one night, the woman recaptures the passion she once felt for a former lover. During an exotic dance performance the man becomes enchanted with the lead dancer.

At breakfast the next morning, they realize their marriage has come to an end. The woman flies to Paris to meet her lover; the man arranges to have dinner with the dancer. But both their romantic fantasies were disappointing. The damage had been done, they were now adrift, unable to “take shelter” anywhere.

It took a surprisingly short time for sixteen years of marriage to come undone.

There is a deep longing and loneliness in each of these nine stories. They are beautifully written, a pleasure to read, and be surprised by the chance encounters creating the dilemmas in each of them. The struggles of her characters have a generality that captures the reader, captured me anyway. They also focus on the places where her characters find themselves and the effect it has on their lives.

"Yet a foreigner always remains a foreigner, no matter how long he’s been away from his native place."

All the Light We Cannot See

The brain is locked in total darkness, of course, children, says the voice. It floats in a clear liquid inside the skull, never in the light. And yet the world it constructs in the mind is full of light. It brims with color and movement. So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?

Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See is beautifully written. At times it is almost lyrical, both in language and storytelling. The sentences are short, so are the chapters, the central characters, a young French girl and equally young German boy, are appealing, intriguing, memorable. …there are none so distant that fate cannot bring them together.

They are caught in the horror of World War II. Marie-Laure Le Blanc is the daughter of a skilled locksmith at the Museum of Natural History in Paris. Werner Pfennig lives with his sister in an orphanage in a German coal-mining town.

When she is six, Marie-Laure becomes blind, her father builds her a scale model of their Parisian neighborhood so she can learn how to navigate its streets. The young Werner, a technology prodigy, builds a short-wave radio and together with his sister they listen to the science tales of a mysterious Frenchman.

When the Nazi’s invade France, the war takes control of their lives. Nothing is the same as before.

Silence is the fruit of the occupation; it hangs in branches, seeps from gutters. …The smoking, ruined villages, the broken pieces of brick in the street, the frozen corpses, the shattered walls, the upturned cars, the barking dogs, the scurrying rats and lice…

Marie-Laure and her father flee to Sant-Malo, where they live in the home of her great uncle, the reclusive Entienne, who turns out to be the Frenchman broadcasting the science tales, as well as coded messages to the French Resistance. Her father builds her another model of the streets of Sant-Malo, but soon thereafter is captured by the Nazis.

Meanwhile once Werner’s scientific skills are recognized, he is sent to a rigorous but cruel, elite Nazi training school. Because he is adept at finding illegal radio transmissions, he is assigned to a team that searches for them throughout Germany and Poland and, eventually, in Sant-Malo.

However, Werner is not at ease at being a Nazi soldier and is sickened by their treatment of his best friend. His doubts express themselves by the acts he doesn’t perform and in the words Doerr gives him on the page.

Werner is succeeding. He is being loyal. He is being what everybody agrees is good. And yet every time he wakes and buttons his tunic, he feels he is betraying something.

Do you see where this is headed?

And looming in the background throughout this tale is a priceless, diamond stone, The Sea of Flames, hidden in a series of locked cabinets deep inside the Museum of Natural History. Marie-Laure’s father is entrusted with the stone’s safety, only he and the Museum Director have the set of keys required to unlock the cabinets.

When the Nazis invade Paris, copies of the original stone are made, each one given to Museum staff member, including Marie-Laure’s father. Who has the original? Where is it? A Nazi officer has been searching everywhere for the treasure, including the very house in Sant-Malo where Marie-Laure lives. The stone is said to carry a curse that allows the keeper to live forever but also brings misfortune to those close to the person who has it.

Reading All the Light We Cannot See is an adventure, a long one as it is a 500+ page novel, but from start to finish I found it a genuine pleasure. It will surely be among the best of the year.

…his model of their neighborhood makes little sense to her. It is not like the real world. The miniature intersection of rue de Mirbel and rue Monge, for example, just a block from their apartment is nothing like the real intersection. The real one presents an amphitheater of noise and fragrance: in the fall it smells of traffic and castor oil, bread from the bakery, camphor from Avent’s pharmacy, delphiniums and sweet peas and roses from the flower stand. On winter days it swims with the odor of roasting chestnuts; on summer evenings it becomes slow and drowsy, full of sleepy conversations and the scraping of heavy iron chairs.

Late Bloomers

Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made.
Robert Browning

Why is a person’s most creative work done when they are young? The French poet Arthur Rimbaud was published at 15 and then disappeared into Africa. Mozart wrote his Piano Concerto No. 9 at the age of 21. Herman Melville completed Moby-Dick when he was 32. And in 1905, when Einstein was 26, he laid the groundwork for the Special Theory of Relativity that he completed ten years later.

In contrast, a great many artists and writers took much longer to do their best work. Daniel Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe when he was 58. Joseph Conrad published his first novel, Almayer’s Folly, when he was 54. Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness followed a few years later.

In Late Bloomers Brendan Gill, long-time New Yorker writer, briefly describes the work of 75 artists who did their best work relatively late in life. He says, “I never dreamed I’d write a book that would be regarded as inspirational…But the geriatric set is going full tilt…”

The late boomers in his book are artists, writers, musicians, dancers, fashion designers, motion picture actors and directors, etc. Of the 75, I have made note of writers who Gill reports wrote their most well-known or first book when they were well past their youth. They include the following ten:

Isak Dinisen: First novel at 49, Out of Africa at 52

Michel de Montaigne: First essay at 38

Jean Jacques Rosseau: Confessions at 70

Edith Hamilton: First book, The Greek Way, at 62

Harriet Doerr: First book, The Stones of Ibarra, at 74

Miguel de Cervantes: First volume of Don Quixote at 58, second volume at 68

Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels at 59

Ian Fleming: First book, Casino Royale at 44

O. Henry: First collection of short stories at 47

Lawrence Sterne: First volume of Tristran Shandy at 47

Perhaps you can think of others? According to Gill, the qualities that late bloomers share are “energy, high intelligence and discipline.”

It is clear that some truly creative individuals do their best work early in their careers, others, many years later. Consider two painters: Picasso was an early prodigy, while the opposite was true for Cezanne.

Cezanne was a late bloomer. Malcolm Gladwell claims that the paintings he finished in his mid-60s are valued fifteen times more highly than those he painted as a young man. On the other hand, he says a mid 20s painting by Picasso is worth an average of four times as much as one done in his 60s.

“For age is opportunity, no less than youth itself, though in another dress.
And as the evening twilight faces away, the sky is filled with stars, invisible by the day.”
Henry W. Longfellow

It's the Water, Stupid

This is the season for graduation at most high schools, colleges and universities in this country. By and large, the commencement addresses on these occasions are fairly similar, forward-looking, optimistic, and some counsel. I am familiar with exceptions, for example, Ann Patchett’s address to the seniors of Sarah Lawrence.

It has been published as What Now? Her remarks are charming, wise, and funny, just like most everything Patchett has written. In it she suggests that your life is always going to be a work in progress and in finding a balance between “going out to get what you want and being open to the thing that actually winds up coming your way.”

At the same time she advises graduates to, “Make up some plans and change them. Identify your heart's truest desire and don't change that for anything.” That’s pretty good advance for anyone, at any age.

But it is the remarks of David Foster Wallace that, in my view, remains the classic, all-time-commencement address of the ages. It was delivered to the graduates of Kenyon College in May of 2005 and was recently published as This Is Water.

Wallace begins with a parable: Two young fish happen to meet an older fish that says to them “How’s the water?” The two young fish swim on a bit until one says to the other “What the hell’s the water?”

Wallace writes: “The point of the story is that the most important, obvious realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about.”

To the graduating students he says that the significant education they have received isn’t “really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about.” This means: “…being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.”

He says that in his experience the most dangerous consequence of an academic education is the tendency to “over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right of front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.” It’s the water parable again.

Much of the talk is a warning to the students about what adult life is really like. “Let’s get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what “day in day out” really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I’m talking about.”

Wallace then proceeds to unpack what that means. You get up, you go to work, you are there eight or ten hours, you are tired and exhausted and now you are stuck in traffic on the drive home, and then you have supper if you are lucky enough to have someone prepare it, otherwise you stop at the market and try to find something to eat and wait a while longer in the check out line, and get back on the freeway, where the traffic is as bad as it was when you got off, and then you try to unwind a bit after your lean cuisine, whereupon you hit the sack early because you have to get up early again the next day and go through it all again.

“Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn’t yet been part of you graduates actual life routine, day after week after month after year….The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in.”

For Wallace being educated is being able to recognize the importance of attention and awareness and discipline and he adds “being able to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty unsexy ways every day.” These are not our default settings. They have to be learned and the learning isn’t easy and it is readily forgotten in the midst of all the distractions that usually take control of our lives.

Wallace concludes that his remarks (“stuff”) aren't your normal inspirational, optimistic, commencement speech. He reminds the students again that the real value of their education has little to do with knowledge “and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over: This is water.”

Even if his remarks are far from cheerful, they are pretty inspirational in my book. Even more, they are true. A transcript of his address can be read here.

As Time Goes By: Jessie and Celine

You must remember this
A kiss is just a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh.
The fundamental things apply
As time goes by.

Jessie and Celine, there they are again, nine years since we last saw them in Before Sunset. Then they were in Paris, at a reading Jessie was giving of one of his books. He said he wrote it so they would find each other again.

Perhaps you recall seeing them in Before Sunrise, when they met for the first time on a train heading for Vienna. Upon arriving, they get off, and spend a long night talking and wandering about the streets of the city. Then they depart, as they must in all their encounters. It is difficult for them and difficult for us too. We don’t imagine they will ever see each other again.



But they do and now, in Before Midnight they are in Greece for the summer at a friend’s villa on the Peloponnesus with their two daughters and some friends. They are older, many years after first meeting and we are just as many years older too.

Like us, they are a little bit worn, weary and for the first time we see them arguing about both the serious and the trivial. Is their relationship about to end? Will we not see them grow into old age? We seem to care. Will we still be alive to join with them again in nine years? Will Richard Linklater, the film’s director and co-writer, as he was in the first two, even bring us together again?

Before Midnight seems very real, far more so the time they met on the train and at the Parisian bookstore. One night they gather together for dinner with their host, his companion, and the two other couples who have been with them. Their meal is lively, full of warmth, intelligence. It was a pleasure to watch, nothing I have ever known, however.

But I have observed many such meals, lively gatherings of smart and attractive people, full of shrewd observations and clever humor. Mostly they have been in Europe, at Italian trattorias where the wine is flowing freely and the food is bountiful, fresh and beautifully prepared. I know that’s all I can ever do, for I am not sufficiently smart and attractive or well-placed.

Before Midnight ends at a café by the sea where Celine has gone, after walking out on Jessie. She no longer wants anything to do with him, wants to assert her independence. In time, Jessie appears, does a little time traveling routine, and we linger on them, as the film pulls away from their continuing romance and we say goodbye to them once again.

It has been almost twenty years since the first time we saw them, as it were. Their fictional relationship is perhaps the longest of any I have ever seen or read. I confess it seems as if they are as alive as anyone else I have known.

Over the years they have aged, as we have. We were young when they were and each time they meet, we are also the same age. The progression of time, of years gone by, marks the central feature of the series. And, as in all things alive, we know it cannot last forever. Soon they will have to say their final goodbyes, as we will.

In the Times (12/12/13), Stephen Holden ranked Before Midnight as the number one film of 2013. He wrote, “Theirs [Jessie and Celine’s] is as real and complex an observation of a relationship as the movies ever have produced.”

And in commenting on the film, Ethan Hawke, who played Jessie writes (New Yorker 5/13/13) that in their third film together Jesse and Celine’s (Julie Delpy) attraction rests on a fault line of contention. The bitterness of their dispute was difficult to watch, to be a part of, albeit as an observer.

“One of the difficulties of romantic love,” Hawke said, “is that the fantasy of how the other person will complement you and be the balm you always hoped for…that evaporates over time. Everybody’s charm fades.”… “The inevitably of decay. You can’t keep having first love forever.”

Living Apart Together (LAT)

In our twenty-seventh year of marriage, we have finally discovered our key to wedded bliss: living separately. Lise Stryker Stoessel

I have been doing some reading about couples who live apart, perhaps a dozen or so examples. An increasing number of married couples in this country (9%-10%) and abroad (9%) England live this way. Sociologists have labeled them LATs (Living Apart Together)

Most of the couples are young, a few are middle age and some older. Most live in the same town, visit frequently, if not daily, often spend the night or weekend together. Only a few that I’ve read about so far live in distant towns, largely commuter couples who have jobs in different cities. Not one of those I’ve read about expressed real concern about the financial limits of maintaining two separate homes or any degree of serious discontent.

In Living Happy Ever After Separately Lise Stryker Stoessel describes the reasons she and her husband decided to live in separate homes. Soon after they were married, they became aware of their opposing needs, competing desires and the bitterness that came from a cascade of disputes. She wrote:

…our differences and disharmonies would engulf us: He tends to be a hermit; I am outgoing. He is a worrier; I am optimistic; He is a Spartan; I am a decorator. He is self-contained; I need and offer affection. He guards his territory; I invite people in. He likes his routine; I crave new experiences. He is practical; I am aesthetic…His cup is half empty; my cup is half full.

Her therapist asked if her marriage was so miserable, why didn’t she get divorced like everyone else. Her answers were clear. They loved one another, she needed financial support, and they wanted to raise their children as a family.

They decided to try to preserve their marriage by living in separate homes, he in the one where his construction equipment was scattered everywhere (to her annoyance), and she to a nearby townhouse that she decorated to suit her taste. The friction and bickering didn’t end, but it was far less frequent.

In her recent (3/17/14) interview on NPR the English, Booker Prize winner Penelope Lively describes the reasons why she and her husband lived in separate homes:

“Jack, my husband, and I had both led busy, professional lives rather separately. He was an academic and I was a writer, so I was often on my own. We lived in two places. We lived partly in London and partly in the country, in Oxfordshire, and quite often we'd be in different houses, so I was used to being in a house on my own. That didn't worry me too much. Of course, then I always knew there'd be an end to it — we'd be together again — so that's rather different...”

The concluding section of Living Happy Ever After Separately raises an important question: Why is it so hard to stay married these days? Stoessel’s answers point the way to potential remedies: We aren’t taught about how to be married and we have unrealistic expectations about what married life is like. Well, maybe. But I doubt that would do much, if anything, to reduce the divorce rate or bickering among married couples or quite frankly most couples, married or not.

Deadly Viruses

In 1918 a deadly influenza virus swept over the globe. It infected 500,000,000 people and was responsible for the death of an estimated 50 to 100 million –3 to 5 percent of the world’s population. It was no doubt one of the worst natural disasters in recorded history. From time to time a severe virus infects a significant number of people in this country and elsewhere, but not anywhere like the 1918 Flu Pandemic, as it has become known.

Just yesterday there was a report of the arrival in this country of a new virus that spreads from person to person and is often fatal. It is known as the MERS, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, that has so far infected three people in the US and many more in sixteen other countries. In Saudi Arabia alone, 157 have died from this virus. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reports the virus is from the same family as the common cold and severe acute respiratory syndrome virus (SARS).

Early last month there was an outbreak of Ebola virus in Guinea. As of April 17th, over 200 cases had been reported, including 137 deaths. Liberia and Sierra Leone, both neighboring countries, have also reported Ebola cases. Research on its origin and treatment has just begun.

The outbreak of such a deadly disease is the subject of two films I saw recently—Contagion and Outbreak. Contagion deals with a killer virus that originated in Hong Kong, spread rapidly to Chicago and elsewhere in this country. A team of researchers was recruited (all played by well known actors) from the World Health Organization, the CDC and a professor in San Francisco. People were advised to wash their hands, avoid shaking hands, be mindful when you open doors in public places, or press elevator buttons, etc. The toll the virus takes upon an infected body is horrible to behold.

Outbreak opens deep in an African rain forest where a monkey has infected a small village, killing everyone who lived there. Again a team of researchers (played by an equally well-known cast of actors) descends upon the village in an effort to understand the source of the virus and contain it, insofar as possible. They are unsuccessful, as one of the disease carrying monkeys is imported to this country and escapes into a forested area close to a small town. Eventually most of residents who lived there are infected with the virus, whereupon the military is ordered to quarantine the town so that no one can leave.

Outbreak is the more significant of the two. It explores a complicated issue after the President, at the request of a sinister general in cahoots with a drug company, orders the military to bomb the town with a weapon that will destroy all its inhabitants. The issue that emerges from this order is the moral legitimacy of such an action, one that will kill a relatively small number of people to save millions of other individuals throughout the country.

In philosophy this is known as the trolley problem. In one variation of this hypothetical, you are standing by the side of a railway track as a train whose brakes have failed, approaches. You note that 5 people are tied to the tracks that will be killed unless you pull the switch you are standing by, sending the train to a sidetrack. Then you observe one person is tied to the sidetrack where you could send the train.

What do you do? Do stand by helpless as the train kills five people or divert it so that it only kills one?

The answer to this question is by no means simple and has been the subject of considerable philosophical debate. It is also the question set before the commander of the plane about to be sent to kill all the inhabitants of the quarantined town. Meanwhile, you are aware that researchers are working feverishly to find a vaccine that will destroy the virus.

Weekend Video

Following his article the diffusion of innovations in the July 29, 2012 issue of the New Yorker, Charlie Rose interviewed Atul Gawande about his research.

According to Gawande, some innovations spread rapidly, others far more slowly, even though they just as important. What accounts for this difference?

Have a look:

La Foce

In the Times last Sunday there was an detailed article about La Foce, a vast estate at the southern edge of Tuscany, where my wife and I headed last summer. I had always wanted to visit the area, after reading Iris Origo’s The War in Val d'Orcia. There she describes her arrival with the Italian Count who owned the land, and together they developed the area, introducing new farming techniques to the peasant farmers who lived there, establishing a school for their children, and a health center.

“We lived 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 is 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.”

During the Second World War, a great depression settled over all of Italy. Eventually the fighting reached La Foce, the German’s took over their home and other properties, it was difficult to find food for everyone, as refuges, children and the homeless began arriving. “And so, day after day, it goes on—an unending stream of human suffering. And it will yet be worse.”

The War in Val d’Orcia concludes as the American troops arrive along with a sense of hope as plans are made to restore the farmhouses and gardens that have been destroyed and begin replacing much of what had been looted by the Nazis.

Had you not read Origo’s book, none of this history would be sensed today. We lived in one of its beautifully furnished villas, where we had a view over the countryside in all directions. The villa consisted of several apartments on two levels around an open garden courtyard. The walls were covered with ivy, plants were everywhere. We were the only occupants of at least a dozen other apartments. It was quiet, peaceful, rather bucolic, once you got into the mood.

We visited the hill towns of Montepulciano, Pienza, San Quirico D’Orcia, Chuisi, and nearby Chianciano Terme, such melodious names. Also, Bagno Vignoni, where there is a thermal water spa in the heart of the village.

At night we drove somewhere for dinner. The driving was slow, curvy narrow roads, sometimes dirt or gravel. One must concentrate. What must it have been like when it rained? What must it have been like in the days of carriages and horse drawn wagons?

Often I thought about the history of the place, what it was like when Origo and the Count first came here, the remarkable step-by-step rebuilding of the vast acreage, educating the people who lived there, then, building the dams and reforesting the land. And then there was the War and I imagined what life was like then and what the Germans did to the place.

I asked my wife what did she like about being at La Foce. She replied: “First, the history that lets you imagine (a little) what life was like in the 30s and 40s. I kept thinking about the Origos building the estate, helping the peasants, putting in the water system with its reservoirs and wells. What an engineer Antonio Origo must have been. And then imagining the war, where the partisans might have been, up in the woods behind our Charentana [villa] And the Germans living there.

Our apartment was so spacious, and furnished with antiques. We had everything we needed. I especially loved looking out of the windows at the countryside, seeing the shadow of the ivy on the shutters, hearing the birds chirping away. The birds were nesting in the ivy! I liked the kitchen and being able to put meals together with fresh Italian ingredients. I had never peeled a salami before, always bought it sliced thin, but surprisingly, the thick slices from the one that Benedetta [our host] had left for us were quite delicious.

I loved having nothing to do during the day, being able to go and sit outside, draw the walls of Charentana. Their adobe colors glowed in the sunlight, complemented by the tile roof and the ivy and/or rose vines clinging to the walls. Everywhere I looked, I saw a picture.

And I splashed around in the pool, looking at Mount Amiata and the valley on one side, and a lovely wisteria arbor where, one day, we had eaten our picnic lunch. Then lying by the pool and feeling the warmth of the Tuscan sun and the fragrance of the yellow broom, blooming nearby. So often, throughout the time we spent in the valley, we came across areas where banks of flowers, sometimes jasmine, sometimes the broom, filled the air with the most marvelous sweetness.

Walking in the morning was also pleasant, seeing the red poppies in the fields and other wild flowers by the roadside. The early morning sunlight filtered through the poppy petals, creating shadows of design. I took many pictures!

Driving was a bit of a challenge, even for the passenger, since the roads were very curvy and narrow; approaching cars often speeded past with only inches to spare. But each curve brought a new visual delight from the round hay bales in the fields to banks of blooming wildflowers, pink ones that I initially thought were clover, but upon examination, turned out to be something else. There were so many wonderful sights in the Val d’Orcia, castles here and there, broad expanses of hilly farms, with rows of cypress marching up to lead to a house on the hilltop.

I also loved exploring the narrow streets of the hill towns and finding, occasionally, a puss preening itself in the sun in a window or on a door stoop. The little shops were fun to explore too, to see the Tuscan souvenirs, most hand-made or at least, I liked to think so. Locally made, anyway, not from China, although who knows.”

Love Story

Earlier this month David Brooks published a beautiful column in the Times (5/1/14) about Michael Ignatieff’s biography of Isaiah Berlin. He titled his column “Love Story.” I don’t usually read Brooks’ column, but its title led me to give this one a try.

He describes an incident in Ignatieff’s book about the visit Isaiah Berlin made to the apartment of the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. She was 20 years older than he was, “still beautiful and powerful, but wounded by tyranny and the war,” quoting Brooks. Berlin didn’t know a great deal about her and at the outset, their conversation was said to be reserved.

But they continued and Brooks reports: “By midnight, they were alone, sitting on opposite ends of her room. She told him about her girlhood and marriage and her husband’s execution. She began to recite Byron’s “Don Juan” with such passion that Berlin turned his face to the window to hide his emotions. She began reciting some of her own poems, breaking down as she described how they had led the Soviets to execute one of her colleagues.”

And so it continued. At 4 in the morning they were talking about Pushkin and Chekhov and Dostoyevsky. They spoke more and more about their life, their literary pleasures, art, history, the rich cultural life they could not live without. Finally, Berlin returned to his hotel and was said to exclaim, “I am in love; I am in love.”

I thought how wonderful this was, how rare it is today or seems to be, how a life of wide reading, reflection and writing seems to have lost whatever luster it had. When have you ever had a conversation like that? Or a bond with another person like that?

It was a friendship and a love, built around ideas, great books, writing. Several times Brooks refers to it as an intellectual communion. How often I have dreamed of such a relationship.

A friend and I have exchanged a few words about the Brooks column. She wrote:

It's a kind of life that seems to be passing. I see so much today in the history of the past, the rise and then decline of various civilizations. We do seem to be on a decline today…I don't see much positive in the future for my grandchildren.

In reply, I wrote: Who can be sure of what the future holds? It has a way of surprising us. It is already a different world than the one into which we were born. But there are still quite a few poets and writers and Isaiah Berlins who love books, and learning, literature and the humanities in general. And there are still a few places, like Reed and the two St. John’s College campuses, where that kind of life is taught and respected. Some gravitate to it naturally and I hope that will always be the case. There have never been very many, anyway.

Brooks worries that not many schools prepares students for this kind of life. Or parents either, I might add. But Berlin and Akhmatova were prepared, had done the reading, knew what it meant to grapple with large ideas, how important it was, and so they were able to have that kind of conversation.

‘tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished.

The Paris Architect

As a rule, I don’t read mysteries. But Charles Belfoure’s The Paris Architect, became one. Lucien Bernard is the architect of the title during the Nazi occupation of Paris, a difficult time for anyone designing buildings, as well as most of the French who remained in Paris then.

The mystery, or I should say the mysteries, begin when Bernard is asked by a wealthy Frenchman to design hiding places in apartments for Jewish individuals. Bernard, who was raised by parents who hated Jews, feels rather indifferent about them, but likes the idea of outwitting the Nazis. He is fully aware of the risks he is taking and the constant fear that will accompany him once he becomes involved in the projects.

The first mystery begins: Is he going to survive or get caught and endure the torture the Nazis will inflict on him?

The projects also come with a considerable amount of cash and the chance to design a factory for the Germans outside of Paris. The second mystery unfolds: Will Bernard become an accomplice of the German Reich, a collaborator?

One of the hiding places is behind the brick wall of a fireplace. When the Nazi’s storm the apartment without finding the Jewish couple they are looking for, they burn the apartment down. The couple is smothered to death as Bernard did not anticipate such a situation and has failed to build an air pipe for them. His failure initiates the third mystery: After this tragic error, will Bernard begin reevaluating the choices he has made?

The novel slowly creates these moral dilemmas: Does designing factories for the Germans conflict with creating safe places for Jews? And how can a person who is devoted to France and has fought for its survival, collaborate with the enemy who is occupying his country?

With the death of the Jewish couple, Bernard begins to see things differently, he realizes the occupation brought out the very worst in human beings, the hardships had set one person against another, one group against another, neighbor against neighbor, friend against friend. What he was doing for the Germans was simply wrong.

Lucien knew he couldn’t be that way and just stand by; he had to continue what he’d been doing. When he asked himself why he was risking his life, the answer wasn’t the cash, the factories, or the sheer thrill of the challenge. He was risking his life because it was the right thing to do. He had to go beyond himself and help these people.

He had also fallen in love with a woman who was hiding two young children and had admired his growing moral conscience. Then a young boy, who he had taken in to both his home and his workplace when the Nazi’s killed his parents, saved his life.

The five of them become a “family” that eventually escapes to Switzerland, oddly with the help of a Nazi who had come to admire Bernard’s work and had found pleasure in their mutual appreciation of European art and architecture.

The Lunchbox

In Mumbai thousands of workers receive their noontime lunch by deliverymen, known as dabbawalas, who shuttle stacked metal cans from a food preparer’s home to an office worker, and back again using an elaborate, color-coded system. The odds of delivering a lunchbox to a person for whom it was not intended are said to be one in a million. It happens in the Lunchbox.

The meal is prepared by a lonely housewife, Ila, who is trying to revive her marriage by preparing exotic recipes for her husband. The meals are inadvertently delivered to an equally lonely office worker, Saajan, whose wife has recently died. Ila’s husband never says a word about the lunches. So she puts a little note in his lunchbox one day to figure out what is happening.

Saajan receives the note and responds in kind. They begin a daily correspondence, not by way of texting, emailing, Skyping but by the fine art of writing letters, albeit short in the beginning, but longer as their notes become increasingly personal. In a sense, they join a long and notable group of letter writing friends.

Gradually Ila and Saajan disclose more of their life, their regrets, hopes, and their struggles to get by. They wanted to meet at a café, where Ila goes, waits for Saajan who is there all the time, but is too shy to introduce himself.

After viewing the film, I wanted to learn more about the Mumbai delivery service. In an age of Fed Ex, UPS, etc, it seems like throwback to the Pony Express system. I learn there are 5,000 or so dabbawalas in the teaming city of Mumbai, said to be the world’s fourth most populous. . They deliver, 130,000 lunchboxes throughout a vast city that entails carrying a large pallet full of lunch packs to and fro a home to an office, 260,000 transactions, six days a week, 52 weeks a year minus holidays.

Mistaken deliveries are virtually unknown. How do the dabbawalas accomplish this feat? An article in the Harvard Business Journal (November 2012) reports an investigation of how the service seems to work almost to perfection. In a word, it appears to be due a beautifully organized system or management, training, adherence to rigorous standards and a strong sense of belonging to the members of their group.

The article concludes: “And that’s a lesson managers of all enterprises should take to heart.”

Stories We Tell

I look at Sarah Polley, the Canadian actor and film director, and wonder where did she get her beauty.
She doesn’t look at all like her father.

You look at her brothers and sisters, none of whom look like their father, yet they have the same features, the attractiveness, and all look alike. Finally, I see a photo of their mother, Diane, and at once, I know.

This is what you see in Polley’s new film, Stories We Tell. She is both director and central figure in this part documentary, part mystery. Because I have read a little about the film I know the mystery: Who is Sarah’s father?

Is it Harry the father she lived with ever since she was born? She never gave the question a thought, until her brothers and sisters began teasing Sarah that she didn’t much look like her father.

Gradually, Sarah, the interrogator, leads us to hear the stories that each of her mother’s friends recall about their relationship with Diane. We learn that Diane did some acting and for a brief period moved from her home in Toronto to Montreal where she had a bit part. While there she had several encounters with men and by the time she returned home, she was pregnant again.

We meet each of the individuals who knew her in Montreal, as well as what her brothers and sisters remembers about those days. Each recalls a something a little bit different, their memories are not entirely clear. Perhaps they make up the gaps with and there.

In time we learn who the father was or who claims to be. Sarah meets him, they become close friends and it seems the story is over. But it isn’t. Polley ends the film with a brief exchange with another actor in the Montreal play, a younger man. He admits he slept with Diane once. The film ends.

Is there a truth to be found in these stories and, if so, who is telling it? Whose memory is most reliable or can we count on any of them? Polley and one of the Montreal lovers have a DNA test. The results are clear. The ending isn’t.

The Flamethrowers

She wasn’t shopping for experience. She was trying to survive. I was the one shopping for experience.

I read Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers on the basis of James Wood’s rave review in the New Yorker. Other reviewers have been equally praiseworthy; the novel has been on the short list for several prizes.

Yes, on occasion I thought the novel was magical. Yet at other times I got lost in one of the several stories Kushner tells. It is clear she likes crafting them. No matter how many, most are vivid, informed and sometimes perceptive. And the novel skips around between them.

It opens with one about motorcycle racing, more generally the meaning of speed, going fast, breaking records. The heroine, Reno (where she was born), is driving her Moto Valera motorcycle across the great Nevada desert to enter a speed racing event on the Utah Salt Flats.

Nevada was a tone, a light, a deadness that was part of me…the high desert gleamed under the morning sun. White, sand, rose, and mauve—those were the colors here…pure white stretching so far into the distance that its horizon revealed a faint curve of the Earth. I heard the sonic rip of a military jet…but saw only blue above, a raw and saturated blue…

We are taken to the art world in New York during the 1970s, then to an upper class villa in Bellagio on Lake Como in Italy, the family home of her lover, Sandro Valera, the scion of a wealthy family, whose wealth was made on the rubber plantations in Brazil.

They also made motorcycles, the kind Kushner rides on the Utah salt flats and in New York. We shift to Rome, where Reno falls in with a group of radicals during the years of the Red Brigades and then back to the downtown art scene in New York.

Lorzi said the only thing worth loving was what was to come, and since what was to come was unforeseeable—only a cretin or a liar would try to predict the future—the future had to be lived now, in the now, as intensity.

The book finally came alive for me when Reno and Sandro spend two tedious weeks at his family villa high in the hills above Lake Como.

The villa was at the top of a steep incline, just a fifteen-minute drive from the lakeside promenade of Bellagio proper with its double-parked Lamborghinis and its women in furs. Its regal-looking car ferries, which arrived from Varenna, across the sparkling water. And along the waterfront, its white tablecloths, cold prosecco, rich and subdued families gazing off. But in that fifteen minutes traveling uphill from the lakefront to the Villa Valera, one left that world behind, passed horses and cows grazing lazily, handwritten signs advertising farm made honey and yogurt, and roads choked with blackberry and young chestnut trees.

In spite of its beauty, Reno found it an alien place, the way his mother treated her, like one of the servants from the wrong class, not at all befitting her son. “All this beauty led me back to a sense of cruelty, to the people kept out, and those kept in, in the kitchen, the washing shed, the servants’ little stone cottages.”

In an interview about her novel, Kushner commented: All these things I was interested in—motorcycles, art, revolution and radical politics—don’t seem connected, yet I thought they could become so, in the space of a novel, [and like all her risky interests], there had to be the real possibility that the novel could be a disaster.

On balance, I didn’t think it was a disaster, although at times, it gets a bit confusing. But The Flamethrowers never loses its vitality, its bizarre characters, or vibrant sentences.

Night Train to Lisbon at the Cinema

Was it possible that the best way to make sure of yourself was to know and understand someone else?

Ever since I read Pascal Mercier’s Night Train to Lisbon (“an international best seller”), I heard rumors that a film might be made of it. Finally, they did and finally I saw it the other day. I found it as splendid as the book, one of the best I’ve ever read.

Most everything is there, the adaptation, unlike so many others, is true to the novel. The casting matches my notion of the characters--Jeremy Irons as Gregorious, the scholarly classics and linguistics teacher, Jack Huston as Amadeau de Prado, the Portuguese physician/writer, Melanie Laurent as the young Estefania, Prado’s love, Lena Olin as the aged Estefania.

The film begins, as it does in the novel, with Gregorious rescuing a young woman who is about to take her life jumping off a bridge. The encounter leads him to a bookstore where he discovers Prado’s volume, A Goldsmith of Words, is so entranced by it that he abandons his class and take the next train to Lisbon in order to find out more about Prado’s life.

…he had the amazing feeling, both upsetting and liberating, that at the age of fifty-seven, he was about to take his life into his own hands for the first time.

Once there the people he meets come alive on the screen—Prado’s teacher, Father Bartholomeu, and we hear every word of the rebellious speech Prado gives when he graduates. We are introduced to Mariana, the optician, who prepares a new set of glasses to replace those Gregorious broke in rescuing the girl on the bridge, and serves as his guide around Lisbon.

We meet Prado’s best friend, Jorge, and then his sister, Adriana who, after much hesitation, eventually shows him the house where they lived, his study and medical office. Later we meet Prado’s friends in the resistance, fighting the dictatorship of Salazar in the 70’s, led by Estefania who is known to have a photographic memory of the phone number of every resistance member. Eventually this makes it necessary for her to escape to Spain when Salazar’s henchmen attempt to capture her. Prado drives her there.

You’re too hungry for me. It’s wonderful with you. But you’re too hungry for me. I can’t want this trip. You see, it would be your trip, yours alone. It couldn’t be ours.

It is all so familiar after reading the book twice, writing about it, and pondering it’s endless, unanswered questions. This adaptation is so unlike the recent film version of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, whose character is nothing like one I had imagined for years once I read James Thurber’s short story. That film will be easily forgotten, while the one of Night Train to Lisbon will move the novel even deeper into my mind.

Amsterdam

In Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam, two old friends Clive and Vernon meet at the funeral of Molly, the former lover of both. Clive is a composer struggling to finish a symphony and Vernon is an editor of a failing newspaper.

They ruminate over Molly’s swift decline. “The speed of her descent into madness and pain became a matter of common gossip: the loss of control of bodily function and with it all sense of humor, and then the tailing off into vagueness interspersed with episodes of ineffectual violence and muffled shrieking.”

When Clive begins to think he is losing his faculties, he meets with Vernon and together they agree to assist each other when the time comes call it quits. Their pact takes on an urgency when Clive finds himself unable to finish his symphony and Vernon is sacked from his editorship for publishing compromising photos of the current foreign minister.

They fly to Amsterdam for the premier of Clive’s never-to-be performed symphony. The two have become bitter enemies: Clive is appalled that Vernon published the scandalous photos and Vernon is shocked by Clive’s failure to help a woman being attacked during a hike he was taking in the Lake District.

At a reception for the members of the orchestra, Clive and Vernon end up drinking champagne laced with a deadly powder they have obtained from euthanasia group in the Netherlands.

Amsterdam, the winner of the 1998 Booker Prize, opens at a funeral and the specter of death and suicide hovers over the novel. Yet it is also dense with McEwan’s typical interests, as well as his talent in writing about them: the pleasures of walking the Scottish highlands, the joy of music, the collapse of “human project.”

When the definitive histories of twentieth-century music in the West came to be written, the triumphs would be seen to belong to blues, jazz, rock and the continually evolving traditions of folk music

…it was easy for Clive to think of civilization as the sum of all the arts, along with design, cuisine, good wine and the like. But now it appeared that this was what it really was—square miles of meager modern houses whose principal purpose was the support of TV aerials and dishes; factories producing worthless junk to be advertised on the television… roads and the tyranny of traffic.

The moral and creative failures of Clive and Vernon move the novel to its calamitous conclusion. In one-way or another the clock is ticking for everyone and McEwan offers up this advice:

…monitor you own decline; then, when it was no longer possible to work, or to live with dignity, finish it yourself.

All the Ships at Sea

A question. What percent of world goods are shipped by sea? Unsure? Oh, about 35%? Not a lot?

The answer is nearly everything, in fact, 90%, although in Hawaii, it is close to everything.

The question is discussed in a fascinating article (New York Review of Books 4/6/14) on container ships by Maya Jasanoff in her review of Rose George’s Ninety Percent of Everything: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry that Puts Clothes on Your Back, Gas in Your Car, and Food on Your Plate.

Jasanoff reviews the history of shipping goods at sea, the development of container ships, techniques for loading/unloading them in port and the “byzantine ownership patterns,” where a ship can be registered in Liberia, fly the Greek flag, owned by a Norwegian company and have neither a Liberian or Greek or Norwegian in the crew. The ships are enormous, larger than aircraft carriers and the huge containers are stacked, stem to stern, seven high above the deck and another six below.

She also describes George’s experience on one of these ships, as well as her own, somewhat briefer excursion, and the dangers of Somali piracy. What they reveal is “an industry replete with appalling labor conditions, low wages, physical dangers, personal hardships, and environment costs.”

I happen to have considerable interest in this offbeat topic, not only because I live in Hawaii, but also because I look out at the ocean and wonder about all the container ships and barges heading to and from the Port of Honolulu. I first began noticing giant barges following behind something that was clearly a tugboat. Then I began wondering if the tugboat is used only to pull the barge to or from the harbor and or if it tows it all the way across the Pacific.

So I searched Google, “Do barges across the Pacific Ocean have engines or are they towed?” And the first listing takes me to page that in a flash answers my question. “A pioneer in ocean towing to Alaska and the islands of the Pacific, X has provided marine transportation services for more than 115 years. Today, the X fleet offers point-to-point towing worldwide with some of the most advanced and powerful tugs in the industry.”

So in a blink of an eye my question has been answered. I think what would I have done in all those days before Google? Nothing. The question is by no means sufficiently important to draw me to the library and those people around here, who I have asked, don’t have the foggiest idea. Moreover, I suspect the X or any other towing company hasn’t written any books that reside in the very fine university library hereabouts.

So now my days of looking out at the sea and staring out at the barges that slowly pass by are no longer times of wondering and I think that is really unfortunate. But I remain hopeful that other questions will drift in as I look out at the sea. Like, why do the airplanes take off and head this way when there’s scarcely any wind? Where are they headed, anyway? Oh yes, who does that gorgeous yacht parked in the harbor belong to?

I don’t know what I’d do without questions. Answering them is far less important. And I know that if eventually I chance upon an answer, it will only lead to more questions, for which I am ever so grateful.

Later I see two large freighters that have been lying offshore for days. I cannot figure out why. No room in the port? They are under quarantine for some reason? Their cargo is suspect? The longshoremen are on strike?

At night I see the lights on in cabin area. During the day, the ships move about as the currents take them. Two large freighters rather close to one another. The pleasures of having a view of the sea. More questions emerge. Where are they from? Why do they remain offshore so long? What type of cargo do they carry?

I see the film Captain Phillips and wonder if the ships are under siege by Somali pirates. I see another film, All is Lost, where Robert Redford sails by himself somewhere off Sumatra. I wonder where he is going. While asleep one night, his beautiful sailboat crashes into an enormous steel box that fell off a container ship. Water cascades into his cabin. Then I watch a TED lecture on container ships.

Again I get interested in these container ships. I learn that in 2010 the Harvard Business School chose Somali piracy as the best business model of year. Funny guys back there.

Rachel Cusk's Outline Part 2

Dickens did it. Alexander Dumas did it. So did Henry James and Herman Melville. And now the English novelist, Rachel Cusk, is doing it. Cusk might be familiar to previous readers of this blog as I admire her work a great deal. Her latest venture is being published in the Paris Review, in each of the periodical’s issues this year.

Part 2 is the most recent in her forthcoming volume that is currently titled Outline. In the first installment, an English writer travels to Greece to teach a writing course. Seated next to her on the flight is an older Greek man who describes the failure of his two marriages and other family misfortunes. He invites her to take a boating excursion with him the next day.

Part 2 begins as they drive to a small boat harbor outside Athens. They continue their dialogue that, at times, is both amusing and stimulating. She swims far out to sea, all the while ruminating. I want only to comment here on a few of her ideas.

She notes that people can never change completely. Rather she believes whatever changes occur are latent, “had lain dormant, waiting to be evoked by circumstance.” I know well such an experience, although it is infrequent.

Once in a while I will meet a person and engage in the kind of conversation I’ve not had in years. It is quick, clever, witty, sometimes hilarious and usually leads nowhere. Only certain people in certain situations can evoke it. It is unpredictable, but when it happens it is worth the wait.

Cusk also comments at some length on a family she observes as she is swimming in the sea. They are gathered together on a boat. She sees how happy they are or seem to be. But then she knows that what she observes is probably not at all like they really are. When she looked at the family, what she saw was a commentary on her own life. She saw “a vision of what I no longer had: I saw something, in other words, that wasn’t there.”

In another language, this is the familiar actor-observer bias. The actors view the situation from their own experience, while those who observe it, see it from their own. The two can be widely divergent. Similarly, when explaining their own behavior, a person is likely attribute it to external events, while attributing other people’s behavior to personal or internal events.

She remembers a scene in Wuthering Heights. “Looking through the window, the two of them see different things. Heathcliff what he fears and hates and Cathy what she feels and desires and feels deprived of. But neither of them can see things as they are.”

In the evening, after their boating trip, they meet for dinner in Athens with another writer. The talk is lively, serious, interesting. They talk about the meaning of the self, a person’s identity. And Cusk comments to my delight: “I thought the whole idea of a “real” self might be illusory: you might feel, in other words, as though there were some separate, autonomous self with you, but perhaps that self didn’t actually exist.” Yes, I exclaimed as I was reading along, I have always believed this was the case.

I am enjoying her story immensely. We are in Greece, in the summer, it is warm, very much so, and the dialogue is pure philosophy. What is next? A visit to an island in the Aegean? A trek up the Acropolis to the Parthenon? A discussion of Plato’s view of poets in the Republic? I will have to wait, although I’d rather not.