"The Purest Form of Eros"

A few years ago a group of social psychologists posed the following question in an article on conversational styles. “What is the source of the ineffable “chemistry” that some couples enjoy? The question is both fascinating and frustrating: fascinating because of its richness and complexity; frustrating because it has defied simple answers. Indeed, precisely why members of some couples get along better than do others has, for the most part, remained cloaked in mystery.”

This is a question that has longed been an interest of mine. In their latest book, Click: The Magic of Instant Connections, Ori and Rom Brafman try to unravel the mystery of this phenomenon. They begin with what is clearly well known to anyone who has experienced this “almost euphoric state.”

Clicking can be defined as an immediate, deep, and meaningful connection with another person or with the world around us…we immediately sense that we can just be ourselves around that person. Things feel right: we hit if off.

Only a very few times in my life have I felt this way. Once it occurs, I think you are changed forever. The experience sets a standard against which you tend to measure all your future relationships. There is a responsiveness to each other that is rarely found with other individuals. You can say something to one person and nothing happens. When you say the very same thing to a person you click with, there is an immediate understanding, an even faster reply, which in turn, gets another and the cycle continues until you both need to stop to take a breath.

“You’re so clever, sometimes, with words, and I’m every so clever when I’m talking to you….You’re appreciative of my cleverness, you laughed at my jokes, you make related jokes back, implying that you’ve heard and actually LISTENED to what I said.”

After discussing a range of conditions in which clicking occurs, Brafman and Brafman describe “five click accelerators—ingredients or factors involved in a click—that show up time and time across different contexts."

The first is the power of vulnerability, the willingness “to disclose to others the kind of person you are, to drop your protective armor....” An example is the way shared adversity can become a key factor in bringing people together.

Proximity is the second accelerator that can make a big difference. This is not the least bit surprising. The likelihood of clicking with someone in Montevideo if you live in Omaha is pretty close to zero.

Similarity is said to be an accelerator. That is also fairly obvious, although far from a necessary condition, as two people with widely different interests often get along just fine.

In 1979 Woody Allen met Mia Farrow and they stayed together for many years. Yet Woody once said. "I could go on about our differences forever: She doesn't like the city and I adore it. She loves the country and I don't like it. She doesn't like sports at all and I love sports. She loves to eat in, early -- 5:30, 6 -- and I love to eat out, late… She can't sleep with an air-conditioner on; I can only sleep with an air-conditioner on. She loves pets and animals; I hate pets and animals. … She would love to take a boat down the Amazon or go up to Mount Kilimanjaro; I never want to go near those places… She has raised nine children now with no trauma and has never owned a thermometer. I take my temperature every two hours in the course of the day."

The Brafmans identify the environment as the fourth click accelerator. Here they speak of shared communities working together for a common goal or to overcome adversity. They mention soldiers who become lifelong friends after fighting together, individuals who lived together on a kibbutz or individuals who worked together in the same office for years.

Finally they say certain personalities simply seem to click more readily. They come almost preset with an open and levity spirit. This, in turn, can often lead the other person to respond in the same way.

Have the Brafman brothers contributed to our understanding of the mystery of connecting with another person? To be sure they have described various components of the relationship and they have done so by discussing a good deal of current empirical research. I view their analysis as identifying some of the key predictors of clicking.

But even when all these factors are present, there is no guarantee the other person will be on the same wavelength. We can disclose all we want but that may only lead someone else to clam up. Similarly, neither similarity nor proximity seems to me necessary for these kinds of relationships to develop. Nor does a sparkling personality absent a shared temperament.

The mystery remains. Of all of the factors the Brafmans identify the one that seems to have the most practical value is disclosing personal details of your life, what they call “the power of vulnerability.” But this is a very tricky matter, as well as a bit manipulative. More likely, that “ineffable chemistry” simply happens or it doesn’t, the gears will mesh unpredictably, uncontrollably perhaps once or twice in a lifetime—if you are lucky. Let it be. No matter your age, your current relationships, your joys or heartbreaks, you’ll recognize it instantly.

21st Century Commonplace Books

Has the commonplace book tradition come to an end? I know there are still a few people who keep a private collection of memorable passages from the books they read. At the same time, in recent years a considerable number of “commonplace books” have migrated from their handwritten or printed version to the Web. Perhaps they are the wave of the future, the dominant form that 21st Century commonplace books will take.

While these electronic analogues of their forerunners have probably not led to a revival of the commonplace tradition, they have surely broadened the audience for what was always a largely private activity. Several of these sites include a section in which the author gives a brief statement of its background. For example the author of The Sheila Variations writes:

Years ago - in high school - I started keeping a 'commonplace book' - although I had no idea at the time that there was a NAME for it. I just wanted to keep all the quotes I really liked in one place. I called it my quote book. Then much later, I realized that there's a long, long tradition of people keeping these "commonplace books" - especially "those guys" that I love so much in the 18th century. I've shared a ton of those quotes with you all here.

The Commonplace Book Website is authored by a librarian, J. Jacobs is distinctive in that it has an author and word index, as well as a search tool for specific topics and “random quotes.” To locate the passages that Jacobs has entered into his Commonplace Book, it is first necessary to type the name of a topic, word, or author in the box on the search page. An author search for Shakespeare resulted in three selections, one for Borges yielded eleven, and a topic search for “Literature” yielded over a dozen passages, some of considerable length. For example, the search for Hemingway produced the following passages that seemed especially timely a few years ago:

No one man nor group of men incapable of fighting or exempt from fighting should in any way be given the power, no matter how gradually it is given them, to put this country or any country into war.

The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.

A few electronic commonplace books are designed as collective sites, a Wiki in Internet parlance, where anyone can contribute to the list of passages. The Literary Works Commonplace Book is an unedited collection of quotations drawn from a list of book titles arranged alphabetically. For example, a click on the link for The American Scene by Henry James displays 17 passages including their page and chapter number, while the link for Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities cites 19 passages with their chapter number.

Another is The Commonplace Book for Advisors is a collection of quotations that educators might find instructive in guiding their students. It has been created by the voluntary submissions of unknown advisors from unknown places. Most importantly, it is organized around a set of fourteen topics including careers, decision making, overcoming adversity, success, and friendship.

Most of the remaining commonplace books on the Web consist of a cumulative set of unrelated quotations and sometimes drawings and photographs from literary or artistic sources on various topics that simply follow one another in chronological order.

Does the public visibility of these commonplace books increase their readership? In response to my question about the number of hits or visits their Websites get during an average week, one author said about 50-75 hits a week, another said 150 each week, while the author of the most widely visited said his gets about 762 during an average week. On a yearly basis, this ranges from about 2,600 to 39,624, an enormous degree of variability that surely depends on the subject matter of the Website, as well as its placement in Internet search engines.

Regardless, it is clear that readership on the Web is far greater than would be expected for a printed volume of the same material. Of course, these figures don’t tell us how much is read, or what a viewer derives from the experience, nor how many readers were stimulated to start their own commonplace books after viewing these electronic collections, all of which would be very interesting to know.

On Moving

We are moving once again. This will be the 23rd time we have moved to a new residence since graduate school days and I am hoping most fervently that it will be the last. Dream on, Richard.

We move, I move, because it is one of the pleasantries of academic life—a sabbatical here, a visiting professorship there. And then again we move, I move, because of the restlessness that I cannot escape, wandering from town to town, from neighborhood to neighborhood in search of I know not what.

This has to be the craziest move of them all. How else to look upon it? From our current rental overlooking beautiful downtown Portland, we are moving to the very same unit one floor below—same view, same floor plan, same everything, only now contrary to my irrefutable arguments, we will own the place rather than rent it. So much for my powers of persuasion

I search for writers who have written about moving. What did Emerson have to say? What about Montaigne—he had something to say about everything? But no, neither has written even a snippet about the matter as far as I can tell.

But Lawrence did: We make a mistake forsaking England and moving out into the periphery of life. After all, Taormina, Ceylon, Africa, America -- as far as we go, they are only the negation of what we ourselves stand for and are: and we're rather like Jonahs running away from the place we belong.

A friend who has recently moved writes: I am not ashamed to admit that when I go back to Atherton, I am homesick. I first saw Atherton when I was 10 years old when my parents went to visit the Walkers who had owned the lumber company in Westwood…and still think of it as my "Eden."

I surely don’t feel this way about our current move. Portland has never been my Eden and I have never felt the least bit like Lawrence, never felt I belonged in Portland. Other places have felt more like home, but they are far away and English is not spoken there, both of which have always been problems for my best beloved.

Andre Aciman writes more perceptively than anyone I know about the larger meanings of these journeys, journeys across the seas or just down the block. In A Literary Pilgrim Progresses to the Past he admits, I may write about place and displacement, but what I'm really writing about is dispersion, evasion, ambivalence: not so much a subject as a move in everything I write.

I may write about little parks in New York that remind me of Rome and about tiny squares in Paris that remind me of New York, and about so many spots in the world that will ultimately take me back to Alexandria. But this crisscrossed trajectory is simply my way of showing how scattered and divided I am about everything else in life.

And a little later in the same article he continues, Ambivalence and dispersion run so deep that I don't know whether I like the place I've chosen to call my home, any more than I know whether I like the writer or even the person I am when no one's looking. And yet the very act of writing has become my way of finding a space and of building a home for myself, my way of taking a shapeless, marshy world and firming it up with paper, the way the Venetians firm up eroded land by driving wooden piles into it.

So like Aciman, I write a bit about this move, playing “musical-condos” if you will, because it is one of the ways I have to make note of writers who express the follies of my life.

Is Google a Commonplace Book?

Look closely at the photo. It’s a page (9th) of a Google search for “Search Engine.” Note at the top it shows 81-90 of 87,600,000 listings that were obtained by Google in lightning speed--0.07 seconds.

Is that page or any of those that precede or follow it a commonplace book? Steven Johnson in his lecture The Glass Box and The Commonplace Book says it is:

What I want to suggest to you is that, in some improbable way, this page is as much of an heir to the structure of a commonplace book as the most avant-garde textual collage.

To understand Johnson’s claim consider the various meanings of commonplace book. There seem to me to be three. The first refers to a set of quotations from a text that follow one another sequentially without any structure or organization. An example is the blog simply known as Commonplace Book that posts from time to time a referenced quotation without a comment or note.

The second meaning is the one I follow in my commonplace book where I list the passages I have made note of in each of the books or articles I read. After I have finished reading the work, I type in a Word document a heading with the name of the author followed by the title of the text. I follow this with each of the passages I’ve marked. My commonplace book consists now of well over 600 typed written, single spaced pages of such passages.

Thus, it isn’t organized in any systematic fashion, say by subject matter, theme, or category. That has to be done subsequently during a time-consuming analysis. While I’ve done that for the first 300 pages, the second remains a task for the future. I am hoping to find a method that will be simpler and more efficient than the one I employed initially.

I might have used the approach John Locke used as long ago as 1652 in A New Method of Making Commonplace Books that represents the third and most complete meaning of the term. Locke developed an elaborate system for indexing and categorizing the contents of his commonplace book by creating at the outset an index keyed to each letter of the alphabet that was, in turn, divided into five separate sections corresponding to one of the five vowels. He explained his procedure this way:

When I meet with any thing that I think fit to put into my Common-Place-Book, I first find a proper head. Suppose for example, that the Head be EPISTOLA, I look into the Index for the first Letter and the following Vowel which in this instance are E.I. If in the space marked E. there is any number, That directs me to the Page designed for words that begin with an E and whose first Vowel, after the initial Letter, is I. I must then write under the word EPISTOLA in that Page what I have to remark.

Locke did not begin with a pre-determined set of topics or “heads” as he referred to them; instead, they were created during the course of his readings. They included a broad array of themes followed by the passage he selected to fit the theme, and a comment of his own. This sounds like a commonplace book at his best. He not only copied passages but he classified, indexed, and annotated them at the same time. I know of no one who keeps a commonplace book in this manner today. It really isn’t that intricate, although it clearly takes a good deal more time than the two other methods. It also encourages the commonplacer to identify the reason the passage was selected in the first place.

Does a Google search employ this method? In citing Locke’s example, Johnson claims that is precisely what its algorithm does and it does so almost instantly. However, every commonplace book I know about has been created by a real person. Although the Google algorithm performs some of the same functions, insofar as I can tell, it is not such a creature.

On review, I should have included the “real person” component to the commonplace book concept. So while a Google search does provide a set of references (without form or structure), still it is not generated from the reading experience of an individual reader. And while it does provide a list of citations with a brief description (snippet) for the specific search phrase, it doesn’t index them or organize the sub-set in any particular way. Rather they are enumerated one after the other without regard to informative value, author or quality. If I really stick with a Google search for page after page, I am often startled to find the very document I want or the one that is most useful a good many pages beyond the initial one.

Johnson’s really fine lecture has stimulated me to think further about the commonplace book concept, as well a new way of viewing the results of a Google search. It seems to me such a results page or cluster of pages might be viewed as a second or third order variation of a commonplace book, something in between the first and second forms I have described.

It is more a remixing, recombination of ideas and references from a vast range of sources, as in a collage or cento, that are almost miraculously put together in not much more than a nanosecond. But a cento is not a commonplace book in the strict sense of the term, although it may be derived from one.

Johnson ends this portion of his lecture optimistically: “But all of this magic was predicated on one thing: that the words could be copied, re-arranged, put to surprising new uses in surprising new contexts. By stitching together passages written by multiple authors, without their explicit permission or consultation, some new awareness could take shape.”

Experiments to Fight Poverty

I first learned about Esther Duflo and her approach to poverty in Ian Parker’s profile, The Poverty Lab, in the May 10th issue of The New Yorker. Subsequently I watched her presentation at the TED 2010 Conference where she spoke about the critical role of randomized field experiments in formulating social policy in the developing world.

Doing this kind of research doesn’t seem especially innovative but, according to Duflo, it is rare in economics, the field in which she was trained. She says, “I hated economics. I thought it was moronic.” In response she has taken economics out of the lab and its tradition of modeling into the field in trying to discover the sources of poverty and the means to eradicate it.

For her work at the Poverty Lab at MIT she was awarded a MacArthur fellowship last year and this year was the winner of the Clark Medal which is awarded by the by the American Economic Association to "that American economist under the age of forty who is adjudged to have made a significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge.”

I spent my professional life teaching the virtues of randomized, control group experiments. This was in the area of experimental social psychology where this type of design is the gold standard among researchers. So when I read about her work, at first, I was far from impressed. In my naïve way, I imagined that’s what everybody was doing in studying methods of overcoming poverty.

No, this was far from the case. Instead, most programs to combat global poverty form aid agencies, build schools, distribute medical information and supplies and above all distribute enormous sums of financial assistance. They do all this without clear evidence that their programs are working. In fact, a recent article in the Times reported that nearly half of the people in the world still live on less than $2.00 a day and a fifth survive on $1 or less.

To overcome this widely recognized failure of most aid programs, Duflo believes it is necessary to conduct the same type of randomized control experiments that are common in medical research, say in testing a new drug. “I have one opinion—one should evaluate things—which is strongly held….Randomization takes the guesswork, the wizardry the technical prowess, the intuition, out of finding out whether something makes a difference."

Duflo asks, for example, “When trying to prevent very poor people from contracting malaria, is it more effective to give them protective bed nets, or to sell the nets at a low price…?" Theoretically, I would have predicted that people would be more likely to use the nets if they paid a small amount for them rather than if they were distributed freely. However, in testing two groups in Kenya a colleague of Duflo’s found that the best (likelihood of using one) price for bed nets was free.

In another study, she addressed the problem of frequent teacher absenteeism in 120 schools run by an Indian nonprofit group. The teachers in half of the groups were asked to have their photograph taken with the students at the start and end of each school day. Teachers in the other 60 groups were not photographed. Teacher pay was based on their attendance record. The photographed teachers were much more likely to be present than those in the control groups.

Duflo comments: “Who do you care about? Lazy teachers who show up sixty percent cent of the time, or the kids? O.K., I care about the kids.” Because the teachers were more often present in class, the kids were taught more and they performed much better on tests.

In spite of her success in applying randomized experiments, doing this kind of research in the field is not without its difficulties. Anyone who conducts research like this immediately confronts practical problems that undermine the degree of rigor that is possible in the lab. There is also the problem of generalizing from one field setting to another.

As a case in point, Duflo has long wanted to test the effectiveness of microfinance programs. Parker reports, “As she saw it there was little beyond anecdote to support claims that the technique had any special power to combat poverty, gender inequality, and ill health.” In spite of several years of experimental research evaluating the impact of microfinance, the findings revealed that it was no “miracle.”

Parker reports “there had been no rise in average consumption (the best way to get a sense of economic well-being) and no evidence of improvement in levels of education, health or women’s decision making.” At this point we are left with mostly anecdotal evidence that the program helps some individuals to hold a steady job, expand their business, enable them to build a house, etc. But for many Duflo had to admit, “We tried to help them. They don’t want to be helped. Too bad.”

Still she remains optimistic: There is a lot of noise in the world. And there is a lot of idiosyncrasy. But there are also regularities and phenomena. And what the data is going to be able to do –if there is enough of it—is uncover, in the mess and the noise of the world, some lines of music that actually have harmony. It’s there, somewhere.

Sources of Influence

All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated….John Donne

Imagine a scale of influences upon a writer where at one extreme, a subtle unconscious return of a forgotten sentence or passage by a writer is used by another writer. At the mid-point of the scale, a writer quotes or reworks the words of another writer with due citation or acknowledgement. Lastly, at the other extreme, a writer copies or plagiarizes the work of another writer, without any citation or acknowledgement.

According to F. K Taylor the first is known as Cryptomnesia that he defines as the return of a memory without its being recognized as such by a writer who believes it is something new and original instead of the work of someone else.

In his widely discussed essay The Ecstasy of Influence, Jonathan Lethem suggests that many writers and artists may have exhibited a form of Cryptomnesia. “The history of literature is not without examples of this phenomenon…”

He wonders, for example, if Nabokov’s Lolita might in fact have been based on an unacknowledged memory of an almost identical tale written by Heinz von Lichberg published forty years before Nabokov’s novel. In addition, he claims unrecognized “appropriation” has occurred in a good deal of Dylan’s and other songwriter’s music.

David Shields recent “manifesto” Reality Hunger is an example a work that falls at the mid-point of influence where an author quotes or remixes the words of another writer with some citation or acknowledgement. Shield’s book is made of up 618 numbered sentences or paragraphs that are largely drawn from other sources. He claims that a collage of this sort overcomes the tedium and boredom in reading novels which he believes are outmoded and have come to the end of their line. We need to get this word out to all those devoted readers of literary fiction.

I read Shields book or more accurately I tried to read it and I found it utterly boring, indeed, I had to push myself to get from one sentence to the next and ended up skimming the second half as quickly as I could. Readers need or want or expect stories. As Joan Didion put it, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” There is no story in Reality Hunger. And it is not especially edifying either.

While Shields did cite the sources of his quotations, he only did so at the insistence of his publisher in order to avoid allegations of copyright infringement. They are also placed at the end of the book that, in my view, greatly interferes with the reading experience in contrast to footnoting them on the same page where they are quoted.

At the other extreme are examples of outright plagiarism where a writer literally copies all or portions of the work of another writer without acknowledgement or citation. Lethem cites, as an example, William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch that he claims “incorporated snippets of other writers’ texts into his work, an action I knew my teachers would have called plagiarism.” Still Lethem admits this method did nothing to detract from the enormous excitement and thrill he experienced in reading the novel.

In the final analysis, most works of literature appear to be a “mélange” of quotation, remixing, and “original” writing. Can it be otherwise? It is all but impossible to know the sources of our ideas, what we draw upon in composing our work, or how we came to compose the lines we end up writing.

Giorgos Seferis, the Greek poet, put it this way: “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.” And it may very be as Helene Hegemann, said in defense of her controversial novel, Axolotl Roadkill that incorporates a great many passages from other works, “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity,”

Lethem concludes his essay on this note: Any text that has infiltrated the common mind to the extent of Gone With the Wind or Lolita or Ulysses inexorably joins the language of culture….The authors and their heirs should consider the subsequent parodies, refractions, quotations, and revisions an honor, or at least, the price of a rare success.

In the surprising and lengthy final section of his essay Lethem provides a Key that "names the source of every line I stole, warped, and cobbled together as I “wrote” (except, alas, those sources I forgot along the way)…Nearly every sentence I culled I also revised, at least slightly—for necessities of space, in order, to produce a more consistent tone, or simply because I felt like it.”

Note: I am indebted to Jonathan Lethem for the John Donne passage that he quoted in his essay, The Ecstasy of Influence, published initially in Harper’s Magazine, February 2007.

Stranger Among the Plants

There are times when I have an idea or desire that leads me to think I must be a little bit crazy. And then I read something in a work of literature, any kind of literature, where someone says they have same idea or desire. And I stop and read it again and at least I know that I am not alone in my craziness.

This experience is one of the treasures of the reading literature. And when the person who has written this confirming statement is a highly regarded poet or writer or commentator, then I can be sure that I’m not yet ready for the loony bin.

Recently at the New York Review of Books Blog, Charles Simic, former US Poet Laureate, wrote about the imaginary snapshots he has taken as he walks around the busy streets of the city. Mostly they are images of attractive women. This is the way it is for me, as well. Simic writes:

Here is a tall, well-dressed young woman with a look of utter despair in her eyes and an incongruous smile on her lips. In the next instant, she’s gone and we forget her as we busy ourselves with other things, except she may reappear later that day to haunt us, or in a month, or even years after, like some snapshot we found in the shoebox in the attic that we can’t stop looking at because we no longer remember who that person in it was or when or where it was taken.

It was the intensity of her gaze that caught my attention. She wasn’t looking at me rather it was the plants at the nursery where I found myself one day. She never looked up as she moved from one table of seedlings to the next, in search of a good specimen, reading the labels, I don’t know what else. She was relatively thin, with medium length black hair, streaked with gray. She must have been around fifty or so and she was married or had been.

Everything she was wearing was black—slacks, shirt, lightweight coat. From time to time she brushed the strands of her hair back behind her ears in that appealing sweep that women perform. I thought she was beautiful, obviously thoughtful, with a finely sculpted face. I imagined she was well educated, maybe an attorney or a writer.

I was fairly certain she was well read or hoped she was. I wanted her to smile, just once please. Where did she live? What did her voice sound like? How could I ever meet her? Would she rebuff me? Never once did she look up and by chance catch my eye.

Often I have experiences like this. Again I wonder if they bespeak of some kind of malady? Or is it fairly common among men and perhaps women too of my age or any age? Again Simic comes to my rescue.

Fifty years ago sitting in Washington Square park one warm spring day, I overheard a story on this very subject. Two old men were chatting about different kinds of women they knew in their life, and the various way in which they drove both of them crazy, when one said that his father told him before he died that the most beautiful woman he ever saw in his life was getting off the Staten Island Ferry just as he was getting on. Their eyes met and that was it. His father even remembered the exact date and the time of day, which as I recall was in the month of May in 1910.

Simic admits he carries around a collection of such random images and suggests they are kind of unintended autobiography of others too. One of the “others” is the poet Baudelaire, for whom he offers a link to three alternative translations of his poem À une passante. Here is one:

A Passer-by
The deafening street roared on. Full, slim, and grand
In mourning and majestic grief, passed down
A woman, lifting with a stately hand
And swaying the black borders of her gown;
Noble and swift, her leg with statues matching;
I drank, convulsed, out of her pensive eye,
A livid sky where hurricanes were hatching,
Sweetness that charms, and joy that makes one die.
A lighting-flash — then darkness! Fleeting chance
Whose look was my rebirth — a single glance!
Through endless time shall I not meet with you?
Far off! too late! or never! — I not knowing
Who you may be, nor you where I am going —
You, whom I might have loved, who know it too!

The Other Man

I am currently reading Flights of Love, a collection of short stories by Bernhard Schlink, the author of The Reader. And while I am reading the third story, The Other Man, I am wondering if I have read this before. I am certain I haven’t. Yet it seems so familiar.

The story describes a marriage between a man, whose name we never learn, and his wife, Lisa, who is dying of cancer. After her death, a letter arrives for Lisa from a man called Rolf. It is brief, he reads it and discovers it is from her former lover. Later he discovers a batch of letters written by Lisa and her lover over the long years of their affair

The letters unnerve the man. He thought Lisa was happy with him, happy in their marriage. “But now nothing was self-evident any longer.” He had believed everything was fine with his family but now he realizes he had probably only been deluding himself.

He begins to reply to the other man’s letters as if Lisa was still alive and for a while he, as Lisa, and Rolf carry on the exchange this way. Eventually he decides to visit the other man’s town and in due course tracks him down. They begin to meet in a café where they play chess and become friends of a sort.

He discovers the other man lives in a decrepit basement hovel and is really nothing but an impoverished braggadocio, a pretentious dandy, who lives on the generosity of others. He now understands why there was nothing left of Lisa’s inheritance. How could Lisa have preferred “this loser to him?"

Eventually he identifies himself as Lisa’s husband. The other man begins borrowing money from him. A letter arrives indicating Lisa will be visiting his town with the orchestra in which she plays first violin. The other man plans a reception for her but soon thereafter learns that she has died.

Nevertheless, he holds the reception anyway and delivers an eloquent speech praising Lisa’s performance of a Haydn’s string quartet. Her husband realizes that “the beauty he praised contained within it not only a higher truth, but a robust one.”

It was not that Lisa had been happy with the other man while being unhappy with him, nor had she been happier with the other man than with him. Lisa had shared her happiness in a variety of ways, had both happily received and happily given to others. The happiness she had given was not a lesser one, it was exactly the happiness to which his ponderous and peevish heart could open. She had held nothing back from him. She had given everything he had been capable of taking.

The story ends as the husband gets back on the train home. He would wake up, see the sun, hear the birds, feel the breeze, and it would all come back to him and it would be all right.

And then suddenly, as the story comes to an end, it dawns on me. With a few modern variations, this is the same tale enacted in the movie The Other Man that I saw on a DVD a few months ago. The film is clearly adapted from Schlink’s short story. What took me so long to recognize the relationship?

The movie featured Liam Neeson, now a computer software wizard, as the husband, Laura Linney, now a designer of elegant shoes, as Lisa and Antonio Banderas, still the same con artist, as the other man. They are all fine actors. Yet the movie is scarcely known with only a few reviews on the Web. It was never shown in my hometown but then it isn’t really a great film town anyway. I don’t know if it was shown anywhere for that matter. And Roger Ebert, who I always look to for cinema insights, had nothing to say about this one.

No matter, cordial thanks to Netflix and Bernhard Schlink and to the staff at The Paperback Exchange in Florence who very kindly brought me these versions of the story and its elemental truth.

Role of Place in Literature

In Florence I begin to wonder about the role of place in literature. So many writers have come to this city--Montaigne, Shelly, Byron, Elizabeth and Robert Browning, Henry James, George Eliot, Goethe, E. M. Forster, Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence, and Dostoevsky.

Some settled here for long periods, others stayed for only a short time during their travels, and many have returned time and time again. More often than not they come to Italy and to this city in Tuscany to escape the cold, damp areas of the North and for some hoping that its sun and warmth will cure them of some ailment, primarily tuberculosis. However, once winter arrives in Tuscany they very quickly learn it can be as bitterly cold and damp here as it is in the North

How has living in Florence affected their writing? Would they have written differently had they remained in the city they left? If being here influences their work, does that depend on how long they stay?

Lawrence Durrell wrote, “What makes a “big book” is surely as much to do with their site as their characters and incidents." Eudora Welty agreed that, “fiction depends for its life on place. Location is the crossroads of circumstance, the proving ground of What happened? Who’s here? Who’s coming?”

We know that Florence has been the setting of the many of the writers who have come here. One need only think of Forster’s A Room With a View:

“It was pleasant to wake up in Florence, to open the eyes upon a bright bare room, with a floor of red tiles which look clean though they are not, with a painted ceiling…It was pleasant, too, to fling wide the windows, pinching the fingers in unfamiliar fastenings, to lean out into sunshine, with beautiful hills and trees and marble churches opposite, and close below, the Arno, gurgling against the embankment of the road.” Yes, very pleasant!

But what we really want to know is whether or not being here shaped their style or turned them in a new direction or solved a writerly problem they were facing. In general, is being here a source of literary inspiration?

Albeit a single example, I think the clearest answer to this question is provided by Dostoevsky, who came to Florence for the second time in 1868, then to escape the “damp and cold of Milan, where he and his wife [Anna] had been living for two months.”

In her Reminiscences Anna records how thrilled Dostoevsky was to be in Florence and that he was working productively on The Idiot. Yet, it did not take him long to realize there is more to writing than being in this benign place. He soon began to miss his friends or any form of congenial company. Anna writes in Reminiscences:

We did not know a single soul in Florence with whom we could talk, argue, joke, exchange reactions. Around us all were strangers, and sometimes hostile ones; and this total isolation from people was sometimes difficult to bear.

And in a letter to his niece, Dostoevsky wrote: I cannot write here. For that I must be in Russia without fail, must see, hear and take a direct part in Russian life; where’s here I am losing even the possibility of writing, since I lack both the essential material, namely Russian reality…and the Russian people.

Then the summer arrived and he and Anna found it almost unbearable to deal with ever increasing heat of this city. Some people seem to thrive in hot weather. Apparently Dostoevsky was not one of them for he found it almost impossible to write under such “hellish” conditions.

At other times he felt differently. When the sun shines, it is almost Paradise. Impossible to imagine anywhere more beautiful than this sky, this air, this light.

In A Literary Companion to Florence, a rich source of information for this post, Francis King claims that Dostoevsky not only completed The Idiot in Florence, “but also began the gestation of The Possessed and The Brothers Karamazov.”

Let us just say, then, that being here in this Tuscan town can offer some writers a comfortable place to work and sometimes give spark to their work. But that these sparks can occur just about anywhere, regardless of place and climate.

The life that Dostoyevsky led in Russia gave him a subject matter that ultimately led to his masterpieces. However, he did not have to be there to write them, at least, not all of the time. Eventually, he needed to return to the source of his tales. And while he did not write novels about the people or places he knew in Florence, he was able to write well while he was here, but only if it wasn’t too hot.

In answer to the general question about the role of place in literature, let us conclude that, as with all general literary questions, there are no general answers. Place has a role, but its role is highly variable and dependent on so many other factors that is impossible to disentangle its effects from all the others that influence a writer.

Live from Florence

In these years he most often planned to go to Italy. He would look forward to the time when he had finished a book or a group of stories and he would be free. These plans were so much a part of his existence that he forgot them, changed them, remade them without consultation or hesitation. —Colm Toibin, The Master

I am staying now in the Oltrarno (other side of the Arno) area of Florence that according to one commentator is the most florentine and greenest parts of the historical center and where the real old and new florentines live, shop, eat and have fun.

Stretching from the Ponte Vecchio to the equally well-known Palazzo Pitti and adjacent Boboli Gardens, this neighborhood is among the most beautiful in Florence. It is also the hippest and most alive, especially around the Piazza Santo Spirito (a block from my apartment) encircled by cafes, “bars,” restaurants, shops, and where so many of the artisans in this city live.

Most of the following “pictures” are selected from my Italian Fragments published in Issue One, Travel Fragments at FragLit.

The Past
I am engulfed by history in Florence. Something extraordinary happened here during the Renaissance. How did it happen? Leonardo, Michelangelo, Galileo, Brunelleschi, Machiavelli, the Medicis—all working together, sometimes across the street from one another.

Buildings
Many of the buildings date from the Renaissance and before. Some are beautiful palazzos or civic buildings, meticulously preserved and thoroughly modernized within. Others are still quite shabby and in need of repair. At first, I am put off by this. But then I am actually back in time, several hundred years. Wandering about the commune then, not now. In the country, the homes and public buildings are painted the most delightful shades of orange, yellow and pink. There are no gray buildings in Tuscany.

Neighborhoods
On every street there are many small shops, each selling only a few items. The pattern is repeated in the next block, as well as on the next street over. So everything you need—bread, fruit and vegetables, a book, hardware, an espresso—is close to where you live. You go from place to place, as I do with the florentines, gathering the things you need. And along the way, you exchange a few and sometimes many words with the people you know—that is, if they are not already chatting with someone else.

Piazza
In every town there is a central square and many smaller ones. They vibrate with talk and music and the activity of the surrounding banks, restaurants, bookshops, churches, artisans and whoever else is fortunate enough to be there. The piazza is the heart of an Italian town and brings a sense of community to those who live there. It is the place to go and to be seen. For many it is their “Third Place.”

Solitude
Here in Italy I am thrown back upon myself like nowhere else. There is no one to talk to. No one I can understand. No one tries to talk with me. The phone never rings. I think this is what it must be like in paradise. There are people everywhere. But you cannot speak to any of them.

Smoking & Talking
Not everyone smokes, but far more do in Italy than in the USA. And as you walk down the streets, you are struck by the large number of men and women of all ages puffing away. Or babbling on their cell phones which are also more prevalent in public areas than in the USA. People engage in animated conversations on the streets, in restaurants, in hotel elevators--everywhere. Yesterday I saw a man with a cell phone in each hand, talking alternatively with the two callers and moments later a woman came speeding by on her Vespa, trying to steer with one hand, while the other was gripping her cell phone as she was fully engaged in a conversation.

Language
It is not surprising that Italians are so musical. It comes with the language. When Italians speak to one another they virtually sing, with a rhythm and gesture that is slightly operatic. Soon the words echo in your mind, although you haven't the vaguest idea what they mean. I doubt it would be difficult to learn Italian. It was not long before I found myself quite unexpectedly speaking an Italian word or phrase in a perfectly appropriate way. When most Italians talk, their hands are usually waving wildly, as if they were conducting an overture. I suspect that if you tied up their hands, they would simply be unable to utter a word.

Scale
Where did we go wrong? Where did we go wrong in America? I think it is the scale of things. You see that so clearly here in Florence, where everything is so much smaller than in the USA. The buildings are only a few stories high, at most. The stores are often nothing more than living room size. They sell only a few products and are ubiquitous throughout the commune. It is interesting that Florence has always been known as the commune, the community. It is really a community of small neighborhoods. The streets are very narrow, often barely wide enough for a small car. There are no broad highways crisscrossing Florence. I think that has made an enormous difference. Traffic is forbidden now in the central areas. The ancient cities were not designed for anything like the automobile. At times there is simply not enough room on the street for both car and pedestrian. Indeed, there is often a little fight for survival when the two meet. In a word, this city was designed to be lived in by human beings. I don't know who the cities in our country were designed for.

On the Language
Robert Penn Warren once said that he liked to write in a foreign country “where the language is not your own and you are forced into yourself in a special way.” A Paris Review interviewer asked Tobias Wolff: You’re just back from seven months in Rome. Why were you there?

Wolff replies: I had immediate reason for going. It wasn’t to do research. I speak some Italian, but living in a country where I can’t be completely aware of what people are saying around me puts this sort of bubble around the head, in which, for a time, not indefinitely, I find I’m able to work with more than the usual concentration and joy. I like not having a car, living in the center of a city where you can walk everywhere. All the errands that seem to consume one’s life become very few and you find yourself with great stretches of time for reading, wandering, and yes, working…it takes the rust off.

Nuggets on the Web

Wolfram Alpha
The quest for new search engines continues. Have a look at the recently developed Wolfram Alpha computational search engine. It provides results that are radically different than the standard search engines. An introductory video will make it clear what it can and can’t do. Testing it for a while both surprised and disappointed me.

Peaceful Coexistence
Are you thinking of buying a Kindle, an iPad, a Nook or any of the other e-readers that are about to make the scene? Does the temptation to buy one of these gadgets keep you awake at night? Or are you content to stay with the good, old-fashioned printed page? Anuradha Raja will help you to resolve this dilemma.

Traveling Books
If people are not going to the library or bookstore anymore, why not bring the books to them? In Argentina, a tank has been converted to a traveling bookmobile and in Chicago a generous soul travels around the city in his Book Bike giving books away to local book lovers. Bookmobiles are not exactly new but they do change the “business models.”

To Prove or Disprove?
Is it better to seek evidence that supports your views or contradicts them? I was raised by Karl Popper to believe that being wrong is the better method. So has Kathryn Schulz whose book Being Wrong is on my list to read. If you are only reading romance novels this summer, you can see her talk about the book or write about it at the Boston Globe.

Updike's Last Collection

I am sure John Updike, who died last year at the age of 76, never stopped writing until his last breadth. In his final volume of short stories, My Father’s Tears and Other Stories, he does what every person his age does—reminiscences and ruminates about all those days “back then,” the process of growing old, and its miseries, if you will.

Updike always wrote ambivalently about the marriages and affairs of the people and places where he lived—rural Pennsylvania and suburban Massachusetts. Here they are viewed with a certain resignation and an increasing awareness of the imminence of death. If I can read this strange old guy’s mind right, he’s drinking a toast to the visible world, his impending disappearance from it be damned. The world is being tended to, I can let go of it, it doesn’t need me.

Most of the stories in his last collection begin with the circumstances of his protagonist’s current life, a life when he is no longer young and frisky and then gradually slide into a recollection of some long-past event or person.

In Personal Archeology, the second in the collection, Craig Martin, finding himself idle on several acres of his Massachusetts land, begins to wonder about the traces left by its prior owners. Soon he begins to ponder his … increasing isolation—elderly golfing buddies dead or dying, his old business contacts fraying, no office to go to, his wife always off at her bridge or committees, his children as busy and preoccupied as he himself had been in middle age…

The realization that he is rarely invited anywhere now transports him back to the lively weekend parties that often led him astray: There were in fact two simultaneous parties, two layers of party—the overt layer, where they discussed, as adults, local politics, national issues (usually involving Richard Nixon), their automobiles and schools for their children, zoning boards and home renovations, and the covert layer, where men and women communicated with eye-glance and whisper, hand-squeeze and excessive hilarity.

Updike then returns Martin to his current marriage and the conversations that sometimes shook its foundations. I’d give anything not to have married you,” Grace sometimes said, when angry or soulful…”I shouldn’t tell you this, but at times I think I hate you.”… That’s what we’ve become, a show. All our married life, we’ve been a show.

But now viewing these exchanges from some distance Martin saluted the utterance as honest, gouged with effort from the compacted accumulation of daily pretence and accommodation. He reflects, As well as love one another we hate one another, and even ourselves.

And then there are the women, the wives and mistresses that often played such a central role in Updike’s fiction who are brought back to life once again in these stories. In The Full Glass a retired insurance salesman recalls a stolen day-off from work when he was with a woman who was not his wife. With his characteristic descriptive detail, Updike writes: Being with this woman made my blood feel carbonated. She wore a broad-shouldered tweedy fall outfit I had never seen before; its warm brown color, flecked with pimento red, set off her thick auburn hair, done up loosely in a twist behind--in my memory, when she turned her head to look through the windshield with me, whole loops of it had escaped the tortoiseshell hair clip.

This is soon followed by, …what I remember is being with her in the interior of the car, proudly conscious of the wealth of her hair and the width of her smile and the breadth of her hips…

These two stories reflect the themes that are reprised in many of the eighteen stories in this collection. There is a present, a once was, and then an understanding that comes with age.

Even though he was nearing eighty, Updike still had his touch. While admitting it’s all downhill at his age and seeing each day in the mirror his multiplying white hairs, his deepening wrinkles, and feel his shortness of breath after exertion, his stiffness after sitting too long in a chair or a car, there is nothing in these stories that strikes me as much different than those he wrote when he was on the upward slope, during a time that he thought the world owed me happiness.

For anyone close to Updike’s age these stories ring true. We brood about the past, experiences unexpectedly come to mind that unsettle us for days, we recall individuals who we have forgotten about for decades. Whatever happened to X? Is he still as clever as he was then? Is Y still as lovely as I found her then? Are S and A still married? Who would have guessed all this was coming?

Ciao from Italy

Florence is “earthly” heaven to me because I experience it, and long for it, more fully than I do any other place. David Leavitt

After a lapse of several years I have come to Florence once again. This time I have returned for a break and to recharge the muse if she will still have me. Of course, I have come back for the sun and for the warmth and quite simply just to be here, here in this place that never is without a surprise—an undiscovered piazza, a chanced upon gallery, a trattoria that I never knew was just around the block

It an article in the Times several years ago Susan Jacoby wrote of the same feeling I have each time I return.

But Florence feels like home, or rather, like what might have been home had I chosen a very different life when I was young. I know Florence well enough to know where to buy paper towels and cheap flowers, well enough to face a dental emergency with equanimity, well enough to be greeted with recognition (or feigned recognition, which amounts to the same thing) by certain shopkeepers and restaurant proprietors. I have never spent an uninteresting day in this city, never experienced small vicissitudes or deeper sorrows that could not be ameliorated by contact with the noble civilization of these stony streets.

I went to my favorite market yesterday to gather a few supplies. The lady who normally greeted me wasn’t there. I wondered if it was here day off or if she had moved on. And the newsstand where I went each morning to get the Herald Tribune had vanished. Things change I guess, even in Florence, where change always seems to be running in slow motion.

However, most everything else seemed to be as it always is. In his book The City of Florence, C. Lewis wrote, We became familiar soon enough with the best-known sites and monuments--….To these returned time and time again, as to old friends always there to be looked up and, as it were, chatted with after a period of absence.

In the Prologue to this volume Lewis expresses many of my own feelings about being here:

All we knew was that we helplessly loved the place, and did not pause to ask why….

Florence was where we were most contentedly living, and where I was working—on something entirely unrelated to Tuscany.

The life and look of Florence were composed of strikingly different elements— differing shapes and styles from historical periods over many centuries—that nonetheless fitted together, lived together, spoke to each other.

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

I’ve been walking everywhere, out and about in the sun. Previously I had written: Where did we go wrong? Where did we go wrong in America? I think it is the scale of things. You see that so clearly here in Florence, where everything is so much smaller than in the US. The buildings are only a few stories high, at most. The stores are often nothing more than living room size. They sell only a few products and are ubiquitous throughout the commune.

It is interesting that Florence has always been known as the commune, the community. It is really a community of small neighborhoods. The streets are very narrow. There are no broad highways crisscrossing Florence. I think that has made an enormous difference. The ancient cities were not designed for anything like the automobile. At times there is simply not enough room on the street for both car and pedestrian. Indeed, there is often a little fight for survival when the two meet. In a word, this city was designed to be lived in by human beings. I don't know who the cities in our country were designed for.

David Leavitt in In Maremma, co-authored with Mark Mitchell, wrote, After living in the Italian countryside, Florence seems more “the city” than any other metropolitan place in the world: more than New York, more than Rome, more than Hong Kong. Paradoxically, it seems this way because it is made to the measure of man—one can walk there.

Kindle in the Classroom

How do eReaders affect the reading experience? In particular, do they improve reading comprehension? Do they enhance student learning in the classroom? Given the increasing cost of textbooks, the enormous amount of paper they use, to say nothing of their weight, these questions are especially relevant to students and faculty in academic settings.

Reed College, where I taught for many years, was recently one of seven schools selected to investigate the effect of Amazon’s Kindle DX on teaching and learning in higher education. Reed is a usual undergraduate institution, well known for its quirky, bright students with a traditional academic program that is among the most rigorous in the country. In terms of the percentage of its graduates who obtain the Ph.D. the College has consistently been among the highest ranking institutions in all disciplines. I felt extraordinarily fortunate to be able to teach there.

The study involved 43 students enrolled in three upper-level undergraduate courses--Seminar in English Literature, Seminar in French Literature and a Political Science course on nuclear politics--taught as is customary at Reed in relatively small conferences where students are expected to support their claims with specific textual citations and where, to keep the discussion moving forward, everyone needs to be able to locate in their own documents the passages cited by others.

The $489 Kindle DX was given to each student (they could keep them after the course was over) and they were asked to participate in the study on a voluntary basis but could obtain the course materials in printed form if they chose not to participate. Roughly 95% of the students signed up for the project.

Aside from issues of legibility (fair), battery life (good), paper savings (excellent), images, color features and graphs (poor), content availability (limited), etc. what interested me most was the evidence on comprehension of the reading materials. Both the students and faculty felt that their grasp of the material suffered greatly, largely because of the difficulty students had in highlighting and note taking.

One faculty member reported that “after a few weeks of trying to take notes by hand (or on their laptops, a number of students abandoned the Kindle DX” and chose to read the course materials in printed form. There was also uniform agreement that for an eReader to be of any use in an academic setting, it will have to be improved by easing note taking, highlighting and making comments in the margin.

In terms of referring to materials in class and switching back and forth between different pages in a document or multiple texts, the Kindle DX failed significantly on both accounts. Students missed thumbing through the pages, searching for notes they had made, and moving through the pages as quickly as they were used to with printed pages.

The evaluation concluded by noting that while students and faculty felt the Kindle DX “…in its current incarnation was unable to meet their academic needs, many felt that once technical and other issues have been addressed, eReaders will play a significant, possible a transformative, role in higher education.” The basis for this prediction eludes me for I see no evidence in the report to justify this belief. Perhaps they were thinking of the iPad, to be similarly tested next year by students and faculty at Reed.

I recognize the sample at Reed was small, that the academic conditions there are not representative of most colleges and that it was a very informal study of advanced classes without a comparison group that read the same materials in paper versions. Nevertheless, the findings at Reed are consistent with those reported by other colleges and universities that have tested the Kindle DX. They are also in agreement with a good many critics who have described their own experiences in reading non-academic materials with an eReader.

Like some of them, I also worry that reading on these devices will become an even more passive process than it already is. Yes, we read for pleasure and for entertainment and when we read for these reasons we don’t usually take notes or mark up the pages. Instead we move rapidly from sentence to sentence, rarely stopping to mull over any single one. However, if you can easily put pen to page, as I do with any book, then reading becomes an occasion to think further about the material, one that is not unlike any educational experience.

All the Lonely People

Is it so that everything we do is done out of fear of loneliness? Pascal Mercier

I’ve always considered loneliness to be due to social isolation, to living alone without a friend or a companion to be with from time to time. In Lonely: A Memoir Emily White takes issue with this conception. She argues that chronic, “genetically programmed” loneliness is qualitatively different from situational loneliness.

In her essay, On Living Alone, Vivian Gornick voiced a similar view, “Loneliness, when it came, came—then and now—like a surge of physical illness.”

White also emphasizes that chronic loneliness is also different from depression and is not merely a symptom of that condition. It is a state entirely of its own, separate and always there, even when you are engaged in a close, intimate relationship. There are medications that lessen the impact of depression; there are none for loneliness.

White writes “…no one’s discovered a vaccine against loneliness; there’s no prayer or charm or safeguard I’ve discovered that can be relied on to keep the state at bay for good.”

Emily White was trained as a lawyer and Lonely is written in the manner of a well-orchestrated legal brief—carefully researched, systematically organized, a bit repetitive, but also personally revealing. “I used to be a lawyer and what I was looking for was evidence.”

Her book is that altogether rare blend of personal experience combined with empirical research. Her evidence is drawn from studies carried out by psychological and medical investigators, the accounts of a fair number of individuals who have responded to her blog and advertisements on Craigslist, as well as her journal record of a lifelong struggle with this affliction.

White’s experience with chronic loneliness began when she was a child, (her parents divorced when she was four and she lived a solitary life as her mother was away at work most of the day), continued through various adult friendships, other causal relationships, and current life with her partner, Danielle whom she met while playing in a lesbian basketball league. Still she notes that her loneliness is still lurking in the background, even though “the state was no longer as intense and all-encompassing as it had been.”

Loneliness, as White often reminds the reader, is a state we don’t often talk about. Few people seem willing to tell others, even their closest friends, that they are often lonely. “Loneliness—especially chronic loneliness—is a state most people work incredibly hard to hide. It is not something alluded to even in intimate conversations.” You might admit you are feeling depressed, but rarely if ever that you are feeling lonely.

White asks, why hide this sometimes severe condition? She argues that loneliness deserves the same attention as any other emotional problem such as anxiety or depression. “There is no need for this silence, no need for the same and self-blame it creates. There’s nothing wrong with loneliness, and we need to start acknowledging this through a wider and more open discussion of the state.” This is precisely what she has done in this volume and, as one who knows well what it means to be lonely I praise her effort to do so.

While she has struggled with loneliness for years and tried every conceivable activity to alleviate it, sociability was rarely a problem for her and she was rarely at a loss for friends. All she yearned for was “the quiet presence of another person.”

“Passive company is something that’s hard to define but easy to recognize. It’s the comfortable, quiet state of cooking as your spouse reads the paper at the kitchen table, or half-listening from the study while your brother takes a call in the living room. Passive company provides us with the chance to simply be with someone else. It’s time, as Glenn Stalker put is, “when nothing much is being said.”

However, White concludes with a remark mystifies me: “…knowing what I do about loneliness—how it can lead to early death, and dementia, and illness, and cognitive changes, and headaches, and stress and threat—I haven’t tried to organize my life in a way that might keep it away.”

Yet I thought that in living with her partner, she had finally found the loneliness cure that she had been seeking all these years.

Epistemology 101

What do we know of another person’s beliefs or intentions? And how can we determine their meaning when we know they are trying to deceive us or even when they know we know they are trying to deceive us?

This is known as an “Expression Game” a term used by Erving Goffman to describe a situation where one individual tries to discover the meaning of information given openly or unwittingly by another or determine the truth of evidence that is intentionally misleading or false.

It is also the problem intelligence agents face in trying to interpret espionage evidence—decoded messages, overheard conversations, or discoveries. Frankly, it isn’t so different from the dilemma those of us who are not spies face in trying to figure out the meaning of what other people do or say.

In the May 10th issue of The New Yorker Malcolm Gladwell treats this issue in a dazzling review of Ben Macintyre’s “brilliant and almost absurdly entertaining Operation Mincemeat.” In 1943 a male corpse was discovered off the coast of southwest Spain; the corpse was dressed in a uniform and was carrying an attaché case fastened to his waist. His papers revealed he was a member of the British Royal Marines. Eventually the contents of the case made their way to German intelligence agents.

The documents revealed the Allied forces were planning a major two-prong invasion from their bases in North Africa to Greece and Sardinia. What to make of this information? To believe it or not? Could it be a deception designed to mislead the Germans about the true location of the invasion? Or could it, in fact, reveal the actual location? Or could it have no relevance at all to the location of the Allied attack?

Various factors went into the way this information was presented to the German commanders, not all them designed in the best interests of the German forces. The hidden agendas of the cast of characters described in Operation Mincemeat is vividly summarized by Gladwell. In the end Hitler and his advisors concluded the documents were believable whereupon they alerted their forces and transferred a Panzer division from France to the Peloponnese.

In fact, the documents were fake, planted by imaginative British intelligence agents to lure the Germans into diverting their troops from Sicily, the eventual location of the invasion of over 160,000 Allied soldiers, thousands of frigates, mine sweepers, heavy guns, tanks in July of 1943. Operation Mincemeat was a total fiction from start to finish. As Gladwell notes, “the Germans had fallen victim to one of the most remarkable deceptions in modern military history.”

(I was amused to learn from Gladwell that Operation Mincemeat was based on a work of fiction that was read another novelist who worked for British intelligence and approved by a committee headed by yet another novelist!)

Why didn’t the Germans examine more critically the evidence? Was it believable, was it true? In retrospect, there were good reasons to believe it was a total fabrication. The doctor who had examined Martin, failed to detect any fish or crab bites that are usually found in a body when it is washed up on shore. Martin’s hair was not brittle, also observed when a body has been submerged for a while. And the same holds for his clothes, which didn’t appear to have been in the water for very long. Apparently none of these “red flags” were taken seriously considered by the Germans.

The issue that Gladwell describes so well is one of interpreting the meaning of espionage evidence like this that is “inherently ambiguous.” It is really no different that interpreting the meaning of anything someone says to you. Are they telling the truth? Are they trying to deceive or mislead you? Do they even know what they believe or if they will continue to believe it tomorrow?

In discussing another espionage case, Gladwell puts it this way, “…Germany’s spies told their superiors that something was true that may indeed have been true, though maybe wasn’t, or maybe was true for a while and not true for a while…Looking at that track record, you have to wonder if Germany would have been better off not having any spies at all.”

Gladwell wonders “…if you cannot know what is true and what is not, how on earth do you run a spy agency?”

And he concludes with sound advice for all of us: “The next time a briefcase washes up onshore, don’t open it.”

Ubiquitous Excesses

Ian McEwan let me down in his latest novel, Solar. After reading Saturday a few years ago, a novel that still percolates in my mind and that I have written about several times here, I thought he could do no wrong. But I found Solar a bit of ordeal and at times thought about giving up on it.

McEwan’s depiction of Michael Beard, the central character in the novel, was the source of my problem. Beard is overweight, five-times married, a womanizer par excellence, heavy drinking, “monster.” I found him utterly repulsive and, in spite of the fact that he was a Nobel-Prize winning physicist with a sharp and crafty mind, I could not overcome my distaste for his excesses.

Why McEwan endowed him with so many vices mystifies me. Nor could I fathom his depiction of the steady stream of Beard’s clumsy, selfish, idiocies. Beard forgets to go to the bathroom before putting on protective gear on polar visit and risks a horrible fate by trying to relieve himself in the icy open air. This is followed by a mindless act of gluttony before delivering a talk on climate change and, as a result, he is barely able to fend off the rumblings of his digestive system.

McEwan continues in this vein when Beard, after returning home from a conference, fails to call 911 when one of his student-colleagues is fatally impaled as he falls and cracks his head on the edge of a glass table. Beard has just learned that the young man had been sleeping with his wife. In response, he runs off to fetch a hammer that belonged to a workman, also sleeping with his wife, and smears it with blood in order to incriminate the unfortunate fellow.

In this way, the novel takes the reader through one preposterous event after another. It has been said that Solar is a comic novel. I confess the humor completely escaped me as I failed to find anything the least bit humorous or terribly ironic in any of these incidents. Implausible, yes. Ridiculous, yes. Totally absurd, yes. Humorous, no.

And this includes novel’s conclusion, when the falsely accused workman, after completing his prison term, arrives on the scene as Beard is about to launch his grand solar project in the New Mexico desert. He beseeches Beard for a job, it is denied, whereupon he proceeds to shatter all the project’s solar panels.

As the project collapses, all Beard’s previous flings, lies, failures, heedlessness, gluttonies, and a long threatening melanoma also come crashing down upon him. We get what we deserve, don’t we? As James Baldwin noted “…people pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.”

The life McEwan created for Beard made it impossible for me to appreciate his effort to approach the topic of climate change. McEwan has said, “I couldn’t quite see how a novel would work without falling flat with a moral intent.” In my view it fell flat even without such intent. Others have felt the same way.

Walter Kirn in the Times said, “…it’s actually quite bad.” Also in the Times Michiko Kakutani wrote, “…its plot machinery soon starts to run out of gas, sputtering and stalling as it makes its way from one comic set piece to another.” and Solar “…is ultimately one of the immensely talented Mr. McEwan’s decidedly lesser efforts.”

On the other hand, Michael Wood writing in the New York Review of Books thought that even its “…slowness works in the novel’s favor” while Stehan Rahmstorf in the Guardian judged Solar to be “…McEwan at his best.” So it goes among the critics.

In order to enjoy a novel, does its central character need to be lovable or likeable or deserve our sympathy? As I think back upon the novels I have most enjoyed they are always peopled with individuals I admire and respect. While Henry Perowne in McEwan’s Saturday is certainly among them, Michael Beard in Solar is definitely not. I don’t know who admires or respects Michael Beard.

I am not entirely sure why McEwan wrote Solar or why he tackled climate change in such an oblique way. But if he hoped to increase public awareness or change many views on this issue without lecturing , I doubt he succeeded in Solar.

Novels of Ideas

What is a novel of ideas? In the March 6th Wall Street Journal Rebecca Goldstein writes briefly about five examples that she admires—Herzog, Middlemarch, The Holy Sinner, The Black Prince and Einstein’s Dreams. How are these novels distinguished from those that are not?

In writing about Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince she says, “Like all the novels of ideas I admire, this one hides its high purpose under well-developed characters and an organic plot.” She notes that Mann’s The Holy Sinner “buries its seriousness beneath the seductions of story telling.” Hides its high purpose? Buries its seriousness? I think she can be more explicit than that, although in fairness I am sure that was not her purpose in compiling this list.

She says Herzog blends “high-mindedness and low farce” and that George Eliot’s Middlemarch is “imprinted with many of Spinoza’s ideas. Finally she notes that Einstein’s Dreams concerns the nature of time “The play of ideas is heady as Alan Lightman wrests irony, pathos and poetry out of the abstractions of physics…”

On my understanding, a novel of ideas is quite simply a work of fiction that treats the issues normally considered by philosophers, e.g. moral, existential, metaphysical, etc. It is a novel of where issues are raised and questions asked. You reflect on the problems it poses, stop in mid-sentence or at the end of a paragraph to ponder something the author has written or you make a note in the margin or discuss the book’s concerns with another individual. And you do all these things and more with a really notable novel of ideas.

Goldstein’s characterization of Lightman’s novel comes closest to this conception. Yet she never frames her discussion of this novel or any of the four others in terms of how the reader might respond to the ideas or questions in the various ways I’ve indicated. Time. What is time? The abstractions of physics. What are they and is there any hope that I can understand them? Where can I learn more out about them?

Ideas and problems abound in Pascal Mercier’s Night Train to Lisbon and it is why I liked the novel so much. There is very little narrative in this novel and but there are a great many questions, most of them unanswered. In my view this is a novel of ideas at its best and is the heart of the reading experience for me.

In an interview in the latest Paris Review (#192) Ray Bradbury expresses a rather different and to me unusual view. “Science fiction is the fiction of ideas... Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.”

Bradbury wonders why this type of novel is so neglected and he gives an example his Fahrenheit 451, a novel I never read but a story I remember vividly in its film version. In talking about the novel he says:

“Take Fahrenheit 451. You’re dealing with book burning, a very serious subject. You’ve got to be careful you don’t start lecturing people. So you put your story a few years into the future and you invent a fireman who has been burning books instead of putting out fires…and you start him on the adventure of discovery…. He reads his first book. He falls in love. And then you send him out into the world to change his life. It’s a great suspense story, and locked into it is this great truth you want to tell, without pontificating.”

Bradbury’s interview opened my eyes to broader conception of the novel of ideas, one that also includes utopian and dystopian fiction, and to a view of science fiction that I’ve not taken seriously before. In their own way they are just as much novels of ideas as those Goldstein mentions or, indeed, that she writes.