The Auschwitz Volunteer

There is always a difference between saying you will do something and actually doing it. A long time before, many years before, I had worked on myself to be able to fuse the two. Witold Pilecki

On September 19, 1940 in Warsaw, Poland a man walked into a Nazi roundup of Polish citizens. He knew exactly what he was doing. What he was doing was volunteering to be shipped to Auschwitz along with the others rounded up that day.

His name was Witold Pilecki and he is the only known individual to volunteer to be taken to Auschwitz. I was rather stunned when I first read about him; everyone is. In light of all that we know about Auschwitz and the other Nazi concentration camps, his act is no doubt one of the most courageous anyone has ever performed.

At the time Pilecki was a member of the Polish Underground in Nazi occupied Poland that had been split in half with the Russians occupying the eastern section and Germans the west.

In The Auschwitz Volunteer: Beyond Bravery, Pilecki describes what he and other prisoners went through at the camp. His report was written after he managed to escape and after many decades in which the Communist government in Poland censored the report.

It has finally been translated into English. The translator comments that he has tried to maintain the unrevised and unpolished character of his writing. The publisher notes: “As a result this report of his Auschwitz mission has a rare immediacy and particularly personal voice—it reads as if Pilecki were sitting in the room with us telling his story.”

At the outset Pilecki writes: “The game which I was now playing in Auschwitz was dangerous. This sentence does not really convey the reality; in fact I had gone far beyond what people in the real world would consider dangerous."

His mission had three objectives:

• To distribute food and build morale for the prisoners, along with news from outside

• To send out reports about what was going on in the camp

• To organize an armed uprising to take over the camp with the support of Polish or Allied arms and troops

Pilecki succeeded in sending out information about the conditions in the camp and in building morale among the prisoners, but in spite of what was well known after a few years, neither the Polish Underground, nor Allied forces did anything to intervene in what had become a death and torture camp.

Starvation, shootings, disease, prolonged exposure to the cold and heat, cutting with sharp instruments, overwork, gassing, phenol injections, all of these brutal atrocities were used by the Germans, first on the Polish prisoners, then on the Russians captured during the German invasion of Soviet Russia and finally on the Jews.

Pilecki writes that he had “bade farewell to everything I had hitherto known on this earth and entered something seemingly no longer of it” He reports that the Soviet prisoners were the first victims of the gassing by Zyklon B and that they were so tightly packed in the crematoria “that even in death they could not fall over.” And of the murdered Jews: “Over a thousand a day from the new transports were gassed. The corpses were burnt in the new crematoria.”

After being in Auschwitz a little over two and a half years, Pilecki, along with another prisoner escaped from the camp through an ingenious and difficult route through the camp bakery. Eventually he returned to Warsaw, participated in the Warsaw Uprising, but in 1947 was arrested by the Polish Communist secret police and executed as an “imperialist spy” the following year.

In the Forward to the book, Rabbi Michael Schudrick of Poland wrote: “May the life of Witold Pilecki inspire us all to do one more good deed, of any kind, each and every day of our lives.”

La Rafle (The Roundup)

In thinking of the lives never allowed to blossom, of those children deprived of a future, those destinies cut short, we must raise still further the demands we make of our own lives. By refusing indifference, neglect, and complacency, we shall make ourselves stronger together. Francois Hollande

The French film La Rafle begins with the roundup of 13,000 Jewish men, women and children at 4 AM on the morning of July 16, 1942 in Nazi occupied Paris, by members of the collaborating French police.

They were taken to a transit camp at Drancy in the suburbs of Paris or a huge bicycle track (Velodrome d’Hiver) where they remained for several days without food and water. Of these 13,000 individuals only 100 are believed to have survived.

The German directive to the French police read: “The teams charged with the arrests will have to proceed with the most possible speed, without useless words and without comment. Furthermore, at the moment of the arrest, the well-foundedness or ill-foundedness of this arrest is not to be discussed.”

Originally the Germans had ordered the arrest of 25,000 French Jews. The fact that only half that number were rounded up reflects the courage of those French citizens who hid at least 10,000 of their Jewish friends and neighbors.

Nevertheless, the police arrested 3,118 men, 5,919 women, and 4,115 children. Eventually these 13,152 Jewish citizens of France were taken by train (cattle cars) with their families to a transit camp closer to Germany. Then they were transferred to Auschwitz in Poland, this time separated from their families, with men in one set of cars, women in another, and children in the third,

The horrors of life in Auschwitz, the brutality of the German guards and subsequent gassing of the Jews in the crematorium are too grim to be recounted here. The film focuses on the treatment of the sick and emaciated Jews, and the terror of the children as they are separated from their mother and father. It also centers on one child who somehow managed to escape from the camp, wend his way back to Paris, only to learn that everyone in his family has been killed.

The child, Joseph Weisman, now 80, believes it is time for the French to speak out on the fate of these wartime Jews. For the most part, the police and leaders of France have resisted a public acknowledgment of these events. Most of the records of the raids were destroyed after the war and only recently have the surviving records of one police station been discovered.

Wiseman says, “When I speak about it, it suffocates me, chokes me. It’s important to tell this story to the youth of today. It is they who will write the story of tomorrow.”

The appearance of La Rafle coincides with the 70th Anniversary of the mass arrests. While not the first public acknowledgment of the government’s role in the roundup, last month there were a series of public commemorations, including museum exhibitions and an address by President Francois Hollande.

The director of the film Rose Bosch, wrote: “La Rafle is a truthful account of events that took place on that morning in July 1942. Having experienced so many horrible things around the world when I was a journalist, I was angered by the fact that children were always on the front line. I was going to tell this story from the children’s point of view, the point of view of a group of real life children who experienced all this in Paris in 1942.”

On A Summer Day

Summer afternoon—summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language. Henry James

A summer morning is every bit as beautiful to me, the clear light, freshness in the air, the sun reflecting off the nearby buildings. I head out and it is already approaching 90. This is going to be a perfect summer day.

How do others view summer mornings and afternoons? To find out I did a targeted search of the word “summer” in my commonplace book, a collection of passages from practically every book I’ve read since 1988.

Ernest Hemingway A Farewell to Arms
In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels.

Christopher Wilkins The Measure of Love
I felt like someone feels who spends a bright summer’s afternoon in a dark, smoky cinema, engrossed in some tenebrous gothic drama, only to emerge blinking into a world where it is still broad daylight and where there are shops and children and safety and laughter and people getting on with their lives.

Ann Patchett Bel Canto
In Paris, Simon Thibault had loved his wife, though not always faithfully or with a great deal of attention. They had been married for twenty-five years. There had been two children, a summer month spent every year at the sea with friends, various jobs, various family dogs, large family Christmases that included many elderly relatives.

Colm Toibin The Master
…he could not stop asking himself what he wished for now, and answering that he wanted only more of this—calm days, a beautiful small house and this soft summer light.

Anita Brookner A Friend from England
One always expects the summer to last for much longer than it does: one forgets the very sensation of being cold.

Andre Aciman Out of Egypt
Summers were long in Venice, she said, and there was nothing she liked more some days than to take the vaporetto and ride around the city, or head directly for the Lido and spend a morning on the beach by herself. She loved the sea. I loved it too, I said, reminding her that it was she who taught me how to swim.

Ian McEwan The Child in Time
I don’t remember a hotter summer than this in seventy-four years. It’s hot. In fact, I’d say it was too hot. Stephen said that was better than too wet and his father agreed. …Give me the heat anytime.

Elizabeth Hawes Camus, a Romance
In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me lay an invincible summer.

Natalia Ginzburg The Little Virtues
There are only two seasons in the Abruzzi: summer and winter. The spring is snowy and windy like the winter, and the autumn is hot and clear like the summer.

Alastair Reid Whereabouts: Notes on Being a Foreigner
I do not own a watch and pass the summer without ever knowing the time.

Andre Aciman Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere
…warm, intimate feeling that settles around noon on typically clear Roman summer days.

Richard Goodwin The American Condition
Now at Florence, when the air is red with the summer sunset and the campaniles begin to sound vespers and the day’s work is done, everyone collects in the piazzas. The steps of Santa Maria del Fiore swarm with men of every rank and every class; artisans, merchants, teachers, artists, doctors technicians, poets, scholars. …And this is the pleasure of the Florentine public.

Olah Olafsson Restoration
…summer arrived with the most glorious weather imaginable: hot, sunny days and warm nights.

Rules for Writing

All I can say is that I was looking for a certain density of thought. A living voice. A text that would surprise me and take me through a mental adventure. Phillip Lopate

There was an article in the Times last month (7/26/12) on how to write. I thought, I can always use a few hints. The article was written by Colson Whitehead, a writer who I had been led to believe is highly regarded.

Since he is an expert on these matters, I read the article with considerable care, only to discover he was dispensing the same advice I must have read at least a dozen times before. You know, the usual: write what you know; revise, revise revise; “what isn’t said is as important as what is said;” and so on. And then I came to the last “rule,” as Mr.Whitehead calls them, number 11, in fact, where I was informed, “There are no rules.”

A great burst of laughter could be heard for miles around. Oh, but, Colin, what about those ten other rules you so kindly “shared” with the rest of us?

Anyway, I thought the last so-called rule was a blessing. Because I write poorly, spell like a six year old, and no doubt violate every rule established by grammarians and the authorities at the New Yorker.

I do that intentionally or maybe, naturally or more likely because I don’t know how to write, as I try not to write, but to be heard, by someone as if we were sitting together in a room, having a conversation, only I am doing that or trying to do that on the page. Like now.

On two occasions I did take a writing workshop to overcome my glaring deficiencies. Both were really excuses to spend some time in Europe, although both were taught by an esteemed writer who I was certain would come to my assistance.

One year the workshop was taught, if you can call it that, by Philip Lopate, the well-known essayist and editor of the invaluable Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. And Lopate did pass along a number of good suggestions, not rules.

• Build suspense; establish a tension

• Pose a problem

• Be fully honest

• Create a character, turn yourself into one, observe yourself from a distance, use your quirks and contradictions

• Reflect on your life, don’t simply spell it out. Even if you don’t understand it, it is important for an author to try to come to some understanding of the autobiographical facts that are presented ad nauseum in most memoirs.

• An analytic perspective is equally important.

• To think on the page is to engage the reader.

Lopate’s suggestions were refreshing, different, tips that go well beyond Whitehead’s oft-repeated rules. Practicing them is another matter. I still have a long way to go. Obviously.

The Magic of Words

The writer discovers first for himself by moving words around, bringing out surprising new meanings in them through arranging them in never-before-seen combinations. And if he hits upon the perfect combination, a light goes off, and the world will seem a brighter place to him and his readers. Joseph Epstein

Country Names
I am sometimes entranced by a word, by the way it sounds and how it looks on the page. “Burkina Faso.” Yes it is really two words but it describes a single entity. Do you know where it is?

How about its capital? Talk about a word. Ouagadougou. Just how do you pronounce that one? Pop the word in Google’s Translator under the “Detect Language” menu and listen to its smooth sound. Pretty exotic. Yes? And it was correctly identified as French in origin, reflecting Burkina Faso’s colonial heritage.

Wordplay
I must have been down and out a few years ago when I went to see Wordplay, a documentary about the world of crossword puzzlers and the legendary Times crossword puzzle editor, Will Shortz. Or just plain fed up with the rubbish playing in the local cinemas.

From the first glimpse of the ever-smiling Will, I too began to smile as he introduced me to a world where there was much to feel good about. The world is primarily the people who construct and play crosswords with such remarkable skill. What a small world, but what talent, what knowledge and what unassuming humor about their gift. Nothing but “Ah, shucks, there’s not much I can do about it.” or “I don’t know how I do it, I just can.”

A refreshing movie, a delightful one for a change, nothing to ponder the moral implications or the madness that surrounds us. How reassuring that not everyone has lost their marbles. Maybe we will get through this after all.

Other’s Words
In The Words of Others, Gary Morson explores the history, the variety, and the multiple uses of quotations. It’s not a book of quotations, as in a unannotated commonplace book, but rather an analysis of the role of quotations in literature, anthologies, and contemporary culture. Through the magic of Kindle’s Highlights, I made note of a number of passages--quotations by authors of some renown, including famous last words and ideas and questions about quotations that Morson discusses in his book.

A wise man once said that ‘no man is ever an island,’ and truer words were never spoken.

Was Adam the only one able to speak without quoting?

As the Talmud testifies, commentary invites ever more commentary. A single gnomic line can come to resonate with centuries of subsequent wisdom.

Anatole France frankly advised, “When a thing has been said and said well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it”). Yes, indeed, but do more. Copy many well-said things. Piece them together. Assimilate them. Make the process of reading them a way to form the mind and shape the soul.

Sometimes phrases we have read or heard become so thoroughly assimilated into our way of speaking or thinking that we no longer recognize them as anything but our own.

Guns aren’t lawful; Nooses give; Gas smells awful. Dorothy Parker

Erasmus saw his amazingly popular anthology as fulfilling the most important purposes of literature, guiding the use of language and conveying valuable lessons. Quotations distilled, and reading them instilled, wisdom.

It could be said of me that in this book I have only made up a bunch of other men’s flowers, providing of my own only the string that ties them together. Montaigne

"How Time Flies"

“Time is memory. Simple as that. Without memory, there can be no time. No before and after, no sooner or later, no now and then. After all, how do we detect what we call the passage of time except by perceiving change? But without memory, all change would be imperceptible. We see the leaves in the forest are turning brown and we think, “autumn already. How time flies.” But that is because we remember how the forest looks in summer. The forest alone, denied our memories could not bear witness to the passage of time.” Christopher Wilkins

When I have something to say, writing takes me away from the clock. I write, its OK, and time flashes by. Sometimes I look at the clock and cannot believe what time it is.

Does time perception vary as a function of motivation? When we feeling good about what we’re doing, does time pass more quickly than when we are in a negative mood?

Einstein observed that the experience of time is largely subjective and most research on time perception attributes this to the effects of positive and negative affective states. But what is the underlying mechanism of this relationship?

In three experiments Philip Gable and Bryon Poole have tried to get a handle the matter. According to their hypothesis, positive affective states vary in motivational intensity with some low in approach motivation (e.g. satisfaction) and others high (e.g. exciting). Similarly, negative avoidance states vary from boring to painful.

In their third and most informative experiment, they tried to separate the approach-avoidance dimension from intensity of arousal. Does high positive motivation shorten the perception of time relative to high-negative states, independent of approach or avoidance?

129 introductory psychology students (97 female, 32 male) participated in the study. They were asked to view high-positive arousal photographs and high-negative arousal pictures. For each picture they were asked to judge whether it was displayed for a short or a long period, with higher proportions indicating a slower perception of time.

The results revealed that high positive motivation shortens time perception relative to high negative motivation. The perception of time was largely determined by positive motivation, rather than either positive (approach) or negative (avoidance) arousal.

So when I’m writing and it is going well, I don’t think a bit about time or what time it is. On the other hand, when it isn’t going well and I am staring at a blank page or deleting one sentence after another and feeling really displeased, I am keenly aware of time and how long it is taking to accomplish something. However, in neither case am I especially aroused.

Of course, the experiments reported by Gale and Poole were conducted in the laboratory, with one method and with college students who participated because they were taking a course (psychology) where participation was a course requirement.

Would the findings occur outside the lab, under different conditions, with a different set of subjects? These are questions that are always important to answer about highly reactive laboratory experiments that are also subject to experimenter biases and a variety of subject hypotheses about what the experimenter expects and their desire not to look foolish.

On A Lazy, Dazy Day in August

Anything can happen on a summer afternoon
On a lazy dazy golden hazy summer afternoon
Lily Tuck

And the sun finally shines upon the Northwest, the days are warm, and the Web is having a summer rally.

A poet reminds us of the long forgotten craft of sending postcards.

While the Spice Girls at the Olympic closing ceremony amused me more than I care to admit, I was far more impressed by word of what the Olympics used to be and could be now without any difficulty.

A psychotherapist suggests that writing and reading poetry can have therapeutic value.

I learned from more than I need to know about England during the last two exhausting weeks, including the fact that people still like to read over there and gather together in groups to talk about its practical value.

Earlier this summer I read about a very special perfect moment experienced by a musician while talking to someone who sounds a lot like someone I know.

New Websites sprout like the dandelions in the grass around here, including one that is so rich in intellectual fare that it has entered the exclusive realm of my Firefox bookmarks.

Expanded Memory

In preliterate cultures, the great sagas and epics were necessarily communal creations committed to tribal memory and chanted under priestly supervision over generations. With the invention of the alphabet, authors no longer depended on communal memory but stored their work on stone, papyrus, or paper. Jason Epstein

More and more now I find myself turning to the Web when I can’t remember something. I don’t remember a person's name or the title of the book she wrote. But the Web remembers and then I remember too.

Sometimes what I am searching for drifts in on its own, usually when I am unprepared or doing something other than trying to recall it. And sometimes this occurs several days after memory failed me, when I’ve totally forgotten what it was that I was even trying to recall.

But I am impatient and have no interest in these “mind pops” and so more and more often I rely upon the Web. I suppose we’ve always depended on other resources to refresh our memories. Nevertheless I always, yes always, feel bad about this. Is my brain turning to mush? Is the dread disease finally consuming me?

So it was with considerable relief that I read Daniel Wegner’s article in the Times last Sunday (8/5/12) suggesting there’s nothing really wrong with checking the Web, that it isn’t a sign of mental deterioration. What good news; I won’t forget that.

He says we all have limited memories, “no one remembers everything.” We ask a friend about something we’ve forgotten. My friend knows everything about the subject I’ve forgotten. My wife asks me where she left her glasses. Since she asks me so often, I always keep track of where her glasses are.

The other night we were watching an old movie and I could not for the life of me remember the name of the actress. I asked her, if she did. She thought for a while and then said, “Emma something.” Immediately I replied, “Emma Thompson.” There we have it: communal memory on the couch.

Each time we draw upon the Web or another person, we only expand our memory. It isn’t that we are becoming overly dependent on these sources or becoming more forgetful. Rather it is an adaptive response to our limited memory capacity.

Wegner refers to this process as “transactive memory.” In introducing the idea he describes it as a “way to understand the group mind….each of us in a couple or group remembers some things personally—and then we can remember much more by knowing who else might know what we don’t. In this way we become part of a transactive memory system.”

Isn’t this an example of our increasingly specialized society? We don’t live in a preliterate society referred to by Epstein, where stories were communicated verbally and where it was necessary to rely upon communal memory and our own ability to remember what was spoken, if we were ever to remember anything.

We have all become a great cybermind. As long as we are connected to our machines through talk and keystrokes, we can all be part of the biggest, smartest mind ever. It is only we are trapped for a moment without our Internet link that we return to our own little personal minds, tumbling back to earth from our flotation devices in the crowd.

His essay was like a cathartic therapy session. A feeling of reassurance swept over me, my fear of relying on Goggle or someone else disappeared, and I no longer have to berate myself or feel bad after all about being part of the “great cybermind.”

No Pain, No Gain

Here is how Malcolm Gladwell defines “slack” in his latest New Yorker (7/30/12) essay: Slack--the gap between what is possible, under conditions of absolute effort, and actual performance--is unavoidable. We all want to try our hardest, every time. But we can’t.”

As an example he compares his experience as a high school runner with that of the early nineteen-eighties distance runner Alberto Salazar. Gladwell gave up competitive running when his fear of what it takes to be among the best grew too overwhelming.

By contrast, Salazar who not only faced the same fear, but almost died from all-out running on two occasions concluded just the opposite.

In his memoir l4 Minutes Salazar writes that he felt “exhilarated” even after doctors thought he was dead after collapsing at the end of the 1978 Falmouth Road Race, “one of the premier road races in the world,” as his temperature reached 107 and was rising.

“My thrill ran deeper; I had learned something from death. I had learned, through the agency of my lifelong prayer, that I wasn’t afraid of death. I realized that this made me different from the people walking by me in the street. More important…it made me different from other runners.”

Gladwell claims that between 17 and 24 Salazar ran on average 105 miles a week (that’s 15 miles every day, through winter storms and blistering hot and humid summers), missing just eleven days of running in that seven-year period. I imagine he wasn’t just running, but running hard during each one of those miles.

Did it take its toll? Yes, according to Gladwell, who claims most “elite distance runners can maintain their form into their early thirties. Salazar stopped competitive racing in his mid-twenties.”

Was that because he pushed himself beyond his limits? While it is surely associated with the way he ran, the only way he could run and win, it is impossible to know if that was the reason he reached his peak comparatively early.

Consider an alternative: Most great distance runners run gracefully, without any apparent effort, almost naturally, like a cheetah racing across the African savannah. In contrast, Salazar “shuffled like an old man,” struggling with everything he had to keep running at full speed.

While Salazar obviously had enormous desire and great talent, it was always accompanied by pain. “The pain of running is like the pain of drowning,” he said. “A kind of weariness sets in and you lose the will to fight. What I could do is simply push myself through that exhaustion.”

Is that kind of pain necessary to be a champion runner? Is it necessary to be superior in any sport or human endeavor? Clearly not. I have no answer to how necessary it is for an elite distance runner.

But I do know that most long-distance runners have said they reach a point during a marathon where they believe they can’t go on any longer, but if they do, they will usually push through that state, get their “second wind” and resume running as before.

Salazar believes his acceptance of pain can be attributed to his father’s deep faith in Catholicism and the demands he placed on Salazar to keep going no matter how painful or exhausted he was. “A Salazar never quits.”

Tin House

Tin House is a literary magazine published every quarter in Portland, Oregon. In the summer issue there were several short stories and poems, two long essays, five book reviews, one culinary memoir and the usual Tin House crossword puzzle. Quite a brainy feast.

The first short story, “The Right Way to End a Story,” was written by Holly Goddard Jones, a writer I’ve never heard of before but after reading her story, I knew I wanted to read everything she’d written.

Juliet had been tending a fantasy about the famous photographer who would be lodging with her at the college’s guest house. She knew that he was older than she – twenty years at least – but that was perhaps a good thing at this point in her life, as recently separated as she was, as recently thirty as she was. An older man, an artist, a jet-setter in (she imagined) khaki trousers and a vest: she’d seen his self-portrait on the Internet and felt very kindly toward him.

Juliet writes good sentences, but her stuff’s just too domestic for most men to care about. Men don’t care about these relationship stories she does. And you know who edits the journals that are worth a shit? Men.

A few pages further on is a short story, “Dolly,” by Alice Munro of all people, perhaps the short story writer of the century. It is about an older couple coming to grips with mortality and emotions that are immune to age.

There had been some discussion of death. Our deaths. Jackson being eighty-three years old and myself seventy-one at the time, we had naturally made plans for our funerals (none) and for the burials (immediate) in a plot already purchased. We had decided against cremation, which was popular with our friends. It was just the actual dying that had been left out or up to chance.

…no lies, after all, are as strong as the lies we tell ourselves.

Then there are several fine book reviews, including a long essay, “The Merritt Parkway Novel,” by Gerald Howard in which he reviews Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road and Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm, each of which takes place in the suburban Connecticut countryside, not far from the Merritt Parkway.

Paul Charles Griffin writes about buying a used Raymond Chandler novel on Amazon when he needs to decide whether to order a copy rated “Like New” or “Very Good” or “Acceptable”. On principle, he never buys one given an “Acceptable” rating but when the seller claimed that his satisfaction “was his top priority,” he succumbed.

Pleased to have someone even remotely concerned with my happiness, I went with the “Acceptable” rating and waited for the mailman to arrive.

And then he writes about Chandler’s Lady in the Lake, and quite delightfully about reading the yellow highlights and marginal notes in the used copy. They are clever and he thinks they were written by a young Indian, Sanjay.

It was as if I were reading the book with him, as if we were discussing it together in a book club…my excursion into the mind of Sanjay K reminded me of what reading is all about, looking to another person’s soul, hearing his thoughts, feeling his feeling and seeing the world through his eyes…This is why reading has always been the most important thing to me. It allows me a reprieve from my private universe, allows me to be somebody else for an hour.

I could go on for a while longer about other book reviews, essays, and the culinary memoir, as well as the solution to the Tin Hat crossword. But I will leave it to you to track down a copy if you’re interested. I do believe it will be worth whatever it costs, new, used (very good, or acceptable).

Marvis Gallant Journals

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

Throughout the 60 years Gallant lived in Europe she kept a daily journal. They are her accounts of the many changes in Europeans and their cultures after World War 2. The war ended in 1945. My first trip to Europe was nine years later. Rubble was still on the streets of London and almost every city in Germany city I visited. People had scarcely any money and in Madrid, where she lived for a while, Franco was still in power.

A friend of Gallant’s, Frances Kierman, is currently editing the vast, mostly handwritten entries for what will be the first of several volumes of her daily journal entries. Gallant is about to turn 90, has been quite ill recently and is doing her best in working with Kierman to recall some of the incidents she wrote about.

Jhumpa Lahiri recently met Gallant to conduct an interview for Granta magazine. After their meeting, Lahiri wrote, "I had never met a writer who has inspired me so greatly, and towards whom I felt such enormous debt."

Several excerpts from her journals were recently published in the July 9th & 16th double issue of the New Yorker. They are drawn from four months 1952 when she was struggling to survive as a writer in Madrid.


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

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

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

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

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

I hang on the end of hunger. We are all as pale as paper. I can’t wear my blouses because they are dirty and I haven’t soap for them and for me and it has to be me.

Today I have no money and no food.

Told Frederick [a friend] I no longer believe in the novel. He said, “Write it whether you believe in it or not.” It is like watching a plant die.

Chambrun [her agent] has send four hundred dollars and says he will send the rest later. The first thing I bought was good white bread.

What to Believe?

“You may deceive all the people part of the time, and part of the people all the time, but not all the people all the time.” Abraham Lincoln*

The rapid fall of Jonah Lehrer reflects a problem with all secondary accounts of scientific findings—on the Web, in the press, in books, conversations, etc. You can’t always believe them.

Lehrer was forced to resign from his position as a blogger for the New Yorker when it was discovered he had fabricated several passages from a purported interview with Bob Dylan and had reused material previously published on his blog at Wired magazine. Having read those blogs, I was quite puzzled to see them once again on the New Yorker’s digital pages.

Since then his latest book, Imagine: How Creativity Works, has been withdrawn by its publisher, and Wired magazine, where he had blogged before coming to the New Yorker is reviewing all of his previous posts. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is asking bookstores to returned their unsold copies for a full refund and the same offer has been made to readers who purchased a print copy of the book.

From a star in the blogosphere, Lehrer has almost overnight been ostracized to a writers no-man’s land, to be shunned as if he carried around some dread virus. One wonders what will become of him.

Absent the original report in a peer-reviewed (ideally) journal, it is hard, no, impossible to determine the reliability of the kind of secondary accounts Lehrer published. They could be subject to any number of reporting biases, errors, outright deception, or simple fudging.

Apparently this was true in several and perhaps others yet discovered in the blogs and books of Jonah Lehrer, whose popularity was not unlike that of Malcolm Gladwell. And it may also be true of the several blogs I have written about Lehrer’s posts and books that are even further away from the original sources than Lehrer’s.

I first started reading Lehrer on his blog, the Frontal Cortex. I liked the way he attempted to integrate scientific findings with ordinary experiences. Eventually, his blogs became more neuroscience and less psychological and, in turn, I didn’t follow him as often as I used to, as I’ve never been particularly enamored of neuroscience and its presumption of “at last we know.”

I knew all the evidence he cited from experimental studies was a secondary account, but I had no reason to believe he fabricated anything or distorted the findings one way or another. Therein lies the problem of a reporter, like myself, or a reader. How can you trust such accounts when you don’t have the original research upon which it is based or even know how to interpret it if you did?

When I was a social psychologist, I uniformly went to the original studies I talked about in class or cited in my research. I read them as carefully as I could, tried to interpret the increasingly complex statistical analyses, and checked to see that the investigator’s conclusions didn’t go beyond the data. I can assure you this was never easy. And how often have you read lately about researchers who have fudged on their data or even in some cases actually made it up?

Apparently Lehrer did fudge and did distort and did also invent what he claimed to be true. Should I remove the several blogs where I have cited his work? No, I’ll leave them up for a while and suggest you read them, as well as all other secondary accounts of the research I discuss with considerable caution.

* Note: The Abraham Lincoln quotation was drawn from Jonah Lehrer’s blog, "Deception" written in November, 2006.

Mr. Keatley's Commonplace Book

Most commonplace books, and there aren’t many of those, are private collections of notable passages that readers have collected over the years. Very few have been published and those that have are primarily the collections of well-known individuals—Thomas Jefferson, John Milton, W. H. Auden, Alex Guinness, etc. However, I suspect a relatively modest number have been published privately, probably less today than in previous centuries. Who can ever know these things?

From the earliest days of the commonplace book tradition, copying noteworthy passages by hand, usually into one or more notebooks, has been the preferred method of transcription. The introduction of the typewriter and computer and more recently the several methods of electronic recording have made inroads on this practice.

A considerable number of “commonplace books” and quotation lists are now appearing on the Web. I discuss a few here. While these electronic analogues of their printed forerunners have probably not changed the character of commonplace books, they have surely broadened the audience for what had become a largely private activity.

One of the most usual of those that I’ve read about lately is On Opening Mr. Keatley’s Commonplace Book by Brendan Bruce. I am completely in the dark about the identity, real or fictional, of Mr. Keatley or Brendan Bruce. But here it is, his commonplace book, formatted as a photographic portfolio on a Website, known as "blub" for some reason.

You can also sample a few of its pages and buy a paper or Kindle version from the ubiquitous Amazon.com. Regardless, on each page is a list of the passages that Mr. Keatley or Mr. Bruce deemed worthy of collecting from what is apparently a rather vast and wide ranging set of books.

No reason is given why the passages were selected, nor are they annotated or organized by theme, which I guess is true of most commonplace books. Nevertheless, here is a sampling from the 15 pages available on the Web. Might this kind of thing be the Christmas gift of 2012 for a fair number of commonplacers?

An acre in Middlesex is better than a principality in Utopia. Thomas Babington Macaulay

Those who never retract their opinions love themselves more than they love truth. Joseph Joubert

Judge and be prepared to be judged. Ayn Rand

I value my garden more for being full of blackbirds than of cherries. Joseph Addison

Those who air at great deeds must also suffer greatly. Plutarch

Destiny: n. A tyrant’s authority for crime and a fool’s excuse for failure. Anatole France

Bring your desires down to your present means. Increase them only when your increased means permit. Aristotle

I have never learned anything from any man who agreed with me. Dudley Field Malone

The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers. Dick the Butcher, King Henry VI Part II

Surprise happens so often that it’s surprising that we’re surprised by it. Paul Wolfowitz

Money is like the sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five. W. Somerset Maugham

What I want is men who will support me when I am in the wrong. William, Lord Melbourne

Reports are not self-executive. Florence Nighingale.

"Moral Life of Downtown"

Earl Shorris was an essayist and social critic who began one of the first programs to bring literature to the poor and uneducated. Shorris died a few weeks ago and for anyone interested in the possibility of changing lives through literature, this represents a great loss.

While he was interviewing inmates for a book he was writing on poverty, he routinely asked them why poor people became poor. In response, one woman answered because they never learned “the moral life of downtown.” When Shorris asked her what she meant, she replied, “plays, museums, concerts, lectures, you know.”

Shorris concluded from these words that what they lacked wasn’t money, but education, education in the humanities. As a result he began developing the Clemente Course in the Humanities designed for economically and educationally disadvantaged individuals that was offered without cost. The participants studied four subjects: literature, art history, moral philosophy, and American History.

I was drawn to Shorris’ course, like others I’ve written about here, because of my interest in the effects of reading literature. The curriculum of most of these programs is based on Shorris’ course and almost all are intended to reach the poor, unemployed, low wage workers, addicts, the homeless and prisoners. Can you imagine groups that might be more resistant and as unlikely to benefit from such a course as these?

How successful is the course in achieving this goal? Gathering evidence to answer this question is not easy. It is often difficult to track down participants, many of whom lead chaotic lives with no permanent address or phone number. Shorris reports a preliminary evaluation in the Appendix to his first book, New American Blues: A Journey through Poverty to Democracy.

Only half (55%) of the students were able to complete the course the first time he offered it, leaving a sample of seventeen individuals for the pre- and post-course assessment. The findings indicated there were modest gains in the student’s self-esteem and use of cognitive strategies.

But most of the change scores were not significant, and absent comparative data from a group of individuals who were not able to participate in the course or were enrolled in an alternative program, it is difficult to know what to make of these findings.

The Clemente Course is currently being taught in over twenty cities in this country, as well as several foreign countries. Anecdotal evidence from students who have taken these courses and others like it, has been uniformly positive.

A student who spoke at the Spring 2006 graduation ceremony of a similar course (Humanity in Perspective) I evaluated for the Oregon Council of Humanities gave this account.

My classmates and I answered an invitation to come and learn. Twice a week for 2 semesters we gathered together to discuss some of history’s great minds and ideas. We read and discussed the Greek Philosophers and dramatists…the foundations of Democracy in America…the Transcendentalists and contemporary writers…issues of slavery, prejudice, women’s right, civil rights, human rights.

We wrote papers and formulated thesis arguments. These things alone would constitute an interesting educational experience. But this is not all we learned. We learned that these were not just texts to be read, but ideas to live by. We learned about the power of words to harm or to help. We learned how to listen, and how and when to speak up. We learned that our ideas and our opinions are important. We learned that each of us can make a difference in our lives, in our community, in the world. We learned these things not only from these texts and from our teachers, but from each other.

Others commented:

During this class, our minds were freed. That is something that will always be with us, and, trust me, it can never be taken away.

The course was the only positive in this whole bad prison experience.

The class is what people need to want to learn and be better people. I know I am because of it.

Reports like these make it clear how much the thousands of students who have taken courses based on Shorris’ conception owe to him.

Serendipitious Discovery

Early in my freshman year at Stanford I began working at the Library. In those days the great collection of books in the stacks wasn’t open to the students. At the circulation desk I would receive the student request card, try to recall from the book’s call number what level it was on, head into the stacks, down the stairs, through the long and dark aisles, until I came to the right shelf, run my hand along the spine of the books, glancing from time to time at the titles, wishing I could stop to read one or two, scanning the Dewey Decimal numbers, collect the book if it was there, head back down the aisle, up the stairs and pass the book on to the staff to be checked out after stealing a glance at its introductory pages.

That sounds pretty tedious, but it wasn’t. I liked wandering around the shelves, always intrigued by the books that were stored there, the new topics and areas of study that I didn’t know existed, stopping every now and then to grab a book to bring upstairs to read until I had to head down again to fetch one. Eventually I became eligible for one of study the tables located on each floor of the stacks. There I could keep my textbooks and other volumes that I had checked out from the library and do my class work in a setting that is about as favorable as they come.

I spent most of my days and many nights at that table in the stacks of the Library. It was utterly peaceful there, no one else was around and I could come and go as I pleased. Since I was in the throes of academic discovery, it was the best of all possible places.

Every once in a while, I’d take a little “study break” to wander up and down the aisles, checking the titles of the books that caught my eye. This kind of exploration will no longer be possible in the new bookless library. There will no discovery of that unknown book that you subsequently found indispensable. Thomas Benton has recently described the importance of such moments in the process of doing research.

I remember one time I was writing about Edgar Allan Poe and phrenology when I found a box of ephemera—not catalogued in any detail—that included a pamphlet for a book by an early psychologist who analyzed Poe on the basis of daguerreotypes of the poet. I quickly found the book in another area of the same library, and discovered a sequence of pages that purported to show that Poe was suffering from a disorder that affected only one hemisphere of his brain and that revealed itself in the asymmetry of his face…that accidental discovery—the centerpiece of a subsequent article—would never have been made but for the serendipity and convenience of the stacks.

How often I recall a similar experience in my own research. I would go in search of a particular bound volume of a journal. Accidentally I’d pick out the wrong one and beginning scanning the pages, only to discover another article, perhaps even more important than the one I was searching for and that, in turn, led me on a path of further inquiry that would never had occurred if I was searching for the article online. Who has not had the pleasure of discovering such an article by thumbing through the journals of their discipline?

To be sure searching online can be a rich source of information and unexpected sources do appear sometimes. But the search is a targeted one, a narrow one. You are looking for a particular document and you find it or something close. As a friend wrote to me in describing her own online experiences: “There is no room in that equation for the serendipitous discovery. When all goes well, you find what you are looking for. But sometimes what you need to find is what you are not looking for.”

On Friendships

All friends are friends in a different way. James Salter

I have been mulling over three films I’ve seen recently, thinking about what I might say about each one. Then a couple of days ago, I suddenly realized they have a common theme, namely the various forms of friendship. (This sometimes happens when I’ve been mulling over something for a while and not getting anywhere.)

The Intouchables
The Intouchables depicts the unlikely friendship between Philippe, a wealthy French tetraplegic (all four limbs are paralyzed) and Driss, a young Senegalese offender who is hired to be his live-in caretaker. From an awkward adjustment to his life in Philippe’s Parisian townhouse and Philippe’s needs, a delightful bond develops between these two individuals from vastly different cultures.



Monsieur Lazhar
Bashir Lazhar, an Algerian immigrant with a painful past and uncertain status in Montreal, learns of a teacher who committed suicide in a nearby school. He presents himself to the school’s principal, describes his teaching background and is hired as a replacement. At first the students resent his presence, miss their former teacher, but as times passes a reciprocal love and respect develops between the students and Lazhar, as well as been Lazhar and other members of the faculty.



Take This Waltz
Margot and Daniel meet by chance on a flight back to Toronto. Although devotedly married, she finds herself attracted to him. Surprisingly Daniel lives across the street from Margot and her husband Lou. Margot and Daniel do little to avoid the mutual infatuation that develops between them. The ambivalence of their romantic attraction becomes the slow waltz that sometimes characterizes a friendship.

Leviathan

Even the strongest were weak…even the bravest lacked courage; even the wisest were ignorant. Paul Auster

Paul Auster’s Leviathan recounts a long and complicated story with a good deal of action and almost as much talk. It begins with a man being killed in a bomb blast. We learn from the narrator Peter Aaron that it was his long time friend Benjamin Sachs. Was it an accident or a suicide?

Both Sachs and Aaron are writers. They met on a snowy night in New York after their joint appearance at a reading was cancelled and became great friends afterward. Aaron knows what happened and wants to write the story before the FBI tracks him down.

Sachs is a troubled man. He writes, he spends days wandering around the city, and escapes to his cabin in Vermont from time to time. While he is deeply in love with his wife, Fanny, he disappears one day, is never found, and is presumed to be dead.

In fact, while walking out in the woods in Vermont, he meets a man who threatens him with a gun. Sachs ends up killing the man and runs off with a bag full of one hundred dollar bills he finds in the guy’s truck. Sachs becomes a wanted man. After driving across the country for days, he ends up in Berkeley.

He calls a friend in New York, explains where he is and why. She pledges secrecy and gives him the number of a friend of hers. He calls, she is willing to have him stay for awhile, eventually they fall in love (nothing like proximity) but he can’t remain there forever.

The story moves on, it has a nice momentum, several mysteries remain unsolved, and so I keep reading. It gets more complicated, there are multiple identities, other romances, and I have only given you a partial account, saying nothing at all about the narrator, Peter Aaron and his life. You have to like this sort of novel to stay with it.

Earlier we learned that Sachs had been in prison for his strong opposition to the Vietnam War. He decides to start down this path once again, learns how to build bombs, purchases the materials to assemble them, and works his way back and forth across the country blowing up replicas of the Statue of Liberty in those scattered communities where they stand.

It is never made entirely clear why Sachs is doing this other than his general anti-establishment views. But we know he is a man of action, not words. “You’re confusing thoughts and deeds. There’s a world of difference between doing something and just thinking about it.”

An accident happens, one of his bombs goes off prematurely, and Sachs is killed. It appears to be an accident. Maybe yes, maybe no. Finally the FBI finds Peter Aaron. However, it’s too late, he has already finished his manuscript and his novel can be published.

Is Auster trying to tell us something? Perhaps he wishes to remind us that life is nothing but a random chain of coincidences. That each event is in one or another connected with every other one. Or that freedom can be dangerous. More likely he simply wants to tell a good story.

Some critics view Auster as a pre-modernist, others as a modernist, still others as thoroughly post-modern. Others have found one fault after another with the way Auster writes. And then there are some critics who claim the narratives in Auster’s novels are all pretty much the same. Let them have their say. In no way did their views interfere with my enjoyment of Leviathan.

The Places in Murakami's Novels

The New York Times has published a combo photo-audio-passage page about the places in Tokyo that Murakami writes about in his novels. The one above is the Metropolitan Expressway 3. His new novel, IQ84, opens on this expressway as taxi is caught in a traffic jam. Murakami writes:

The taxi’s radio was tuned to a classical FM broadcast. Janacek’s ‘Sinfonietta’ -- probably not the ideal music to hear in a taxi caught in traffic. The middle-aged driver didn’t seem to be listening very closely, either. With his mouth clamped shut, he stared straight ahead at the endless line of cars stretching out on the elevated expressway, like a veteran fisherman standing in the bow of his boat, reading the ominous confluence of two currents. Aomame settled into the broad back seat, closed her eyes, and listened to the music.”

Go here to see a similar combination for:

Jingu Stadium and What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
Jingu-Gaien—a favorite Murakami running route from the running book
Denny’s and After Dark
Hotel Okura and IQ84
Kanagawa Prefecture and Gene Pitney’s Town Without Pity
Kinokuniya Books and his running book
Prada Store and IQ84
Aoyama Itchome—a subway station—and Hard-Boiled Wonderland & The End of the World
Nakamuraya Café and IQ84

What Time Is It?

“What is time? If no one asks me, I know. If I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not.” St. Augustine

How often do you wonder what time it is? Time rules much our life. Time to go to bed, time to get up, time to get to work, time to have dinner, time to call it a day. And most of the time we really have a pretty fair idea what time it is.

Unless we are suffering from jet lag, we generally know when to eat and when to sleep. And that is what I am experiencing now, having returned from Italy to the West Coast. The flight took a fair amount of a day. The adjustment is going to take a fair amount of a week or two.

It is said that you need one day to recover for every time zone you travel through. That means nine days for me. Based on previous experience, I think that’s about right. I begin to wonder if the trip is worth it after all.

I find the west-east trip (Portland to Florence) doesn't cause much of a problem, hardly any, in fact. That’s odd given the reports of most other travelers. Perhaps it’s the pleasure of being back in Florence that does the trick. There is light, there is sun, the sky is blue. My clocks click in to Florentine time almost immediately.

On the other hand the return trip, east to west (Florence to Portland) really does me in. I’ve no idea why there is this difference. It’s still the same crossing of 9 different time zones. It isn’t that it may be grey, perhaps rainy, cloudy most of the day. Even when it’s sunny, as it can be in July and August, I experience a prolonged period of jet lag.

I don’t think age has much to do with it. It has always been uncomfortable. I just have to follow the routine, jet lag or not, and then eventually it will disappear. What it has to do with is the way we tell time. We tell time by our internal clock and we tell time by our psychological clock.

Our bodily rhythms, circadian rhythms and some say, our genetically determined temporal blueprint, govern our internal clock. Our daily routine and social schedule and obligations govern our psychological clock. These two types of clocks run fairly automatically and we don’t spend a lot of time thinking about them.

But now these two time-controlling systems are radically askew to put it mildly, “fucked up” as Katherine Schulz wrote in her review of Till Roenneberg’s Internal Time: Chronotypes, Social Jet Lag, and Why You’re So Tired.

When it’s time to get up here in Portland, it’s early afternoon in Florence. Who wants to have breakfast then? When it’s time to go to bed in Portland, it’s early morning in Florence. Who can sleep then? No one. It is miserable.

For me sleeping through the so-called night is the worst part of jet lag. The other commonly attributed symptoms—headaches, disorientation, memory loss, depression, digestive problems, irritability—never bother me. Fatigue and sleep deprivation do.

By the end of the day, I am so utterly exhausted that I usually fall asleep at once. But after sleeping for perhaps an hour or two, I’m up the rest of the night. By morning, I’m a wreck. I want to work; my body wants to sleep. After lunch, I try to nap, but then it’s early evening in Florence, and I haven’t the slight ability to nap then.

And it goes on like this for days. Eventually the disjointed craziness disappears, and I forget about all this discomfort by the time the next summer rolls around and Italy beckons once again.

On a Summer Weekend

Beethoven Flashmob




Click on: The Happiest Man in American

Archeology of The Present

For her next project, Maria took a temporary job as a chambermaid in a large midtown hotel. The point was to gather information about the guests, but not in any intrusive or compromising way. She intentionally avoided them in fact, restricting herself to what could be learned from the objects scattered about their rooms. …It was an archeology of the present, so to speak, an attempt to reconstitute the essence of something from only the barest fragments: …Paul Auster Leviathan

Their names were Carla and Roberto. I learned this from the welcome sign in the kitchen. I also knew that Moretti is their family name. That was the name on the Post-Its that I found in one of the drawers. Professor Roberto Moretti. Maybe Professor Carla Moretti too.*

A few years ago I stayed in their apartment in Florence and came to know them in this rather indirect fashion. Each day I learned something more and each time I looked at something that I thought I had seen before, I realized it was something new. One day I noticed there were psychiatric journals in the upstairs family room. Maybe Professor Moretti was a psychiatrist. Or maybe Carla was and they shared an office together.

I was not surprised that Roberto and maybe Carla were professors. The number of books in their apartment was enormous. In practically every room, there were floor to ceiling bookcases full of learned texts in music, art, philosophy, literature and several major reference sets and collections of fine editions. In the music room, there was also a grand piano. Perhaps that was Carla’s. Or maybe they both played the piano. That was more likely from the looks of things around there.

Most of the books, however, were literary masterpieces--all the classic novels, many contemporary ones from every nation, all beautifully bound in Italian editions. I looked about this place and asked: Have they really read all of this stuff? I also bemoaned the fact that I did not know Italian. Ces’t la vie.

“…it was fascinating to see the different ways people arranged themselves, and how much you could infer about their lives from a few objects.” Peter Stamm Seven Years

What can one learn about a person from the place they live in, by looking at the objects they have put on their shelves and in their drawers, as well as the photographs and paintings that they put up on the walls? They are the traces of their life that they have left in their home, traces that reveal a great deal about anyone in any place or time. The traces are real, they are brought into their homes and put somewhere by someone. They are not secondary accounts, or someone’s recollections, or something you might be told if you asked about them.

This place clearly belonged to a learned family. I had no idea how old they were, but that was not important. I knew they had a family, or at least two children, whose beautifully framed photographs were hung on the walls of their bedroom.

Their daughter was shown at various stages of her life, from a young child, through adolescence and as mature women. She was in a reflective mood in one photograph. Her dark eyes were framed by equally dark shoulder length hair. Her wide forehead and full lips told me that she would not be easily swayed.

Nearby were three photos of what must surely was her brother. He was also shown at various stages of his life. In the most recent he had a full head of curly hair, was wearing glasses and appeared to be a most studious fellow just like everyone else in this family.

There was also a picture of a nicely dressed young man and woman, caught in an informal embrace. They were smiling and I thought was surely Carla and Roberto around the time they were married. What a handsome couple they were! They reminded me a bit of how my wife and I looked when we were setting out together.

Their apartment is in the university section of the Florence, although I thought they did not teach there. If they did, surely they would be living in the apartment. I sensed that there was more that was hidden from me.

Why didn’t they live there? Their apartment was furnished so beautifully, with a fully equipped kitchen, two bedrooms and ample space for entertaining. Perhaps they fell on hard times and had to move to more modest quarters. But then again, perhaps they simply needed a place that had more bookshelves.

* To protect their privacy, I have used fictitious names.

A Free Bench

We spend our life trying to bring together in the same instant a ray of sunshine and a free bench.
Beckett, Texts for Nothing

The days drift by. The Florentine mood is peaceful. Being here is almost hypnotic, slightly soporific. At noon each day I take my bag lunch and sit out on a bench, more accurately a ledge attached to some of the classic Renaissance buildings.

The Palazzo Ruccelai, shown above, was designed by the architect Leon Battista Alberti and built between 1446 and 1451. On either side of the two main doorways are long stone benches that run the length of the building. They served then, and still do, as resting places for the weary and occasional picnicker.

I stare at the people passing by and wonder about their life, where they are from, what they do during the day, and how they like it. The variation between them is enormous-the wealthy out shopping with their overflowing bags, the over-dressed, the simply dressed, the undressed. I think she could lose some weight, she is wearing too much makeup, how wonderfully thin she is, why doesn’t she look over this way, what does she see in him.

At breakfast several years ago I drank too much of the strong coffee they make around here and experienced what is known as a vasovagal reaction, a mild form of fainting. I desperately wanted to lie down and sleep for a bit. Frankly, I thought it might be the end.

Luckily I happened to be passing by the Palazzo Strozzi, a center of cultural events in Florence. The Palazzo is furnished on three of its sides with a large stone benches originally intended as a shady resting place for servants and the motley assortment of characters the palace attracted long ago. The bench now gives everybody a welcome opportunity to rest for a moment and let their latest vasovagal reaction fade away.

One day I penned a little poem about the bench I try to visit when I’m in Portland.

Across the street from my home and down about half a block
a bench has been thoughtfully placed beside the building.
I go there around teatime when the rains have passed
to sip my diet Snapple and linger in the sun.

I watch the cars go by and stare a little too long at the pretty girls
from the art school around the corner. It is my bench or so I like to think.
Sometimes another neighbor or passing stranger will come to sit beside me
and we may strike up a conversation which I do not mind at all.

But I do mind when the clouds are overhead and the rain is pouring down
upon the bench across the street from my home and down about half a block.
For then my bench and I must take our drinks indoors which is, I regret to say
most of the time around here.

Studying Psychotherapy

From time to time one of my former students comes to see me when he or she is in Portland. It is one of the great pleasures of my life, especially when they go on to achieve the kind of success that the person who came to see me a few weeks ago day has.

Professor Jeffrey Berman was one of the first students who studied with me at Reed. I guided him on his senior thesis and Jeffrey was able to publish the results. Since then he has conduced a large number of influential studies on the effects of psychotherapy.

A great many therapists resist the experimental scrutiny of their practice. Nevertheless, Jeffrey forges on. He always has a new study to tell me about and no doubt it is a controversial one, in spite of its methodological rigor. In most cases, his research takes issue with one of the many current myths about psychotherapy.

Much of his research involves comparing the outcomes of different types of therapy, say behavioral, cognitive, humanistic, psychoanalytic, or “undifferentiated” counseling, etc. In the study we discussed in detail he compared the therapeutic effects of trained (professional) and untrained (paraprofessional) therapists.

Training programs are almost naturally assumed to be necessary for clinical success, that a trained therapist is bound to be more effective than an untrained one. Most of the prior research confirmed this assumption. However, Jeffrey found they were based on inappropriate comparisons and statistical analyses.

To avoid those problems he carried out a more selective comparison with stiffer methodological requirements. Unlike the previous studies he found that professional (trained) and paraprofessional (untrained) therapists were generally equal in client outcome effectiveness.

Further, there were no outcome differences for patient problems or for type of treatment or, finally, for treatments carried out individually or in groups. In a word, on these measures, trained therapists were no more effective than those who were untrained.

Of course, these findings are no better than the previous studies upon which they were based. And while they were chosen with great care, they were not original studies carried out by Jeffrey, research that is extremely difficult to conduct now. So in the end he had to fall back on a second order comparison, known as meta-analysis that has become the standard method of summarizing research findings but to some commentators has its own inherent limitations.

Nevertheless, his findings both surprised and pleased me; one more myth about psychotherapy falls by the wayside to empirical analysis. Of course, I was also pleased to hear about his research and how provocative it continues to be.

Recently, he has been returning to Reed each year, ostensibly for his annual class reunion. But I know it also reflects how much his years at Reed, his many friends, the great spirit of the place means to him. It is an ailment for which there is no cure, one that affects most graduates of this very special college.

You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train

“People should go where they are not supposed to go, say what they are not supposed to say, and stay when they are told to leave.” Howard Zinn

In 1994 I read Howard Zinn’s You Can’t be Neutral on a Moving Train. I know this from the passages I collected in my commonplace book 18 years ago.

I am quite distant from my copy of the book now and recall very little other than Zinn’s impassioned plea for equal justice in this country and the power of speaking out when it is denied. Since then, I have seen his films, read about him, and admired his life-long protests to insure genuine equality in this society.

Howard Zinn died early in 2010. I remember him on this July 4th and reassert the values we presumably celebrate today by citing some of the passages I recorded from You Can’t be Neutral on a Moving Train.

It is easy to mistake silence for acceptance.

I knew that the letter of the law was not as important as who held the power in any real-life situation.

The chain of relationships made me think of how connections are made—you read a book [Johnny Got His Gun, Born on the Fourth of July], you meet a person, you have a single experience, and your life is changed in some way.

The crimes of the rich and powerful go mostly unpunished.

Free speech? Try it and the police will be there with their horses, their bulbs, their guns, to stop you.

From that moment on, I was no longer a liberal, a believer in the self-correcting character of American democracy. I was a radical, believing that something fundamental was wrong in this country—not just the existence of poverty amidst great wealth, not just the horrible treatment of black people, but something rotten at the root. The situation required not just a new president or new laws but an uprooting of the old order, the introduction of a new kind of society—cooperative, peaceful, egalitarian.

…to relinquish the safety of silence.

I had always insisted that a good education was a synthesis of book learning and involvement in social action, that each enriched the other.

Going around the country, I was impressed again and again by how favorably people reacted to what, undoubtedly, is a radical view of society—antiwar, anti-military, critical of the legal system, advocating a drastic redistribution of the wealth, supportive of protest even to the point of civil disobedience.

We don’t have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people can transform the world.

What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act…

Americans in Florence

I don’t have the gift of entering into paintings as I do when reading a book. It isn’t that they leave me without a thought or two and some kind of vague appreciation of their colors and style.

But beyond that, I am at a loss for words and words are the only way I think and imagine, at least insofar as I am aware of. I feel very much like Edgar Logan in Jennie Erdal’s The Missing Shade of Blue.

At that point the language to interpret a painting was simply not available to me. …My eyes were innocent like those of a child, though to me they were simply crude and ignorant.

In spite of this, last week I went to see the exhibition, Americans in Florence, at the Palazzo Strozzi and hoped I could learn a little something about the many American painters who enjoyed their days here, as much as I do, and were suitably inspired to express their pleasure in the way they know best.

The exhibition featured the work of John Singer Sargent. Like many Americans who travel to Florence, they made a first stop in a local hotel. Here is how Sargent depicted one such room.

William Merrit Chase, less well known among the American Impressionists, usually preferred to stay in one of the many villas just outside the centro. Chase painted this picture of the Villa Silli before he bought it a few years later.

Many of Sargent’s paintings were portraits of the writers and artists who visited Florence. The British writer Vernon Lee (pseudonym of Violet Paget) known for her novels, essays, and travelogues, was among them.

Willard Metcalf, also not as widely known as Sargent, was among the several artists who painted the Tuscan countryside. Here is one he painted of Fiesole, located up in the hills above Florence. It is one of my favorite places to visit while I’m here.

Sargent’s painting of Henry James is often reproduced; perhaps you’ve seen it before. One reviewer wrote of this painting, His eyes, watery green, yet secret and profound will look at you, will touch and catch you intimately.

These are only a sampling of the exhibition’s paintings. It runs until July 15th, so there’s plenty of time to head over for a first-hand viewing. If you can’t make it, there’s an app of the exhibition available at the iBooks store.